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by Emily Elena Dugdale, KPCC/LAist

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

Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies disproportionately contact, cite and arrest Black students in the Antelope Valley, according to a new report by the county Inspector General’s Office. And those students are also disproportionately suspended and expelled at higher rates than other racial groups, the report said.

The analysis was spurred by a yearlong investigation into allegations of racial discrimination in Antelope Valley high schools by LAist and ProPublica. Reviewing data for the 2018-19 school year, our investigation found that Black teenagers accounted for 60% of deputy contacts in Lancaster high schools, although they made up only about 20% of the enrollment in those schools.

Inspector General Max Huntsman’s office reviewed Sheriff’s Department data for the 2019-20 school year and said its findings corroborated the news organizations’ investigation. In addition, it said the problem may be worse than the numbers indicate, due to flaws in the department’s data-collection system.

The report also slammed the Sheriff’s Department for failing to provide any evidence for claims it made that challenged the validity of our analysis.

“The practice of making public denials without factual support is fundamentally inconsistent with California law controlling the conduct of law enforcement officers,” investigators wrote. “The ProPublica analysis appears fundamentally correct.”

In an emailed statement, the Sheriff’s Department told LAist that it couldn’t provide immediate comment because it had not yet fully reviewed the report.

“What we can say is Sheriff Alex Villanueva takes allegations of misconduct very seriously and we will provide a more detailed response once we review these findings,” the department wrote.

The Inspector General’s Office presented its findings to the Civilian Oversight Commission on Thursday. This was the same body that had asked the Inspector General’s Office to look into the matter in the wake of the news organizations’ report.

Just after the article was first published last fall, Capt. John Lecrivain, the head of the Lancaster sheriff’s station, told commissioners that the investigation was “a very entertaining piece of fiction.” He struck a different tone at the Thursday meeting.

“This is a serious concern to the department, and we relish the opportunity to be involved in the discussion and find some solutions,” he said, adding that the department had looked back at its data and “we did find that there was some disparity in the contacts with the students.”

Assistant Inspector General Mahdi Mohamed said at the meeting that the Sheriff’s Department also did not comply with investigators’ request from nine months ago for information — including body-worn camera video — related to an incident at Lancaster High School in which a 16-year-old student, MiKayla Robinson, was body slammed by a sheriff’s deputy.

Mohamed said the lack of information from the Sheriff’s Department made it hard to “investigate the reason for the deputy’s contact with the student.” He said the office finally received the body camera video in the past few days.

Robinson’s attorney, Lisa Bloom, said she filed a complaint in May against both the Antelope Valley Union High School District and the Sheriff’s Department, alleging civil rights violations. Neither the school district nor the Sheriff’s Department has responded.

“The findings of this new report that Black students are cited, arrested, suspended and expelled at disproportionately higher rates than other students should be a wake up call,” Bloom said in a statement. “Immediate action must be taken to protect Black students from further harm.”

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department entered into a court-ordered consent decree, agreeing to reforms that included protections against racial profiling. That agreement grew out of findings from a two-year DOJ Civil Rights Division investigation, which found, in part, that deputies routinely racially profiled Black residents in the Antelope Valley.

Underreported Data

The data examined by the Inspector General’s Office and by LAist and ProPublica came from the Sheriff’s Automated Contact Reporting system.

Huntsman’s office analyzed nearly 17,000 contacts by Lancaster station deputies — who are assigned to Antelope Valley high schools as school resource officers — during the 2019-20 school year. Roughly 400 of those contacts were conducted at or around 11 high schools in the valley.

Investigators said the SACR system “is inaccurate and significantly underreports significant data.” In a report issued this month, the office found the Sheriff’s Department underreported more than 50,000 stops and more than 70,000 arrests between 2018 and 2019.

“Any findings based upon this review of SACR data likely understates the issues identified in this report, particularly those relating to racial disparities,” investigators wrote. They called on the Sheriff’s Department to improve the system’s accuracy.

The analysis by the Inspector General’s Office found Black students experienced a disproportionately higher number of contacts with deputies than any other racial group. (Courtesy of the Inspector General’s Office)

The inspector general’s analysis found that Black students made up about 67% of the contacts made by Lancaster station deputies but only about 18% of total school enrollment.

In comparison, Latino students — who make up the majority of the school’s population, about 64% — accounted for only 26% of deputy contacts.

Black Students Cited and Arrested More

The inspector general’s analysis also showed that Black students were issued nearly 70% of all citations resulting from contact with deputies. Black students also made up nearly 60% of all arrests resulting from contact with deputies.

The report said these findings were consistent with the news organizations’ previous reporting.

Sheriff’s Deputy Justin Ruppert, team leader of the Lancaster station’s school safety unit, told LAist and ProPublica that the vast majority of deputies’ contacts on campuses are based on referrals from school staff and administrators — rather than being initiated by law enforcement. At the time of the original story, Antelope Valley Union High School District administrators did not respond to interview requests or to a list of written questions.

The inspector general’s office, though, found “the majority of school contacts were self-initiated by deputies.” However, it noted that deputies may not be coding calls correctly.

The analysis by the Inspector General’s Office found the majority of contacts with high school students were self-initiated by deputies. (Courtesy of the Inspector General’s Office)

Huntsman’s office also found that Black and Latino high school-age youth had fewer recorded contacts with deputies outside of school than inside.

Notably, white students had more contact with deputies outside of school than inside.

The Inspector General’s Office found that Black and Latino students were contacted by deputies more at school than outside of school. (Courtesy of the Inspector General’s Office)

Additionally, the Inspector General’s Office found that Black students made up 54% of total suspensions in the 2019-20 school year.

About 1 in 7 Black students at the high schools have been suspended, a rate more than twice the statewide average.

Black and Latino students each made up about 47% of expulsions, though Black students were expelled at a disproportionately higher rate given that their share of the student population is so much lower.

A Call for Transparency and Training

At the 2021 protest in Lancaster. (Bethany Mollenkof, special to ProPublica)

The office listed a number of recommendations “aimed at increasing the transparency, accuracy and efficacy of oversight of School Resource Deputies and the safety of community youth.”

The investigators also recommended that the Sheriff’s Department expand its training curriculum “to educate all patrol-related deputies on their opportunity to act as informal counselors and gateways for at-risk youth to non-criminal County services.”

Last June, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors passed a motion requiring the county CEO to report back on a plan to collect and publish data relating to deputy contacts with youths.

The news organizations’ investigation last fall profiled Barron Gardner, a high school history teacher working for Antelope Valley district. Gardner had become a reluctant spokesperson for a growing movement, driven primarily by Black and Latino residents, to get LASD deputies off school campuses.

On Thursday, Gardner said over the phone that he believed the numbers in the inspector general’s report “aren’t any surprise” to school staff and Antelope Valley residents.

“I could have guessed those numbers off the top of my head,” he said.

Gardner also said he wished the inspector general’s report — in addition to recognizing that his Black students were overpoliced — gave more context for the issues that his Black students face. He listed some: “homelessness, foster care, parents and prisons” — and systemic racism. Gardner said all are factors that prevent Black students from accessing socio-emotional and mental health resources.

“This is what we think is the best way to deal with it — with cops,” he said.

by Andy Kroll

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

Update, June 21, 2022: Spokespeople for Facebook, TikTok and Twitter said they would remove posts flagged by ProPublica for violating their respective community standards policies. This story has also been updated to include comment from True the Vote, which the organization sent after our story published.

The dummied-up flyer bore the hallmarks of a real WANTED poster. A grainy photo of a woman outside an election office in the suburbs of Atlanta stamped with the word “WANTED.” An image of a sheriff’s badge and the phone number for the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office. The implication was clear: The woman was being sought by the local sheriff for voter fraud.

The flyer was fake, and though the sheriff’s office eventually called it out, the false poster went viral, amassing tens of thousands of shares, views and threatening comments on Facebook, Twitter and TikTok and raising fears that harm could come to the unidentified woman.

Stolen-election activists and supporters of former President Donald Trump have embraced a new tactic in their ongoing campaign to unearth supposed proof of fraud in the 2020 presidential race: chasing down a fictional breed of fraudster known as a “ballot mule” and using social media to do it.

Inspired by a conservative documentary film that has won praise from Trump and his allies — and debunking from critics including former Attorney General William Barr — self-styled citizen sleuths are posting and sharing photos of unnamed individuals and accusing them of election crimes. They are calling on their followers to help identify these “ballot mules,” who are accused of having violated laws against dropping off multiple absentee ballots during the 2020 election. A state lawmaker in Arizona has even encouraged people to act as “vigilantes” and catch future “mules.”

Promoting such false information violates the policies of Facebook, Twitter and TikTok. Facebook’s “Community Standards” says its policy is to remove content that incites harassment or violence or impersonates government officials. Twitter and TikTok have similar rules and guidelines for what can and can’t appear on their platforms.

(Screenshot captured and redacted by ProPublica)

ProPublica identified at least a dozen additional posts on Twitter, Facebook and TikTok that accuse unnamed individuals of being “ballot mules” and engaging in allegedly illegal activity. Some of these posts echo the “WANTED”-style language seen in the Gwinnett County meme, while others include similar calls to action to identify the individuals.

None of the posts reviewed by ProPublica include evidence that any of the people depicted in the posters engaged in illegal activity. Yet the social media companies have reacted slowly or not at all to such posts, some of which clearly violate their policies, experts say.

Disinformation researchers from the nonpartisan clean-government nonprofit Common Cause alerted Facebook and Twitter that the platforms were allowing users to post such incendiary claims in May. Not only did the claims lack evidence that crimes had been committed, but experts worry that poll workers, volunteers and regular voters could face unwarranted harassment or physical harm if they are wrongfully accused of illegal election activity.

So far, there is no sign that any of the people depicted have been identified or suffered any threats.

Emma Steiner, a disinformation analyst with Common Cause who sent warnings to the social-media companies, says the lack of action suggests that tech companies relaxed their efforts to police election-related threats ahead of the 2022 midterms.

“This is the new playbook, and I’m worried that platforms are not prepared to deal with this tactic that encourages dangerous behavior,” Steiner said.

Spokespeople for Facebook, TikTok and Twitter said they would remove posts flagged by ProPublica for violating their respective community standards policies.

Thirty-one states allow a third party to collect and return an absentee or mail-in ballot on behalf of another voter. These laws help voters who are disabled or infirm, live in spread-out rural areas or reside on tribal lands with limited access to polling places or ballot drop boxes. In states with a history of absentee voting, both Democratic and Republican operatives have engaged in organized ballot-collection drives.

Critics, labeling the practice “ballot harvesting,” have sought to restrict its use, warning about the potential for fraud. However, incidents of proven fraud related to ballot collection are extremely rare. A database maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation identifies just 238 cases of “fraudulent use of absentee ballots” since 1988. One high-profile case of fraud involving absentee ballots occurred in a 2018 North Carolina congressional race. A Republican operative engaged in a ballot-tampering scheme involving hundreds of ballots. The state election board later threw out the election result and ordered a redo. It was likely the first federal election overturned due to fraud, according to historians and election-law experts.

The phrases “ballot mules” and “ballot trafficking” — with their intentional echoes of the language of drugs and cartels — started to gain traction online in 2021, according to Mike Caulfield, a misinformation researcher at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. An analysis by Caulfield and his colleagues found that prominent Republicans including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel invoked “ballot trafficking” last spring.

But it wasn’t until conservative provocateur Dinesh D’Souza and a discredited conservative group called True the Vote last fall began to tease findings that would later appear in D’Souza’s movie “2000 Mules” that uses of “ballot trafficking” and “ballot mules” shot up, according to Caulfield’s research.

The “2000 Mules” film claims that a network of thousands of people illegally stuffed ballot boxes in swing states to steal the presidency for Joe Biden. It draws heavily on the work of True the Vote, which purported to use surveillance footage and geolocation data to make its claims of illegal ballot activity.

Numerous fact-checks of the film have cast serious doubt over its central premise. In a deposition with the Jan. 6 select committee, Barr said he found the conclusions of “2000 Mules” far from convincing. “My opinion then and my opinion now,” he said, “is that the election was not stolen by fraud, and I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that, including the ‘2000 Mules’ movie.”

True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht said her group had never spoken with Barr and disputed the notion that True the Vote had not proven its claims about voter fraud. “I do think that when 80%+ of America is concerned about election integrity, something must be done to address the situation,” she said. “It is the failure of leaders across all branches of government, who have allowed lawlessness to be the new law, that we find ourselves where we do.” D’Souza did not respond to a request for comment.

Despite its flimsy conclusions, “2000 Mules” found an enthusiastic audience in Trump and his supporters. In early May, Trump screened the film at his Mar-a-Lago private club. The film has since earned nearly $1.5 million at the box office, according to Box Office Mojo. In a recent 12-page letter responding to the public hearings organized by the Jan. 6 select committee, Trump cited “2000 Mules” nearly 20 times.

As the film’s dubious claims have spread online, stolen-election activists are creating and sharing online content purporting to reveal more “mules” and accusing those individuals of illegal behavior without actual evidence of wrongdoing.

The most striking example is the meme that depicts an older white woman leaving a ballot drop box in Georgia’s suburban Gwinnett County. The word “WANTED” appears above her head as does the image of a sheriff’s badge labeled “Gwinnett County” and the sheriff office’s phone number.

“Ballot mule,” the meme says. “If you can ID her, call Gwinnett Co. sheriff’s office.”

A spokeswoman for the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office says the meme is fake. The sheriff’s office hasn’t received calls purporting to identify the woman. The spokeswoman said that the office was investigating who created the meme.

ProPublica was unable to identify the woman in the “WANTED” meme. A spokesman for the Gwinnett County elections office confirmed that the name tag worn by the woman in the meme matched those worn by county election workers in 2020. He also verified that the drop box in the video was located outside of the county’s election headquarters.

The origins of the woman’s photo in the “WANTED” meme appear to point back to a Georgia businessman and self-described election-fraud investigator named David Cross.

For months Cross has posted short clips of surveillance footage showing people depositing ballots at drop boxes in Gwinnett County. Cross sometimes narrates these videos and makes unverified accusations of illegal ballot harvesting. In a clip that Cross posted online on May 3, an older white woman — the same woman in the “WANTED” meme — deposits multiple ballots into the drop box outside the headquarters for Gwinnett County’s elections office. In his narration, Cross accuses the woman of depositing as many as 35 ballots, though it’s not at all clear from the video exactly how many ballots the woman deposited. “Totally illegal,” he says in the video. (Cross did not respond to requests for comment.)

Georgia law prohibits many third parties from submitting a ballot that’s not their own. However, the law makes exceptions for caregivers for the elderly and the disabled, immediate family members, members of the same household, in-laws, nieces, nephews, grandchildren and more.

Cross, the Georgia activist, has filed complaints with the State Election Board and secretary of state’s office alleging illegal ballot deliveries and citing his surveillance footage clips. Last month, the State Election Board dismissed three complaints alleging “ballot harvesting” after an investigation by the secretary of state’s office found that the alleged “mules” were voters dropping off ballots for themselves and family members.

A spokesman for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told ProPublica that the office has a pending investigation into the woman in the “WANTED” meme. The spokesman, Walter Jones, stressed that no one should assume that an individual shown in a video delivering multiple ballots is automatically guilty of a crime, nor would the ballots in question be invalidated even if someone had violated the state’s ballot-collection law.

The video published by Cross of the woman at the Gwinnett County drop box spread rapidly online. Twitter users accused the woman of being one of the “2000 mules” and urged their followers to “MAKE HER FAMOUS!” — in other words, reveal her identity and share it widely.

One Twitter user shared the woman’s image with the “WANTED” text and the fake Gwinnett County sheriff’s badge. “Once we find out who paid these people the whole story will become clear,” the account wrote. That tweet amassed more than 9,000 retweets and more than 14,000 likes before Twitter removed it.

The “WANTED” post spread across Twitter, Facebook and TikTok. A Facebook group called “Celebrities for Trump” shared it. “We need more if [sic] these,” the post said, referring to the WANTED sign. “Keep your eyes open. Report them all it is a crime.”

Several days after the “WANTED” flyer surfaced and reached a large audience, the Gwinnett County sheriff stated that the post was “false.” Yet despite the post impersonating a law-enforcement agency, social-media companies have been slow to remove it.

While Twitter removed dozens of posts with the “WANTED” sign, ProPublica was able to find instances of it still on the platform.

Disinformation researchers tell ProPublica that they also identified posts accusing people of being ballot mules in other states with laws that restrict third parties from submitting people’s ballots. “Mule right here in PA,” one TikTok post read. “Make this Upper Dublin resident famous #2000Mules #2000MulesDocumentary #2000MulesTheMovie.”

In Arizona, a Republican state senator named Kelly Townsend has encouraged people to camp out at ballot drop boxes and write down license plate numbers of people deemed to be suspicious. “I have been so pleased to hear of all you vigilantes that want to camp out at these drop boxes,” Townsend recently said. “So, do it. Do it.”

Even if “2000 Mules” were accurate — which experts stress it almost certainly is not — the ballot-trafficking theory put forward by the film would not change the result of any election. Rick Hasen, a professor and election-law expert at the University of California, Irvine, says he believes the rigged-election message in “2000 Mules” is just the latest attempt to more broadly lay the groundwork for challenging and overturning the outcome of a future election.

“If you believe the last election was stolen, you’re going to be more likely to take steps to steal the next one back,” Hasen said. “It’s pretty obvious that what’s going on here is using false claims of fraud as a potential pretext to engage in election subversion in 2024 or another future election. That’s very dangerous for American democracy.”

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by Peter Elkind

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For the past six years, government officials have tried ever harder to kill a type of tax avoidance scheme that the Internal Revenue Service has branded “abusive” and among “the worst of the worst tax scams.” The IRS has pursued tens of thousands of audits and warned of hefty penalties facing anyone who exploits it. The Justice Department has targeted top promoters of what it calls “fraudulent” deals with criminal charges and civil lawsuits, yielding several guilty pleas and a civil settlement. In Congress, Democrats and Republicans have united to sponsor legislation to abolish the practice.

But the industry has fought back with a coterie of lobbyists, including a onetime member of Congress long viewed as a liberal lion, Henry Waxman. The battle shows how even on those rare occasions when both parties agree to take action, well-funded interests can frustrate a solution.

The result: The use of the scheme continues unabated. Along the way it has cost the U.S. Treasury billions in lost taxes, according to the IRS.

“There is a tax shelter gold mine here, and they’re fighting very hard to protect it,” Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said. “There are enormous sums of money to be made as long as the number of transactions keeps increasing. This is a textbook case of the power of lobbyists.”

The government is targeting a tax deduction that goes by the cumbersome name “syndicated conservation easement,” which exploits a charitable tax break that Congress established to encourage preservation of open land. Under standard conservation easements, landowners who give up development rights for their acreage, usually by donating those rights to a nonprofit land trust, get a charitable deduction in return. When conservation easements are used as intended, both the public and the owner of the property benefit. A piece of pristine land is preserved, sometimes as a park that the public can use, and the donor gets a tax break.

The syndicated versions are different. Instead of seeking to protect a bucolic reserve for wildlife or humans, profit-seeking intermediaries have turned the likes of abandoned golf courses or remote scrubland into high-return investment vehicles. These promoters snatch up vacant land that till then was worth little. Then they hire an appraiser willing to declare that it has huge, previously unrecognized development value — perhaps for luxury vacation homes or a solar farm — and thus is really worth many times its purchase price. The promoters sell stakes in the donation to individuals, who claim charitable deductions that are four or five times their investment. The promoters reap millions in fees.

ProPublica first investigated the booming syndicated conservation easement business, which initially took root in Georgia, back in 2017. Efforts to shut it down were then already underway, led by the Land Trust Alliance, a trade association whose 950 members administer traditional conservation easements. As longtime advocates of the charitable tax break, Alliance leaders were horrified to see it exploited, in their view, by “brazen” profiteers claiming bogus deductions.

Fearful that this would jeopardize the conservation deduction altogether, the Alliance barred its members from accepting easement donations from syndicated deals and prodded the IRS to begin a crackdown. By 2020, that effort was underway in earnest.

But the syndicators flummoxed their opponents by refusing to back down, despite IRS audits and enforcement efforts, which had shut down other tax schemes in the past. The syndicators had formed their own Washington trade group, called the Partnership for Conservation (or P4C). They began spending millions on lobbying Congress and public relations. P4C argues that syndicated deals offer conservation and profit, and it rues what it has called the “chilling effect” of the government efforts to crack down.

Today, the fight has taken on a grinding quality. By the IRS’ most recent reckoning, the use of syndicated easements grew from 249 deals in 2016, generating $6 billion in charitable deductions, to 296 deals in 2018, producing $9.2 billion in deductions. (By contrast, more than 2,000 nonsyndicated easement deductions have resulted in about $1 billion in annual deductions.)

The trend continues today, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig told the Senate Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government last month. He was visibly frustrated. “Notwithstanding our efforts,” Rettig testified, “we have not had an impact on essentially slowing the volume of these transactions that we receive currently. We need Congressional help. We need a statute to help us curb this activity.”

A bipartisan group of influential lawmakers has tried. Democrat Wyden and Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, the finance committee’s ranking Republican, jointly released a 151-page investigative report in 2020 that referred to syndicated easements as a “dollar machine” for wealthy taxpayers. “You simply insert the dollar bill and then watch the Dollar Machine return two dollar bills to you,” the report explained. “But it was not the promoters who gave back the two dollars; it was the Federal government by way of foregone tax revenue, and the only risk involved was whether or not the transaction would lead to an audit.”

Others looking to rein in syndicated deals include Montana Republican Sen. Steve Daines, Michigan Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow and House members Mike Thompson, a California Democrat, and Mike Kelly, a Pennsylvania Republican. Together, several of these lawmakers introduced the Charitable Conservation Easement Program Integrity Act of 2017 — and have reintroduced it, in updated form, in one congressional chamber or the other, eight times since, most recently a year ago.

The legislation aims to put an end to syndicated deals by eliminating their profitability, with a bar on taxpayers claiming easement deductions that exceed 2.5 times their investments. Closing this loophole would generate $12 billion in additional tax revenue through 2027, according to the Office of Management and Budget. But the legislation has never gotten far — and lawmakers say that’s no accident.

Since 2017, syndicators have spent $11 million on lobbyists, according to publicly filed lobbying disclosures. P4C has paid for more than $6 million of that. EcoVest Capital, a big promoter based in Atlanta that is now facing a Justice Department civil fraud suit, has spent $3.3 million. (By contrast, the Land Trust Alliance has spent $2.4 million on lobbyists during the same time period.)

While recruiting congressional allies to block the Easement Program Integrity Act, syndication advocates have also gone on the attack, pressing Congress (unsuccessfully, so far) to strip the IRS of funds used to enforce the agency’s 2017 listing notice that flags profit-making syndicated deals as abusive and requires participants to report their involvement.

Syndication promoters have actively courted Democratic support, adding Waxman Strategies, a self-described “progressive-minded public affairs firm” chaired by Henry Waxman, 82, the liberal former California representative, to their lineup of heavyweight lobbyists. In April 2018, P4C founder Frank Schuler, whose Atlanta firm was then one of the most prolific promoters, advised top executives at EcoVest about the move. “P4C is about to get the Waxman group underway to work on the D side of things,” Schuler wrote, in an email disclosed in court filings. “They really believe in what we are doing and that was a condition of Waxman’s to undertake the engagement. This is another $23k per month but we are in the thick of the fight and now is the time.”

Since then, Waxman Strategies has earned $485,000 for representing syndicators, with the former congressional representative working on the issue along with others at the firm. “Partnership style conservation easements are an important tool for conserving land that is under development pressure,” Michael Goo, the firm’s managing director and a former staff director for a House environmental subcommittee, told ProPublica in a written response to questions sent to Henry Waxman. “We believe they can be used to mobilize private capital into conserving land that in fact would be developed sooner or later.” The reform legislation, he added, “would effectively remove the incentive for investors to mobilize private capital into conservation easements.”

Unable to move their Easement Program Integrity Act through a divided Congress, supporters managed late last year to get its language included in the “Build Back Better” provisions passed by the House Ways and Means Committee. This raised hopes that it could get enacted along with the spending measure, which would require just a majority vote in the Senate.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the enigmatic Arizona Democrat, who represented a potentially decisive vote in her 50-50 chamber, put an end to that, telling the White House the syndication-killer language was among the provisions she wanted out of the bill, according to press reports. It was removed. That prompted 13 conservation groups to write Sinema on Dec. 7, pleading with her to “stand with us” to “curb abuse and restore the integrity of this cherished and worthy conservation program.”

Sinema, whose objections to the measure remain unclear, was unmoved. “All efforts to persuade the AZ Senator to reconsider her position have failed,” one advocate for the measure told ProPublica in an email. (Sinema’s staff did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.)

Since then, President Joe Biden, signaling his support, has included the measure in his proposed 2023 budget in a section entitled “close loopholes.” But it remains far from enactment.

Rep. Thompson, an original sponsor of the measure, told ProPublica his bill is “a no-brainer. It stops a bunch of individuals who have been taking advantage of the taxpayers and lining their pockets with taxpayer dollars. It’s one degree off criminal what they’re doing, and they’re getting away with it.” Thompson said he’s looking for “other places to put the language. If we can find a vehicle where it works, we’ll put it in. I’d do it today if I could.”

Syndication easement promoters have attacked the measure by claiming it would allow the IRS to “retroactively” disallow transactions that are now legal — even though the agency first warned taxpayers against engaging in syndicated deals back in early 2017, when it identified them in its listing notice as an abusive “tax avoidance transaction.” The IRS has been routinely auditing such deals since then.

P4C has taken up this cry on its web page and Facebook site, where it promotes its members’ work on behalf of “private land conservation” as essential to the survival of the planet. One posting displays an image of two trapped raccoons, next to the words, “Don’t let this happen to our wildlife”; it warns that “retroactive tax hikes will have devastating consequences on our natural lands and wildlife.” Robert Ramsay, the group’s president, told ProPublica that such a “punitive retroactive tax law change” would harm “a large swath of American taxpayers” eager to participate in land conservation, from “a variety of walks of life.”

Andrew Bowman, CEO of the Land Trust Alliance, called the fairness argument “a canard.” As he put it, “People were on very clear notice that the federal government was saying this was abuse. They haven’t seen the need to stop.” This, he said, is why congressional action is necessary: “The IRS has thrown everything they have at it.”

In 2020, after warning that it planned to audit every taxpayer return claiming a deduction for a syndicated easement, the IRS announced a “limited-term” settlement offer, allowing individual investors to pay back taxes with a reduced penalty. Few took the agency up on its offer. In an internal IRS management review last year, agency officials lamented the poor response, noting, “Many taxpayers are undeterred and are opting for litigation, clogging up the Tax Court.” (One reason taxpayers are willing to fight: Syndicated easement deals routinely set aside $500,000 or more in advance to handle lengthy audits and tax court fights.)

The IRS is now examining the returns of 28,000 investors in syndicated easements, challenging $21 billion in deductions claimed between 2016 and 2018, according to testimony by Rettig.

For its part, the Justice Department has taken the enforcement fight to the courts, with legal actions shedding light on industry practices. In December 2018, a government civil suit targeted Atlanta’s EcoVest Capital, which built a national client-feeder network of brokers, financial advisors and accountants, who received generous referral fees.

According to an amended DOJ complaint, EcoVest had been involved in 58 syndication deals between 2013 and 2018, generating nearly $3 billion in federal tax deductions — on average, a write-off of $4.39 for every dollar invested. (For a wealthy taxpayer investing $100,000, that would have effectively generated a profit, often in a matter of months, of $60,000 or more.) Fifty-one of those 58 deals, according to the government complaint, relied on what the DOJ called “grossly overvalued” appraisals performed by a single appraiser, Claud Clark III, based in Magnolia Springs, Alabama.

The Justice Department sought to bar EcoVest and five individuals associated with the company, including Clark, from any future easement deals. It has already made some inroads. Defendant Nancy Zak, a syndicated easement pioneer, settled with the government in March 2021. She denied wrongdoing but accepted a lifetime bar from the easement business and agreed to pay an undisclosed settlement. (According to lobbying registrations, it was one of Zak’s firms, called Greenth, that hired Waxman Strategies in 2018, paying $20,000 in fees. Waxman Strategies said it terminated its relationship with Zak immediately after the government sued her. The firm then began getting paid, $465,000 to date, by Red Oak Reserve LLC, a low-profile legal entity that previously listed Zak’s office number in SEC filings. Waxman Strategies’ Michael Goo said Red Oak Reserve was founded by Brian Sullivan, who is a former Nancy Zak associate. Sullivan declined to comment.)

EcoVest’s go-to appraiser, Clark, also now appears to be out of the syndicated easement business. After several complaints to state boards about his methods, Clark has given up all his licenses to perform appraisals, according to a national appraisal industry database. His LinkedIn account now lists him as “Retired.” A recent filing in the DOJ case says he’s currently engaged in settlement talks with the government.

EcoVest’s CEO and Zak did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. EcoVest and Clark (whose lawyer declined comment) have denied any wrongdoing in earlier court filings. Atlanta-based Ornstein-Schuler, another of the biggest syndicated easement promoters, announced in January 2019 that it was getting out of the business.

Criminal investigations of industry practices are reportedly underway in three states. The crackdown’s most sensational case became public in February, when a federal grand jury in Atlanta indicted North Carolina developer Jack Fisher, a major syndication deal promoter and owner of Inland Capital Management. The 135-count indictment charged Fisher and six associates with participating in a conspiracy to sell $1.3 billion worth of illegal tax shelters. The charges against Fisher include wire fraud, conspiracy to defraud the U.S., money laundering and aiding in the filing of false tax returns. He has pleaded not guilty.

The indictment was backed by a string of damning statements attributed to Fisher, including several secretly recorded by an undercover government agent posing as an easement promoter.

The indictment, for example, charged that Fisher’s conservation deals relied on “fraudulent” and “grossly inflated” land appraisals, often valuing the easement properties at more than 10 times what he had paid for them just months earlier. It asserted that Fisher routinely “pre-determined” these valuations before any appraisal was actually performed, telling his two “hand-picked” appraisers what valuation he needed to generate the generous deductions he’d promised investors. In one recorded conversation described in the indictment, Fisher said one of the appraisers simply “puts down whatever we say.” In another, he said he always made sure easement valuations were high enough to make sure investors “can still get a good return on their money,” even if a later IRS audit reduced their charitable deduction.

The government also charged that Fisher frequently orchestrated the illegal backdating of checks and tax documents, allowing him to keep offering unsold stakes in his deals to investors as much as nine months after the year-end tax deadline, after the easement was already donated. In one recording, Fisher acknowledged rewarding partners at an accounting firm with free shares in an easement deal because “they participated in basically backdating all the documents.” After learning he was under investigation, according to the indictment, Fisher told one associate he could claim that backdated checks weren’t deposited until after the close of the tax year because they had been “lost” on someone’s desk.

Both appraisers, now among Fisher’s fellow defendants, have pleaded not guilty. One says on his website that his firm decided in mid-2019 to stop doing conservation easement work “until there is greater clarity from the courts on conservation easements.”

Three accountants who worked closely with Fisher had been criminally charged earlier. One, Herbert Lewis, has pleaded not guilty. Two others, brothers Corey and Stein Agee, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and are cooperating with prosecutors. According to the government, the Agees each received $1.7 million in fees from promoting the syndicated deals.

Fisher, a CPA himself, once worked for the IRS.

The indictment said he made $60 million personally from the 15 syndicated easement deals he put together between 2013 and 2020. With those funds, the government said, Fisher purchased a $2 million home on the Caribbean island of Bonaire, an airplane, a $450,000 luxury recreational vehicle, a $750,000 show jumping horse and more.

Fisher’s attorney, Russ Ferguson, said in a statement: “Jack Fisher looks forward to defending the allegations brought by the Department of Justice in court and hopes for a speedy trial. Through a congressionally authorized and IRS-approved tax deduction to encourage conservation, Jack Fisher has conserved nearly 10,000 acres of developable, natural land for generations to come. In doing so, Mr. Fisher has not only followed the law but has acted in conformity with IRS regulations, agency guidance and audit guidelines.” The statement said Fisher stopped promoting easement donations in 2019 because the government “now considers such transactions criminal.”

Paul Kiel and Doris Burke contributed research.

by Michael Grabell, photography by John Francis Peters for ProPublica

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

Join ProPublica on July 7 to discuss the current inflation crisis.

The story you’re about to read is bananas, and it’s also about bananas.

Last fall, a company called One Banana loaded 600,000 pounds of the fruit from its plantations in Guatemala and Ecuador onto ships bound for the Port of Long Beach in California. Once they arrived, the bananas, packed in refrigerated containers, were offloaded by cranes for trucking to a nearby warehouse, where the fruit would be sent to supermarkets nationwide.

But in the midst of a global supply chain crisis, none of the trucking companies the importer normally worked with were willing to come and get the containers.

As the bananas sat at the marine terminal, a logistics specialist for One Banana scrambled, contacting more than a dozen trucking firms.

With each passing hour, the bananas grew closer to spoiling.

“We need to pull out 15 containers from Long Beach Port,” the logistics specialist wrote in an email to one firm. “Please let me know if you could help me with this.”

A trucking company finally said it could — but only if One Banana first paid $12,000 per container on top of already higher transportation costs.

This is where the plot ripens.

If One Banana were to accept that additional fee and pass the full cost along to consumers, the bananas could go from 60 cents a pound to 90 cents a pound. That alone might not break your budget, but rising prices of everyday items are adding up to the worst inflation in 40 years. Many of the causes may seem obvious. Massive consumer spending and pandemic shutdowns have strained supply chains. The war in Ukraine is driving up the price of gas. But the extra fees for transporting bananas — and countless other products — are a hidden and mind-boggling source of inflation controlled by ocean carriers.

Simply put, as ballooning costs hit the wallets of American families, the global ocean shipping industry is enjoying its most profitable period in recent history. In the first quarter of 2022, the biggest carriers’ operating margins hit 57%, according to one industry research firm, after hovering in the single digits before the pandemic.

The hauler that wanted $12,000 per container to move the bananas told the One Banana logistics specialist that it needed the money to cover a slew of fees the ocean carriers were tacking onto freight bills. Hapag-Lloyd, the German shipping giant that owned the containers the bananas were sitting in, had become particularly notorious in the freight industry, leading to multiple complaints to the Federal Maritime Commission.

In normal times, the fees, known as detention and demurrage, make a lot of sense. Importers who don’t pick up their stuff on time get charged demurrage for storage at the marine terminals. Truckers who don’t return an empty container on time pay late fees, or detention. The purpose of the penalties is to incentivize the various players in the supply chain to keep goods flowing.

Most of the imported goods Americans buy are carried by ship and unloaded at ports like Long Beach for transportation by truck or rail toward their final destination.

But as supply chains snarled last year, the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles ran out of room and became clogged with shipping containers that importers, often big-box retailers and brands, weren’t able to retrieve. Surrounding truckyards and streets were flooded with empty containers, temporarily dumped there by trucking companies that couldn’t get appointments to return them to the ports.

Hapag had made it “extremely difficult” to return empty containers, the trucking company said, and it was often left holding them for a month, all while Hapag continued to charge the firm $400 a day for each container that wasn’t returned on time. One trucking company that the importer contacted said it almost had to shut down temporarily because all the chassis — the steel frames with wheels that attach to trucks — that it needed to pull new loads from the ports were sitting under 70 empty containers that Hapag refused to take back.

Essentially, One Banana and several trucking companies said Hapag had created the situation it was now profiting from.

“It’s like renting a car at the airport, and when you try to return it, they’re saying, ‘No, you have to hang on to it for us, and we’re gonna continue to charge you,’” said Fred Johring, the CEO of one of the trucking firms, Golden State Logistics.

Hapag declined to comment, but in filings with the Maritime Commission, it denied One Banana’s allegations that the fees were unfair.

The case is ongoing, but on this late October day in the Port of Long Beach, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of bananas hung in the balance.

For more than a year, retailers and brands have complained of crushing costs as the rate to ship a container from China to the West Coast skyrocketed from less than $2,000 before the pandemic to over $20,000 last year. Ninety percent of the stuff Americans buy from overseas arrives by ship, and nearly all of it is carried by a small number of ocean carriers that work together in three alliances that dominate the trade. The Federal Maritime Commission, which regulates the ocean shipping industry, recently concluded that the spike in freight rates was driven by the surge in spending and record congestion, not monopoly power. But the federal government said what’s happening with the additional detention and demurrage fees isn’t simple supply and demand. Instead, it said ocean carriers have [taken advantage](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/02/28/fact-sheet-lowering-prices-and-leveling-the-playing-field-in-ocean-shipping/) of the crisis and “[contributed to the pain](https://www2.fmc.gov/readingroom/docs/21-09/21-09_BOE_Opening_Brief_Public2.pdf/)” by imposing [billions of dollars](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqReHGykGbE) in “purposeless” and illegal fees that violate the Shipping Act. Now, the arcane matter of detention and demurrage has made its way into corporate earnings reports. Companies ranging from [Bed Bath & Beyond](https://news.alphastreet.com/bed-bath-beyond-inc-bbby-q4-2021-earnings-call-transcript/) and [Havertys Furniture](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000216085/000021608522000010/hvtex99.htm) to [Vita Coco](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001482981/000148298122000040/coco-3312021xexx9911.htm) beverages and [Summer Infant](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001314772/000110465922034637/sumr-20220101x10k.htm), which makes baby strollers and potties, have blamed detention and demurrage fees for hurting their bottom lines or leading them to increase prices. “Most people didn’t even know what those things were,” Trevor Lang, chief financial officer for Floor & Decor, [said in an earnings call](https://seekingalpha.com/article/4490311-floor-and-decor-holdings-inc-fnd-ceo-tom-taylor-on-q4-2021-results-earnings-call-transcript) in February. In comments to federal regulators in April, the Home Furnishings Association [wrote](https://www2.fmc.gov/readingroom/docs/22-04/22-04_Comments_HFA.pdf/), “These demurrage and detention fees have become a significant part of furniture retail costs in the last 2+ years.” The trade association representing toymakers like Hasbro and Mattel called the charges “[unethical](https://www2.fmc.gov/readingroom/docs/22-04/22-04_Comments_ToyAssoc.pdf/),” while a group representing meatpackers like Tyson Foods and Cargill accused ocean carriers of “near-constant predatory and unreasonable behavior” and “[a clear abuse of market power](https://www2.fmc.gov/readingroom/docs/22-04/22-04_Comments_MICA_NAMI_USMEF.pdf/).”

Cranes move containers off ships and into the port. Containers are typically owned by the ocean carriers, which can charge fees for storage at marine terminals or when containers are returned late.

One Banana called the fees “unjust and unreasonable” in a complaint to the Maritime Commission. But other fruit importers went further in agency comments.

“Demurrage charges are one way in which ocean carriers abuse their monopoly power over ocean transport,” the fruit importer William H. Kopke Jr. Inc. wrote to the commission. “Particularly when the cargo is perishable, it is as if the cargo is held hostage. If the receiver does not pay any charges demanded immediately, not only does the cargo rot while the charges are under dispute, but demurrage charges will continue to accrue.”

In an interview, John Butler, president of the World Shipping Council, said the ocean carriers that the trade group represents have been dealing with historic demand and congestion and, with the millions of boxes that they’re moving, disputes are bound to erupt.

“In the eyes of their customers, do they get it right all the time? Of course not,” he said. “Does that make it unreasonable? Sometimes it might be. Sometimes it might not be. It really is case by case. So you can't generalize about practices because it really does come down to the situation.”

In particular, Butler said, many big-box retailers and other importers have been using the ports as storage because their warehouses are full or they can’t get truckers to move their cargo.

The fee controversy is pitting the Maritime Commission, with 128 employees and a $31 million annual budget, against a global shipping industry that raked in $214 billion in profits last year.

In recent months, the commission has been trying to crack down on the fees by inviting complaints like One Banana’s and proposing tougher rules on ocean carriers. And on Monday, Congress approved the Ocean Shipping Reform Act, giving the commission more teeth.

The Maritime Commission rebuked Hapag in one case involving Golden State Logistics, proposing the biggest fine in the agency’s history: $16.5 million.

The proposed fine was still less than the profit Hapag made in a single day last year, but the commission hoped it would send a message. In late April, an administrative law judge agreed that Hapag had violated the Shipping Act, and last week the company agreed to settle the case for $2 million — about what Hapag made in 98 minutes.

Hapag declined to comment on the commission’s case but told the judge that its practices were reasonable and that any fees were the trucking firm’s fault.

As U.S. regulators spar with the global behemoths who control the shipping trade, the inefficiencies of a supply chain that once seemed blazingly efficient are becoming clear.

You’re paying more for everything, and much of it can be traced back to the COVID-19 lockdown when consumers started buying more goods like couches and electronics.

With cargo ships focused on bringing stuff in, more containers arrived than were taken back. Empty containers started piling up. And ocean carriers were in a prime position to profit.

Suddenly, the ports had no more room. Ocean carriers refused to accept all the empty containers that truckers needed to return but charged late-return fees anyway.

With ports full, ships carrying everything from couches to bananas began backing up at sea.

When the goods finally arrived, truckers couldn’t pick them up on time because many of the chassis were occupied by empty containers. Still, the ocean carriers charged late-pickup fees.

Retailers and brands have often passed those fees on to you, the consumer, which means that now you pay more for your couches, electronics and bananas.

To understand this morass, ProPublica followed one trucking company’s battle to return empty shipping containers and the ripening plot of a load of star-crossed bananas.

(Illustration by Laila Milevski/ProPublica)

Kim Cruz, an auditor for Golden State, steered a Toyota pickup through the dusty potholed storage yard in Wilmington, California, craning her neck to read the numbers stamped on the backs of shipping containers parked in row upon row. It was April, and she was looking for a container that the trucking company had been trying to return to the Chinese shipping titan COSCO since Jan. 26. The light gray container had traveled the world, according to customs records, carrying suitcases from a Cambodian factory to a port in Vietnam, where it was loaded onto a ship called the Marco Polo that is as long as the Empire State Building is tall. The container arrived in mid-January at the Port of Los Angeles, where a trucker for Golden State picked it up and drove it to a warehouse for a major department store. Now it sat empty, hidden somewhere amid hundreds of blue, green, yellow, pink and rust-colored containers lining the dirt lot squeezed between a rail line and a refinery. “It’s insane — you have to search this whole yard,” said Cruz, who has brown curly hair and a tattoo of a sooty owl wrapped around her forearm. Cruz knew the absurdities of the global supply chain intimately. She had helped Golden State and the Maritime Commission build the case against Hapag.

Kim Cruz, an auditor for the trucking firm Golden State Logistics, at a storage yard where shipping containers rack up late fees when they can’t be returned.

Overwhelmed by detention and demurrage bills in 2021, the midsize trucking firm based in Compton, California, had tasked Cruz with fighting back. She studied the law, along with a decades-old industry code with a tongue-twisting name: the Uniform Intermodal Interchange and Facilities Access Agreement. It spells out the relationship between ocean carriers, marine terminals, equipment leasing companies and trucking firms as containers and chassis change custody along the supply chain.

Many people might assume that returning a shipping container is easy: Truckers pick up a load at the port, take it to a warehouse and return with an empty container — back and forth throughout the day.

But the supply chain doesn’t work like that. Containers typically belong to the ocean carriers, and different types of containers can only be returned to certain marine terminals at specific times. To manage the flow, terminals usually require trucking companies to make appointments.

Cruz and Golden State’s dispatchers had been trying for months to schedule a time to return the COSCO container. But appointments to simply return a container are hard to come by as terminals try to free up space by requiring what’s known as a “dual transaction,” meaning that for every container brought back, a new load needs to be taken out of the port. If one of Golden State’s customers didn’t have a load at that terminal, it couldn’t return the container. To make matters more difficult, the container was sitting on a specialized chassis that couldn’t be reused and could only be returned to a specific terminal.

Each day that Golden State couldn’t return the container to COSCO, it accrued another $180 in fees that would ultimately be passed on to the department store and most likely its shoppers. So far, the container had racked up nearly $8,000 in fees, not including thousands more for the chassis and yard storage.

COSCO declined to comment.

As Cruz scanned the storage yard, she repeated the first few letters of the container number.

“What’s that one?” she asked, pointing to a gray container. “Oh no, I don’t think it’s that one.”

Before getting hired to keep track of equipment and audit invoices for trucking companies,

Cruz studied social work and psychology and worked as a customer service representative for Harley-Davidson.

“I didn’t even know what a chassis was back then,” she said. “But now I love it. It’s like trying to figure out lots of little puzzles.”

Los Angeles County’s Alameda Street is a main thoroughfare for trucks and rail lines moving containers in and out of the ports.

In the Hapag case, Cruz provided screenshots from the terminal booking websites showing that no appointments were available. But each time, a Hapag representative responded that the marine terminals manage the appointment systems, not them, and that Golden State still owed the fees. (The trade group for marine terminals said the availability of appointments is dictated by the ocean carriers.)

Frustrated by one of Hapag’s replies, Cruz shot back over email: “We are not paying this invoice. There were no appointments available and the terminal appointment system is out of our control.” She explained that Golden State had contacted Hapag daily to ask for help or alternate return locations and had gotten nowhere.

“How does any of this make sense?” she asked. “These are unfair business practices that must be stopped immediately.”

As Cruz drove deeper into the container yard, an early spring heat wave pushing temperatures past 90 degrees, she squinted through the glare of the afternoon sun on the windshield.

“It’s got to be in here somewhere,” she said.

If a container stays out too long and late fees aren’t paid, trucking companies can be slapped with a shut-out notice, barring them from picking up any of the ocean line’s containers. The notices are akin to a death sentence in the freight industry, as trucking firms that can’t fulfill their customers’ orders will quickly lose business.

In the last year, Cruz said, Golden State had been threatened frequently with shut-outs. It’s a powerful scare tactic, she said, that often pressures trucking companies to pay invalid bills.

“Truckers usually pay it and just say be done with it,” she said. “You know, we’re gonna lose more money if we end up getting shut out. So that’s what happens.” She shook her head: “Dirty business.”

After searching through rows of containers, Cruz finally approached the back of the yard.

“Maybe behind that container?” she said.

She got closer and read the letters.

“That’s it!” she shouted.

The light gray COSCO container was pocked with rust marks, sitting between a lime-green container and one that was taxi yellow. Cruz stepped out of the pickup to look at the box that had been a line at the top of a spreadsheet and the object of so much agita.

But she still needed a trucker — and an appointment to return the container.

The impact of the fees has hit freight haulers big and small. And the circumstances causing them to pony up are often out of their control. The IMC Companies, one of the largest port trucking firms in the country, said it paid well over $100 million in demurrage fees alone last year on behalf of its customers, compared with a few million dollars before the pandemic. Jim Gillis, president of the IMC subsidiary Pacific Drayage Services, said at one point last fall one of his customers, a large household goods retailer selling small appliances and candles, had 350 containers that it couldn’t return. “By the time you’re said and done, instead of paying $10,000 a container, with all the fees racked up, with storage fees at the port, chassis fees, per diem fees, these guys are paying $60,000 to $70,000 a box,” he said, estimating the total might have reached $20 million. “If I’m an importer,” he said, “I’m adding that to the price of my products.”

Jim Gillis, president of Pacific Drayage Services, a subsidiary of IMC Companies, one of the largest port trucking firms in the country, at a storage yard behind the company’s office in Compton, California

The issue became so bad for Leslie Luna, freight coordinator for Luna and Son’s Trucking, that her family moved its small trucking firm out of Southern California to the less-congested Port of Houston in Texas.

“It got to a point where we were stressed with having to house all these containers and not getting much help,” she said. “I was lucky if I got two to three hours of sleep, because I was literally on that computer all night trying to get appointments.”

Ocean carriers and marine terminals typically don’t let truckers leave with a container until all late pickup fees have been paid. Businesses say that’s forced them to shell out even when the charges are disputed.

Sometimes, containers are pulled aside for inspection by U.S. customs officials. J&K Fresh, a customs broker for the fruit industry, said Chilean grape importers are “facing a financial crisis” at the Port of Philadelphia as congestion delays are forcing them to pay thousands of dollars in fees per container while waiting for the grapes to be fumigated — a requirement of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Once containers are picked up, another clock starts. Importers have a few days to take them to a warehouse, unload them and return them empty.

Often, retailers will hire freight brokers to act as travel agents to handle the whole trip.

Under some contracts, the broker can be the ocean shipping line, which arranges transportation of the container across the sea, over rails and aboard trucks to its final destination. But sometimes the ocean carrier’s trucking company is backlogged for weeks. Both retailers and freight brokers said they’ve sometimes been stuck with late fees in these cases even when other trucking firms were available.

In addition to alerting importers that their goods have arrived, ocean carriers also tell U.S. companies waiting to export products when their ship is about to dock. Those companies, often farmers and manufacturers, will then load their products into containers and take them to the port. But because of the congestion, the companies complain, the ocean carriers’ ships have been delayed, forcing them to pay fees for port storage or extra container use.

Even when supply chains aren’t snarled, fees can add up fast.

In one particularly pungent anecdote, Brian Watt, a logistics manager based in Florida, described a container carrying plastic bins full of liquid yeast extract from Europe to New York. On its journey across the Atlantic, he said, one of the bins burst open, coating the inside of the container with a slurry-like goo. The mess was discovered only after his trucker had delivered the container to a food industry and brewery supplier in upstate New York.

Watt had to send a trucker to pick the load back up, hire a waste company to clean it out and wait for a permit to dump the yeast extract in a New Jersey landfill.

“You can imagine how it smelled. This is July. Do you know how hot it gets inside a container?” he said. “We had to send guys in suits to clean that thing up.”

The process took almost two months, and in the end, the ocean carrier sent Watt a late-return bill for $42,150.

The front window of Golden State’s office glowed like a beacon among the low-slung warehouses of Compton. It was a few minutes past 4 a.m., and Lisandro Figueroa was at his cubicle, scanning terminal websites for appointments to return empty containers — like the one his coworker Cruz was dealing with. He stared at a blue-and-red grid on his computer screen, jotting down abbreviations for ocean carriers on a piece of a paper as country music hummed in the background. “This is COSCO. This is Evergreen. This is OOCL. This is ONE line. CU lines. BAL lines. Wan Hai lines. Yang Ming lines. As you can see,” he said, “everything mostly says no.” The global supply chain has often been heralded as a high-tech wonder. The movement of containers at ports and through warehouses is a heavily automated ballet of advanced robots. But keeping it all together are people like Figueroa and Cruz.

Truck traffic near the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, where drivers pick up and drop off containers with direction from dispatchers

Figueroa’s work as a dispatcher is kind of like a cross between Wordle and SimCity. Golden State has to pick up about 150 containers loaded with auto parts, appliances and electronics from the port terminals every day. The stores and suppliers want their stuff as soon as possible, and each load has a deadline — typically a few days after arrival in the port — after which fees start to accrue. To get those goods, Figueroa has to match up drivers with empty containers that the terminals will accept. That way, the drivers can drop off the old containers and reuse the chassis to pick up the new ones. So he scans a spreadsheet for the oldest empties he can return to stop fees from accumulating.

Golden State’s yards, meanwhile, can only accept so many containers. That morning, one of its yards had 88 containers sitting in 90 spots. If Figueroa didn’t move empties out of the yard soon, Golden State would run out of space.

By 5 a.m., his phone was ringing every few minutes. Figueroa, who has a black beard with gray streaks, switched seamlessly between English and Spanish while also speaking fluent logistics jargon.

Port truck drivers are nearly all independent contractors seeking to line up the most profitable loads and avoid those that would cost them time and money while sitting in lines at the port or stuck in Los Angeles traffic.

“To keep a driver, you’ve gotta be on their level sometimes,” Figueroa said. “I’m a driver psychologist because I do a whole lot of listening.”

One driver called looking for work, only to call back a few minutes later saying his battery had died.

“Well, let me know when you get it fixed, not a problem,” Figueroa assured him. “Ándale pues.”

He sent one driver to take a shipment from the yard to an appliance warehouse and another driver to haul an empty container back to the port and pick up a new load: “Ándale, bye-bye.”

At 6:41 a.m., a driver wearing a reflective-striped shirt and orange polarized sunglasses stopped by the office and said he was ready for a load. Figueroa sent him to fetch a shipment of tires that would start accruing fees if not picked up by the end of the day.

A few minutes later, the phone rang.

“Uh-oh,” Figueroa said. “What happened? Don’t scare me. Don’t scare me.”

It was a driver who was supposed to pick up an empty container from the yard, return it to the port and pick up a new load between 7 and 8 a.m. But he had accidentally pulled from the yard a container full of auto parts destined for a customer.

Before Figueroa could worry, a colleague reported that another driver who was supposed to pick up a load of auto parts had broken down. The problem had essentially fixed itself. Figueroa reassigned the driver who’d taken out the wrong load to cover the delivery for the driver who’d broken down.

Lisandro Figueroa, a Golden State dispatcher, at the company’s office in Compton

Yet Figueroa still had to cover the 7 to 8 a.m. appointment to pick up a new load at the port. So he called the driver with the orange sunglasses.

“Hey, that load I gave you? Cancel it,” Figueroa said. “I am going to send you another load instead.”

The tires would have to wait, getting closer to racking up fees.

As things quieted down, Figueroa started going through the COSCO containers that had been sitting on the specialized chassis for weeks, collecting thousands of dollars in fees. But as usual, there were no appointments at the terminal that would accept both the container and the chassis.

So he started to see if he could just return the container and then separately turn in the chassis later.

Amid the congestion, finding an appointment has been like trying to nab tickets for a K-pop concert or a COVID-19 vaccine in early 2021.

There was an appointment for 5:30 p.m. But before Figueroa could type in the container number to reserve it, the appointment was gone. The next one wasn’t until 10:30 p.m., and it was Friday night. The chances of getting a trucker to cover it were slim.

But Figueroa said he knew a trick.

“I’ve done this so much,” he said, “that I’ve figured out that they’ll open appointments every half hour on the two mark, and by the two mark, I mean they'll open appointments at 8:02 and 8:32.”

It was almost 8:02 a.m. Figueroa placed his fingers on the keyboard and refreshed the terminal’s website. He refreshed again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

“If I didn’t get one by now, I’m probably not going to get one,” he said.

At 8:32 a.m., Figueroa tried again. No luck.

It too would have to wait, and the meter kept running.

A container at a storage yard in Wilmington, California, stuck for months and racking up fees

The imbroglio over the bananas was becoming increasingly desperate for One Banana. The company typically shipped five to six refrigerated containers of bananas with Hapag each week. The family-owned firm had started with one plantation in Guatemala in 1958 and grown into one of the largest producers of tropical fruits in Central America. With more than 100 vessels queueing outside the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach last fall, One Banana’s loads suddenly had to wait longer. And shipping rates had increased substantially. Starting in September, One Banana contacted 15 trucking companies, and almost all refused to pick up the importers’ containers if they were from Hapag, because they were afraid of getting stuck with them and racking up fees.

“We have 30+ empties out of the port with nowhere to return them,” a One Banana employee wrote to Hapag in October. “On top of this, we have 30+ full containers of perishable product that is sitting at the port and getting older every day because no carrier will go into the port to get it because they know they will be stuck with containers for weeks.”

The employee added, “I do not see how it is right that we are getting charged demurrage for containers that we cannot even pickup because we cannot return your empties.”

As weeks passed without a resolution, One Banana faced a choice of whether to pay $12,000 per container to get its 600,000 pounds of bananas to grocery stores. The company had already incurred more than $300,000 in detention and demurrage fees on 67 containers since the start of September.

“We can only help you if you pay in advance,” the trucking firm told the company.

One Banana declined to say whether it agreed to pay the fees.

But it did pay a price.

The bananas had already gone bad.

An orange Hapag-Lloyd container sits on a side street near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, surrounded by other containers left in limbo.

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

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 was co-published with the Chicago Tribune.

From the moment Amara Harris was accused of stealing another student’s AirPods at Naperville North High School, she has insisted that it was a mix-up, not a theft.

She told a school dean that she thought the AirPods were her own, having picked them up a few days earlier in the school’s learning commons, where she said she thought she had left her own set. Her mother repeatedly told officers that her daughter hadn’t stolen the wireless earbuds, records show.

Still, the school resource officer wrote Amara a ticket in 2019 for violating a municipal ordinance against theft. Paying a fine would have made the matter go away, but Amara says she won’t admit to something she didn’t do. For two and a half years, she has repeatedly gone to court to assert her innocence, even delaying her plans to attend on-campus classes at her dream school, Spelman College.

Now, in a rare and dramatic example of the impact of school ticketing, the case is headed for a jury trial, with the next court date on Tuesday. As Naperville continues to prosecute the case, Amara and her mother have racked up far more in legal bills than the city’s highest fine would have cost them.

“I am innocent. I am fighting because I don’t want this to happen to anyone else,” said Amara, now 19. “Why would I say I’m innocent to everyone but then I lie in court and say I’m guilty? It doesn’t make sense to me.”

This spring, in the investigation “The Price Kids Pay,” ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune exposed the widespread practice of school officials and local police working together to ticket Illinois students for misbehavior at school, resulting in fines that can cost hundreds of dollars. Reporters documented about 12,000 tickets issued for possession of vaping devices and cannabis, disorderly conduct, truancy and other violations from August 2018 through June 2021.

Ticketing students for their behavior in school skirts a state law that bans schools from disciplining students with monetary fines. Immediately after the report was published, state officials including Gov. J.B. Pritzker and the state schools superintendent said they intended to put a stop to the practice.

The superintendent, Carmen Ayala, chided schools for outsourcing discipline to police and urged them to stop. The Illinois attorney general’s office, concerned that school ticketing was violating the civil rights of students of color, launched an investigation into a large suburban high school district and said it might investigate others.

But none of the state officials addressed how to deal with pending cases of students who, like Amara, had already been ticketed.

“The governor says he wants this to stop, he wants this to end,” said Amara’s mother, Marla Baker. “We are in the middle of it.”

Amara’s family, like so many others, was thrown into a system that uses a lower standard of proof than a criminal court. People ticketed for ordinance violations can be held responsible if the allegation is deemed more likely to be true than not, and the ticket itself is considered evidence. At every turn, the system and the officials in it encourage families to admit liability and pay a fine. And most do.

During a year of reporting on student ticketing that included attending more than 50 days of hearings, Tribune and ProPublica reporters met dozens of students and parents who paid fines even though they believed police didn’t need to be involved in the first place. Some were initially inclined to fight the citations but eventually gave up, worn down by the process.

Amara’s case demonstrates the extraordinary effort it can take to argue against a ticket in a system built for assembly-line justice. Hers is the first case the Tribune and ProPublica have encountered that could go before a jury; Naperville officials said the city hasn’t had a jury trial for an ordinance violation in at least a decade.

The ticket is a civil matter, so there’s no threat of jail time. But Amara said she is committed to clearing her name.

To Amara and her mother, the ticket — and the city’s commitment to prosecuting it — is another example of people in power discriminating against Black children. Only about 120 of the roughly 2,700 students at Naperville North are Black, and Baker has spoken out in the past about what she sees as racism and bias in the city’s schools.

A Naperville city spokesperson, responding on behalf of the city and its police department, said “the City categorically denies that race in any way played a factor in this case.”

Spokesperson Linda LaCloche declined to answer specific questions about the police investigation because Amara’s court case is pending. The spokesperson attributed the case’s slow progress to court closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Amara’s change in attorneys and court scheduling issues, among other reasons.

The officer who wrote the ticket, Juan Leon, declined to discuss the case but said it was “unbelievable” that it was still pending. He blamed Baker for dragging it out.

A Naperville Community Unit School District 203 spokesperson distanced the district from the case, saying: “Naperville 203 does not ticket students.” Spokesperson Alex Mayster said school officials rely on school resource officers, who work for the city’s police department, when a disciplinary matter may involve a law being broken. State schools chief Ayala has said schools that take this approach are “abdicating their responsibility.”

Amara’s family so far has paid at least $2,000 in lawyer fees to fight the case, Baker said. She and Amara stopped working with their most recent attorney in part because of the cost of going to trial and his recommendation that they accept a plea deal.

If there’s a trial, Amara may have to defend herself. Still, she said, she is not going to quit and allow the ticket to blemish her hard-earned school record. She made the honor roll at Naperville North, participated in school activities including cheerleading and the step team, served as an aide in the classroom and for the school deans and, in 2020, graduated from high school ahead of schedule. She said she has interned at the Brookfield Zoo and hopes to become a veterinarian.

“They are taking away all of my accomplishments that I have worked hard for and substituting it with an accident that happened,” she said. “To define me as a person — that is not who I am.”

The AirPods investigation began in November 2019, when a school dean told the school police officer he had received a voicemail from a father who said his daughter’s AirPods had been stolen. Two of the school’s deans then began gathering information, according to the Naperville police report that summarizes how the school and police handled the incident.

Amara became part of the investigation, the report states, when the girl whose AirPods had gone missing reported something she had been told by a friend. During class, the friend saw Amara’s name pop up on her own laptop connected to AirPods that she thought belonged to the girl, the report says. The friend informed the girl, who then went to the school administration.

That same day, Dean Jim Konrad went to Amara’s classroom to speak with her. According to the police report, Amara told the dean she had purchased AirPods months earlier and handed Konrad the ones in her possession. They turned out to match the serial number provided by the other student.

“Amara stated that she did not know how this happened, and told him she thought they were hers,” the police report stated, recounting the conversation between the dean and Amara, then a 17-year-old junior.

The report said nothing more about Amara’s explanation for having the other girl’s AirPods.

“They never talked to me, never asked me what happened,” Amara said in an interview with ProPublica and the Tribune. But what she’d tell them is simple, she said: “I would tell them I found them in the exact location where I thought I misplaced them.”

Baker said she showed a receipt to school administrators and later to police to prove that Amara owned a set of AirPods and to show that Amara had reason to believe the ones she picked up were hers. Amara said using the other girl’s AirPods was seamless and there was no indication they belonged to someone else.

The police report makes no mention of the receipt.

After speaking with Amara, the dean went back to the police officer. The two of them agreed to call Amara’s mother, but before that happened, a fire alarm went off at the school. Amara, meanwhile, called Baker on her own. According to the police report, Baker came to the school and “started to yell” that school officials had “interrogated” Amara. She then left with Amara.

The school resource officer then called the father of the girl whose AirPods were missing. He told the officer he was glad his daughter had her AirPods back but he wanted Amara charged with theft, according to the police report. The officer said he explained “the different possible consequences toward Amara.”

School officials didn’t discipline Amara, she and her mother said, but the police continued to pursue the matter. Two weeks later Baker met with the school resource officer and a sergeant at the police station. Baker brought the former police chief of Aurora, who is retired but acts as a liaison between police and Black community members in the Chicago area. Amara was not present.

At that meeting, the Naperville school resource officer explained that he was issuing Amara a city ordinance citation for theft. According to the police report and the former police chief, Baker insisted “there was no theft” and would not accept the ticket. The officer wrote “Refused” on the signature line for the defendant when Baker declined to sign the citation.

The ticket issued to Amara Harris (Redactions by ProPublica)

“Something just wasn’t right,” said William Powell, the former Aurora police chief, who now works with the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives. “When her daughter was accused of taking these AirPods, they wanted to jump on her daughter right away and press charges.”

Powell said he was troubled that the police wouldn’t explain why they believed it was theft and not a mix-up. He said he thought the police were dismissive and acted like the ticket was not a big deal.

“They said, ‘She’s not being charged, she’s being ticketed,’” he said. “It doesn’t make any difference — she’s still in the system. I felt that it might not have been investigated thoroughly.”

When racist incidents in Naperville schools caught the nation’s attention a few years ago — one student was accused of posting an online ad with a photo of a Black student that said “slave for sale” — Baker spoke out.

At a community meeting and to reporters, she described how her son had been bullied in middle school, with classmates using slurs and sending him photos of a noose and of the Ku Klux Klan.

When Amara was ticketed for theft soon after that community forum, Amara and her mother felt like it was another injustice.

“We moved to Naperville for a better education, not to be marginalized where [if] she has a situation, she is sent all the way to court,” said Baker, who moved in 2016 with her family from Carbondale in southern Illinois.

The most recent court order in Amara’s case

A Naperville Community Unit School District 203 spokesperson said the district has worked to address concerns raised in 2019 about systemic racial inequities, including by adopting an equity resolution that commits to ending racial injustice, offering districtwide implicit bias training and examining hiring and requirement practices.

For “The Price Kids Pay,” the Tribune and ProPublica were able to identify racial disparities in school-based ticketing in some districts. But that type of analysis wasn’t possible for Naperville because ticket records obtained from the city’s police department didn’t indicate the race of the young people cited.

To fight Amara’s ticket, Baker hired a lawyer and also reached out to representatives from the NAACP and other advocacy groups. She started an online petition. She appealed to members of the Naperville City Council and to the mayor in an email urging them to dismiss the citation.

“Let her move on with her life and finally be able to attend college in person,” she wrote in March. “Let her move on from this false allegation that should have stayed as a simple school disciplinary issue.”

But the city’s prosecution of Amara continued. To make it easier to appear in DuPage County court, Amara has been taking her Spelman classes online, delaying a move to Atlanta. To pay her legal fees, she dipped into money she had saved for school as well as paychecks from a recent job.

Amara uses a whiteboard in her bedroom to keep track of court dates and her work schedule. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)

Earlier this year, a second lawyer representing Amara negotiated a potential plea agreement in which the city would dismiss the case if Amara paid a $100 fine plus $100 court costs. She would also have to concede that if she went to trial, the city would present a case and it was possible that she could be found guilty.

Amara wouldn’t agree to that deal and requested a jury trial. Her mother was angry. She wanted the lawyer to fight for a full vindication and felt that the plea deal would have undercut their pursuit of justice. The lawyer withdrew from the case.

“I just can’t tell my daughter to plead to something you didn’t do,” Baker said. She also acknowledges that it’s hard to know at this point what would feel like a win in Amara’s case. “I feel like no matter what, even if they dismiss it and we walk away from it, she still lost.”

When reporters asked Naperville officials about Amara’s case, city spokesperson LaCloche suggested the matter could have been resolved without a ticket. She said the decision to issue the citation was made by police after they “initially considered addressing this matter via an informal out-of-court resolution.”

Baker and Amara said police never indicated there was an alternative to a ticket and they were shocked to hear what the city told reporters. Powell, the former police chief, said no other option was mentioned in the meeting he attended.

“If you didn’t want to give the ticket, what parent would be like, ‘No, no, no — give me the ticket’?” Baker said. “If that was always the case, you still have the power to do so now. That is ridiculous to me.”

The father of the student who reported her AirPods missing in 2019 said he did not realize the case was still going on. He declined to comment further, saying he didn’t want anything to do with it.

After lawmakers said in April that they planned to take action on police ticketing at school in response to “The Price Kids Pay,” Baker renewed her efforts to get authorities to help them. She contacted a state senator and the Illinois State Board of Education. A board employee last week told Baker that she couldn’t help because the case isn’t under school jurisdiction any longer — it’s a court matter. She encouraged Baker to email the state superintendent.

Amara and her mother also reached out to ProPublica and the Tribune through a form asking students and parents to contact reporters about their experiences.

Throughout the case, Amara has remained focused on her academic goals. In addition to taking online classes at Spelman, she also enrolled at a local community college. By May 20, she had earned enough credits for an associate degree in science from the College of DuPage.

Amara crosses the stage while graduating from the College of DuPage. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)

On graduation day, Amara put her green gown on over a white flowered outfit and fitted her cap over her long braids. Baker made a point of saying that she didn’t want Amara to think about court on that day.

“I want you to enjoy this, I really do. I want you to block everything else out,” Baker said when she and Amara went outside to take photos. “I hope this will encourage you to keep going, and you’re halfway there already.”

But the ticket still looms. On a whiteboard in her bedroom, Amara marks the court dates alongside her work schedule.

She and her mother say they desperately need the case to end before summer’s over so Amara can head to Spelman. “Somebody’s going to come to help us,” Baker said.

Marla Baker hugs her daughter after watching Amara graduate from the College of DuPage. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune) Help ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune Report on Police Issuing Tickets at Schools

Police are ticketing students at schools across Illinois for behavior such as vaping, littering and disorderly conduct. Many students are forced to appear at hearings, which means missing school time, and the cases almost always result in judgments against the students, which carry fines as high as $750. We have found students as young as 10 are being ticketed, and Black students are disproportionately impacted.

To continue with this important reporting, we need to hear from people who have been affected by tickets handed out at school. Are you a parent, school worker, researcher or attorney? Please fill out this brief survey.

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

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by Nicole Carr

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 and accompanying videos were co-published by ProPublica and FRONTLINE as part of an ongoing collaboration.

In April of 2021, Cecelia Lewis had just returned to Maryland from a house-hunting trip in Georgia when she received the first red flag about her new job.

The trip itself had gone well. Lewis and her husband had settled on a rental home in Woodstock, a small city with a charming downtown and a regular presence on best places to live lists. It was a short drive to her soon-to-be office at the Cherokee County School District and less than a half hour to her husband’s new corporate assignment. While the north Georgia county was new to the couple, the Atlanta area was not. They’d visited several times in recent years to see their son, who attended Georgia Tech.

About This Partnership

This story is part of an ongoing collaboration between ProPublica and FRONTLINE that includes an upcoming documentary.

Lewis, a middle school principal, initially applied for a position that would bring her closer to the classroom as a coach for teachers. But district leaders were so impressed by her interview that they encouraged her to apply instead for a new opening they’d created: their first administrator focused on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

DEI-focused positions were becoming more common in districts across the country, following the 2020 protests over the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. The purpose of such jobs typically is to provide a more direct path for addressing disparities stemming from race, economics, disabilities and other factors.

At first, the scope of the role gave Lewis pause. In her current district, these responsibilities were split among several people, and she’d never held a position dedicated to anything as specific as that before. But she had served on the District Equity Leadership Team in her Maryland county and felt prepared for this new challenge. She believed the job would allow her, as she put it, to analyze the district’s “systemic and instructional practices” in order to better support “the whole child.”

“We’re so excited to add Cecelia to the CCSD family,” Superintendent Brian Hightower said in the district’s March 2021 announcement about all of its new hires. (The announcement noted that the creation of the DEI administrator role “stems from input from parents, employees and students of color who are serving on Dr. Hightower’s ad hoc committees formed this school year to focus on the topic.”) Hightower acknowledged “both her impressive credentials and enthusiasm for the role” and pointed out that, “In four days, she had a DEI action plan for us.”

Cecelia Lewis: “The District Identified This as a Need” (FRONTLINE)

During her early visits, Lewis found Cherokee County to be a welcoming place. It reminded her of her community in southern Maryland, where everyone knew one another. But leaving the place where she’d been raised — and where, aside from her undergrad years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she’d spent most of her adult life — wasn’t going to be easy. Before her last day as principal of her middle school, her staff created a legacy wall in her honor, plastering a phrase above student lockers that Lewis would say to end the morning messages each day: “If no one’s told you they care about you today, know that I do ... and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it!”

How We Got the Interview

Cecelia Lewis initially was reluctant to talk about her experience in Georgia. For several months, she did not respond to requests for an interview. Lewis then declined to comment in March, citing safety and privacy concerns. After multiple additional requests, Lewis agreed to an interview, her first regarding what happened to her in Georgia, seeing it as a way for her experience to help people understand what educators are facing in these times. Read more about reporter Nicole Carr's pursuit of the story.

Lewis was beginning to prepare for her move South, spending as much time with friends and family as possible, when she got a strange call from an official in her new school district. The person on the line — Lewis won’t say who — asked if she had ever heard of CRT.

Lewis responded, “Yes — culturally responsive teaching.” She was thinking of the philosophy that connects a child’s cultural background to what they learn in school. For Lewis, who’d studied Japanese and Russian in college and more recently traveled to Ghana with the Fulbright-Hays Seminars Abroad program for teachers, language and culture were essential to understanding anyone’s experience.

At that point, she wasn’t even familiar with the other CRT, critical race theory, which maintains that racial bias is embedded in America’s laws and institutions and has caused disproportionate harm to people of color. In a speech the previous fall, then-President Donald Trump condemned CRT as “toxic propaganda” and “ideological poison.”

The caller then told Lewis that a group of people in a wealthy neighborhood in the northern part of the county were upset about what they believed were her intentions to bring CRT to Cherokee County. But don’t worry, the district official said; we just want to keep you updated.

The following month, inside a gabled white clubhouse overlooking the hills of a Cherokee County golf course, dozens of parents from across the county had assembled on a Sunday afternoon for a lesson in an emerging form of warfare. School board meetings would be their battlefield. Their enemy was CRT.

One of several presenters at the meeting was Rhonda Thomas, a frequent guest on conservative podcasts and the founder of the Atlanta-based Truth in Education, a national nonprofit that aims to educate parents and teachers about “radical ideologies being taught in schools.” “So what is critical race theory?” Thomas asked the crowd. “It teaches kids that whites are inherently racist and oppressive, perhaps unconsciously,” and that “all whites are responsible for all historical actions” and “should feel guilty.”

She added: “I cannot be asked for repentance for something my grandparents did or my ancestors did, right?”

Thomas stressed that parents should form their own nonprofit groups and cut ties with their schools’ Parent Teacher Associations. “The PTA supports everything we’re against,” she told them.

Another presenter, a local paralegal named Noelle Kahaian, leads the nonprofit Protect Student Health Georgia, which aims to “educate on harmful indoctrination” including “comprehensive sexuality education” and “gender ideology.”

Kahaian emphasized how to grab attention during upcoming school board meetings. Identify the best speakers in the group, she told them, adding: “It’s OK to be emotional.” Be sure to capture video of them addressing the board — or even consider hiring a professional videographer.

“It’s good in case Tucker Carlson wants to put you on air,” Kahaian said. “It really helps.”

Inside the Clubhouse

Presenter Noelle Kahaian talks to the crowd about the “tsunami strategy.”

She then briefed them on how to file grievances about school board members’ teaching licenses and on their right to request school board members’ cellphone records.

And she advised them on the benefit of collaborating with “outside forces” to file open records requests to school systems for employee emails and curriculum plans that could provide evidence of inappropriate material being taught in classrooms. Doing so would allow those outsiders to “take some of the heat.”

But there was one agenda item that would inspire the crowd to take more urgent action than any other: They had to figure out what to do about the Cherokee County School District’s decision to hire a woman named Cecelia Lewis.

“And when I got a text message from somebody saying that this person was hired, I immediately was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, where are my people?’” said another speaker, Mandy Heda, a Cherokee County GOP precinct chair who introduced herself as a parent of four students in the district.

Thomas, Kahaian and Heda did not respond to multiple requests for comment or to a list of questions detailing the points they raised at the clubhouse meeting and elsewhere.

After asking the crowd to look at the Maryland district where Lewis was coming from, Heda wondered how Lewis could “leave that at the border” (she didn’t elaborate on what “that” was) and how the longtime educator could come “to Cherokee County and not want to change us.” (Like Cherokee, the district where Lewis was a principal serves a majority-white county that voted for Trump in 2020 — though Heda and others in the clubhouse seemed unaware of this.)

A man interjected, saying he’d contacted the Cherokee County School District to find out “how they arrived at the choice to hire” Lewis. Hadn’t there been any local candidates, he asked.

Targeting Lewis

Presenter Mandy Heda criticizes the district's decision to hire Cecelia Lewis.

“You cannot tell me, you know, that you can’t find somebody else qualified,” Heda responded. “And if you’re looking for her to be Black, that’s fine. But that’s not what this is about. This is not about the color of her skin. It’s what she’s going to bring into our district and what she’s going to teach our children.”

Another person in the crowd later asked if the arrival of Lewis was a done deal. Several confirmed that it was.

“We don’t have to accept it, right?” another man asked, the crowd’s energy rising in response with a collective yes. “We can change that, right?”

“In some way, shape or form,” another woman vowed.

The May 2021 clubhouse meeting, a recording of which was provided to ProPublica by a parent who attended, provides a window into the ways in which conservative groups quickly and efficiently train communities to take on school districts in the name of concepts that aren’t even being taught in classrooms.

National groups, often through their local chapters, have provided video lessons and toolkits to parents across the country on how to effectively spread their messaging about so-called school indoctrination. Parents Defending Education has created “indoctrination maps” tracking everything from a district celebrating “Black Lives Matter week” to one that allows students to watch CNN Student News, while the Atlanta-based Education Veritas and Kahaian’s Protect Student Health Georgia provide portals for anonymously reporting educators supposedly sympathetic to CRT, DEI and other so-called controversial learning concepts.

In the wake of 2020’s summer of racial reckoning, as the work of anti-racist authors shot to the top of bestseller lists and corporations expressed renewed commitments to diversity initiatives, conservatives mounted a counteroffensive against what they viewed as an anti-white, anti-American, “woke” liberal agenda. And with that effort came a renewed vilification of CRT, a four-decade-old theory that, contrary to its opponents’ accusations, is rarely if ever taught in K-12 public school systems (it typically is taught in graduate-level college and law school courses). That effort quickly snowballed into complaints about what used to be basic history lessons involving race and slavery, which organized groups began conflating with CRT and campaigning for their removal from curriculums.

Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter.

Nearly 900 school districts across the country have been targeted by anti-CRT efforts from September 2020 to August 2021, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, San Diego, found. Teachers and district equity officers surveyed and interviewed for the report “often described feeling attacked and at risk for discussing issues of race or racism at all, or promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion in any way. Equity officers told us that at times they feared for their personal safety.”

The report also stated: “Only one equity officer described a year free of anti ‘CRT’ conflict.”

“It makes me very sad for my colleagues,” said Cicely Bingener, one of the UCLA researchers and a longtime elementary school educator.

Using local media coverage and lawsuits, ProPublica has identified at least 14 public school employees across the country, six of them Black, who were chased out in part by anti-CRT efforts in 2021. Some of the educators resigned or did not have their contracts renewed, while others were fired by school boards where elections had ushered in more politically extreme members.

Since January 2021, legislatures in more than 40 states have proposed or passed bills and resolutions that would restrict teaching CRT or would limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism. Four days after the meeting in the golf course clubhouse, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp released a statement solidifying his stance against CRT and asking the state Board of Education to do the same. “I urge you to take immediate steps to ensure that Critical Race Theory and its dangerous ideology do not take root in our state standards or curriculum,” it read.

On June 3, 2021, the Board of Education did just that, joining Utah’s as the first such groups to pass resolutions of that kind. Georgia’s declared that “the United States of America is not a racist country, and that the state of Georgia is not a racist state.”

In predominantly white Cherokee County, 40 miles north of downtown Atlanta, the fight over CRT has led some residents to question whether they still recognize the community they thought they knew.

“These are our neighbors,” said Leanne Etienne, a Black mother of two Cherokee County students, one of whom served on the superintendent’s ad hoc committee that led to the creation of the DEI position. “These are people who are the parents of the children my kids go to school with. It’s a very uncomfortable feeling. You don’t know who to trust. You don’t feel safe.”

After that April call from the school district official, Lewis was confused but remained optimistic. She read up on CRT and determined it had nothing to do with her role. Then came more calls.

In one, a district official asked Lewis if she has social media accounts. “Only a LinkedIn,” she replied. (Lewis barely has a digital footprint. She has never posted anything on social media nor made any professional statements in regard to CRT or any other controversial topic.) The official explained that some of the people upset about her hiring were complaining that a Twitter user with her name was posting Marxist ideology.

Around that same time, according to Lewis, several emails and handwritten letters were showing up at her school in Maryland, calling her a Black Yankee and saying her liberal thinking is unwanted. She saved only one, with typewriting on the envelope. The return address was just “A Cherokee County Citizen.”

“They ultimately just said, you know, ‘We don’t want you here, and we don’t want you to push us to find out what will happen if you come here,’” Lewis said.

On May 18, 2021, two days after the meeting at the clubhouse, Cherokee County’s schools communications chief and its school board members received the first of approximately 100 form letters that would flood their inboxes over a 48-hour period, demanding that Lewis be fired.

One of approximately 100 form letters opposing Lewis’ hiring that were sent to Cherokee County School Board members and district officials during a two-day period in May 2021. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Another parent wrote to a school board member, citing Cherokee County’s recent census statistics: “Did you know that 77.8% of the population is considered ‘whtie [sic] alone’ 7.7% are black and 11.1% hispanic? Are we now in a county that is going to cater to a handful of people?”

Lewis said she was willing and eager, once she arrived in Georgia, to speak to concerned parents. “I just felt as if there was a misunderstanding,” she said, “and as soon as I [would] have an opportunity to get there and really speak on my own behalf, then it was going to be OK.”

She also felt comforted by the fact that school district officials were regularly checking in with her, offering reassurances that they were monitoring the situation and that everything would be OK “once they get to know you.”

Lewis tends not to talk about racism in terms of her professional life. She said that, until she got the Black Yankee email, she had not experienced racial prejudice and was accustomed to learning and working in majority-white spaces. She also recalled being surprised when someone from the district pointed out that a hiring like hers was rare, in that there were not many minority leaders working in the district.

“I did not think that in 2021 that that was really a thing,” Lewis said, noting the district’s proximity to Atlanta, with its high concentration of Black leadership and affluence. “And that was probably just ignorance on my end. And I mean that in the purest form of ignorance, of just not knowing. I didn’t know.”

On May 20, 2021, one of Lewis’ soon-to-be colleagues called to say that the people upset about her hiring were claiming to have spotted her around Cherokee County and were sharing with one another her supposed locations. Lewis, however, was still in Maryland.

That same day — following an increase in social media posts, emails and phone calls complaining about Lewis and CRT — the district installed metal detectors and assigned extra security at the county building where school board meetings are held.

Lewis soon received yet another call. Someone from district leadership asked if she was planning to watch the board meeting that night. She replied that it hadn’t been on her radar.

“You should watch it,” they said.

Well before the Cherokee County School Board meeting’s 7 p.m. start time, people hoping to get inside were being turned away. The room and the overspill viewing area in the lobby were at capacity. Those who were denied entry gathered outside near the parking lot, where they could peek through windows and glimpse the large screens mounted in the boardroom. Others hung around outside, planning to watch the livestream of the meeting on their phones.

At home in Maryland, Lewis and her husband sat in their bedroom, the laptop propped up between them.

Inside, just before the meeting started, mothers in black T-shirts printed with the words “I don’t co-parent with the government” smiled and posed for pictures. A husky man with a deep voice formed the beginning of the large prayer circle that inched toward the dais where district officials, student delegates and Cherokee County’s seven school board members were seated.

The first order of business was introduced by Mike Chapman, a Republican board member who’d held his seat for more than two decades: a resolution against teaching CRT and the 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times series that “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” (Conservatives have railed against it as racially divisive and have often lumped it together with CRT in an attempt to ban both from schools across the country.)

What came next caught Lewis off guard.

Hightower, the superintendent, read from a statement: “While I had initially entertained and publicly spoken to the development of a diversity, equity and inclusivity, DEI plan, I recognize that our intentions have become widely misunderstood in the community and it created division.

“To that end, I have concluded that there will be no separate DEI plan.”

To Lewis, it was as if the “foundations of everything that I was asked to do have just shifted, and I was not a part of the conversation.”

State Rep. Brad Thomas, a Republican, spoke next. He assured the board that, as the father of a Cherokee County student, he’d done his research after fielding complaints about Lewis’ hiring.

He said he now had a plan of his own in the works: He would be drafting legislation to ensure that teaching CRT and the 1619 Project would be illegal statewide. “We’ve pulled language from Tennessee’s bill. We’ve pulled language from Texas’ bill. We’ve pulled language from Oklahoma’s bill. We’ve pulled language from Idaho’s bill,” he said. “And I’ve put some of my own language in there.”

Heda, the Cherokee County GOP precinct officer who’d spoken at the clubhouse meeting four days earlier, also addressed the board. She claimed that the definition of DEI had changed over time and now represents the views held by people with “the same woke political understanding of power dynamics and social positions.”

“We cannot fix racism with institutionalized racism,” she said.

A neighbor of Heda’s approached the lectern next. The woman, who is Black, spoke in favor of the decision to hire Lewis. It was the first time she was mentioned by name.

According to one observer, that’s when the crowd gathered outside began beating against the building’s windows.

“No, no, no!” they screamed in unison, the sound reverberating through the lobby as their fists pounded the glass.

The scene outside the May 20, 2021, Cherokee County School Board meeting. (Provided to ProPublica)

A subsequent speaker, a parent named Lori Raney, was rewarded with applause when she asked the board, “My question to you is, if you vote to do away with the DEI program, does that mean the new DEI officer has her offer rescinded? Because why do we need to pay $115,000 for somebody who doesn’t have a job to do anymore?”

At that moment, Lewis recalled, her husband said: “That’s it. We’re not doing this. You are not going there.” He left the bedroom in disgust.

Not long after, a volunteer from the campaign of Vernon Jones, a Black Republican who at the time was running for governor (Jones later switched to a run for Congress), read a statement to the school board from the candidate. “Embracing the teaching of critical race theory is a slap in the face of Dr. King’s teachings,” said the volunteer, Stan Fitzgerald. “Taxpayer-funded anti-white racism is still exactly that — racism.”

Upon hearing that, Lewis thought about how Martin Luther King Jr. promoted humanity and love, and she was devastated to hear his words used by strangers to attack her. Everything she had just witnessed felt contrary to his ideals.

Breaking down in tears, Lewis closed her laptop. She could no longer watch.

“That cut me so deeply,” she said. “It hit the core of who I am as a being.”

Lewis missed the part when Miranda Wicker, another parent and member of the county’s Democratic Party, addressed the board. “Those who want this ban are spouting talking points fed to them by an outside special interest group with a deeply political agenda to keep people riled up against an invisible other,” said Wicker, who was interrupted by loud shouts.

“Stop the disrespect!” school board Chair Kyla Cromer yelled at the crowd after banging her gavel. “Stop! Stop!”

Cromer threatened to adjourn the meeting early but ultimately allowed it to continue.

The board voted 4-1 with two abstentions to pass the anti-CRT and anti-1619 Project resolution. But the crowd was still worked up. Cromer moved to take a break. The livestream of the meeting was paused. But the yelling continued. And things spiraled out of control, to the point that Cromer abruptly adjourned the meeting.

One man in the crowd screamed: “I’m furious!”

Another declared: “We’re going to hunt you down!”

The scene inside the May 20, 2021, Cherokee County School Board meeting, as Chair Kyla Cromer moves to adjourn. (Provided to ProPublica)

The school district’s chief communications officer, Barbara Jacoby, would later say that’s when the students attending the meeting started crying.

“They had to be rushed out of the room,” Jacoby recalled. She went with them and the school board members as security guards ushered the group to a conference room behind the dais. “And then we had to be walked to our cars,” she said. “We had to be followed out of the parking lot onto the highway by police officers.”

In response to questions from ProPublica, the school board provided a statement describing how some members requested school police escorts to their homes, where city and county agencies conducted extra patrols. In response to the other questions, including ones about anti-CRT letters the board received, Jacoby responded on its behalf, stating “the information you note below is correct.” Cromer and Hightower declined to comment.

Jacoby said the scene felt unreal. “It’s certainly not anything anyone who comes to work for a school district expects would ever be part of their job.”

Cecelia Lewis: “I Don’t Even Know Why We Continue to Give Life to It” (FRONTLINE)

Lewis’ phone kept ringing that night. People from the district were telling her that this is not who they are, that they’re embarrassed by the actions of their neighbors and church members, that they’re sorry she had to witness this.

In a phone call the next morning, Hightower apologized to Lewis. He said he still wanted her to come to Cherokee. Another administrator asked if she would consider a different position.

But by then she’d made up her mind. She told Hightower: It’s just not going to work.

“I can’t say I blame her,” Cherokee County School District chief of staff Mike McGowan said in an interview with ProPublica. “There was so much misinformation about who she was, what she stood for and what was going on politically.”

In response to a detailed list of questions to the district covering all aspects of Lewis’ experience in Cherokee County, Jacoby responded that “we have no further comments to add.”

The following morning, before it was publicly known that Lewis had quit the job she’d never started, a former Cherokee County student who’d attended the school board meeting appeared on “Fox & Friends” and warned that the board was still pursuing CRT under the guise of other concepts. “I think that they’re relying on wordplay to try to confuse Cherokee County representatives or constituents that aren’t necessarily completely involved because they’re busy with their day-to-day life,” the guest, Bailey Katzenstein, said. She claimed that CRT initiatives would be carried out by “someone from Maryland” in the form of programs “synonymous” with CRT: DEI and SEL (or social emotional learning). SEL is a decades-old child development concept that emphasizes building self-awareness, teaching kids how to better communicate, fostering relationships and making responsible decisions, according to scholars and researchers.

“I don’t think it’s acceptable,” Katzenstein said of the school board not banning DEI and SEL along with CRT. “They’re hiding behind closed doors, and I think it’s completely full of cowardice.”

The Fox host, ending the segment, said: “If you thought this was an elite, New York City school problem, Bailey Katzenstein just told you the exact opposite. This is spreading. It’s going all over the country, and it’s having real impacts.”

The next day, Cherokee County parents used their private Facebook group to continue to report Lewis “sightings.” (People with access to the group shared screenshots of posts with ProPublica.)

A post to a private Facebook page falsely claimed that Lewis was in Cherokee County and working for the school district. (Screenshot provided to ProPublica)

“My husband swears he saw Ms. Lewis at Ace yesterday afternoon!” one woman wrote, adding, “He saw the Maryland plates and the driver looked just like her.”

But Lewis was still in Maryland. She hadn’t returned to Georgia since the house-hunting trip.

In a statement quoted in the Cherokee Tribune & Ledger-News a week and a half later, Lewis wrote: “I wholeheartedly fell in love with Cherokee County when I came to visit and accepted the position, but somehow, I got caught in the crossfire of lies, misinformation, and accusations which have zero basis.”

When Lewis and her husband actually relocated to Georgia later that summer, the Cherokee parents’ private Facebook group lit up.

“Guess where Cecelia Lewis is possibly landing now?” another woman wrote.

They’d figured out her next move.

Five days after Lewis quit her would-be job in Cherokee County, the district’s human resources director forwarded a copy of her resume to the chief academic officer at his former school district, one county over. “Great catching Up!” he wrote. “Talk soon.”

Officials in the Cobb County School District, the second-largest in the state, called Lewis soon after. They wanted to talk to her about an opening they had for a supervisor of social studies, a job title she’d held in another school district earlier in her career.

Lewis did not know it, but the position already had been subjected to scrutiny.

In the summer of 2020, in wake of Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police, the Cobb County School District began to more tightly manage the way racial issues are handled in social studies teacher training and more closely vet the materials trainers and educators could use.

According to records obtained by ProPublica, the previous, longtime social studies supervisor had been reprimanded for hosting a district-approved speaker from the state Department of Education. A teacher had complained about the speaker’s presentation, titled “All are Welcome.”

The social studies supervisor’s boss wrote in the letter that most of the presentation was appropriate. There were just a few issues.

The boss wasn’t happy with the “sensitive content and images” and “probing questions” in the presentation. One slide included a photo of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin atop Floyd, his knee pinned to Floyd’s neck, along with two questions that challenged educators in how they approach lessons about such controversies: “What can we share with our black students to help them cope with the bottom?” “What did the man on top miss out on learning that could have made him a better person?”

Additionally, the director’s letter reminded the social studies supervisor that there already had been discussions about references to the 1619 Project, about vetting all presentations, about monitoring social media posts for the “message they send to the greater Cobb County community” and about ensuring that outside organizations the social studies supervisor might partner with would present controversial issues in a manner acceptable to the school district.

In 2021, the social studies supervisor retired. Lewis — who holds a master’s degree in teaching the subject — applied to replace her.

In June, at around the same time that Lewis got the call from Cobb County to come in for an interview, Cobb’s seven-member school board passed its own anti-CRT and anti-1619 Project resolution. Three members — all of them Black Democrats — abstained, noting this was not the first time they were blindsided by the addition of a problematic, last-minute agenda item.

Once a Republican stronghold represented by Newt Gingrich in Congress, Cobb County flipped to blue in 2018 and has remained that way since. By 2020 the county elected its first Black sheriff and county commission chair. Though the school district’s population is 30% Black and 24% Hispanic, the school board majority remains white and conservative.

By mid-July, another metropolitan Atlanta school district was courting Lewis. But by then she was living in Cobb County and decided to follow-up with the district there. It had been weeks since she’d gone through multiple rounds of rigorous interviews, during which Cobb officials complimented her on her credentials, saying she’d be an asset in multiple leadership roles, according to Lewis.

Lewis recalled that a district official finally called her back toward the end of July to apologize for the delayed response and explained that the superintendent had been involved in vetting her hiring, something that typically doesn’t happen for a person who applies for a supervisor role.

The district offered Lewis the job on that call, and she accepted. She was asked to report to work the next day, July 20.

By the end of the week — right around the time when the Cherokee County parent circulated the tip in the private Facebook group that Lewis might now be heading to Cobb — Lewis got a call from a school district leader. It was someone above her boss, Lewis said. According to Lewis, the person requested an immediate, off-site meeting.

It was already after 6 p.m. Lewis had just settled in for a manicure and pedicure. She left her appointment and headed to a nearby Panera Bread, where she and the district official took a seat near the back of the restaurant.

The person explained that complaints about her were “percolating” out of Cherokee into Cobb, according to Lewis, who also remembered the person telling her to be careful; she’s an at-will employee (meaning she can be fired at any time for any reason without notice) and the person might not be able to help her. Lewis also recalled the person telling her that she shouldn’t have to endure in Cobb what she went through in Cherokee.

Lewis was stunned. “I did nothing but showed up to work, signed a contract, agreed to do what I was asked to do in the job description,” she told ProPublica. “And yet again, I’m getting attacked.”

Around the same time, Cobb’s four Republican school board members, its superintendent and another district official, John Floresta, were fielding complaints about the decision to hire Lewis.

“I am appalled that anyone would advocate for the racist, sexist, and Marxist ideology that is Critical Race Theory,” one woman wrote to the group in an email, which ProPublica obtained through an open records request. Her name was redacted. She went on to say, among other things: “I insist that you pass real policy reforms that forbid indoctrinating children with CRT in classrooms,” “Anyone found pushing CRT on CCSD time should be immediately terminated,” and “Make no mistake: press releases and toothless resolutions just won’t cut it.”

“I agree with you 100%,” Cobb County school board member Randy Scamihorn responded. “Thankfully, the majority of the Board did vote on June 10th to ban CRT and 1619 Project from our schools in Cobb County. We then directed Superintendent Ragsdale to implement the enforcement of this decision, which he readily agreed to do.”

“I’m glad to hear you feel that way, but it certainly seems we need to remain vigilant,” the woman replied. “Why has Cecelia Lewis been hired by Cobb? She was hired by Cherokee schools for CRT and was run off because the parents put up such a fight. Now Cobb has quietly hired her. This isn’t a good move for the optics that Cobb has supposedly banned CRT.”

There is no record of an email reply from Scamihorn.

In response to ProPublica’s request for comment on the email exchange, a spokesperson for the district responded on behalf of Scamihorn: “Your assertion that Mr. Scamihorn ‘agreed 100%’ that ‘anyone pushing CRT on CCSD time should be immediately terminated’ is grossly inaccurate and not consistent with the email you are referencing. The Cobb Board did pass a resolution which directs the District to focus on keeping schools, schools, not on political distractions.” When asked to elaborate on what was inaccurate or inconsistent, the spokesperson did not respond.

Floresta responded to a different email complaining about CRT, assuring the sender that it was not allowed to be taught per district policy. The sender then pointed to the hiring in Cobb of “Cecelia Lewis, a well known advocate for CRT and DEI agents who actually resigned from Cherokee County recently because of the push back from the parents.”

“How in the heck did Dr. Cecelia Lewis get hired on?” the email continued. “It is ASTOUNDING to think that anyone would think this was a good idea. We need answers on this, immediately, and an explanation of her role within the County. To list her under Social Studies does not fool any of us.”

On Lewis’ fourth day on the job, she got a message from one of the district secretaries.

“I received a call from a parent wanting to know if you were the same person hired in Cherokee County. I just told her that someone would give her a call back to address her questions.”

Lewis’ boss soon told her to direct all such messages to her office. She also told Lewis to hold off on responding to any emails regarding her hiring, after Lewis replied to a positive note that came in from a supportive parent.

The following week, Lewis was supposed to introduce herself to all the social studies teachers at a districtwide training meeting. She said she’d been asked, before the Panera meeting, to prepare a presentation and share the social studies program vision.

She said she was then asked to shorten the presentation to a simple series of slides. Then, to one slide.

Finally, she learned she wouldn’t even be acknowledged at the meeting as the new supervisor of social studies.

“When the day came, I was told that I had to sit in the back and flip the slides for the presenter,” Lewis recalled. “I was not introduced at all.”

Lewis said she did receive warm welcomes when she individually introduced herself to teachers, some of whom said they’d heard she’d arrived and wondered when they’d meet her.

Not long after the meeting, she recalled, other aspects of her job began to change. Her emails to social studies teachers would need to be vetted before she could hit send (not a single one was approved). And she’d now be on a special project, reviewing thousands of resources that had already been approved and adopted by the district.

“It was pretty much them tucking me away,” Lewis said. “Every meeting was canceled. Every professional learning opportunity that I was supposed to lead with my team, I couldn’t do. Every department meeting with different schools, I was told I can’t go.”

According to Lewis, the only direct communication she was allowed to have without vetting was with other supervisors.

“They were wasting their money,” she said. “I’m just sitting here in this room every day, looking through resources that have already been approved, which makes no sense, and not given much direction as to what I’m looking for — just making sure they’re aligned to standards, which obviously they were.”

At the end of August, Lewis requested a meeting with her supervisor and the district’s chief academic officer. She told them that she would be submitting her two-week notice.

The next day, she got one last email from district leadership.

“As we discussed, it is never our intention, as an organization, for an employee to feel anything other [than] the support and collegiality associated with a positive and professional work environment,” the email said. “Please know your concerns and feedback, as an individual and employee, were heard and valued.”

ProPublica submitted to the Cobb County School District and its school board a list of detailed questions about the hiring of Lewis, the community blowback and the changes to her job. A school district spokesperson responded: “Cecelia Lewis was employed by the Cobb County School District during the summer of 2021, voluntarily submitted her letter of resignation in early fall of 2021, and like every Team member, her contributions and work for students was greatly appreciated.”

Lewis’ departure from not one but two school districts didn’t put an end to the efforts of anti-CRT groups. In fact, the groups used Lewis’ retreat as a rallying call.

In August 2021, Educate Cherokee — a group with a now-defunct website that identifies itself on Facebook as a local chapter of the national conservative nonprofit No Left Turn in Education — announced that it would be holding an event. According to an online notice about the event, it would be led by Heda, who had spoken at the clubhouse and the school board meetings, and Raney, who at the school board meeting had called out Lewis’ salary. In the notice, the group claimed the elimination of “a new DEI administrative position” as one of its accomplishments. “Bring your ideas, energy, and enthusiasm,” the meeting notice said. “We need to convert all of it into an effective election effort to eliminate CRT by replacing all of the current school board members up for re-election with new conservatives committed to our cause.”

In the months to come, four school board candidates — Michael “Cam” Waters, Ray Lynch, Sean Kaufman and Chris Gregory — established themselves as part of a collective effort to gain a majority on the board, in part by ousting board members who’d come under attack following Lewis’ hiring.

The candidates dubbed themselves 4CanDoMore and launched a website, the top of which states: “In May of 2021, Cherokee County was taken by surprise when it was announced that our ‘conservative’ board voted to bring in Cecelia Lewis, as Administrator on Special Assignment, Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). However, her history was riddled with Critical Race Theory (CRT) ideologies in her previous school district. Why would the current board vote 7-0 to bring in someone to implement programs not in alignment with the family values of our community?”

A promotional photo of the 1776 Project PAC’s first endorsements of the year: a slate of Cherokee County School Board candidates who are opposed to Lewis’ hiring and CRT. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

In March of 2022, the 4CanDoMore candidates got a boost. The 1776 Project PAC, founded last year by author and OANN political correspondent Ryan Girdusky, had been singling out open school board seats across the country and supporting candidates who ran on platforms to ban CRT and the 1619 Project. (The super PAC’s name is a nod to an advisory committee launched in 2020 by Trump partly in response to the 1619 Project. Trump’s 1776 Commission sought to support a “patriotic education” in schools and oppose lessons that teach students to “hate their own country.”)

In 2021, the 1776 Project PAC backed 69 school board candidates in eight states. Fifty-five won their seats, its website claims, including all 15 candidates the PAC endorsed in Texas.

The 4CanDoMore candidates were the 1776 Project PAC’s first endorsements of 2022.

Girdusky did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the decision to zero in on Cherokee County candidates.

In May, two of the 4CanDoMore candidates lost their primary bids to incumbents. The other two, Kaufman and Lynch, advanced to a June runoff. Another familiar face in the anti-Lewis effort also made it to the runoff: Kahaian, the paralegal who’d told parents in the clubhouse how to prepare for an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show. She’s running for a seat in Georgia’s House of Representatives.

Even before any potential shake-up on the school board, some changes have already arrived in the Cherokee County School District. Among them is a ban on the word “equity” from any district initiative.

“We had to stop using the word because the word was redefined by people,” said Jacoby, the Cherokee County Schools communications director. “And so we had to take the word out of the equation, and say, OK, fine, ‘access.’ There’s no way around that access is important.”

After moving back home to Maryland, Lewis continues to work in education, although her role doesn’t primarily focus on DEI. “I may not have the specific acronym tied to my official title, but I am committed to celebrating diversity and promoting equity and inclusion,” Lewis said.

She also noted that, even in the face of increasing attacks, educators should not lose sight of their value and the difference they can make in children’s lives. “No one can take that away from us.”

Cecelia Lewis: “The Work Still Needs to Be Done” (FRONTLINE)

Today, the metal detectors remain installed at the entrance to the building where Cherokee County School Board meetings are held. A staff member is permanently assigned the task of evacuating students in attendance, should the need ever arise. And an increased number of security officers are strategically placed throughout the meeting room and beyond.

Standing in line outside the building before a recent school board meeting, mothers identified themselves to each other as “a Marjorie” — meaning a proponent of the speaking style of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, known for her provocative and unfiltered claims.

A little while later, once the meeting was underway, a man who described himself as a school bus driver and a grandfather stepped to the microphone during the public comment period.

A security officer keeps tabs on the May 19, 2022, Cherokee County School Board meeting. After the events of 2021, county officials increased the number of security officers at the meetings. (Lynsey Weatherspoon for ProPublica)

“This is not California or New York. This is Cherokee County, Georgia. We can choose what and how our students learn on a local level,” said the man.

“I was raised in a different era, in the ’50s and ’60s, where we were equipped to survive and succeed.”

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

Mollie Simon contributed research.

Correction

June 17, 2022: This story originally misspelled the first name of one of the people who spoke at the Cherokee County School Board meeting. She is Lori Raney, not Lauri.

by Lexi Churchill

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

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

In the past week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has joined the growing list of state and local officials fighting the release of records that could help bring clarity to how the emergency response unfolded during last month’s deadly shooting in Uvalde.

The governor’s office strayed from that broader opposition Monday, granting a request under the Texas Public Information Act from a Houston television station that sought the handwritten notes he used when he first spoke publicly about the shooting. The notes appear to support Abbott’s claim that he was misled when he initially praised law enforcement efforts during the mass shooting that resulted in the deaths of 19 children and two educators and left many more injured.

The recent release by Abbott underscores both the tremendous power government officials have to decide what is in the public interest and the unwillingness to release records that could call their agencies’ actions into question.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have submitted about 70 public information requests that could help answer larger questions as state and local leaders continue to offer conflicting accounts about why law enforcement did not confront the gunman sooner during the May 24 massacre. Those requests include 911 audio recordings, body and police car camera footage, and communications among local, state and federal agencies. The newsrooms also requested use-of-force documents, death records and ballistic reports.

Three weeks after the shooting, government officials have not provided the news organizations a single record related to the emergency response.

“The public wants immediate transparency,” said Kelley Shannon, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas. “The most enlightened law enforcement agencies understand the importance of being transparent, being open and doing it right away.”

Since the shooting, state police have said Pete Arredondo, the chief of police for the school district, erred in judgment by keeping law enforcement officers from immediately confronting the barricaded gunman despite 911 calls from inside classrooms indicating that children and educators remained in danger.

Arredondo, who leads the district’s six-person police force, defended his actions in an interview last week with the Tribune. He said he never considered himself in charge of directing the law enforcement response and didn’t issue any orders. He also said he didn’t know about the 911 calls because he left his radios behind. He thought they would slow him down and wanted both hands free in the event that he had to use his gun.

Abbott’s office, the Texas Department of Public Safety, the U.S. Marshals Service and the city of Uvalde are asking the state’s attorney general for permission to withhold records that may offer tangible answers to the contradictory accounts. (Under Texas law, agencies seeking to avoid disclosure of public records typically must make their case to the attorney general.) Other government entities have asked the state for extensions as they decide whether to fight such disclosures. News organizations across the country are reporting similar responses.

Among the arguments provided by government entities for withholding such documents is one from DPS stating that releasing records like footage from body cameras would provide criminals with “invaluable information” about its investigative techniques, information sharing and criminal analysis.

In most cases, however, the agencies argue that releasing such information could interfere with ongoing law enforcement investigations by the federal government and the Texas Rangers, an arm of DPS now tasked with investigating its own department. In a statement, Abbott’s office said that, upon completion of the investigations, “we look forward to the full results being shared with the victims’ families and the public, who deserve the full truth of what happened that tragic day.”

But timely disclosure of the records is paramount given the lack of transparency and contradictory accounts from state and local officials, three Texas Public Information Act experts told ProPublica and the Tribune.

Laura Prather, a First Amendment attorney in Texas, said the reason the state allows agencies to withhold information when it is part of an ongoing investigation is to protect someone who was accused of a crime but didn’t ultimately get convicted, “not to protect law enforcement for their actions in circumstances like this, where the shooter is dead.”

“The public has the right to know what happened that day, and right now they can only act on rumors and conflicting information,” said Prather, who is representing ProPublica in an unrelated defamation lawsuit. She said law enforcement must be transparent in order to earn the public’s trust, but agencies are instead using their discretionary powers “to thwart the public from getting information that they are rightly entitled to.”

Because state law allows government officials to withhold information in cases that don’t result in a conviction, it creates a loophole that lets governments deny records in cases where the offender was killed and will not be tried.

That results in a challenge for members of the public seeking records related to Uvalde because “either way, there is a statutory basis for these governmental bodies to seek to withhold information,” said Jim Hemphill, an attorney who serves on the board of the Texas Freedom of Information Foundation.

Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, a Republican from Beaumont, raised concerns about the “dead suspect loophole” in a tweet this month. He said it would be “unconscionable” for agencies to use the loophole to withhold “information that is so badly needed and deserved right now.”

“This is an area in dire need of reform,” Phelan wrote.

The state’s attorney general has 45 days to consider requests from government and law enforcement officials to withhold records from the public.

In 2019, after a gunman killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, the attorney general issued a ruling that pointed to an ongoing investigation and required the Police Department to release records but allowed it to heavily redact the information.

Families of the 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting victims are still seeking information after the attorney general sided with the district attorney who said he could not release records because of a pending prosecution, according to the Houston Chronicle. The shooter was later declared mentally incompetent to stand trial.

Shaheera Jalil Albasit, whose cousin, Sabika Sheikh, was killed during the Santa Fe shooting, feels an overwhelming sense of helplessness four years later. She and Sheikh’s sister still have biweekly conversations in which they discuss how they could shake loose more details about that horrific day.

Albasit has been following the unfolding of information in Uvalde over the past few weeks and says she imagines the frustrations families must be feeling at not knowing more about whether law enforcement could have saved lives by acting sooner.

“All of these questions, they can whack your mind, especially if you’re a family member,” she said in an interview. “You can’t help thinking about the what ifs.”

State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat who represents Uvalde, said families should not have to wait for answers.

“Parents are grieving their children, let’s be clear, but undoubtedly the community is questioning the credibility of law enforcement,” he said. “Can you blame them? People are upset and rightly so.”

Carla Astudillo contributed reporting.

by Stephen Engelberg

This column was originally published in Not Shutting Up, a newsletter about the issues facing journalism and democracy. Sign up for it here.

In July of 1973, a young, preppy-looking lawyer named Gordon Strachan appeared before the Senate Watergate Committee and acknowledged his role in the cover-up of America’s most consequential burglary.

When he finished, a senator asked 29-year-old Strachan if he had any advice for young people interested in public service. “Stay away,” he said. “It may not be the type of advice you could look back and want to give, but my advice would be to stay away.”

I was among the millions of Americans glued to the television that summer, a gangly teenager with dreams of working some day in politics. The Watergate hearings changed the nation’s perception of President Richard Nixon, laying the groundwork for his impeachment.

Stephen Engelberg as a young reporter in 1988. (Courtesy of Stephen Engelberg)

The hearings, and the role played by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in exposing the Nixon administration’s corruption, inspired a generation of young people to become investigative journalists. I was one of them.

In a cosmic twist, this month’s House hearings on the Jan. 6 attack coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in. (For history buffs, the precise date the hapless team was caught trying to break into the Democratic Party’s headquarters was June 17.)

Many commentators have argued that given the current fractured political and media culture, Nixon would not have left office had the crimes of 1972 and 1973 taken place today; he could have been confident that 34 senators of his own party would stand by him, regardless of the evidence.

I’m not so sure. It’s certainly true that the major television networks broadcast gavel-to-gavel coverage on what amounted to nearly all channels available in that pre-cable period of our nation’s history. It would be decades before the creation of a network that would deliver an alternate reality in which an event like the Jan. 6 hearings could go mostly uncovered.

But the view that the America of 2022 is divided as never before ignores the staggering level of popular support Nixon enjoyed. His reelection in 1972 was one of the biggest landslides in American history, nothing like the knife-edge presidential races we’ve experienced over the past two decades. George McGovern, the Democratic candidate, ended up 18 million votes behind Nixon and carried only one state — implacably liberal Massachusetts — and the District of Columbia. The map on election night was a coast-to-coast sea of red.

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As the facts about Watergate came to light after the election, minds changed. Strachan, the witness whose testimony made such an impression on me, testified that he was the courier who delivered cash from a White House safe to a Nixon campaign official. Strachan acknowledged that he “became more than a little suspicious” when the official put on gloves before accepting the package.

Nixon had his defenders in Congress, some of whom stayed with him to the bitter end. I still remember my anger in watching Rep. Charles Sandman, a New Jersey Republican, aggressively deny that Nixon had played any role in the crimes traced to every one of his closest aides.

The evidence ultimately prevailed. Sandman and the other Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee abandoned the president after the release of the “smoking gun” tapes in which Nixon directed the CIA to block an FBI investigation of Watergate on national security grounds. By then, Nixon’s approval rating had fallen to 24%.

The question that hangs over the Jan. 6 hearings is whether the emergence of similarly damning facts or documents would move either the Republican base or its leaders in Congress. The prevailing wisdom says no, and there are plenty of reasons to argue that a strikingly large portion of former President Donald Trump’s base will dismiss any disclosures by the media or members of Congress as “fake news.”

After initially condemning the attacks on the Capitol, a range of prominent Republicans took roughly that tack. Some likened the mobs to tourists on a rowdy visit. The Republican National Committee declared that the attacks were “legitimate political discourse.” Those assertions stood in stark contrast to the videos we assembled from the Parler app, which showed the violence of Jan. 6 from the perspective of those who filmed and posted it. Similar video evidence played an important role in the first night of the Jan. 6 hearings.

In its hearing Monday, the committee focused on a line of inquiry that our reporters explored this year: the willingness of “Stop the Steal” advocates to push theories they knew were disproven or dubious. That story took readers inside the small group that honed such arguments as the bogus ability of Dominion Voting Systems machines to “flip” votes from one candidate to another.

On Monday, the committee released testimony from Trump aides who said the president had embraced claims about stolen votes without any regard as to whether they were accurate or even plausible. William P. Barr, the former attorney general, said in taped remarks that he feared the president had become “detached from reality if he really believes this stuff.”

“When I went into this and would tell him how crazy some of these allegations were, there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were,” Barr said.

Over the years, the effects of congressional inquiries have been decidedly uneven. The investigation into illicit support of the anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua by the administration of President Ronald Reagan turned the White House ringleader of the operation, Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, into a right-wing celebrity. I covered those hearings as a young reporter, and their main value, from my perspective, was the Republicans’ dissenting report that asserted presidents have every right to defy Congress on foreign policy issues. That document, written under the direction of then-Rep. Dick Cheney, turned out to be a valuable blueprint for how Cheney, as vice president, and the administration of President George W. Bush would deal with Congress in the post-9/11 era.

On the other hand, the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings ended the demagogic power of Sen. Joe McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican who used congressional investigations as a weapon against left-leaning government officials. In a fascinating link in the chain of history, those hearings focused on the conduct of Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel and a lawyer who would come to school a young Trump in the scorched-earth approach to political and legal opponents. As president, Trump famously asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” when he felt White House lawyers weren’t sufficiently aggressive in defending his interests.

All of this is to say one should be cautious in predicting the effect congressional investigations will have on public opinion. Learning that Trump’s advisers were divided between Team Crazy and Team Normal, and that Team Crazy clearly had the upper hand, might disturb a fair number of voters. I’ve seen congressional hearings change minds, including my own.

by Craig Silverman and Ruth Talbot

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Do you have tips or information about Google’s ad business? Screenshots of ads we should investigate? We want to hear from you: craig.silverman@propublica.org, or get in touch using one of our encrypted options.

For roughly two decades, Google has boasted that it doesn’t accept gun ads, a reflection of its values and culture. But a ProPublica analysis shows that before and after mass shootings in May at a New York grocery store and a Texas elementary school, millions of ads from the some of the nation’s largest firearms makers flowed through Google’s ad systems and onto websites and apps — in some cases without the site or app owners’ knowledge and in violation of their policies.

Ads from gunmaker Savage Arms, for example, popped up on the site Baby Games, amid brightly colored games for children, and on an article about “How to Handle Teen Drama” on the Parent Influence website. Ads for Glock pistols loaded on a recipe site’s list of the “50 Best Vegetarian Recipes!” as well as on the quiz site Playbuzz, on the online Merriam-Webster dictionary and alongside stories in The Denver Post, according to Adbeat, which aggregates data about web and mobile digital ads.

Ads for guns also showed up on Britannica, the media site Heavy, the employer review site Glassdoor, and on MacRumors, U.S. News & World Report, Publishers Clearing House and Ultimate Classic Rock.

A ProPublica analysis found that 15 of the largest firearms sellers in the United States — including Daniel Defense, the company that made the AR-15 used by the Uvalde, Texas, gunman — used Google’s systems to place ads that generated over 120 million impressions, a measurement roughly equivalent to an ad being shown to one person, between March 9 and June 6. And every time an ad was viewed by a user, Google earned a small fee.

Some of the ads likely violated Google’s rules, but the vast majority were placed thanks to longstanding loopholes in the company’s ban on ads for guns, related weapons and ammunition. The loopholes allow the company to publicly claim it has a no-gun policy while facilitating the placement of — and earning money from — more than 100 million gun ads each year. The ad data was gathered using Adbeat and Similarweb, a digital intelligence platform.

The gun ads came as a surprise to representatives of some of the sites where they appeared. Spokespeople for Heavy, The Denver Post, U.S. News & World Report, Publishers Clearing House and MacRumors said they don’t accept gun or weapons ads and the ads shouldn’t have appeared. Playbuzz said it was launching an internal investigation after being contacted by ProPublica. The owners of other sites did not respond to requests for comment.

If this all sounds confusing — how can Google say it doesn’t accept gun ads but allow them to appear? — it is, perhaps by design.

In reality, Google has two sets of rules for weapons ads. One is for Google Ads, the ads that run on the company’s own ad network and on properties it owns, such as YouTube or Google.com search results. The other is for ads sold by partners, such as ad exchanges, that place ads using Google’s systems. Ad exchanges enable digital ads to be bought and sold via an automated bidding process. For these partners, Google operates as an “exchange of exchanges” — in which it facilitates the buying and selling of ads on other exchanges — and takes a cut of each ad transaction. Partner exchanges are guided by a set of more permissive rules that allow gun ads to flow through Google’s ad systems.

“We do not allow Google Ads to run alongside firearms content, nor do we allow Google Ads that promote weapons,” said Google spokesperson Michael Aciman. “While we offer tools for publishers to decide if they want to accept third party ads for weapons, we do not block sites from running these types of ads if they choose to do so. As always, we work diligently to provide users with a safe experience and ensure that ads comply with all applicable policies.”

Firearms sellers also use Google tools and partners to target ads at people as they browse the web — a process known as retargeting — at times resulting in gun ads appearing on sites where they’re prohibited. After visiting the websites of gun manufacturers, for example, a ProPublica reporter was shown Brownells Armory’s ads for a Smith & Wesson handgun and gun accessories when visiting Ultimate Classic Rock and was served ads for tactical vests and gun accessories on Baby Games. The tactical vests and gun accessories ads appeared on the page for “Royal Family Christmas Preparation,” the same URL that Adbeat recorded showing a Savage Arms ad in late March. (Google only allows ads for gun accessories “that increase the safety of a gun.”)

In both cases, data examined by ProPublica shows the Brownells Armory ads were delivered using Google’s ad systems. Brownells did not respond to a request for comment.

Ads for tactical vests and gun accessories were served to a ProPublica reporter on the website Baby Games. (Screenshot by ProPublica) Two ads for Brownells Armory were served to a ProPublica reporter on the website Ultimate Classic Rock. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Zach Edwards, a security researcher and founder of digital ads consultancy Victory Medium, said canny marketers have for years used Google’s policy loopholes to place ads for restricted items such as guns and sexual products.

“The truth of it is Google makes money while looking the other way,” he said.

He compared Google’s approach to a mullet: “Google has corporate policies in the front and exchange-of-exchange internet chaos in the back.”

The placement of gun and ammunition ads is especially sensitive as the country reels from a series of mass shootings in recent weeks, including the 10 killed at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket and the 19 children and two adults gunned down in Uvalde, Texas. The shootings resulted in renewed calls for gun control legislation.

Google stands to benefit from the millions of dollars that gun safety and gun rights groups are spending on marketing to sway politicians and voters. While Google’s policies ban gun ads, they allow ads about guns and Second Amendment issues to run across its ad network without restrictions, according to Aciman.

The NRA has announced a $2 million ad campaign targeting gun safety proposals. And national gun violence prevention group Everytown for Gun Safety said it will spend $400,000 on a campaign “urging Senators to take action and reach a deal on gun safety measures.”

Most TV networks, magazines and newspapers banned gun ads years ago, which caused firearms companies to seek out digital marketing opportunities, said Lisa Jordan, a professor at Drew University and the lead author of a 2020 research paper about gun ads on social media.

“For firearms companies, it was this transformation following a big clampdown in access to ads,” she said. “The internet makes it so much easier.”

At least one firearm maker said it was not to blame if its ads turn up on sites that don’t want them. Glock, whose ads appeared on several general-interest websites in the past three months, said in a statement that it has “very strict guidelines in place for its advertisements including demographic, content and site level restrictions.”

“However, Glock does not control the ad exchange for any content placement that may be visible within Google,” said spokesperson Brandie Collins. “We suggest that you contact Google for any further information in this regard.”

She did not respond to follow-up questions to clarify which Google partner ad exchanges Glock works with and whether the company had intended to place ads on general-interest websites.

Savage Arms and other firearms companies did not respond to requests for comment.

Google: Gun Ads “Incompatible” With Values

Google has spent years touting its refusal to accept gun ads. In 2004, cofounder Sergey Brin said the policy was a matter of ethics and a reflection of the company’s “don’t be evil” corporate value.

“We don’t allow gun ads, and the gun lobby got upset about that,” he told Playboy magazine nearly two decades ago. “We don’t try to put our sense of ethics into the search results, but we do when it comes to advertising.”

Today, the company’s “dangerous products or services policy” even bans ads for devices that “appear to discharge a projectile at high velocity,” such as paintball guns and BB guns.

“Our company has a strong culture and values, and we’ve chosen not to allow ads that promote products and services that are incompatible with these values,” the company said in a statement when it banned weapons-related items from Google Shopping in 2012.

Google’s dangerous products or services policy does, indeed, block sellers of guns, ammunition and many weapon accessories from using the Google Ads tool to place ads on Google properties or across the millions of websites and apps in the Google Display Network. Weapons makers and sellers can use Google’s advertising tools and partner exchange system to place ads on firearm and outdoor enthusiast properties and on other sites that have not blocked weapons ads.

This is where the vast majority of gun manufacturer ads end up — on sites with names like thefirearmblog.com, gundigest.com, and survivalistboards.com.

Critically, gun makers also use Google’s tools to track the activity of visitors to their sites and target users with ads as they browse other websites and apps. The websites of gun makers such as Glock, Daniel Defense and Sig Sauer use Google products called Floodlight and Spotlight to facilitate this process, which is called retargeting. Advertisers typically pay a premium for retargeting since those ads are more likely to lead to a purchase or other action. Google allows retargeting of gun ads when they are placed via one of its ad exchange partners and end up on a site that accepts weapons ads, according to Google’s Aciman.

But rather than block weapons ads by default in this scenario, Google requires publishers to opt out of receiving ads from Google partners for guns and other weapons or related accessories.

Edwards calls this Google’s “gun retargeting product for firearms manufacturers.” He said it’s a major loophole that gun marketers can use to place ads on sites they would otherwise not have access to.

“Google purposefully built a loophole into all of their retargeting systems so that policy violations pour like a noncompliant firehose,” he said. “It has been a full decade or so of this retargeting loophole existing and Google is still acting dumbfounded that firearms manufacturers are having their retargeting ads show up on kids websites and other publishers.”

And even if the owner or publisher of a website or app opts out of receiving gun ads via retargeting, they still slip through. This is one reason that gun ads from companies such as Glock and Savage Arms ended up on general-interest websites even after publishers had opted out.

A spokesperson for Playbuzz.com, a popular site for quizzes and other entertainment content, told ProPublica it does not accept weapons ads of any kind. Yet Adbeat data shows a Glock ad with the message, “For Sport. For Fun. For Everyone,” appeared on a page filled with Chinese-language quizzes between late April and early May.

“We have started an investigation to determine if prohibited content appeared on Playbuzz.com and if so, which one of our demand partners (including Google) may have accidentally caused this error,” said Tammy Blythe Goodman, a spokesperson for the site’s parent company.

Also in May, an ad featuring two “slimline” pistols from Glock appeared on a feastingathome.com post about vegetarian recipes.

“I do not accept gun ads,” Sylvia Fountaine, a chef who runs the recipe site, told ProPublica.

Ads for Savage Arms rifles and shotguns generated roughly 4.6 million impressions on the website of Publishers Clearing House in the previous three months, according to Adbeat. PCH said it does not accept gun ads and blamed the automated, or programmatic, bidding process used by ad exchanges for the placements.

“PCH’s policy is not to accept or carry firearm advertisement,” said Christopher L. Irving, the company’s vice president of consumer affairs. “The recent ads you referenced appear to have been placed programmatically without advance approval or review by PCH. PCH has restrictions in place that should have prevented such programmatic ads from appearing.”

A spokesperson for U.S. News & World Report also said ad exchanges were likely to blame for the presence of Savage Arms ads on its site.

“U.S. News does not accept firearm advertising,” the spokesperson said. “If an advertisement from a firearm or ammo company was displayed on our site it may have come through programmatically without our knowledge. We have taken steps to ensure that firearm ads will not appear on USNews.com to the best of our ability.”

The misplaced gun ads are just one way that the opaque and complex digital ads ecosystem, which Google dominates, causes ads to appear on websites and apps in ways that violate publisher or brand rules. In November, ProPublica revealed how Steve Bannon, ex-President Donald Trump’s indicted former adviser who made death threats against officials, found a way to keep earning money from Google Ads after being banned from YouTube. Ads from Land Rover, Volvo, DoorDash, Staples and Harvard University appeared on his site, War Room. Spokespeople for Harvard, DoorDash and Land Rover told ProPublica the ads were a mistake and, like Glock, blamed ad partners for any errors.

Vexed by Unwanted Gun Ads

Google has a history of failing to properly identify and block weapons ads. In 2019, shortly after a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, The Verge reported that Google’s owned and operated ad network placed ads for high-capacity ammunition magazines. The company acknowledged it was a violation of its policy.

In April, a publisher complained on a Google support forum about gun ads showing up on their website. “Google is showing clear and obvious ads for guns on my site, with no way to remove them and no way to contact Google,” wrote the website owner, whose name was not listed.

The publisher said they had used the option in Google’s ad tools that was meant to allow them to opt out of accepting weapons ads from Google’s partners. The publisher provided screenshots of a gun ad and of their Google AdSense dashboard to back up the claim.

“I have done everything I’m aware of to not allow deadly weapons to be advertised on my site, but Google AdSense is essentially forcing them on my site... and profiting off of the ads ... all while offering no help in removing them,” they wrote.

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by Vianna Davila and Ren Larson

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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.

Police in a Texas border town used stay-at-home orders in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to unlawfully stop and arrest a high school senior driving to his mother’s house, according to a civil rights lawsuit that has its first hearing this week.

Socrates Shawn, then 18, was commuting between his divorced parents’ homes when he was pulled over in April 2020 by a police officer in Progreso, a town of about 4,800 residents in the Rio Grande Valley.

Attorneys with the Texas Civil Rights Project, who are representing Shawn, allege that the police officer had no reasonable suspicion to stop him and lacked probable cause to arrest him under the Fourth and 14th amendments.

Shawn was featured in a December 2020 investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune that found Progreso and other cities and counties in the Rio Grande Valley were among the most aggressive in the state for ticketing and arresting residents who violated orders that required them to stay home during the pandemic. Officials adopted curfews and banned nonessential travel.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court this April, cites the news organizations’ investigation, which included a finding that San Antonio and Austin issued only a combined 10 citations in April 2020. Progreso filed more than 60 citations during the same period, according to the news organizations’ findings. As a result, the border town doled out penalties 2,000 times more frequently, on a per-capita basis, than two of Texas’ largest cities, the lawsuit said.

According to the lawsuit, Shawn had a lawful reason to be driving because he had a court order that gave his parents joint custody of him. The custody order was in effect until he graduated from high school. His attorneys argue that the legal document fell within the numerous exceptions the city allowed under its stay-at-home rules, such as buying groceries, driving to and from work, and travel required by a court order.

They also contend that the county’s curfew was not set to start until two hours after Shawn was stopped. While the officer who arrested him said he violated the city’s curfew, they have found no evidence that a city curfew existed.

Attorneys representing Progreso did not respond to requests for comment. The lawyers have argued in court documents that the complaint does not establish a violation of the 14th Amendment. They also dispute the Fourth Amendment claim, arguing that officers can temporarily detain people for investigative purposes and for concerns about their own safety.

The first hearing in the case is scheduled for Wednesday afternoon in U.S. District Court in McAllen.

Ricky Garza, an attorney with TCRP, said that while the lawsuit is focused on Progreso, aggressive law enforcement is a problem across the Rio Grande Valley. The region is a four-county area where law enforcement is omnipresent, the result of a patchwork of local police and sheriff’s departments and a large number of state and federal agencies that enforce immigration and border security laws.

One of the lawsuit’s goals is to ensure that law enforcement agencies in the region don’t continue to use emergencies, such as COVID-19, as a pretext to overpolice residents, Garza said.

“This was not something that began with the pandemic,” Garza said. “It predated it, and it is going to continue if we don’t do anything to hold cities like Progreso accountable.”

Aside from the city, the lawsuit names as defendants Officer Ernesto Lozano, who stopped Shawn, and Progreso police Chief Cesar Solis, who TCRP argues is the city’s law enforcement policymaker.

Solis did not respond to a request for comment.

Lozano now works for the Police Department in Edcouch, a city less than 15 miles north of Progreso. Reached by phone last week, he declined to speak and referred questions to the city of Progreso, which also did not respond.

After arresting Shawn, Lozano took him to the city’s jail, where TCRP said he was exposed to officers and city employees for hours, before COVID-19 vaccines were available and in violation of the public health order police purported to enforce. The lawsuit contends these actions put Shawn’s health and safety at risk.

Shawn said an officer told him he would have to pay $1,000, the maximum fine allowed for violating the order. He told the news organizations in 2020 that officers allowed him to leave without paying the fine immediately.

Eventually, he got his citation dismissed — but only after spending months trying to fight off a private collection agency working with the city. He is now seeking an unspecified amount of compensatory and punitive damages in the lawsuit.

Shawn’s lawyers said he was not immediately available for an interview but instead provided a statement from him in which he said his experience continues to weigh on him.

“It was jarring to be pulled over and arrested for simply driving through Progreso,” he said in the statement. “I’m more worried about my safety when I drive now and I had to spend two years of my life waiting for Progreso to drop the illegal charges against me. I hope that through this lawsuit, we’re able to keep this from happening to others in the future.”

by Anna Clark, Aliyya Swaby and Annie Waldman

This page may be updated as we continue our reporting and respond to feedback.

One in five American adults struggles to read English at a basic level. Some have a hard time with everyday tasks like taking a driver’s test or voting. Some cannot read at all.

These 48 million people — many of whom are native English speakers who left school without the necessary reading skills — are often resourceful, finding ways to navigate a world designed for readers. But they face barriers to getting jobs, accessing social services and finding medical care. This is not just an individual hardship — it’s a collective crisis. Some police departments are having trouble recruiting people who can take entrance tests. Throughout history, American institutions have used literacy tests to exclude people from fully participating in society, including at the polls. We are reporting on similar barriers still in place.

ProPublica focuses on stories that can have a real-world impact. Our team is reporting on why reading is inaccessible to so many people; we’re looking at disinvestment in public schools and the intergenerational consequences of low literacy.

To do this right, we’d like to learn from you. We want to hear from educators, voting rights advocates, employers, health care providers, literacy experts and others who can help us understand the root causes of America’s literacy crisis and how it plays out day to day. We know some people learn to read later in life, and we would love to hear your stories, too. We also welcome introductions to people who struggle to read in ways that affect their lives. We will reach out to any low-literacy participants we’re connected with via phone.

By filling out the form below and sharing it with others, you will help us tell stories that can make a difference. You can also email us at literacy@propublica.org.

You can also leave a voice message at 212-379-5781 telling us about your experience with this issue, and a reporter may follow up.

We are committed to making our work accessible and will share this information and our stories in multiple formats. We welcome your feedback and advice.

Asia Fields contributed reporting.

by Shannon Heffernan, WBEZ

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Correctional officer James Fike already had been suspended twice when the Illinois Department of Corrections began investigating allegations that he had beaten a man who was incarcerated at Pontiac Correctional Center, in a small town in central Illinois, in 2016.

The man, Jamale Douglas, was in trouble for holding open the slot in his cell door where staff deliver food trays. When Douglas refused to pull his arm out of the slot, staff said they called in a special tactical team to remove him from his cell.

According to a report from Department of Corrections’ internal affairs officials, who investigate both staff and prisoner wrongdoing, Douglas refused to get in handcuffs, so officers maced him. Douglas said the tactical team then came into his cell and he was repeatedly punched, even after he was handcuffed. Staff are required to film the situation anytime the tactical team forcibly removes someone from a cell, and the video of this incident, as described in that report, shows an officer making an “up and down” motion with his arm in the back of the cell. That video is incomplete — an officer in charge of videotaping explained the gap by saying it occurred when she was changing the camera battery. Later video footage shows Douglas’s face covered in blood, and photos from the prison show that his face was swollen and bruised and that he appeared to have a chipped tooth.

When internal affairs investigated, another employee identified the officer in the video as Fike, who had already been suspended in 2014 for reasons that are not public, and again in 2015 for violations of “standards of conduct.” This time around, Fike told investigators that he wasn’t sure if it was him and that “he did not recall losing control” and that he had “kept it professional.” But the prison investigators ruled that accusations of excessive force were substantiated based on the testimony of other officers and on the video. Fike received a written reprimand, which was then expunged from his record by the warden, according to documents from internal affairs — though no explanation for the expungement is given.

What was remarkable about these cases was not the findings, however, but what happened next. Two years later, in 2018, Fike was promoted to lieutenant. How could a correctional officer disciplined three times in three years be promoted? WBEZ and ProPublica tried to find out.

Across the country, there have been calls for increased consequences for police officers who harm people. In Illinois, the state legislature passed a massive criminal justice bill in 2021 that gives the state more power to decertify problematic police and remove them from duty.

But those reforms have had no effect on how correctional officers are disciplined. That system is so shielded from the public that experts say it is difficult to track if the Department of Corrections is properly handling misconduct allegations.

Here’s why: Disciplinary records for an individual correctional officer are exempt from public disclosure if the documents date back more than four years. And the reasoning and evidence that went into the disciplinary decisions are invisible because publicly available records show only the outcome, nothing about the decision-making process.

So WBEZ and ProPublica used the files that are available to try to piece together how the system responds when internal investigations find that staff engaged in serious misconduct against prisoners. The news organizations reviewed hundreds of pages of internal affairs documents detailing when a corrections employee was found to have done something wrong.

Through that effort, WBEZ and ProPublica identified 18 Illinois corrections employees who, according to internal affairs findings between 2014 and 2019, had misused force or sexually harrased people incarcerated in the state’s prisons, but who remained on staff. In one case, an imprisoned man died from asphyxiation when guards restrained him. In another case, a video shows a guard pulled a man from his prison bunk and pushed him against a wall; according to the man, the officer then choked him until he nearly passed out.

Of those 18 employees whom internal affairs found responsible for serious wrongdoing, all 18 held onto their jobs after the misconduct; 11 remain employed by the Illinois Department of Corrections today; the others either retired, resigned or were terminated years later, for apparently separate reasons. For seven of the 18, no discipline was recorded in the personnel records that were available via public records laws, although after a period of time disciplinary records may be shielded from public disclosure. We did find that at least eight of the 18 were suspended shortly after the misconduct and at least four, including one who was also suspended, were fired — and then later reinstated after they filed grievances.

The Department of Corrections claims that state laws requiring records to be made public apply only to the final outcome of the case, not to any documents from discipline hearings in the Department of Corrections or to hearings about whether to reverse penalties. Even the records of discipline are exempt from public disclosure after four years.

When asked about transparency regarding staff discipline, Anders Lindall, a spokesperson for AFSCME, the union that represents most corrections staff, shared portions of the state’s transparency statute that mention concerns over privacy and security, but did not elaborate.

Advocates say the Department of Corrections needs to provide increased transparency, especially given the life-and-death circumstances of its work.

“We should know exactly what it is they’re doing, how they’re being disciplined, all of the information around that should be made publicly available,” said Jenny Vollen-Katz, executive director of the John Howard Association, an independent citizen group that has monitored Illinois prisons for more than a century. “We cannot hold accountable behavior that we can’t see happen.”

That secrecy contrasts with the Chicago Police Department, where evidentiary hearings about the most serious cases of alleged misconduct are open to the public and evidence — including dispatch recordings, body camera video and police reports — is posted online.

The call for changes in correctional officer discipline comes amid criminal proceedings of three guards charged in the 2018 death of Larry Earvin while he was incarcerated at Western Illinois Correctional Center. Documents reveal there had been a pattern of abuse, sometimes involving the same officers and the same location in the prison, prior to Earvin’s death. One officer pleaded guilty, another was convicted at trial this year and a third is scheduled to go on trial in July.

The Illinois Department of Corrections did not respond to repeated requests for an interview and did not answer numerous written questions. But in a written statement, prison officials said that the department takes appropriate disciplinary action when an employee violates rules and that “employees facing possible discipline must be provided due process rights under their union contract and the personnel rules.”

WBEZ and ProPublica also sought comment from all 18 staff members, as well as their union, about the wrongdoing that internal affairs found they had committed, and all either declined comment on the specific cases or could not be reached despite multiple attempts.

Sarah Grady, a civil rights attorney with Kaplan & Grady who has spent over eight years working on prisoners’ rights cases, said the public needs to know about “folks who are misusing the great power that they've been given as correctional staff.” As long as it remains secret, she added, “there’s really no disincentive to continuing to commit that abuse.”

“They Do It Just Because They Can”

In 2019, the Department of Corrections’ internal affairs division conducted an investigation into Jason Hermeyer and Christopher Melvin, two staff members who ran a program where incarcerated men worked making eyeglasses. Investigators conducted more than a dozen interviews with department employees and prisoners, which revealed a pattern of prisoner abuse.

According to one witness cited in the report, Hermeyer would put his leg up on a table, “like the Captain Morgan statue,” and gyrate toward prisoners. Incarcerated men and at least one staff member also reported that he would grab men’s rear ends and grind his genitals against them. Witnesses said the sexual harassment was so common that men placed mirrors at their workstations so they could see Hermeyer approach.

Both staff members treated the imprisoned men in a range of cruel or unprofessional ways, according to an internal affairs report. On one occasion, prisoners said staff ordered a man to get into a cardboard box and taped it shut. Then, according to one witness, Melvin had other incarcerated men dump the box in a trash can. At other times, the report says, men were forced to make decorations for a graduation party for Hermeyer’s and Melvin’s kids and to make eyeglasses for Melvin’s relatives.

Hermeyer and Melvin denied the allegations, according to department reports but internal affairs investigators found that the evidence substantiated multiple accusations against the two, including allegations of unauthorized use of state property, sexual harassment and, in Hermeyer’s case, sexual assault. Both were also criminally charged for official misconduct, a felony, although the state’s attorney ultimately dropped those charges as part of a diversion program agreement that required them to do things like community service.

Today, Hermeyer still works for the Illinois Department of Corrections, while Melvin retired in 2021, two years after the internal affairs report.

Richard Serrano says he experienced abuse and harassment under Hermeyer and Melvin while incarcerated. “They do it just because they can do it,” Serrano said in an interview. “They can get away with it.” Neither the lawyer nor the union representing Hermeyer and Melvin responded to a request for comment about the internal affairs investigation or criminal charges; the Department of Corrections also declined to comment.

WBEZ and ProPublica set out to learn what happened next, both in the Hermeyer and Melvin cases and in the 16 other cases we identified where a correctional officer was found to have violated use-of-force rules.

The news organizations searched the public record for evidence of any discipline that was meted out. We requested information from personnel records and from the state office that handles grievances from employees facing discipline. We found that even in an extreme case in which internal affairs concluded excessive force had caused a death, there was no public information on whether or how the officer was disciplined for that death.

The news organizations found that internal affairs ruled that charges had been substantiated against four Pontiac guards who, in a 2015 incident, continued to apply force to a man named Terrance Jenkins even after he was restrained, face down, and no longer posing a threat. A pathologist concluded Jenkins died from asphyxiation. In 2018, the state settled a $2 million lawsuit linked to the incident, but even after the internal affairs findings and settlement, the guards kept their jobs, according to state records.

For Hermeyer, the corrections employee who was found to have sexually harassed men in prison, a public records request early in the reporting process revealed that he had been suspended without pay for 21 days. But for Melvin, it took months to find out what happened. Ultimately, the department did disclose that Melvin received a 15-day suspension.

One key way corrections employees are able to keep their jobs and avoid punishment is by filing grievances through the union; some of those end up in arbitration. But those processes, too, happen behind closed doors.

The grievance system came into play in a 2016 incident involving Demarko Mason, who was incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center. Mason said he was in his bunk when an officer named Adrian Thomas began yelling at prisoners who were supposed to be in their beds. In an interview with WBEZ and ProPublica, Mason said that when he laughed, Thomas came charging at him “like a raging bull.” An internal affairs report says Thomas yanked Mason off the top bunk, causing him to hit his head on another bunk. Thomas then pushed him against the wall. Most of the incident was caught on video. Mason said he was choked until he nearly passed out, but the camera angle does not clearly capture the part of the incident in which he says he was choked.

In an interview with internal affairs, Thomas said that besides “helping Mason off the bed,” he never touched the prisoner. Internal affairs said Thomas had violated departmental rules regarding use of force. The department fired him. But that’s when the union proceedings kicked in: Thomas filed a grievance and then, after he’d been away from the job for more than a year, the department reinstated him. The basis for that decision has not been released. Thomas continues to work for the department and declined to comment for this story.

Neither the union nor the Department of Corrections provided data for how often disciplinary decisions were overturned. But state employment records show that of the 141 staffers discharged for cause from May 2016 to May 2019, 33 were reinstated.

Before he retired in 2004, Charles Hinsley worked for the Department of Corrections for 20 years and served as a warden at Menard Correctional Center. He said the way grievances and arbitration worked made it difficult for him to hold staff accountable. (AFSCME, the union that represents most correctional officers, says the grievance system provides an important check, ensuring that discipline is fair.)

While he was warden, he was accused of being too pro-prisoner and anti-staff, and the union cast a vote of no confidence against him. But, he said, when administrators fail to respond to staff violence, it puts both incarcerated people and other staff at risk.

Hinsley said that inaction in response to staff misconduct sends a message to the incarcerated that “we have to fend for ourselves.” He added, “My position is always if there’s an employee that has been found in violation of staff misconduct, and it’s a very grievous level of misconduct, and they were terminated, they shouldn’t ever be reinstated.”

New Legislation Does Not Cover Prison Staff

WBEZ and ProPublica asked the Illinois Department of Corrections about the opaque disciplinary records. A spokesperson said the department doesn’t track data that would show how often it disciplined employees.

Vollen-Katz said knowing how staff misconduct and abuse is handled is essential to the John Howard Association’s ability to do its job as a watchdog group. “It’s outrageous, it’s irresponsible, frankly, for the state of Illinois that we don’t know that piece of information,” Vollen-Katz said.

Alan Mills, an Illinois civil rights lawyer and executive director of the Uptown People’s Law Center, said other places, like Oregon, already publish information about correctional officer misconduct and Illinois should move in that direction.

In February of 2021, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a massive criminal justice bill that, among other things, mandates an annual report to the legislature outlining the number of investigations conducted into state police misconduct and their outcomes. After the bill’s passage, its sponsor, state Sen. Elgie Sims, said those provisions do not apply to corrections officers, but he is aware of how important it is to address the behavior of prison staff.

Sims said the new law “should only be a starting point in an ongoing effort at reform.”

Those reforms could include independent oversight, a strategy the John Howard Association has spent years pushing for. To make that kind of system effective, advocates say, any oversight body would need autonomy, enforcement capabilities and the power to share information with the public. Other states, like New Jersey and Washington, already have a corrections ombudsperson, an independent office that can rule on disputes within the department of corrections. A bill that would create an ombudsperson for the Illinois Department of Corrections was proposed in 2021 but has not become law.

Shareese Pryor, who was the chief of the Civil Rights Bureau of the Office of the Illinois Attorney General and now works as senior staff counsel for Business and Professional People for the Public Interest, told the news organizations there needs to be more transparency into accusations of and discipline for correctional officer misconduct “so that the public knows what’s happening and whether public actors are responding to brutality within our jails and prisons.”

Such measures might have helped in the case of Fike, the correctional officer who was suspended twice and given a written reprimand for excessive force before he was promoted to lieutenant in 2018. The story didn’t end there: The next year, he was criminally charged with battery and official misconduct for another prison beating. That time, Fike pleaded guilty to battery, and a felony charge of misconduct was dropped. He resigned from the department in June of 2019.

Please get in touch with WBEZ’s criminal justice editor Rob Wildeboer if you have something to share about: violence and safety inside Illinois prisons, staff conduct and oversight, prisoner discipline or internal affairs operations. You can reach him via email (rwildeboer@wbez.org) or phone: 312-948-4650.

Claire Perlman contributed research.

by Mick Dumke, ProPublica; Video by Nick Blumberg, WTTW/Chicago PBS

This report is a collaboration between ProPublica and Chicago Tonight/WTTW News from WTTW/Chicago PBS. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

When thousands of families were forced to move out of the ABLA Homes public housing complex two decades ago, Chicago and federal leaders promised they would be able to come back to new housing and a revitalized community on the city’s Near West Side.

Most of the residential buildings at ABLA would be demolished. But, officials said, thousands of new homes for both poor and more affluent families would be built to replace them. The pledge was part of a 10-year plan to “transform” public housing citywide and offer a model to other cities.

Now, after building less than a third of the promised new units, officials are moving with unusual urgency to redevelop the largest plot of empty land at ABLA — but not for housing. Instead, Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago Housing Authority are planning to lease the land for decades to a professional sports team owned by a local billionaire.

Under the deal, the CHA would lease about 26 acres to the Chicago Fire Football Club, which would construct a practice facility consisting of six soccer fields and a building for training and business offices. The Fire are owned by Joe Mansueto, founder of the investment research firm Morningstar and one of Chicago’s most influential business leaders.

To housing advocates and those desperate for affordable homes, the deal is the latest in a series of betrayals by Chicago mayors and the CHA.

As its rebuilding efforts have lagged over the last 15 years, the CHA has repeatedly let its land be developed for purposes other than housing. It has sold or leased property for a nonprofit tennis academy, a charter school, a police station, medical facilities, movie production space and a supermarket, according to agency records. Federal officials have signed off on the land transactions.

“We have an agency, the Chicago Housing Authority, that is supposed to provide housing for the most vulnerable, and instead of building housing they want to give that land to a soccer team,” said Rod Wilson, executive director of the Lugenia Burns Hope Center, a nonprofit that advocates for affordable housing and equitable community development. “It seems that the CHA wants to get out of the business of providing quality housing for families.”

Rod Wilson on land where the ABLA Homes once stood, now the proposed site for the Chicago Fire Football Club training facility (Alexander Gouletas, special to ProPublica)

Lightfoot and the CHA are pushing the Fire deal as Chicago, like many other cities, faces an affordable housing crisis. More than 30,000 people are currently on the CHA’s waiting lists for a public housing apartment or a voucher to help them rent in the private market. And the city’s housing commissioner has said Chicago needs at least 120,000 more affordable units to house everyone in need.

While the CHA is a separate agency that is not formally part of city government, its CEO and board members are picked by — and often answer to — the mayor. It is also overseen by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, the source of much of its funding.

In 2000, the CHA vowed to improve the lives of its residents through what it has called the “largest redevelopment/rehabilitation of public housing in the history of the United States.” It would raze most of its apartment buildings citywide, displacing thousands of families. Then it would build or rehabilitate 25,000 units of housing within 10 years. The new communities would include people with a mix of incomes but offer far fewer homes for poor families than before.

Richard M. Daley, who was then Chicago’s mayor, and federal officials including Andrew Cuomo, then the HUD secretary, were deeply involved in crafting the plan. It received backing from nonprofit foundations and was replicated on a smaller scale in other cities.

The public housing developments were torn down, but plans for replacing them were often vague or simply abandoned. More than 20 years later, the CHA still hasn’t met its commitments. Despite receiving federal money to redevelop sites with new housing, the CHA is sitting on dozens of empty plots around the city, including the property offered to the Fire.

Altogether, 3,600 families once lived at ABLA. In 2003, as the CHA leveled most of the apartment buildings there, it announced plans to remake the development with 2,441 new and 455 rehabbed units.

After two decades, the CHA’s chosen developer has built just 667 units. The rehab work was done, but so much time has now passed that those units need to be fixed up again, the CHA says. And plots of land throughout the neighborhood remain empty. The property picked for the Fire, at Roosevelt Road and Ashland Avenue, is the largest of those vacant areas.

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CHA officials now argue that the Fire deal is needed because the land has been undeveloped for so long — even though the CHA itself was responsible for leaving it that way.

“That property has been sitting vacant for 20 years and it’s time for us to do something productive with it,” said Tracey Scott, the housing agency’s CEO. The Fire proposal, she added, is “in line with our philosophy of mixed-use, mixed-income community development.”

In a statement provided to ProPublica and WTTW, the CHA said that a lease agreement with the Fire would provide funding to fix up aging ABLA properties and recreational facilities while offering job opportunities for residents. The statement repeated promises from Scott and other agency officials that the CHA still plans to deliver all the housing units it promised.

The Fire stressed some of the same points about how the agreement could benefit CHA residents. “When this location was offered by the city, we viewed it as an opportunity to increase our investment on the Near West Side while securing a site for a world-class performance center,” the team said in an emailed statement.

Many current ABLA residents said they first heard about the plan when they received a flyer from the CHA in late April, days before CHA and Fire officials held a meeting about it at a rec center next to the site. Afterward, some residents said they welcomed the Fire facility because it might create jobs or bring new businesses to the community. But others were skeptical, and some worried it was part of a plan to remove public and affordable housing from the neighborhood altogether.

Wilson, the housing organizer, was outside the meeting leading 10 activists in voicing opposition to the plan.

“What do we want?” Wilson called out.

The others responded: “Housing, not soccer!”

A Promise Unfulfilled

The CHA has housed families on the Near West Side since its first development, the Jane Addams Homes, opened in the Little Italy neighborhood in 1938. By 1963, the agency had completed three other developments nearby.

The Grace Abbott Homes c. 1970 (Digital image collection, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois, Chicago)

Together they were known as Addams-Brooks-Loomis-Abbott, or ABLA. The Abbott Homes, where more than 1,000 families once lived in high-rises and row houses, stood on the land that would later be offered to the Fire.

When Rita Sallie moved into an apartment in the Abbott Homes as a young mother in 1991, “it was a community,” she recalled.

“Children were outside playing, people watched them, and my kids made lifelong relationships there. But the longer I lived there, the less comfortable I was.”

Management of the properties was often poor and maintenance was neglected. By the mid-1990s, many of the ABLA buildings were deteriorating. City inspectors cited the CHA for poor lighting, broken faucets, leaking roofs, “defective lead-bearing paint” and other code violations at multiple ABLA properties. More than 4 of every 10 ABLA units were vacant or occupied by people without a lease, according to the city. Crime increased.

“They allowed it to become uninhabitable,” Sallie recalled. She and her family moved out in the late 1990s.

After watching the properties decay, the CHA concluded that most failed a HUD “viability test” and would be too expensive to fix up. The agency received nearly $60 million in federal grants and started demolishing ABLA buildings; only the Brooks Homes and Loomis Courts sections of ABLA were left standing and rehabbed. The agency forced thousands of residents to move, promising a “right to return” to those who had not violated the terms of their leases.

The citywide Plan for Transformation, unveiled in 2000, called for the old ABLA to be replaced by a “revitalized” community with more than 3,000 units. But the CHA soon whittled that number down.

In 2003, the agency tapped LR Development, an affiliate of real estate firms Related and Related Midwest, to build 2,441 new units at ABLA sites over the following 10 years. More than 750 town homes and apartments would be set aside for public housing. But most of the new homes would be sold to homeowners either at market rates or for affordable prices, so the redeveloped community would include a mix of incomes. On the site of the former Abbott Homes, planning documents called for hundreds of new residences surrounding a park.

By 2008, the CHA had rebranded ABLA as Roosevelt Square. But Related Midwest already was years behind on delivering the units it had committed to. Then the housing market crashed, and progress stalled around the city.

In the last 14 years, just one new building has gone up at the ABLA sites: A public library with an apartment complex on top of it, which opened on Taylor Street in 2019. Even after that project was finished, the CHA still needed to build 1,773 more units, including 469 for public housing residents, to fulfill its commitments.

Fewer than 800 families have exercised their right to return to ABLA, the CHA said. The agency determined that more than 2,000 families were not eligible, and it lost track of hundreds of others. But, it said, any eligible residents can still claim their right to return.

Sallie said she was never told she might have that option. After leaving ABLA, she found an apartment for her family on Chicago’s Northwest Side. Then, in 2007, her 13-year-old daughter was shot and killed when a gang member fired into a neighborhood park. Sallie eventually found a new home and career in Atlanta.

She suspects the CHA doesn’t want to keep track of former residents like her: “They want to do other things with that land.”

Help for a Billionaire

Mansueto, the Fire’s owner, is one of Chicago’s wealthiest business leaders. He has made donations to the campaigns of several local and state officials, including former Mayor Rahm Emanuel, but not Lightfoot, records show. (Mansueto’s family foundation has donated to a number of cultural and nonprofit entities, including ProPublica.) Last fall Lightfoot praised him during her annual speech on the city’s budget, citing his work with the city on a development project in an economically struggling area on the West Side.

When Mansueto bought the Fire in 2019, his plan was to give the franchise a home inside the city limits. The team would move from a stadium in suburban Bridgeview to playing home games at Soldier Field, owned by the Chicago Park District, on the city’s lakefront.

Finding a site for offices and practice fields proved trickier. “One of the downsides of being in a major metro area like Chicago is it’s pretty well built up,” Mansueto told reporters last year. “There’s not a lot of 25-acre parcels lying around.”

When the team finally found a chunk of land it liked last year — 35 acres of green space between three public schools on the Northwest Side — it couldn’t close the deal with the Chicago school system. Mayoral aides worked closely with Fire officials for months as they presented the plan at a community meeting and then sought approval from the Chicago Board of Education, according to emails obtained by ProPublica through a Freedom of Information Act request. By fall, though, negotiations fell apart over when students would have access to the facilities.

“They did not want to meet our demands and basically walked away,” school board President Miguel del Valle told ProPublica.

The Fire and the mayor quickly pivoted to an option that generated little interference. In October, mayoral aides emailed Lightfoot a 14-page document detailing three “Opportunity Sites” for the practice facility. All three had been empty since the CHA demolished housing developments that were never replaced. One was the ABLA property.

A double exposure of the former Abbott Homes site (Alexander Gouletas, special to ProPublica)

City officials had little reason to worry that the CHA might resist using its land for something other than housing: The agency had already been pursuing a broader development strategy for nearly a decade. In a 2013 update to its transformation road map, the agency declared it wanted to “promote CHA-controlled vacant land as a source for long-term public and private investment opportunity.”

That year, Target opened a new store on property that had been part of the Cabrini-Green development. In 2015, the CHA sold several Taylor Homes parcels to XS Tennis, an athletic and education organization.

Since then, the agency has also allowed its land to be used for a South Side grocery store and a Southwest Side charter school. In each of those cases, the CHA argued that their residents and the public at large would benefit from new neighborhood amenities and the money received for the sale or lease of the land. HUD approved those land uses. The federal agency did not answer specific questions from ProPublica about the transactions but said it “works closely” with the CHA.

The ABLA site offered to the Fire has been empty since the Abbott Homes were torn down. Beyond mowing the grass, the CHA has done little to develop or maintain it, and portions are still covered in rocks or concrete from when a road looped between the apartment buildings.

Former ABLA resident Bryant Spencer at home (Alexander Gouletas, special to ProPublica)

On one of the first warm afternoons of the year, Bryant Spencer and Lewis Clayton were sipping cold cans of beer next to an SUV with its rear door open on the western edge of the property. Both men said they had grown up at ABLA in the 1960s and ’70s — Spencer had been born steps away in a row house that was torn down in the 2000s. Though they live in other parts of Chicago now, “we like to come back and reminisce,” said Spencer.

Neither had heard about the CHA’s impending deal with the Fire. Clayton, a proud military veteran with a salt-and-pepper mustache, said he thought the empty land was supposed to be filled in with new homes.

Spencer nodded. “When they got rid of all the housing over here, they promised they was going to rebuild.”

He looked over the open field. “They always do the Latino and Black people just like that. Always.”

“People Are Waiting”

On Jan. 26, Lightfoot introduced an ordinance to the City Council to authorize financing for the long-delayed next phase of homes at Roosevelt Square. The project is slated to include three new apartment buildings and the rehab of the last remaining building at the Jane Addams Homes, which would include space for the National Public Housing Museum.

Even with these 222 units, the CHA and developer Related Midwest will have produced less than half the new homes promised for the ABLA development two decades ago. In a written statement, a spokesperson for the company said it still plans to bring more housing to the ABLA area: “We continue to closely collaborate with the CHA to build additional homes as funding becomes available.”

Lightfoot’s ordinance acknowledged the need for more housing. Its opening section said: “WHEREAS, the City has determined that there exists within the City a serious shortage of decent, safe and sanitary rental housing available for persons of low- and moderate-income and that the continuance of a shortage of affordable rental housing is harmful to the health, prosperity, economic stability and general welfare of the City ...”

The next day, Lightfoot announced that the city and CHA were engaged in talks to lease the ABLA property to the Fire.

The announcement took many housing advocates and community residents by surprise. In one meeting with resident leaders, Alderman Jason Ervin, who represents the area in the City Council, said he shared concerns about the need for building more housing, according to a meeting participant. But he bluntly advised them that the mayor had called him early one morning and made it clear she really wanted the deal to happen, so they might as well use that as leverage to get something out of it.

Over the following months, officials from the Fire, the city and the CHA met repeatedly with the leaders of the official residents’ group. The Fire promised to upgrade a basketball court and make other community investments, while CHA officials said proceeds from a deal would fund a new round of renovations at the aging Brooks Homes and Loomis Courts. The advisory council leaders eventually got behind the plan.

Ervin later said in an interview that he supports the Fire deal but wants more details. “I think the Fire will honor whatever they agree to. My concern is with the CHA,” Ervin said. “The [housing] units still have to get built. We need to hear where these units are going, especially since they’re carving out this land.”

He added, “We think the development team needs a kick in the rear.”

CHA officials say they have not determined how much money the agency would get from a long-term lease and will commission independent analyses to determine the value.

The CHA has received hundreds of millions of dollars in capital grants from the federal government in the last decade, and last year it made plans to undertake new maintenance work at Brooks and Loomis buildings that were rehabbed at the start of the ABLA revitalization. But officials now say the agency needs money from the Fire deal to fund those repairs.

ABLA resident Laura Donaldson at the former Abbott Homes site (Alexander Gouletas, special to ProPublica)

“Our present and future needs — and the housing needs of low-income families — woefully outpace the proposed federal funding amounts,” the CHA’s statement said. “This private-public partnership helps us deliver quality housing.”

The CHA added: “We’ve held significant public engagement around this project thus far and the response has been overwhelmingly positive, including from CHA resident leadership.”

Public housing authorities are required to get federal approval to sell or lease their land, and on May 17 the CHA board discussed whether to start that process for the ABLA site. It represented the first of several steps the CHA has to take before completing the Fire deal. A city planning commission and the City Council would also need to sign off.

When members of the public were allowed to comment at that board meeting, Laura Donaldson, an ABLA resident and advocate for people with disabilities, made a plea for more housing. Donaldson herself was once homeless, and she noted that thousands of people, including many who are disabled like herself, are on the CHA’s waiting lists.

“I don’t know about this plan for the Fire or any of this, but I do know that people are waiting. It takes forever to get called back or interviewed or anything,” she said. “We’re not asking for the Taj Mahal. We’re asking for housing, which is a human right for everyone.”

The board voted unanimously to seek federal backing for a lease deal.

by Meribah Knight, Nashville Public Radio, and Ken Armstrong, ProPublica

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

A juvenile detention center in Rutherford County, Tennessee, that for years illegally jailed children will now be overseen by a five-member board rather than the county’s juvenile court judge, a change designed to bring greater accountability to a long-troubled system.

At a meeting earlier this year, the county’s mayor said he thought the shift could bring “more oversight or transparency.” The board members will be appointed by Rutherford County commissioners.

In October, ProPublica published a detailed account, in partnership with Nashville Public Radio, about Rutherford County’s juvenile justice system. The story chronicled how the county had illegally arrested and jailed children for years, all under the watch of longtime juvenile court judge Donna Scott Davenport. Last June the county settled a class-action lawsuit, eventually agreeing to pay more than $5 million to hundreds of people who have been arrested or jailed as children. And Davenport has since announced her retirement.

Within Tennessee, Rutherford County stood out for years in terms of the percentage of kids it locked up in cases referred to juvenile court. In 2014, for example, the county jailed children in 48% of those cases. The statewide average was 5%.

Many children in Rutherford County were placed in solitary confinement under conditions a federal judge called inhumane.

After ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio wrote about Rutherford County’s juvenile justice system, state lawmakers called the system a “nightmare” and “unchecked barbarism.” The state’s governor called for a judicial review. Eleven members of Congress signed a letter asking the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the county’s juvenile justice system.

In January, Davenport announced she would not be seeking reelection and would retire at the end of her term this summer. Two candidates are currently running to replace her. Davenport previously declined a request to be interviewed. She did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment for this story.

As director of the detention center since 2001, Lynn Duke has reported to Davenport, who appointed her to the job. (Duke did not immediately respond to a request for comment. She has previously declined to be interviewed.) The new board will oversee Duke as well as all the detention center’s policies, procedures and budget.

County officials said they want applicants with experience in law enforcement, building maintenance and the state’s child welfare system.

However, an investigation by Nashville Public Radio and ProPublica found inadequate systems of oversight starting with the county and going all the way up to the state and its Department of Children’s Services.

Duke appears monthly before county commissioners, who have rarely asked questions about policies. They sometimes liken the jail to a business, with one even joking that it’s like a hotel. At one meeting a commissioner said it would be “cool” if, instead of being a cost center, the jail could be a “profit center.”

Meanwhile, the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, which licenses juvenile jails, inspected Rutherford County’s jail every year. Not once did it flag an illegal policy under which the jail was incarcerating children.

Before publishing our story last fall, we requested an interview with the department’s longtime director of licensing. But the department refused to make him available.

by David Armstrong and Ryan Gabrielson

Update, June 10, 2022: The growing size of St. Jude’s reserve fund prompted a charity watchdog to downgrade the nonprofit’s rating one letter grade, from B to C. CharityWatch, in a report posted on its website on Friday, explained that it issued the lower grade because St. Jude’s assets now exceed three years’ worth of operating expenses.

Update, June 13, 2022: CharityWatch issued a correction to a report posted on its website Friday, saying that St. Jude's does meet all of the rating organization's benchmarks for governance and transparency. It had previously reported that St. Jude's didn't meet those benchmarks. We have adjusted our Friday update to reflect that change.

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In July 2021, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital announced to fanfare that it had just finished raising $2 billion in donations, a single-fiscal-year record for the nation’s largest health care charity. “Solving pediatric cancer is a global problem — a multi-trillion, multi-year problem,” Rick Shadyac, chief executive of St. Jude’s fundraising arm, told the Associated Press at the time. “The way we look at it is: If not St. Jude, then who?”

Financial disclosures newly released by St. Jude, however, show $886 million of the hospital’s record $2 billion-plus in revenues last fiscal year went unspent. Those surplus dollars instead flowed to the hospital’s reserve fund, which helped it grow to $7.6 billion by the end of June 2021. That’s enough money to run St. Jude’s 77-bed hospital in Memphis at last year’s levels for the next five years without a single additional donation.

The impressive growth in fundraising raises new concerns about the amount of money that the charity has put aside for its rainy day fund.

Last year, ProPublica reported that St. Jude had accumulated billions of dollars while many families of young patients treated at the hospital struggled financially. Parents told ProPublica that they’d exhausted savings and retirement accounts and borrowed from family and friends, despite St. Jude’s much-publicized pledge to alleviate many of the costs associated with treatment “because all a family should worry about is helping their child live.” St. Jude said they provided generous benefits to families, but cannot cover all financial obligations that a family experiences during a child’s illness. In response to the story, St. Jude significantly increased its benefits for families, including more support for travel and housing.

Some researchers, oncologists, health care advocates and families of patients complain that St. Jude’s fundraising makes it more difficult for other pediatric hospitals to raise money for their operations. St. Jude competes for fundraising dollars directly against other children’s hospitals, some of which have significant numbers of patients in clinical trials and their own research divisions focused on pediatric cancer care. To visualize just how much St. Jude outstrips its competitors: In 2020, U.S. News and World Report’s ranked the nation’s best children’s cancer centers. St. Jude’s, ranked tenth, pulled in more than the combined total of the nine hospitals ranked above it , according to financial records filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

“Donors all want to get the biggest bang for their buck,” said Ge Bai, a professor of accounting and health policy at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s time for St. Jude to respect donors’ preferences and stop hoarding. Effectively and sufficiently spending money on the core mission is the only way to deserve donors’ trust and sustain their generosity.”

In a statement, St. Jude said the large reserve was a prudent cushion against swings in the stock market as well as the economic uncertainties created by global crises like the war in Ukraine. It said it expects the yearly cost of operating the hospital and making capital improvements to increase from a total of $2 billion in fiscal 2023 to $2.2 billion by fiscal 2026. At that point, according to the statement, contributions may not keep pace with spending and the hospital may need to tap the reserve fund. The hospital said it expects to spend a total of $12.9 billion over the six-year period beginning with fiscal 2022.

St. Jude said it cannot be fairly compared to any other hospital because its operating model relies disproportionately on public donations.

“Our reserves allow us now, and in the years ahead, to treat patients and continue research projects — no matter what happens to the economy or in the event of a disaster,” the statement said.

St. Jude said it is also expanding its work internationally, including a plan to spend $200 million over five years to help thousands of children in the Middle East, Africa and other parts of the world receive free chemotherapy drugs. In recent months, the hospital has also helped pediatric cancer patients in Ukraine continue receiving care.

“Having a responsible reserve fund is critical to fueling this comprehensive, global strategic plan,” St. Jude wrote.

The Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance, which sets standards for charitable spending, advises charities to avoid accumulating funds that could instead be used for current programs. It says a charity’s unrestricted net assets available for use should not be more than three times the past year’s expenses or the current year’s budget. The alliance' deducts assets like land and buildings from its calculations and combines the expenses of the hospital and its fundraising arm. The alliance calculation puts the reserve fund at 3.05 times higher than the current year budget of the hospital and ALSAC, which the charities provided to the alliance. Though St. Jude itself is slightly above the limit, the alliance said it remains in compliance.

St. Jude’s fundraising arm, the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities, or ALSAC, spent $626 million in fiscal 2021, about 35% of the organization’s total expenses, the financial disclosures show. That figure includes fundraising and educating the public about childhood cancers. St. Jude spent $1.2 billion on treatment for children with major illnesses, laboratories and clinical trials and hospital administration. St. Jude said its fundraising and marketing expenses were well within industry standards.

The record-breaking $2 billion in contributions to St. Jude represented a 16% increase over the previous year. St. Jude said that it benefited from investment gains in a hot stock market in addition to the increase in contributions in fiscal 2021.

One key driver of the boost in donations was bequests, in which donors name St. Jude as a beneficiary in their wills. Such donations increased 24% from the prior year to $478 million, or almost one in four dollars donated to St. Jude.

The bequest program, while one of the most successful in the country in terms of dollars raised, has also led to disputes with donors’ family members and allegations the hospital is too aggressive in seeking monies from inheritances. St. Jude says that it operates with the highest ethical standards in carrying out donors’ intents.

While St. Jude’s fundraising thrived, the pandemic shutdown devastated many other charities.

St. Baldrick's Foundation is one of the largest funders of childhood cancer research in the country. Its wide-ranging programs pay for clinical trials to test new treatments and provide training for new doctors and researchers entering the field.

The charity primarily raises money through events where people shave their heads to solicit contributions. When COVID-19 triggered quarantines in March 2020, St. Baldrick's had to cancel scores of events and lost millions of dollars in donations, said Kathleen Ruddy, the organization’s chief executive.

In the fiscal year before the pandemic began, St. Baldrick's financial disclosures show it raised more than $36 million. Total donations last fiscal year, ending in June 2021, were about $18 million — a 49% drop. The charity had to close several research grant programs and lay off staff, Ruddy said.

People often ask if St. Baldrick's is part of St. Jude, Ruddy said, but in fact St. Jude applies for, and sometimes receives, research grants from St. Baldrick’s.

St. Jude is one of a number of deserving charities serving kids with cancer, Ruddy said.

“We have funded about $9.3 million worth of research at St. Jude” since the foundation launched in 2004, Ruddy said. “But we've funded over $300 million at other hospitals. So it tells you that no institution has a monopoly on talent and innovation and ideas.”

She said St. Baldrick’s fundraising has begun to recover and the charity plans to restore one of its shuttered research grants next fiscal year.

by Abigail Kramer, THE CITY

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

Sara Taylor felt the knot in her stomach pull tighter even before she answered the phone. The call was from the hospital taking care of her 11-year-old, Amari. And she knew what they were going to say: Amari was being discharged. Come pick her up right away.

Taylor was sure that Amari — that’s her middle name — wasn’t ready to come home. Less than two weeks earlier, in March 2020, she threatened to stab her babysitter with a knife and then she ran into the street. Panicked, the babysitter called 911. Police arrived, restraining Amari and packing her into an ambulance, which rushed her to the mental health emergency room at Strong Memorial Hospital, not far from her home in Rochester, New York.

This had all become a sickeningly familiar routine. Amari had struggled since she was little, racked by a terrible fear that Taylor — who is her great-aunt and has raised her for most of her life — would leave her and not come back. She often woke up screaming from nightmares about someone hurting her family. During the day, she had ferocious tantrums, breaking things, attacking Taylor and threatening to hurt herself.

Taylor searched desperately for help, signing Amari up for therapy and putting her on waitlists for intensive, in-home mental health services that are supposed to be available to New York kids with serious psychiatric conditions. But the programs were full, and it took months to get in.

During Amari’s worst episodes, Taylor had little choice but to call 911 — which Taylor, who is Black, said made her nauseous with fear. She and Amari live just a few miles from the block where Daniel Prude, a Black man with a history of paranoia and erratic behavior, was hooded and pinned to the ground by police until he stopped breathing, in a 2020 incident that began after his brother called 911 for help. Prude died days later at the hospital. In 2021, a video went viral that showed Rochester police officers handcuffing a 9-year-old Black girl and pepper-spraying her in the face while she sat, sobbing, in the back of a squad car. Every time police entered her home, Taylor was terrified that Amari would end up hurt or dead.

“We know that Black children with mental illness are criminalized,” Taylor said. “When you have men with guns coming into your house to handle your sick child, that’s frightening.”

Several months earlier, in 2019, Taylor had filled out paperwork to apply for a place where she thought Amari would be safe: a residential treatment facility for kids with very serious mental health conditions. But the application was still pending in March 2020, and Taylor had no idea how long it might be before Amari got a spot.

Since the early 1980s, New York’s residential treatment facilities have served as an option of last resort for very sick children and adolescents, after outpatient and community-based services have failed. Like psychiatric hospitals, they provide round-the-clock medical and mental health care, but they are designed for much longer stays. Kids typically end up in them after cycling through emergency rooms and hospital beds without getting better. Often, they’ve had multiple encounters with police and their families see residential treatment as a last-ditch chance to get help before they end up in a juvenile lockup — or worse.

In the past 10 years, however, more than half of New York’s residential treatment facility beds for kids have shut down, with the total bed count plummeting from 554 in 2012 to just 274 this year. Sick kids often wait months to get into the remaining beds, despite a 2005 federal court settlement in which the state agreed to cut waitlists and make admissions faster.

State officials, who license and regulate residential treatment facilities, have done little to fix the problems, an investigation by ProPublica and THE CITY found. Instead, the officials made bed shortages worse, greenlighting facility closures even as the number of kids in psychiatric crisis soared. In recent years, the state also made the admissions system even more complex, keeping sick kids in limbo while they wait for care.

“Years ago, when you needed to move a kid up” to a residential treatment facility, “it just got done,” said James Rapczyk, who directed mental health programs for kids on Long Island for more than a decade. In the last several years, “the system just froze up.”

The residential treatment facility closures are part of a larger trend. New York has repeatedly promised to fix a mental health care system that officials have acknowledged to be broken, but in fact the state has made it even harder for the sickest kids to find treatment. As we reported in March, New York has shut down nearly a third of its state-run psychiatric hospital beds for children and adolescents since 2014, under a “Transformation Plan” rolled out by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. At the same time, the state promised to massively expand home-based mental health services designed to prevent kids from getting so sick that they needed a hospital or residential program at all. In reality, those services reach a tiny fraction of the kids who are legally entitled to them.

That’s why, when the hospital called to say that Amari was ready for discharge, Taylor made one of the most difficult decisions of her life: She refused to pick Amari up. Taylor knew that she would be reported to child protective services and investigated for abandoning Amari — and that there was a chance she could lose custody of her altogether. But she was banking on the hope that, if Amari had nowhere else to go, state officials would fast-track her into residential care.

“The last thing I wanted to do was send my little girl away from home,” Taylor said. “But I couldn’t keep her safe.”

Up through the 1930s, children who were violent or psychotic — or even suicidal — were likely to either spend their lives in state-run asylums or be labeled as delinquents and sent to reform schools on the theory that they could be punished into good behavior.

Residential treatment programs appeared in the 1940s, founded on the premise that kids with mental health and behavioral problems were sick, rather than criminal, and needed specialized treatment. Over the next several decades, the model evolved to include a sprawling assortment of group homes, boot camps and therapeutic boarding schools — some with horrific histories of abusing and neglecting children. As of 2020, just under 19,000 kids were living in close to 600 residential treatment centers in the United States, according to federal data.

A few of those programs are run directly by states, but the vast majority are operated by independent providers that survive on a mix of public funds, private insurance reimbursements and patients with deep pockets. Often, insurance covers a stay of a month or two, and then families may be on the hook for anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000 for a year of treatment.

New York created its residential treatment facility program in the early 1980s as an option for young people who tend to get kicked out of other settings. In a typical year, more than 80% of kids in the facilities are physically aggressive; about 60% have histories of running away. When young people are admitted, the state nearly always enrolls them in Medicaid, the public insurance program, which reimburses providers $500 to $725 for each day of stay. Kids live in dorms, attend full-day schools and do art and recreational therapy, in addition to traditional counseling.

After a surge in the use of residential treatment in the 1980s and 1990s, however, advocates and the federal government have pushed to reduce the number of kids in institutions. This is partly because of new research: Studies show that young people who receive intensive mental health services at home have better outcomes — at far lower costs — than those who are removed from their families and communities. It’s also because kids in institutions are especially vulnerable to abuse. New York’s residential treatment facility providers have been sued at least five times in the past 10 years by kids who say they were sexually or physically abused by staff or other patients. (Four of the cases are still open; one was closed with no finding on the facts.)

A decade ago, the Cuomo administration announced a plan to cut psychiatric hospital beds. Residential treatment facilities warned state officials that they might have to close beds down, too. Reimbursement rates hadn’t gone up in years, and providers couldn’t pay enough to attract employees, according to a 2013 report commissioned by a coalition of mental health care agencies.

Rich Azzopardi, a spokesperson for Cuomo, told THE CITY and ProPublica that facility closures were part of “a national movement away from one-size-fits-all institutionalization and redirecting resources toward out-patient treatment.”

This year, thanks to a budget surplus and an infusion of federal money, the state legislature approved increases to funding for residential treatment facilities — up to about $25 million, in addition to nearly $9 million for COVID-19 relief and employee recruitment. The state also earmarked funds to open 76 new beds where kids can stay short-term during emergencies, according to the Office of Mental Health. But much of that new money has yet to reach providers, some of whom have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on the programs in recent years.

Keeping staff in place is a persistent challenge. Residential treatment facilities rely on workers who earn as little as $15 per hour — not enough to convince most people to work with kids who are confrontational and sometimes violent, said Cindy Lee, the CEO of OLV Human Services, which runs a residential treatment facility in Lackawanna, New York. “Our wages are not competitive with Walmart, Tim Hortons, Burger King. You can go work an eight-hour shift at Target for more money, no mandated overtime and not be challenged by children with trauma.”

The 2013 report’s alarm bell went unheeded. By 2020, three facilities had shut down, while others cut back on beds. Then, in 2021, the system went into freefall when The Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services — one of the state’s largest providers of mental health care for kids, and one of just a few agencies to run residential programs in or near New York City — got out of the residential treatment facility business altogether, closing three sites in the Bronx and Westchester County.

In addition to budget deficits, the facilities had faced several “programmatic concerns,” including excessive use of restraints, kids going AWOL and allegations of serious abuse, according to The Jewish Board’s closure application. But the model had also become obsolete, Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, the agency’s CEO, told ProPublica and THE CITY. The Jewish Board is expanding other programs that keep kids close to their families and get them home faster, Brenner said.

By law, proposed residential treatment facility closures must be reviewed by a state oversight board called the Behavioral Health Services Advisory Council, which hears petitions and makes recommendations to New York’s mental health commissioner. In September 2021, when The Jewish Board presented the council with its closure plan, however, all of the residents had already been discharged. At the Bronx site, staff had vacated the premises and the parking lot was stacked with moving boxes.

During the council meeting, members discussed their concerns about the disappearance of residential treatment facility beds. Michael Orth, the commissioner of the Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health, said that referrals had increased in the region, and that facility closures left “significant gaps” in care.

In the end, however, the council unanimously voted yes on The Jewish Board’s closure proposal. “Telling folks to stay open when it’s fiscally unfeasible makes no sense,” another council member said.

In response to questions about the timing of the closure application, a Jewish Board spokesperson wrote that the agency had worked with the Office of Mental Health, “diligently obtaining the required approvals at every stage of the process of closing down our three RTF programs.”

The Office of Mental Health did not address the timing of the closure application submission, but said that all of the children from the Jewish Board facilities were appropriately discharged.

Amari was 11 months old when she came to live with Taylor. Her biological mother — Taylor’s niece — was 18 and “so smart and capable,” Taylor said, but she was also alone and struggling with a depression that seemed to suffocate her after Amari was born. She had dropped out of high school and was bouncing from house to house when her sisters — Amari’s aunts — asked Taylor to take the baby in.

Taylor’s own son was grown. The idea of raising another child seemed unimaginable, but she didn’t want to see Amari end up in foster care. On Memorial Day weekend in 2009, she met her nieces, with Amari, in Erie, New York. “They gave me a $100 bill, a child carrier and a gym bag and said, ‘Here she is.’ I cried like a baby,” Taylor said.

At first, Amari saw her mom by video every night, but the calls faded away. She started calling Taylor “mommy.”

From the beginning, she had a terrible fear of separation. She sobbed inconsolably when Taylor left her at day care in the mornings, and she threw toys and hit other kids. As she got older, she seemed to have trouble focusing and following simple instructions. Her pediatrician prescribed her medication for ADHD when she was 4.

Later, social workers would make lists of Amari’s strengths. She loves her family and has a great sense of humor. Even at her most recalcitrant, she likes showing off her gymnastics moves. And she has very big ambitions: When she grows up, she plans to be a rapper, a nurse and an actor, she said in one clinical interview. But she was also lonely. At school, she sat by herself most of the time. At home, her tantrums spun wildly out of control. She’d exhaust herself, sobbing, “I want my mom. Why doesn’t she want me?”

Taylor, left, has raised Amari for most of the girl’s life. Since she was little, Amari has struggled with a fear that Taylor would leave her and not come back. (Sarah Blesener for ProPublica)

When Amari was 9, Taylor took her to a therapist, who helped to get her approved for in-home mental health services, including a crisis-response team that would come during emergencies and a specialist who would work with her on coping and social skills. But the waitlist was more than six months long, and by the time Amari finally got into the program, everything had fallen apart.

It was the spring of 2019, and Amari was 10 years old. Her mother came for a visit, but when she left, she didn’t answer or return Amari’s phone calls. The family’s pastor, whom Amari had known since she was a baby, died suddenly. And then Taylor went on a business trip, leaving Amari with a cousin. When Taylor came back, Amari told her that the cousin’s boyfriend had molested her.

Over the next 11 months, “our lives were chaos,” Taylor said. Amari had always been a bad sleeper; now she refused to get up in the mornings. When Taylor dragged her out of bed, she’d throw things, punch the walls, grab onto Taylor’s neck and refuse to let go. Sometimes, she told clinicians later, a “bad emoji” would tell her to do things like run out of the house, into the street. More than once, she jumped out of Taylor’s car and into traffic.

After Daniel Prude’s death, the City of Rochester — along with many other jurisdictions, including New York City — promised to transform how emergency services responded to people experiencing mental health crises. Carlet Cleare, a spokesperson for the City of Rochester, told THE CITY and ProPublica that police officers participate in numerous mental health courses and training activities, and that all uses of force are reviewed by supervisors. In the coming year, the city will add staff to its crisis intervention programs, Cleare wrote in a statement.

Those efforts, however, remain small and limited. The reality for most families is that, if they can’t physically contain a child who is threatening to hurt themselves or someone else, there is no option except to call 911 and wait for police.

What happens next depends on who shows up at the door, Taylor said. Once, she and Amari got lucky. An officer who happened to have an autistic child saw Amari rushing at Taylor. Instead of putting his hands on her, he got between the two of them and talked Amari down.

Other police officers got physical far too fast, Taylor said. “They would handcuff her, manhandle her. I would be crying.”

By 2020, Taylor had left her job in order to take care of Amari. She started organizing support groups and advocating for families of color with kids in the mental health system, who are often reluctant to seek help because they are afraid that they’ll be reported to child protective services or that their kids will be treated like criminals, she said.

After Prude’s death, “Black and brown parents were terrified,” Taylor said. “Nobody with a Black child with a mental health condition was calling the police.”

Taylor, too, decided that no matter what happened with Amari, she would handle it on her own. But then, just two months after the video of Prude came out, Amari called 911 herself, intending to report Taylor for refusing to let her out of the house. When police arrived, Taylor could feel her heart pounding, she said. She tried to force the image of Prude, face down on the sidewalk and suffocating, out of her mind.

“I went to the door as articulate as I can be, because I can’t have them coming in my house harming my child,” Taylor said. “I said, ‘My child is highly dysregulated. This is not a criminal justice issue; this is mental health. I need you to take it easy when you come in my house.’”

At first, the officers tried to talk to Amari, but when she ran toward Taylor, they grabbed her and forced her into handcuffs, Taylor said. “I’m frantic, begging them to take it easy, telling her to calm down, saying, ‘Don’t touch her like that.’ They take her outside — rough, like a criminal. I’m crying, ‘Stop, stop!’”

Amari struggled, refusing to get in the police car, Taylor said. “I’m watching them physically wrestle each other. It was like flashbacks. What’s going to happen when they get her in the car?”

Eventually, an ambulance arrived, and Amari climbed into it, unhurt. But Taylor thinks a lot about what it must have been like for Amari — how much it must have scared her, and what it taught her about herself — to be physically overpowered, again and again, by adults with guns, nearly all of them men, most of them white.

It’s damage that can’t be undone, Taylor said. “If I’m traumatized as a parent when they handcuff her and take her out like a criminal, can you imagine how she feels? This child who from the age of 10 has had multiple restraints and arrests? I can’t even imagine what that’s like for her.”

New York’s application system for residential treatment facilities has been a subject of contention for a long time. In 1999, the Legal Aid Society filed a lawsuit against New York state’s Department of Health and its Office of Mental Health on behalf of kids who were sitting on waitlists for residential care. Many kids waited more than five months for a bed, the lawsuit alleged; some waited over a year. During that time, they were either locked in restrictive hospital units or left unsafe at home. Some ended up in juvenile or adult jails.

The state settled with plaintiffs in 2005, with a requirement that the state must place kids in residential treatment facilities within 90 days of certifying them as eligible. A judge encouraged officials to solve the problem by opening more beds. Instead, providers and advocates say, the state created a complex, multilayered application system that slows down applications and keeps kids off the waitlist.

“If you deem a kid eligible, you have some responsibility for providing services,” said Jim McGuirk, who recently stepped down as the executive director of Astor Services, which operates a residential treatment facility in Rhinebeck, New York. The state evades that responsibility by doing “whatever you can to reduce the waiting list by not approving people. By making it harder,” he said.

Two years ago on Long Island — in the far corner of New York state from Rochester — a 16-year-old named M (his first initial) spent more than a year in the limbo of the application process. As a little boy, M had watched his dad abuse his mom for years, according to treatment records. After his parents split up, M got violent with his mom, hitting her and threatening to kill her when she didn’t give him what he wanted. It got so bad that his mom would lock herself in the bathroom to hide.

When M was 12, the Office of Mental Health placed him in a community residence — a group home that’s less restrictive and has fewer services than a residential treatment facility. As M got older, however, his behaviors only got worse. He attacked workers and bullied kids who were smaller than him. M “will conduct himself in a charming manner to get what he wants,” according to notes from mental health professionals who treated him, but he “displays no remorse” and “has no empathy.”

In June 2020, M’s treatment team submitted an application for a residential treatment facility. He urgently needed intensive treatment — in a more controlled environment — before he became an adult, his providers said. The first step was to bring his case to a regional outpost of the Office of Mental Health, where a local committee would decide whether to forward it to a second committee, which can authorize kids to be placed in residential treatment facilities.

The rationale for the multiple layers of screening is that these facilities are such restrictive environments that, under federal law, it’s the state’s responsibility to try everything else first. In practice, providers say, the result is constant deferral and delay. If a committee doesn’t make it through all of its pending applications, “Well, wait until next month,” said Christina Gullo, the president of Villa of Hope, a nonprofit mental health care agency in Rochester that closed its residential treatment facility this year because it was running at an annual deficit of over $500,000.

Rather than referring M’s application to the authorization committee, the local committee said that he should try to find a spot at a residential school, paid for by the state Education Department. The schools, however, rejected M because he was too aggressive and his mental health needs were too great. M’s team came back to the Office of Mental Health in October 2020. This time, the local committee declined to advance the application because it had questions about M’s physical health: Was it possible that his neurological issues or sleep apnea caused the behavior problems? Had the family tried getting services through the Office for People With Developmental Disabilities? (The answer was yes — it had turned M down too.)

“My jaw just dropped at that one,” said a family advocate who worked with M’s mom through the process. “It’s a sin that they’re not helping this boy. He’s just falling through the cracks, and he has been for years.”

Finally, on the third submission, the local committee agreed to pass M’s application to the authorization committee, which approved M for placement and sent his information to individual providers. By that time, however, three residential treatment facilities in the region — run by The Jewish Board — were getting ready to close. The shutdowns hadn’t yet been made public, but the facilities were discharging the kids they had, not taking new ones. One by one, the facilities turned M down.

State data shows that delays and denials are common. While the number of applications for spots in residential treatment facilities has gone up since 2018, the share of applications that the committees approved has dropped, from close to 70% in 2018 to just over 50% in the first half of 2021. The percentage that were denied nearly doubled, from 16% to 29%. Close to 20% of committee reviews resulted in a deferral.

And even when kids are authorized for admission, many don’t end up entering residential treatment facilities. In 2020, for example, 444 young people were approved by the authorization committees, but only 364 were actually admitted.

Some of those kids may have gotten the treatment they needed in the community, according to James Plastiras, a spokesperson for the Office of Mental Health. In that case, “the family may decline to proceed with an RTF admission, or the child may no longer meet RTF eligibility criteria,” Plastiras wrote in a statement.

No one would disagree that it’s best for kids to live at home whenever possible, said Rapczyk, who directed the Long Island community residence where M lived. But it doesn’t make sense to close beds when young people still can’t find outpatient care, Rapczyk said. “It was so crazy to me that they were closing all of these places without any contingency plan, in a pandemic, without any hospital beds available and kids’ mental health skyrocketing,” he said. “It was just crazy to me that this was going on.”

For M, time ran out. He aged out of the group home and moved into an adult housing program, which — unlike in the kids’ system — can kick him out if his behavior is too disruptive.

The next stop would be a homeless shelter or jail, M’s mom said. “He never got the help he needed, so what do you expect? The system says, ‘Oh, we’re here to help you,’ but it’s such bullshit. They just give you the runaround.

“My fear is that it’s gonna be a complete train wreck and my son will have a truly horrible life,” she continued. “I think his evils will take him over.”

What Taylor did in the spring of 2020 — refusing to pick Amari up from the hospital — is not so unusual, said Dr. Michael Scharf, chief of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center, which encompasses Strong Memorial Hospital.

Amari first went to Strong Memorial in April 2019. She’d woken up in the middle of the night, shaking uncontrollably. Taylor took her to the emergency room, where a security guard scanned her with a wand for potential weapons and escorted her to the hospital’s Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program. A heavy steel door locked shut behind them. Staff sat behind thick glass.

Once kids are inside, they wait — sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. The setup delivers the message that kids with mental health problems are bad rather than sick, Taylor said. “Children with medical conditions — they treat them completely different than children with psychiatric disorders. Our families are blamed; our children are blamed.”

Scharf agrees that the emergency room is not a good place for kids in crisis. But like the rest of New York, Rochester faces a crisis-level shortage of outpatient mental health care. The hospital’s outpatient clinic — the largest in the region — gets calls from about 100 families a week looking for services, and it typically has at least 125 kids on a waiting list, according to a hospital spokesperson.

Without access to outpatient care, the sickest kids often cycle in and out of hospital beds, where providers focus on treating their most acute symptoms, not on addressing long-term behavioral problems.

The cycle is exhausting and scary for kids and their families, Scharf said. Often, hospital staff get involved in the search for residential treatment, but there are never enough beds available. “It’s almost silly to be in some of these meetings” with the Office of Mental Health, Scharf said. “They will say, ‘This child is on our highest-needs, crisis list.’ The parent thinks, ‘OK, that means something is going to happen.’ But there’s 70 people on that list. That list doesn’t necessarily mean a bed is coming.”

A stack of Taylor’s files concerning Amari (Sarah Blesener for ProPublica)

In a way, Amari was fortunate. In April 2020, less than a month after Taylor refused to pick her up from the hospital, the Office of Mental Health worked with a social service agency called Hillside Family of Agencies to get her into a residential treatment facility in Rochester.

For Taylor, it was an excruciating victory. She believed that if the mental health system had done its job, Amari would never have had to leave home. But she also blamed herself. Amari’s worst fear was being abandoned, and now Taylor was dropping her off and driving away.

She remembers sobbing all the way home. At one point, she pulled the car over to throw up. “The guilt and shame runs so deep,” she said. “I was sick in bed for two days.”

At the facility, Amari cried for Taylor and begged to go home. Many of her behaviors got worse. Counselors wrote that she frequently tried to run away, was aggressive with her peers and made homicidal threats. She would yell and swear, pounding on the walls and flipping tables. She told an evaluator that she often wanted to hurt herself. After a few weeks, she was placed on a “prevent from leave” status, meaning that staff should physically restrain her if she tried to leave a building without permission. Even so, there was a night when she ran out of the facility and was left outside, unsupervised, with a 17-year-old boy, until morning.

To Taylor, it seemed like she was constantly getting calls from staff saying that Amari had been restrained. She thought about bringing Amari home, but then what? Ending up in a juvenile justice facility would surely have been worse, she thought.

Maria Cristalli, Hillside’s CEO, told THE CITY and ProPublica that staff rely on nonphysical interventions whenever possible, using restraints only as a last resort. “Hillside is committed to maintaining therapeutic environments that are free of violence and coercion,” Cristalli wrote. “We do not tolerate unnecessary, inappropriate, or excessive physical intervention.”

In November 2020, Amari was in such constant crisis that the residential treatment facility staff applied to get her into a state-run psychiatric hospital for acute care. The hospital was full, so Amari waited more than a month to get in. When she came back to Hillside, the facility told Taylor that Amari needed an even higher level of supervision. They wanted to transfer her to their Intensive Treatment Unit — a residential treatment facility that was more restrictive, with a lower staff-to-resident ratio.

At first Taylor said no. She spent weeks trying to secure in-home mental health services, but no one could promise her anything other than what Amari had been getting before. Eventually, she gave up and agreed to the higher-level facility. Beds were full there, too. It took six months before a spot opened up for Amari.

Last month marked two years since Amari left home. Taylor hopes she’ll come back in the fall, in time to start a new school year. She’s given up the idea that Amari will get the services she needs at home — or that anyone, really, will be there to help her.

“At this point, I’m just trying to keep her alive,” Taylor said, her voice breaking. “I have a very sick child. She wants to come home. How do I keep her alive?”

Taylor is hopeful that Amari will be able to return home for school in the fall. (Sarah Blesener for ProPublica)

Mollie Simon contributed research.

Correction

June 8, 2022: The caption for the first picture in this story originally misstated Amari’s age. She is now 14 years old, not 11, which was her age at the time of her 2020 hospitalization.

by Sarah Blustain

This column was originally published in Not Shutting Up, a newsletter about the issues facing journalism and democracy. Sign up for it here.

Most of the time, my colleague Irena Hwang works with numbers. An electrical engineer by training, she wrangles impossible data sets into intelligible sentences that word-bound people like me can understand. What she does seems like a kind of intellectual alchemy, drawing solid and valuable facts out of barely visible particles of knowledge.

But this year, as Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica worked to document the extent to which the salmon hatcheries of the Pacific Northwest were failing to sustain fish at healthy levels, another of Irena’s talents emerged. One she had been keeping secret.

Since November, we — by which I mean, she — had been trying to count fish: specifically the large number of salmon released by government-funded hatcheries into the Columbia River to swim down to the Pacific and the much smaller number that completed the hard journey back upstream. Her co-reporter, OPB’s Tony Schick, was finding through interviews that nowhere near enough salmon were surviving. Despite more than a century of promises from the U.S., native tribes were losing access to traditional fishing, and with it their way of life. Counting fish would help us prove that.

The publicly available data and reports from experts measured the flow of fish in myriad ways, and Irena’s analysis goals seemed to shape-shift with every conversation. Irena read hundreds of pages of reports, conducted many hours of interviews with fish scientists and encountered a number of dry riverbeds — data-wise — along the way.

Little did I know, however, that Irena was working on more than the data. In mid-April, at one of our weekly project meetings, she presented a draft of the graphics for the story, including a few icons of fish pulled from the internet, and asked us which style we liked best. I hadn’t really focused on them, but I saw they were very different. One, a digital illustration with hard lines and uniform colors, was almost a caricature. Another looked hand-drawn, with subtle variations in color. We all agreed the more detailed and colorful version was best. In hindsight, Irena was coming very close to tipping her hand, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time.

Irena, however, was thinking. “I did a lot of art when I was a kid,” she told me later, but “when it came time to go to college, I ended up doing highly technical work, and art just fell by the wayside.” She said she occasionally thought about art but felt paralyzed. “I didn’t feel creative enough to be a, quote, true artist.” As she worked her way through an undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degree in electrical engineering, Irena said, she lost the motivation to sketch more than a handful of times each year or to even doodle in the margins of a notebook. She stopped visiting art museums.

Then the fish project rolled around. There was a blank spot where illustrations might go. And she thought that maybe she had been avoiding art because “it was this big open-ended thing”; that maybe it would be easier with some structure. A straightforward assignment — just four anatomically accurate fish! — with a deadline seemed like just the type of contained project that Irena had been looking for. She wrote to one of ProPublica’s visuals editors, Andrea Wise, and shared two older pieces she’d done. Immediately, Andrea said she would love to art direct as Irena created illustrations for the story.

A watercolor cat portrait Irena Hwang painted for a friend in 2017. This was one of the pieces she shared with ProPublica’s visuals team when she asked about taking on fish illustrations for an article. She says she’s learned a lot more about fish anatomy since designing the satirical coat-of-arms in the background. (Courtesy of Irena Hwang)

Seen one way, painting and data work are very different. As Irena said, “Coding uses the part of my brain that’s good at planning and breaking complex tasks down into little components. But when I’m painting, I let the other half of my brain take over, the part that seems a little mysterious, squishy and does things because they just feel — and look — right.”

But while that distinction is very real, it’s not the whole picture. In talking with Irena about the four beautiful watercolors she created for this project, I also recognized that she brought to her art the same intensity she brings to her data work every day. She briefly considered creating stylized fish using Adobe Illustrator — it would have been easier — but settled on painting fish that were as accurate as they were beautiful. And painting visually accurate fish for ProPublica meant research, and a lot of it.

Irena tried a stylized digital approach to illustrating the salmon before deciding on watercolors instead. (Irena Hwang/ProPublica)

As she tried to identify the right source photographs on which to base her work, the variables were almost as endless as with the data she had been analyzing. For one thing, “there’s a lot of sexual dimorphism in fish”; that is, the males and females of a species can look very different. There are also geographic differences: a Chinook in Alaska may mature to a completely different color from a Chinook in Oregon.

On top of that, each fish looks different at different points on its journey, sometimes undergoing dramatic changes as it swims upstream to spawn. Most salmon species are silver in the ocean but erupt in browns, greens and bright reds as they make the freshwater journey to spawning grounds. Chinook, coho and sockeye males can develop a pronounced, hooked upper jaw. Male sockeye grow a prominent hump. And, Irena pointed out to me, fish actually look different in water than they do in hand, held high for the trophy shot. She had built files and folders of fish research. But if she could only represent one image of a coho salmon, which coho salmon would it be?

“There was a lot of really fun nerdery going on,” she admitted. “Among my nightmares was that someone would write in and say this isn’t what a salmon looks like.”

Ultimately, Irena had to make some key decisions she could stand by: She focused on fish as they were returning to spawn, deciding that those brightly colored ones would be more iconically recognizable than their silvery ocean selves. She focused on underwater fish to capture their brilliant colors in their native state. And, finding that many available pictures were of the more brightly colored male fish, she decided, “Yeah, we’re going to feature female fish!”

Certainly it was an artist who created those watercolors for publication. Even Irena seemed to experience it that way. “What I love about watercolor is that it is very transparent. You’re working in layers so every time you add a layer, it’s like you are revealing something that was hidden in the paper all along, waiting for you to bring it out.”

Irena’s images of what she calls “my setup.” The fish were painted in her apartment on 8 1/2-by-11-inch paper, which she called a “manageable size.” (Courtesy of Irena Hwang)

But the engineer in her was not far away. Those images needed fact-checking. Irena needed to know that, even beyond her precise choices, her images had turned out precisely right.

Some of the flaws were obvious: She had forgotten to give the Chinook “something that looks like a nose on a salmon.” We struggled for the technical word. She Googled it. “Nostrils! I had to give it nostrils!”

Some of the flaws were in the eye of the beholder: She sent three of the images over to Tony, her co-reporter, who shared them with his fish-savvy colleagues at OPB. One suggested the jaw of the Chinook should be more hooked. “I’m doing the females,” Irena fired back, putting that issue to rest.

The colors were perhaps the biggest trouble of all. The source image Irena had worked off of for the Chinook was taken in a sunny area of a river, resulting in a fish that was a bit more golden in tone than most anglers might recognize. Photoshop helped bring it into a more recognizable olive-brown tone.

And then there were the total misfires. Irena mentioned that there had been an earlier steelhead painting, entirely different from the one we published. She had struggled with it because mature steelheads have intense colors, but the source image she was working off of was full of colors that Irena worried would combine into a muddy mess. In an attempt to avoid a drab fish, she chose paint colors that emphasized the highlights — and ended up with one that was too bright.

I wanted to see it. So she sent me this message over Slack: “was this even a steelhead? It’s unclear in hindsight.”

She included a little grimacing emoji and then the photo of her earlier painting.

The steelhead painting OPB and ProPublica published is on the left; the abandoned one is on the right. (Irena Hwang/ProPublica)

Steelhead or not, I honestly would not have known. As I wrote back to Irena: “It’s very beautiful. Just a different cast of light, in my opinion...”

I asked Irena about painting as a journalist. “It was definitely fun. It was also stressful because I had never painted on deadline,” she said. On the other hand, it was clear there was something to her concept of doing art within structures: Before this, “I walked around thinking I was too much of an engineer to be an artist, and too much of an artist to be an engineer,” she reflected. The fish project seemed to bring those two different sides of her brain closer together. “That’s why I love journalism so much.”

by Jeremy Kohler

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In the final days of Missouri’s legislative session in May 2019, lawmakers turned their focus to a bill that would outlaw abortion in the state if the U.S. Supreme Court were to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The abortion ban passed by the legislature and signed by Gov. Mike Parson remains in limbo, at least for now. A leaked draft opinion suggests the high court is preparing to overturn the landmark 1973 ruling, which would trigger bans in Missouri and about a dozen other states.

But another piece of the same Missouri bill that has garnered far less attention has already taken effect. It has funneled millions of tax dollars to fight abortion, and it may well move tens of millions of dollars more to that battle — a drain on state revenues that legislative oversight officials failed to forecast.

That provision beefed up tax credits for Missouri taxpayers who donate money to pregnancy resource centers, or crisis pregnancy centers. Abortion foes praise the nonprofit centers for supporting women and presenting alternatives to ending pregnancies, but supporters of abortion say the facilities mislead women by appearing to offer clinical services and unbiased advice.

An analysis by ProPublica found the measure is proving costly for the state. Until an expansion took effect last year, Missouri residents who donated to the centers were able to claim a credit of 50% for their donations, meaning for every $1,000 in donations, a taxpayer’s bill dropped by $500. The law increased the credit to 70% in 2021, further shifting the cost of those contributions to the state.

Because the centers are nonprofit, donors can deduct the remaining $300 of a $1,000 donation from their federal income taxes. (A deduction is worth less than a credit because it only reduces taxable income. A credit reduces dollar-for-dollar what a person owes in taxes.) Ultimately, a donor can end up recouping close to 80% of their gift in credits and deductions.

Lawmakers also removed the limit to how many pregnancy resource tax credits the state could issue in a given year starting in July 2021. And they removed the program’s previous end date of 2024; the tax credit program will continue unless the law is changed.

The cost analysis of the bill, authored by nonpartisan legislative oversight directors, concluded the changes would carry a nominal cost to taxpayers. Increasing the tax credit to 70% from 50% meant the same donations that resulted in $3.5 million in tax credits a year — the maximum for the program before the increase took effect — would now result in $4.9 million, a jump of $1.4 million a year. But that was only if donations did not increase.

The authors acknowledged that without a cap, the impact could be greater if the increased tax credit led to more giving. And that’s exactly what happened. In the quarter ending March 31, the state authorized more than $7 million in pregnancy resource tax credits, more than three times higher than in any previous quarter.

Pregnancy Resource Tax Credits See a Huge Jump in 2022 (Source: Missouri Department of Revenue)

Bigger tax incentives for giving to the crisis pregnancy centers brought out more donors than in previous years.

“We definitely did see an increase in big donations,” said Deb Beussink, assistant director of Birthright of Cape Girardeau, one of the 76 pregnancy resource centers across the state authorized to participate in the program.

“And these were from donors who had already been donating well to us,” she added. “But they wanted to take advantage of that tax credit, so they enlarged their donation.”

Until recently, Missouri has been the only state to issue tax credits for donations to pregnancy resource centers. In April, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves signed into law a program offering a maximum of $3.5 million per year in tax credits. Ohio considered a similar measure, but it did not advance.

Missouri’s tax credits for pregnancy resource centers come on top of the record $8 million in funding for the centers that lawmakers allocated for the fiscal year starting July 1. Those funds go to centers for the social services they provide. Missouri has long been one of the nation’s leading suppliers of tax dollars for pregnancy resource centers. An Associated Press analysis this year estimated the state had issued more than $44 million to centers since 2010, third most of any state behind Texas and Pennsylvania.

The tax credit’s impact on state revenues, and the potential for that impact to deepen, has one Missouri budget analyst concerned.

“It does make me nervous,” said Amy Blouin, the president and CEO of the Missouri Budget Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that studies the state’s spending and public policy decisions.

Legislators and advocates on both sides of the abortion debate said they were surprised by the increase in the tax credits that were issued. Even the bill’s sponsor in the state Senate said he was unaware of the $7 million in tax credits for one quarter. “I would have expected that for an annual number,” said Sen. Andrew Koenig, a Republican from St. Louis’ western suburbs.

Taxpayers can only redeem tax credits up to the amount of their tax bill, but what’s left over can be used the next year. Businesses also can take advantage. The maximum tax credit per taxpayer per year is $50,000.

The recipients of Missouri’s pregnancy resource tax credits are confidential — unlike other types of state tax credits that are reported on the Missouri Accountability Portal.

Kyle Rieman, who was the oversight director and lead author of the cost analysis of the tax credit expansion, said lawmakers gave his staff only an hour to analyze the financial impact before they voted. And he said state agencies provided him with little data to help make an estimate of more than the program’s minimum cost.

“It pretty much didn’t matter what the cost was,” he said in a text, “they were going to pass the bill.”

But Koenig said he provided Rieman’s office with the tax credit proposal weeks before the vote and asked for — and received — a confidential financial analysis. He said that if the research had pointed to major costs ahead, “it could give pause.”

Rieman said such requests are common but “not official or required, so they are not a priority.”

The analysis sent to legislators before the vote said Rieman’s staff wanted more information to update their analysis. But Parson signed the measure before Rieman could publish a more complete review.

The final analysis, published nearly a month after the governor’s signature, still did not fully explore the potential cost. It said the Department of Social Services, which issues the tax credit, indicated there would be “no fiscal impact” on the agency. Asked how there could be none, a Social Services spokesperson told ProPublica that the department meant the program did not affect its own budget and the “impact is on the state’s general revenue.”

Rieman said the Office of Administration, which coordinates management of the state, did not provide information about how much the program’s cost could exceed the minimum estimate or consider the costs of removing the program’s end date. The office did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

Rieman said the experience was “a clear example of a policy that was passed by the General Assembly and Governor without any real public process or consideration of what the fiscal impact would be to the state.”

A spokesperson for Parson did not respond to ProPublica’s questions.

Koenig said he did not consider the amount of revenue diverted for the pregnancy resource tax credit to be significant next to the state’s $48 billion budget.

“If we’re going to put this ban on abortions in place, I wanted to make sure we support women who are going to be having these babies, and the way to do that was increasing the pregnancy resource tax credit,” Koenig said.

Mallory Schwarz, the executive director of Pro-Choice Missouri, said abortion foes knew exactly what they were doing when they expanded the tax credit.

“Crisis pregnancy centers or pregnancy resource centers are unregulated, unlicensed fronts designed to look like legitimate medical clinics, run by people who are anti-abortion, and intentionally mislead and coerce pregnant people to try to scare them out of having abortions or delay their care to the point where they can no longer have an abortion,” she said. “But at the same time, we’re lining the pockets of these pregnancy centers and incentivizing (people) to give against their own self-interest and their own well-being.”

Jill Schupp, a Democratic senator from St. Louis County who voted against the bill, said she was “shocked” by the amount of tax credits being issued: “These numbers are huge.” While the budget is flush with federal stimulus, she said, the cost “might not look like it’s hurting other programs. But that will change.”

And even a Republican who voted for the bill said the new numbers are concerning. “I wasn’t aware it was that much money. You just brought it to my attention,” said Rep. John Wiemann, a St. Charles County Republican. “If it’s outside what the fiscal note said, someone needs to explain why it’s that high.”

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by Perla Trevizo and Jeremy Schwartz

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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.

Federal prosecutors reached a settlement agreement this week with the construction company that built a troubled private border fence along the Rio Grande in South Texas.

The settlement caps off two and a half years of legal wrangling after the federal government sued Fisher Industries and its subsidiaries, alleging that the 18-foot-tall and 3-mile-long fence led to erosion so significant that it threatened to shift the border and could cause the structure to collapse into the river, impacting a major dam.

Under the agreement, the company must conduct quarterly inspections, maintain an existing gate that allows for the release of floodwaters and keep a $3 million bond, a type of insurance, for 15 years, or until the property is transferred to the government, to cover any expenses in case the structure fails.

Experts told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune that the settlement provides insufficient protection to the Rio Grande’s shoreline and leaves too much discretion to the builder when it comes to maintaining and inspecting the bollard fence.

“They’re putting Band-Aids on top of Band-Aids to fix the initial problem that they caused,” said Adriana E. Martinez, a Southern Illinois University Edwardsville professor who studies river systems. She said the settlement does not require enough from the company to prevent additional flooding or damage from the fence.

The settlement lets Fisher Industries select the places along the fence to inspect for damage, decide what triggers some repairs and reject any proposed changes to the maintenance plan suggested by the government. It also allows the company to police itself instead of requiring a third-party inspector, said Amy Patrick, a Houston forensic structural and civil engineer and court-recognized expert on wall construction.

“It appears as though they are trusting the contractor far more than I have seen other contractors trusted,” she said.

As part of the settlement, Fisher and its subsidiary must destroy copies of an engineering report, commissioned by the Department of Justice, that studied the project’s soundness. Federal officials said the report contains “proprietary information.”

ProPublica and the Tribune requested copies of the report in August, months before the settlement, but the DOJ refused to provide the records, citing a confidentiality order in the ongoing lawsuit.

Ryan Patrick, former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, said that his office first filed the lawsuit to stop the construction of the project because it violated the law and it was too close to the river. “We always knew it was a joke, but it was a dangerous joke,” said Patrick, now a partner at a law firm in Houston.

Patrick said he still thinks the fence should be removed, but he declined to discuss the settlement, saying there might be information related to the difficulty or cost of taking it down that he doesn’t know since he left office in February 2021. “But I am still concerned for the surrounding towns if a big storm hits that thing.”

Neither the builder, Tommy Fisher, nor his company’s attorney responded to requests for comment. DOJ officials declined to comment, saying they did not have additional information besides what was available in court documents.

Fisher Industries started building the bollard fence along the banks of the Rio Grande in 2019 as part of a wider effort of We Build the Wall, a nonprofit organization founded by Brian Kolfage, an Air Force veteran. The nonprofit raised more than $25 million, Kolfage said, to help former President Donald Trump build his “big, beautiful wall” along the border. In April, Kolfage pleaded guilty to federal charges of defrauding donors of hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to the wall effort.

The government filed a lawsuit soon after Fisher started construction of the project. It alleged the fence violated a treaty with Mexico that requires both countries to approve any development that can affect the international boundary. A state district judge in Hidalgo County granted the government a temporary restraining order to stop construction, but a federal judge reversed it a month later.

By February 2020, Fisher completed the 3-mile fence along the river’s edge.

Later that year, ProPublica and the Tribune reported that severe erosion at the base of the fence outside of Mission, Texas, could result in the structure toppling into the Rio Grande if not fixed. Following the reporting, Trump attempted to distance himself from the project, saying on Twitter that it had been constructed to make him look bad, despite some members of his family and top advisers previously vouching for it.

Two engineering reports, commissioned by the nearby National Butterfly Center, a nonprofit that opposed the project because of flooding concerns, later confirmed the news organizations’ findings.

In the summer of 2020, Hurricane Hanna dumped about 15 inches of rain into the area, leaving waist-deep cracks on the banks of the Rio Grande along parts of the fence, which threatened the structural integrity of the project, experts told ProPublica and the Tribune at the time. Fisher, the CEO who put more than $40 million of his own money into the project, told ProPublica and the Tribune that erosion was expected given the amount of rainfall.

He said his company had fixed the erosion, in part by adding a 10-foot-wide road made out of rocks for the Border Patrol to drive over. “I feel very comfortable with what we’ve done,” he said a month after the hurricane.

But Marianna Treviño-Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center, said she worries that the hurricane season, which began Wednesday and is expected to be more active than usual, could cause the structure to fail, potentially flooding communities and properties on both sides of the border and damaging the Anzalduas Dam, which provides irrigation water in the Rio Grande Valley.

Treviño-Wright called the settlement agreement a “total miscarriage of justice.”

Sally Spener, a spokesperson for the International Boundary and Water Commission, which will be in charge of oversight as part of the settlement, expressed support for the agreement and said she believed it addressed previous concerns. The binational commission is now responsible for ensuring the owners comply with the inspections and address any issues that arise.

Patrick, the former prosecutor, called the fence “a mess” that will have long-term implications.

“Looks like the builders of this thing are going to have to feed and care for this white elephant for quite some time and will in the end be far more expensive and a pain to deal with than they ever envisioned,” he said.

by J. David McSwane

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Unlike the countless inexperienced middlemen and outright swindlers who jumped into the mask market at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Tim Morgan knew what he was doing. In the 1990s he taught English in Japan and later traveled throughout Asia, scouting factories that produced Nike watches and shades for Sunglass Hut, before he returned to Cleveland in 2000 to form his own import business, International Sourcing Group.

Two decades of navigating supply chains and negotiating with far-flung manufacturers taught Morgan it was best to steer his firm clear of the mask frenzy, which was rife with fraud and confusion. In the summer of 2020, though, he was inundated with requests for a similarly cheap but tough-to-get commodity: nitrile gloves. Hospitals and businesses were burning through them faster than they could be shipped from Asia, home to most of the world's protective equipment production.

“There was this explosion around gloves when they were trying to reopen the economy,” Morgan said. Companies were “just so desperate to be able to reopen and keep their workers safe.”

Now, two years later, Morgan leads a group of American businesses who’ve banded together to reclaim an estimated $100 million lost to scammers, who seized advantage of the country’s mad scramble for supplies. Members of the PPE Fraud Coalition say the pandemic exposed weaknesses in the international trade system and left many legitimate importers in shambles.

“These kinds of stories have affected so many American businesses who thought it was safe to operate in Vietnam — and I thought it was safe to operate in China,” Morgan said. “Ever since the pandemic, all the flaws in the system have come out.”

Morgan’s story began when an American expat he knew in Vietnam connected him to what he believed was a legitimate glove factory. In normal times, Morgan would have packed his bags and checked out the factory or hired a third-party inspector, but with lockdowns and travel restrictions, this wasn’t an option. Instead, Morgan set up deals by phone and video conference.

Bank records show that International Sourcing Group wired $1.5 million on July 15, 2020, to an account in Ho Chi Minh City as a deposit for nine shipping containers of gloves. About $1.4 million dropped into another company’s foreign account, followed by $1.65 million into a different account.

“I sent money — about $7 million of other people’s money — to Asia over a very quick period of time,” Morgan said. “We had to kind of trust the process and hope that everything would move quickly. It didn’t.”

Emails Morgan would later share with the Justice and Commerce departments show the sellers began to offer excuses. First, it was the holidays. Then, they just stopped responding. Finally in September, his Chinese seller sent a shipping container, which arrived with just a fraction of the gloves Morgan had purchased. The Vietnamese sellers vanished altogether; he wondered if their glove factory had ever existed.

Unable to fly abroad, Morgan couldn’t do anything. His customers demanded refunds, so he took out loans and entered repayment plans to return what he could. It wasn’t until the summer of 2021, as his company teetered near bankruptcy, that Morgan cut through several layers of red tape involving three countries and flew to Vietnam, where he was required to quarantine for three weeks in a rundown motel overlooking the bank he believed had his millions of dollars.

He fashioned a desk out of water bottles and boxes and kept a diary, which included photos of the streetscape below and musings about televised sumo wrestling, his only distraction. Finally, he was released only to find law enforcement had frozen the accounts of his alleged supplier. Law enforcement, Morgan claimed, offered to help him get his money out but only if he paid them a portion of what he collected. He refused. As Morgan told it, a fixer he hired informed him that his saying “no” had upset a high-ranking officer, so he’d better leave. He returned to the United States with a rich knowledge of sumo wrestling, none of his money and legal and travel costs creeping toward half a million dollars.

Unlike the many fly-by-night brokers who entered the PPE market to get rich quick, Morgan knew international trade — or, at least, he thought he did. But his faith was now shaken. Stateside, he reached out to the Commerce Department, which a spokesperson said does try to help business owners in such a bind by making phone calls and sending emails. He wrote to his congressmen, who he hopes will pressure the Justice Department to do something, though it’s unclear what.

As his frustration grew, and as it appeared he might not have much recourse, Morgan began to hear from other businesses with similar stories. They, too, had years of experience in Asia and had lost millions. Their customers also demanded answers. Amid the countless accounts of profiteers who had made money on masks or went to prison trying, the companies felt no one would listen to them unless they banded together and got interest from lawmakers and industry groups. Late last year, they formed the PPE Fraud Coalition, which says it represents scores of U.S. businesses who got fleeced in deals rooted in Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines, China, Vietnam and Russia.

Rob Williams, president of R.L. Williams Company in Conover, North Carolina, said he wants to draw more attention to legitimate companies that stepped in to address unprecedented demand for PPE supplies, which the U.S. neither manufactured nor stockpiled in anywhere near sufficient quantities. These smaller importers were crucial to the pandemic response, Williams said, and did all they could to fulfill orders, only to be left holding the bag.

“I had big companies call on me and wire me money like that,” Williams said, snapping his fingers for emphasis. “So everybody is screaming to get product for front-line workers, health care. The rush of demand was unbelievable.”

Bjorn Chay, who runs a natural supplement company in Greenville, South Carolina, has built a large network in Asia from his decades working in international trade. That didn’t keep him from getting hoodwinked, he said. He shared documents and receipts showing $3 million in payments to companies in Thailand and Vietnam, much of which is now tied up in frozen accounts and bureaucratic tangles. After a year of waiting, he traveled to Thailand and went to the factory that was supposed to ship gloves to him. “I get there. Guess what? There’s nothing,” Choy said. “It was just an empty building.”

These businessmen and others “should have done more due diligence,” said William Reinsch, an international trade expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If we had better trade rules, and if these businesses were dealing with rule-of-law countries, which is one of their problems — they’re not — they’d at least have more recourse.”

Reinsch said that COVID-19 produced a lot of this kind of international fraud, and that it’s likely going to continue even as the pandemic wanes. “We’re in an era of whack-a-mole supply chain crises,” he said, and scammers are going to take advantage. But, he pointed out, COVID-19 also created huge opportunities for fraud in the United States.

“No country has a monopoly on criminals,” he said.

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