ProPublica

by Alexandra Zayas

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As all eyes were on the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday after a leaked draft majority opinion indicated it is planning to overturn Roe v. Wade, ProPublica spoke with journalist Joshua Prager, who spent 11 years dissecting the landmark case that guaranteed abortion rights for women across the country. For his acclaimed book “The Family Roe: An American Story,” Prager interviewed upwards of 500 people including key figures on both sides of the case, most notably its plaintiff, Norma McCorvey, who was better known as Jane Roe. In delving into the untold story behind her life, those of the children she gave birth to and the monumental case, Prager unfurled the decadeslong history of the American war over abortion.

Prager said indicators of the justices’ leanings were clear while observing arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case challenging a 2018 Mississippi law prohibiting most abortions after 15 weeks’ gestational age, which is the subject of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion. Though the Court confirmed the authenticity of the document published this week by Politico, the final vote and decision are still pending. Prager discussed why he believed the road to this week’s revelation was paved, in part, by decades of mistakes and missed opportunities made by the pro-choice movement. (In his book, Prager refers to those who support the right to abortion the way they refer to themselves, “pro-choice,” and those opposing abortion the way they refer to themselves, “pro-life.” We adhered to these conventions during our interview. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.)

Did you expect this day would come?

I absolutely did. Anyone who was a close follower of the issue could see that this was happening when we listened to the oral arguments in Dobbs. We knew where all of the justices stood pretty much, but there were two who we thought might go either way, Justice (Amy Coney) Barrett, Justice (Brett) Kavanaugh — two of Trump’s three appointments. And to listen to them speak and question during oral arguments in Dobbs, we could see where they were going.

Kavanaugh, over and again, was speaking about precedents that the Supreme Court had previously overturned. Justice Barrett, meantime, was speaking about the fact that adoption is, as she put it, a viable alternative to abortion.

What was so fascinating about this and tragic, if you’re a person who believes that Roe ought not to be overturned, was that the Supreme Court did not need Justice (John) Roberts, the chief justice anymore; the conservative bloc now doesn’t need him. They have the votes that they need 5 to 4 without him. He is an incrementalist. He is a person who respects precedent. He really cares about the image of the court, does not want it to be seen as simply a political body. And he was desperate to not actually have the headline that we had last night. He wanted to see Roe maintained, but sort of gutted. But he lost.

So this was not a surprise. If you step back further, when Roe was ruled upon in 1973, it galvanized those opposed to it. And it gave (the pro-life movement) a very simple, clear target, a new raison d’etre: We want to overturn Roe. This is the culmination of 49 1/2 years of efforts and different approaches, novel approaches. And unfortunately, again, if you are a person who believes in reproductive choice, the pro-choice did not take a lot of that seriously for many years, and they are as much to, sort of, blame for this day as the pro-life will (take) credit for.

Tell me a little more about the blame the pro-choice movement shares.

(The pro-choice movement) did not foresee a war here. NARAL’s executive director in 1973, when Roe was ruled upon, told her board after the ruling, “The court has spoken and the case is closed.” They saw this as, basically: It’s over. We’ve won.

The very, very opposite is true of the pro-life, who said: OK, now we have to think about this strategically, how will we go about overturning Roe? As a result of that imbalance, the pro-choice were playing catch up really for 49 1/2 years, as the pro-life (movement has) over and over again come up with many different ways to chip away at Roe and has been remarkably successful. Just to give you a few examples:

• 1976, the Hyde Amendment, which said that you can no longer pay for abortion with Medicaid.
• 1989, the case of Webster, that was a ruling against the use of public resources for abortion.
• 2007, Gonzales v. Carhart banned a specific type of abortion procedure.
• And then of course, just this year in Texas with SB-8, it was a very novel approach coming up with a way to have an end run around the enforcement of abortion by deputizing private citizens to sue anyone who was helping someone have an abortion in any way.

The pro-life also used technology in a way that had never been used before by showing fetal photography. They used language that had never been used before, for example, coining the phrase “partial-birth abortion.”

They also used pseudoscience in a remarkable way. They came up with this very novel approach called “post-abortion syndrome,” saying that if a woman had an abortion, an enormous percentage of the time, she would suffer psychologically as a result of that. That’s not true. In fact, the opposite is true. The majority of women who have abortions express relief as opposed to regret. If there is something that causes women grief, the studies show, it is relinquishing their child to adoption. These were all pro-life weapons in attacking Roe, and over and over again, you had the pro-choice movement outfoxed.

In the early 2000s, one of the attacks on Roe was led by lawyer Allan Parker, who had represented Norma for a time. (The suit) said that Roe needed to become null and void because conditions had changed in the years since it had been filed. And the only way to file this suit was to have the original plaintiff file it. So he came to represent Norma and he filed this suit.

What ended up happening was that the pro-choice basically ignored the suit. They said that it was a sad publicity stunt, and they did not file a single brief defending Roe in this case. And it ended up introducing into the judicial system these affidavits filed by women who said that abortion harmed them. And that idea ended up going right up to the Supreme Court. Justice (Anthony) Kennedy ended up citing them in 2007 in Gonzales v. Carhart. It was evident that Parker’s lawsuit had been incredibly effective and powerful.

It shows all of the different ways in which the pro-choice have failed to meet the pro-life, have failed to repel their arguments and their strategies. And it speaks to a simple human reality that it’s much easier to try to knock something down than to defend it. What we’re going to see now is the very same problem that the pro-choice had, the pro-life now are going to have, because now you are going to see that this is going to galvanize the tens of millions of people who are horrified about what’s happening now. They now will have as simple a marching order as the pro-life used to have to reinstate Roe or to come up with another way to ensure that abortion will be legal for women across the country.

Roe was 1 day old in 1973 when Bella Abzug, who was a House representative from New York, urged Congress to codify Roe. She basically foresaw exactly where we are today, that there was the potential legislation to erode Roe. She introduced an act: The Abortion Rights Act, H.R. 254, to bar states from creating new (laws) on abortion. Congress ignored her bill, and anyway, it was doomed to failure because Roe allowed for future legislation. It gave states the right to oppose regulations from the second trimester onward, but here we are now and people want to go back and do exactly what Bella Abzug was saying that we ought to do.

Is there any more evidence that pro-choice leaders made mistakes that allowed this to happen? Where does the pro-choice movement go from here?

It’s not only true, but something that, case in point, was embodied by Justice (Ruth Bader) Ginsburg’s decision to not step down from the court in her 80s, during Obama’s presidency. We would not be here had she done that. That is a simple fact. And that is a very painful fact, for she’s obviously the greatest hero over the course of 50 years to the pro-choice movement, but whether it was hubris or it was an inability to see that Trump might be elected or just a very human, understandable desire to hold onto a job she loved, it was nonetheless a mistake with catastrophic consequences. And that, you can say, was the final nail in the coffin for Roe, but it was also the latest in a long line of missteps by the pro-choice of failing to properly address the situation in which they found themselves.

And here we are, but again, it’s now going to flip. If you’re a person who cares about choice, that is the silver lining of this very dark, dark cloud that it is now going to galvanize in a way we have not seen in our lifetimes, those who believe in a right to choose.

by Jeremy Schwartz and Perla Trevizo

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

Brian Kolfage arrived in Texas three years ago pledging to help fulfill President Donald Trump’s promise of a “big, beautiful” wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. After pleading guilty to federal fraud charges last month, Kolfage leaves behind two small stretches of fencing that are mired in legal, environmental and permitting fights.

Kolfage, a 40-year-old Air Force veteran, faces more than five years in prison after pleading guilty to defrauding donors of hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to the wall effort. Despite the resolution of the criminal case, Kolfage and his We Build the Wall group still face a defamation suit brought by the National Butterfly Center, a nonprofit nature preserve in the Rio Grande Valley that he accused of promoting sex and human trafficking without evidence. In addition, the federal government has filed suit regarding one of his wall projects, alleging it was built in potential violation of an international treaty between the U.S. and Mexico.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reported in 2020 on severe erosion at the base of the 3-mile fence outside of Mission, Texas — the subject of a federal lawsuit — that experts said could result in the structure toppling into the Rio Grande if not fixed. The outlets also reported on Kolfage’s long history of online harassment and intimidation, which escalated with his border wall projects.

Controversy continues to surround the two physical legacies of Kolfage’s We Build the Wall effort: the bollard fence on the shore of the Rio Grande and a half-mile stretch of fence outside of El Paso.

The federal government has confirmed in court filings that the Rio Grande barrier remains at risk of falling and that it could potentially shift the international boundary. Government lawyers are negotiating a settlement in a lawsuit filed against the project. Based on court hearings, it could require wall builders to modify the barriers, such as adding gates to help prevent flooding, but appears unlikely to result in the removal of the fence that opponents seek.

An attorney for the construction company, Fisher Industries, denied the government’s allegations in his response to the complaint, according to court documents, and did not respond to a request for comment.

Separately, three years after construction of the fence outside of El Paso, Kolfage’s group has failed to fulfill federal requirements, including providing an operation and maintenance plan and evidence of financial responsibility for damage or injuries that can be caused by the structure.

According to the indictment in the fraud case, Kolfage repeatedly claimed that he would “not take a penny in salary or compensation” and that 100% of the funds raised would be used to execute the group’s mission. That’s not what happened, federal prosecutors alleged. The government accused Kolfage of using fake invoices and sham vendor arrangements to siphon more than $350,000 for personal expenses, including home renovations, a boat and a luxury SUV.

In addition to pleading guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy, Kolfage also pleaded guilty to tax crimes for failing to report that income. “I knew what I was doing was wrong and a crime,” Kolfage told the judge, according to news accounts of the hearing. He is due to be sentenced in September.

We Build the Wall board member and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon was accused of receiving more than $1 million through the scheme, according to the indictment. Trump pardoned Bannon during his final hours at the White House, meaning the federal criminal case against him could not proceed.

As part of his plea, Kolfage agreed to forfeit $17 million from the nonprofit. We Build the Wall is also required to give up more than $1 million in donations in a bank account, according to the plea agreement. Kolfage’s attorney in the federal fraud case, César de Castro, declined to comment. An attorney listed for We Build the Wall did not respond to a request for comment.

In a 2020 interview with ProPublica and the Tribune, Kolfage denied the possibility of wrongdoing. “How is there corruption?” Kolfage said. “It’s privatized. It’s not federal money.”

We Build the Wall was an influential conservative nonprofit that grew out of a GoFundMe campaign started by Kolfage in 2018. The group pivoted to soliciting donations to build private barriers after learning it couldn’t donate directly to the federal government to help Trump build a wall along the southern border. By mid-2020, it had raised more than $25 million.

According to court filings, Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state and general counsel for We Build the Wall, said in 2019 that the group was only a “passive” investor in the Mission fence, having provided about 5% of the total cost, and wasn’t involved in the planning or design. It was dropped from the lawsuit. Still, We Build the Wall continued to promote the project on its website as one of two completed projects supporters could even tour, at least as of Dec. 31, 2021.

“This project goes to show you how We Build The Wall’s movement to unite Americans who share a common belief in border security has grown into a larger movement of privatized wall builders,” it posted on its website next to pictures and a description of the project.

After ProPublica and the Tribune exposed erosion issues at the site, Trump tried to distance himself from the private effort, speculating on Twitter that it was built to make him look bad. Yet just a few months earlier his son Donald Trump Jr. had endorsed We Build the Wall, calling it “private enterprise at its finest.” Kolfage himself had bragged of having a direct connection to the White House through Bannon and Kobach.

Born in Michigan and raised in Hawaii, Kolfage joined the Air Force. In 2004, two weeks into his second deployment to Iraq, a rocket exploded a few feet from him, severing both of his legs and his right hand.

The Purple Heart recipient recovered after undergoing 16 surgeries in six months, and he often spoke publicly about his experience, becoming the face of resilience and perseverance.

He soon began running a number of right-wing websites and Facebook pages that he claimed earned him as much as $200,000 per month, according to text messages reviewed by ProPublica and the Tribune. The sites included sensationalized, photoshopped and in some cases fabricated content, and several were shut down by Facebook for “inauthentic activity” in 2018. Kolfage was accused of online bullying and personal attacks, and he formally apologized to a perceived online critic as part of a court settlement.

Upon his arrival in Texas, he targeted local opponents in the Rio Grande Valley, including a prominent Catholic priest and the National Butterfly Center. Both had previously opposed the federal government’s plan to build fencing through their property. On social media, Kolfage declared that the center “openly supports illegal immigration and sex trafficking of women and children.” Social media messages calling staffers “pigs,” “pathetic filth” and “traitors” poured in. “You will be made to pay,” one Facebook follower declared in a message.

The butterfly center filed a defamation lawsuit against Kolfage and We Build the Wall in 2019, as well as Fisher Industries and the property owner who provided land for the fence, claiming that their supporters had “begun to engage in targeted harassment.”

Kolfage, who has not been served with the suit, has not responded to the allegations. An attorney for Fisher Industries has denied the allegations in court filings.

Kolfage’s arrest in 2020 did little to quell the harassment, said the butterfly center’s executive director, Marianna Treviño-Wright, as the site became a rallying point for border wall supporters, including out-of-state political candidates.

In late January, a right-wing congressional candidate from Virginia, Kimberly Lowe, visited the nature preserve. Treviño-Wright said Lowe demanded the center give her and another woman access to the river “to see all the illegals crossing on the raft.” Treviño-Wright said Lowe or her companion tackled her when she asked Lowe to leave the premises, a physical altercation captured on audio. Treviño-Wright said she filed a complaint against Lowe with the Mission Police Department, which did not return calls for comment.

Lowe accused Treviño-Wright of filing a false police report and pushing a “false news story” and claimed she, not Treviño-Wright, was the one assaulted during the altercation in a statement to ProPublica and the Tribune.

Citing safety concerns, the center shuttered its doors for three months. It reopened last week after spending nearly $30,000 in security upgrades.

“I think we will all be on guard for a long time,” Treviño-Wright said. “I don’t know that it’s possible to experience what we have and not, you know, be changed by that.”

Kolfage’s guilty plea did not end his defiant social media posture on the right-wing microblogging site Gettr, where he has a verified account after having been banned from Facebook and deactivating his Twitter account. On the day after he entered his plea, he posted a screenshot of a Gateway Pundit story crediting him with building more border wall than Presidents Barack Obama or Joe Biden. His pinned post reads “They Michael Flynn’d me,” an apparent reference to the former Trump national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI over contacts with Russian officials. Flynn was subsequently pardoned by Trump.

In the comments section, supporters told Kolfage he deserved a “medal” and thanked him for “everything you’ve done.”

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

This story was co-published with the Chicago Tribune.

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.

Illinois’ top education official urged schools to stop working with police to ticket students for misbehavior, hours after an investigation by ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune revealed that schools across the state were evading laws designed to prohibit the fining of students.

In a strongly worded plea sent to officials across the state, Illinois ​​State Superintendent of Education Carmen Ayala said the costly fines associated with the tickets can be immensely harmful to families, and there’s no evidence they improve students’ behavior. School officials who refer students to police for ticketing have “abdicated their responsibility for student discipline to local law enforcement,” she wrote Thursday, the same day the investigation “The Price Kids Pay” was published.

“If your district/schools are engaging in this practice, I implore you to immediately stop and consider both the cost and the consequences of these fines,” Ayala wrote. She highlighted that sentence in bold type in an 800-word email to superintendents and principals.

The Illinois State Board of Education intends to survey school districts to learn more about their disciplinary practices, Ayala wrote. She also warned that the state board will investigate “noncompliance with state law, where appropriate, and work with lawmakers to close loopholes in state law.”

On Friday, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said the Tribune-ProPublica report was “something we immediately jumped on” and conversations with legislators were already underway.

“We want to see what exactly is going to be required in order to make sure that this doesn’t happen anywhere in the state of Illinois,” Pritzker said. “I would bet that you’re going to see legislation about this.”

In “The Price Kids Pay,” ProPublica and the Tribune reported that local police are issuing thousands of tickets a year to students for violations of municipal laws, often for misconduct as minor as littering or vaping. Each ticket can come with hundreds of dollars in fines or fees, forcing many families into burdensome payment plans that can eat up paychecks. (Use our interactive database to look up how many and what kinds of tickets have been issued in an Illinois public school or district.)

Failure to pay can have lasting and severe implications. Some communities send debt from school tickets to collection agencies and warn of wage garnishment, liens and loss of driving privileges if the debt is not paid. Other municipalities have used a program available through the state comptroller’s office to deduct money from individuals’ tax refunds and payroll checks.

“The only consequences of the tickets are to impose a financial burden on already struggling families and to make students feel even less cared for, less welcome, and less included at school, which in turn leads to more antisocial and defiant behavior,” Ayala wrote in her letter.

An Illinois law passed in 2015 prohibits schools from using fines to discipline students. Instead, the investigation found, schools have been referring students to police, who then write costly tickets — taking advantage of what Ayala referred to as a “loophole” in the law. Students received more than 11,800 tickets for school misbehavior in the last three school years, reporters found.

Another law, dating to 2019, directly bans schools from reporting truant students to authorities so the students can be ticketed. But the investigation identified about 40 schools or districts that have been referring students to police for truancy.

The investigation found that students were issued tickets most frequently for possession of vaping devices or cannabis, disorderly conduct, fighting and truancy. But police also wrote tickets for such offenses as littering, being disruptive and property damage — for breaking a soap dish in a school bathroom, for example. The investigation focused on high schools but found that children 12 and under also had been ticketed in some K-12 districts.

The investigation examined 199 school districts and identified ticketing of students in 141 of them. To understand the frequency and impact of ticketing in schools, reporters filed 500 Freedom of Information Act requests to districts and police departments and attended more than 50 hearing dates in courts and municipalities across the state.

So many students get ticketed in some cities and towns that students make up the majority of people attending their municipal hearings for ordinance violations. The hearings are usually held during the day, forcing students to miss school. Ayala noted that ticketing students for truancy “may actually worsen student attendance.”

In her letter, Ayala wrote that while some people who did not grow up poor may not understand the impact of a $250 fine, it can force people to choose between paying for groceries, buying gas to get to work or paying the heating bill.

“For the more than 50 percent of our students and families in Illinois who qualify as low-income, paying $250 for a fine means the lights in the house will literally shut off, mom and dad will have no fuel to get to work, or there will be no hot meals on the table,” she wrote. “Even a $40 fine has a tangible impact on the safety, security and wellbeing of an entire family.”

Pritzker said “issuing fines to students who are in our K-12 system is not helpful,” adding, “It doesn’t help, it doesn’t change the behavior, and it just puts families at risk.”

An excerpt from Ayala’s letter.

In guidance issued last month, the state board of education and Attorney General Kwame Raoul urged schools to reevaluate punitive disciplinary policies such as suspensions; the guidance did not address police citations.

The state board also has been working with educators in about a half-dozen school districts this year on more positive behavioral interventions for students. Through the board’s Partnership for Disciplinary Equity in conjunction with several universities, funded with $2 million in federal pandemic relief funds, K-12 educators are learning about restorative justice practices and other techniques that emphasize resolving conflicts with discussion and problem-solving.

​​The legislators behind the 2015 law prohibiting schools from fining students have said they were troubled to learn from the Tribune and ProPublica that police were issuing costly tickets to children at school. The current House speaker, Emanuel “Chris” Welch, who was a sponsor of the legislation, said the General Assembly should revisit the law in light of the investigation’s findings.

Update, April 29, 2022: This story was updated to include statements from Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

Dan Petrella, Chicago Tribune, contributed reporting.

Jennifer Smith Richards has been a reporter at the Chicago Tribune since 2015. Jennifer’s data-driven investigative work often focuses on schools and disability. Most recently, she uncovered the misuse of seclusion and restraint in Illinois public schools and investigated sexual abuse and assault in Chicago schools. She previously wrote about education for more than a decade at newspapers in Huntington, West Virginia; Utica, New York; Savannah, Georgia; and Columbus, Ohio. She is a member of the ProPublica Distinguished Fellows program.

by Hannah Dreyfus

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The federal Department of Education has begun investigating Liberty University’s handling of student reports of sexual assault. In a statement to ProPublica, the school pledged its “full cooperation” with the investigation.

Last October, ProPublica revealed how the school, which was founded by evangelist Jerry Falwell, had discouraged students who tried to report being sexually assaulted. Some students who came forward were encouraged to sign forms acknowledging they might have broken Liberty’s moral code of conduct, “The Liberty Way.” Others described being encouraged to pray instead of reporting their cases.

Federal law requires that universities receiving federal funds properly handle claims of sexual assault. Liberty students receive hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid. Following our story, senators urged the U.S. Department of Education to investigate.

Liberty students told ProPublica that federal agents have been at the school’s campus in Lynchburg, Virginia, this week. In an email viewed by ProPublica, a Department of Education official reached out to student advocates to arrange meeting times. An agency spokesperson declined to comment, citing a policy not to discuss ongoing investigations.

“Liberty University welcomes the U.S. Department of Education’s review of our Clery Act compliance program,” the university said in its statement to ProPublica. The federal Clery Act requires schools to inform students who report sexual assaults about the option of going to law enforcement and to assist in that reporting if necessary.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., one of the senators who had called for the investigation, praised the government’s move. “I’m glad the Department of Education is investigating Liberty’s handling of sexual assault,” he said in a statement to ProPublica. “I hope the Department looks into it thoroughly.”

In another development, an unnamed former Liberty University student filed a federal lawsuit against the school on Wednesday, claiming the university failed to properly investigate after she reported a rape to school authorities a year ago. The plaintiff also alleged that when she reported being sexually assaulted, she was penalized by the school for violating The Liberty Way, because she had been at a party where alcohol was consumed.

A spokesperson for Liberty declined to comment on the suit.

In November, two weeks after ProPublica’s investigation, Liberty pledged to launch an “independent and comprehensive review” of the school office tasked with handling discrimination and abuse. The school has not responded to ProPublica’s request for an update on the status of that review.

by Annie Waldman, ProPublica, Beth Schwartzapfel, The Marshall Project, and Erin Einhorn, NBC News

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This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system and NBC News. Sign up for The Marshall Project’s newsletters, and follow them on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

A bill that would place strict limits on the use of solitary confinement for youth in Louisiana unexpectedly advanced out of a legislative committee on Wednesday after legislators heard testimony from people who had been held in isolation as children.

Testimony during the hearing also included descriptions of conditions in a facility that was the subject of a recent investigation by ProPublica, NBC News and The Marshall Project. Teens at the Acadiana Center for Youth at St. Martinville were locked behind solid steel doors around the clock for weeks at a time, alone and frequently in the dark, and were handcuffed and shackled when they were allowed out to shower or make phone calls. Conditions were so punitive that one expert described them as child abuse.

“The bottom line is that this is a terrible way to rehabilitate children,” testified Rachel Gassert, policy director at the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights. She cited the findings of the investigation as “a great illustration of why this bill is necessary.”

The state’s Office of Juvenile Justice said that the facility was meant to provide additional support and security to its most troubled teens, but internal documents showed the harsh measures instead led to violence, property destruction and escapes.

After months of defending the treatment of teenagers at St. Martinville, the head of the juvenile justice office, Bill Sommers, publicly acknowledged to lawmakers for the first time that he was not satisfied with how the facility was being run. He also expressed support for the proposed legislation to limit the use of isolation in his facilities.

“The longer an individual is in solitary, the more they’re likely to act out,” he said. “I do believe in that correlation.”

In Louisiana, current state policy allows a maximum of 12 hours of isolation in most cases, and seven days for “highly disruptive” behavior. Those policies are nonbinding and don’t have the force of law, and even those limits stop short of what experts recommend. Most experts suggest that isolation should be used only until a young person calms down and is not a physical threat to themselves or others.

The new bill, which was introduced last month by State Rep. Royce Duplessis, a New Orleans Democrat, would make it illegal for the agency to use solitary confinement for young people for more than eight hours at a time. The bill would also require the state’s juvenile justice agency to better track the use of isolation in its facilities and to notify parents when their children are placed in solitary.

“We’re trying to keep the guards safe, we’re trying to keep the juveniles safe,” Duplessis told lawmakers on Wednesday, adding that the bill “puts some guardrails in place, which currently there are none.”

Both the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association have decried solitary confinement as a harmful, punitive practice, leading to depression and even psychosis. Research has found that more than half the kids in juvenile facilities who die by suicide are, or recently were, in isolation. Citing the harm the practice can cause, the federal government has banned the use of solitary confinement at its juvenile facilities, and at least 24 states have placed strict limits on its use.

“It turned me into an antisocial person,” said Therrin Dew, 21, who said he did numerous stints in solitary confinement — one as long as six months — during the five and a half years he spent in facilities including Louisiana’s Swanson Center for Youth. “I was energetic and a free spirit once, but being in a cell that long, it kind of turned you against people.”

The conditions were unsanitary, he said, noting that he was once isolated in a cell that had someone else’s feces smeared on the wall.

“If you’re in solitary confinement, you can’t learn nothing but the way the bricks look around you.”

Some lawmakers came into the hearing skeptical about the bill, Duplessis said. “There’s a big push in the Legislature right now to make it safer,” he said in an interview Thursday, referring to violence in the facilities. “By making it safer, in some people’s eyes, that means increasing punishment.”

State Rep. Debbie Villio, a Republican and former prosecutor from the New Orleans suburbs, raised concerns early in the hearing about a binding eight-hour limit, saying that juvenile behavior should be handled on a case-by-case basis. But later in the hearing, after testimony from Dew and others, she announced her support for advancing the bill.

“I can’t ignore what we’ve heard,” she said. “It sounds to me like there’s some serious issues that need to be addressed immediately.”

Among those issues is a debilitating staff shortage. Sommers testified that about a third of his agency’s positions are currently unfilled.

The bill ultimately won unanimous support from the House’s criminal justice committee and will now go to the full House.

Last year, legislators ordered an audit of the use of solitary confinement at youth lockups, after two teens died by suicide in isolation in the same week in 2019. That audit, released this week, found that the Office of Juvenile Justice routinely ignored its own policies on isolation, with 40% of confinements in 2019 and 2020 exceeding the maximum duration allowed at the time. The average duration of confinement was about six days, more than 14 times the national average as of October 2020. In one instance, a child was held in solitary confinement for three months straight.

“It’s unforgivable,” said Gina Womack, executive director of Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, which advocates for youth in detention. “A lot of our young people already have some mental health issues, and solitary just really exacerbates that.”

The audit also showed that Black youth were disproportionately held in isolation in state facilities, accounting for 94% of placements in solitary confinement, greater than the 82% of the children in state-run lockups who were Black.

St. Martinville was not included in the legislative auditor’s report because it opened in 2021. But the investigation from ProPublica, NBC News and The Marshall Project found that the conditions there were even more extreme than what the auditor found at other secure care facilities across the state. Youth in the facility were in solitary for weeks on end and weren’t provided education or other legally required services, such as substance abuse counseling.

Witnesses at the hearing told the committee that any time in solitary can be life-altering.

“I lost part of who I was as a human being,” Ronald Marshall, who was held in isolation for seven months as a young person in Louisiana decades ago, told the committee. “My need to feel safe. My need to feel loved. My need to feel in control of my life. It destroyed all of that.”

by Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica, and Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune, photography by Armando L. Sanchez, Chicago Tribune, illustrations by Laila Milevski, ProPublica

Update, April 29, 2022: Hours after the publication of this investigation on April 28, Illinois State Board of Education Superintendent Carmen Ayala urged school administrators across the state to stop working with police to ticket students, saying fines associated with the tickets hurt families and there’s no evidence they change students’ behavior. Read more here.

Lea este artículo en español en el sitio web del Chicago Tribune.

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.

The courthouse lobby echoed like a crowded school cafeteria. Teenagers in sweatshirts and sneakers gossiped and scrolled on their phones as they clutched the yellow tickets that police had issued them at school.

Abigail, a 16-year-old facing a $200 penalty for truancy, missed school again while she waited hours for a prosecutor to call her name. Sophia, a 14-year-old looking at $175 in fines and fees after school security caught her with a vape pen, sat on her mother’s lap.

A boy named Kameron, who had shoved his friend over a Lipton peach iced tea in the school cafeteria, had been cited for violating East Peoria’s municipal code forbidding “assault, battery, and affray.” He didn’t know what that phrase meant; he was 12 years old.

“He was wrong for what he did, but this is a bit extreme for the first time being in trouble. He isn’t even a teenager yet,” Shannon Poole said as her son signed a plea agreement that came with $250 in fines and fees. They spent three hours at the courthouse as Kameron missed math, social studies and science.

The nearly 30 students summoned to the Tazewell County Courthouse that January morning were not facing criminal charges; they’d received tickets for violating a municipal ordinance while at school. Each was presented with a choice: agree to pay a fine or challenge the ticket at a later hearing. Failing to pay, they were told, could bring adult consequences, from losing their driving privileges to harming their future credit scores.

Across Illinois, police are ticketing thousands of students a year for in-school adolescent behavior once handled only by the principal’s office — for littering, for making loud noises, for using offensive words or gestures, for breaking a soap dish in the bathroom.

Ticketing students violates the intent of an Illinois law that prohibits schools from fining students as a form of discipline. Instead of issuing fines directly, school officials refer students to police, who then ticket them for municipal ordinance violations, an investigation by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica has found. (Use our interactive database to look up how many and what kinds of tickets have been issued in an Illinois public school or district.)

Another state law prohibits schools from notifying police when students are truant so officers can ticket them. But the investigation found dozens of school districts routinely fail to follow this law.

“Basically schools are using this as a way to have municipalities do their dirty work,” said Jackie Ross, an attorney at Loyola University Chicago’s ChildLaw Clinic who specializes in school discipline. “It’s the next iteration of the school-to-prison pipeline. Schools might be patting themselves on the back and saying it’s just the school-to-municipality pipeline, but it’s the same philosophy.”

At the assembly-line hearings where many of these cases are handled, students have no right to legal representation and little chance to defend themselves against charges that can have long-term consequences. Ticket fines can be hundreds of dollars, presenting an impossible burden for some families, and administrative or court fees of up to $150 are often tacked on.

The principal is listed as the complainant on this ticket written to a girl at Orland Junior High School for possessing “tobacco or an alternative nicotine product.” (Redactions and highlighting added by ProPublica.)

Unpaid fines are sometimes sent to collections or deducted from parents’ tax refunds. And, unlike records from juvenile court, these cases can’t be expunged under state law.

No government entity tracks student ticketing, either in Illinois or nationally. Though a handful of communities in other states have sought to limit the practice, Illinois has not tried to monitor it, even after lawmakers attempted several years ago to stop schools from fining students as discipline. The Tribune and ProPublica quantified school tickets through more than 500 Freedom of Information Act requests to school districts and police departments, focusing on nearly 200 high-school-only districts and large K-12 districts.

In all, the investigation documented more than 11,800 tickets issued during the last three school years, even though the COVID-19 pandemic kept students out of school for much of that period and even though records show no students were ticketed in the state’s biggest district, the Chicago Public Schools.

The analysis of 199 districts, which together encompass more than 86% of the state’s high school students, found that ticketing occurred in at least 141. In some K-12 districts, tickets were issued to children as young as 8.

Though school officials and police say ticketing keeps students from facing more serious criminal charges, the process routinely draws them into a legal system for infractions that would never be considered sufficiently serious to be heard in juvenile court. Many parents noted angrily that their children already had been suspended, given detentions or otherwise disciplined at school for their behavior.

Joe Nepras, left, accompanied his son Nathan, 16, to a hearing after the student got a ticket related to a fight on a school bus.

The quasi-judicial hearings for these tickets often take place at police stations or village halls, and they’re presided over by lawyers who are not judges. Even when tickets are handled at a courthouse, as in central Illinois’ Tazewell County, local prosecutors resolve most cases informally before getting a perfunctory signoff from a judge.

Tribune and ProPublica reporters attended more than 50 hearing dates, observing hundreds of cases around the state. Some communities hold as many as three sessions a month, with students making up the vast majority of cases.

The revenue from the student tickets goes to the municipalities, not the schools, and essentially funds the ticketing system, including the employees who manage the hearings, lawyers who prosecute the cases and hearing officers who rule on them.

Coming Soon

Part two of this series: racial disparities in student ticketing

With few watchful eyes on the school ticketing system and few rules to govern it, inequities have gone undetected. The investigation examined the race of students ticketed in dozens of school districts and found that police had issued tickets disproportionately to Black students. Even in predominantly white schools, Black students sometimes received most of the tickets. In some communities, Latino students also were ticketed at disproportionate rates.

The fines and punishments, which are set by local governments, vary widely. That means the penalty for disorderly conduct violations might be $450 in one town, $50 in another and community service in a third. Towns also have different policies about whether and when they pursue unpaid ticket debt.

Some police departments choose not to ticket students at school; they say it’s not an effective way to change behavior or help young people. Some schools have police officers on campus but direct them to stay out of minor disciplinary matters.

At schools where police routinely ticket students, officials argued that some young people need consequences beyond school discipline. They said students returning to school after pandemic closures have shown an increase in troubling behavior that has been difficult to manage.

That’s reflected in recent patterns of police ticketing.

At Pekin Community High School near Peoria, police issued 62 tickets totaling more than $10,000 before Halloween. Officers wrote 13 tickets for truancy on a single November day at Dundee-Crown High School in suburban Carpentersville. At McHenry Community High School this fall, police issued dozens of tickets for disorderly conduct, property damage, or possession of e-cigarettes or cannabis.

One woman kept track of students’ fines and hearing fees in a notebook while accompanying her 15-year-old daughter to a packed December hearing in the McHenry City Council chambers. The total came to more than $5,000, including her daughter’s $450 ticket for disorderly conduct.

“Merry Christmas,” the hearing officer said sarcastically as he handed down the punishments.

“Instead of counseling these children, they are giving them tickets,” said the mother. “When they are handing out citations in this volume, you have to stop and say, ‘What’s going on here?’”

Joliet Municipal Building 9 a.m., Nov. 9

“Morning, your honor,” Angelique Adams said, holding the ticket her 16-year-old daughter had received at Joliet Central High School.

The ticket, for disorderly conduct, was issued after a school worker had spotted pepper spray dangling from the teen’s backpack, next to hand sanitizer.

“The spray caused alarm to the school environment,” the ticket states. (A district spokesperson would not comment on the case, citing student confidentiality, but said school employees contact police when a chemical spray is discovered.)

“Ms. Adams, what would you like to tell me?” asked Michael Knick, a lawyer hired by the city to hear such cases.

Adams said she’d given her daughter the pepper spray to keep the girl safe while walking to school.

“She doesn’t have the pepper spray to attack another student. She was walking. I’m not sure how she alarmed or put the school in a deadly environment,” Adams told Knick. “Instead of telling her, ‘You can’t have it, you’re not supposed to have it,’ instead you hit her with a $150 fine? I don’t have $150. I can barely pay her school fees.”

Knick wasn’t swayed. He waived the $50 in hearing costs but handed down a fine of $150. The student would owe $350 if the fine wasn’t paid by the end of the year.

“Y’all is crazy,” Adams told him before walking away.

Schools aren’t allowed to fine students for misbehaving in Illinois. When legislators passed a broad overhaul of school discipline in 2015, they specifically banned fines as a “disciplinary consequence.” That change was inspired by a Chicago charter school that had been fining students for issues like tardiness and uniform infractions.

But the law, still known to educators as Senate Bill 100, doesn’t apply to police. Some school officials argue they are following the rules as long as police officers write the tickets and municipalities issue the fines.

“We’re not the issuer of the ticket,” said Marjorie Greuter, superintendent of East Peoria Community High School District 309. One of the deans there pointed out that the high school also does not make money from the tickets.

But families and advocates for children see little distinction — they just know there’s a financial consequence for misbehavior at school.

“If the school is involving police, the school is issuing the ticket. There really is no difference between the officer and the school,” said Jessica Gingold, an attorney who encountered the ticketing system while representing a child through Equip for Equality, the federally appointed watchdog for people with disabilities in Illinois.

In an emailed statement, the Illinois State Board of Education’s spokesperson said it is unfortunate that state law doesn’t clearly prohibit using police to ticket students at school, adding that the board is committed to helping lawmakers “eliminate ineffective and harmful practices that have no place in our schools.”

The lawmakers who wanted to put an end to school fines said they were troubled to learn that police were issuing tickets to students.

Senate Majority Leader Kimberly A. Lightford, a Democrat who was a chief sponsor of the legislation, said it’s “totally shocking” that schools are still creating financial penalties for children and families. “Unfortunately we have school districts and systems that, no matter what, will not follow the law, will find that loophole to get around being responsive to the law,” she said.

The chief sponsor of the discipline legislation in the House, Democratic Rep. William Davis, called school-related ticketing “in opposition” to the law. Current House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, also a sponsor, agreed and said legislators should revisit the law.

“The whole point of Senate Bill 100 was about keeping kids in school, keeping kids on track to graduate, on a path for success by not creating a pipeline of discipline that creates these records that will follow kids for the rest of their lives. That’s not the goal,” Welch said in an interview.

“Certainly double punishment was not intended by the law either,” Welch said of adding a ticket to suspension or detention.

The Tribune-ProPublica investigation found that school employees and police often work hand in hand to discipline students. In many cases a police officer, called a school resource officer, is already stationed in the building.

At Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School, 10 school security workers patrol the hallways and stand guard outside the bathrooms. If they spot vaping devices, fights or other trouble, they alert school administrators, who decide whether to share the information with the school resource officer.

On the school police officer’s desk is a book of blank tickets.

At Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School students walking between classes are watched by a member of the security staff, left, and by the school resource officer, right.

“We will do our discipline, but it is up to the officer to ticket,” said Principal Brian Wright. For disorderly conduct tickets, a school official signs as the complaining witness. Wright said he thinks the school is obligated to report students to police if they may be breaking a village ordinance. He also said he thinks the practice doesn’t conflict with state law as long as the school isn’t writing the ticket and has a separate process for imposing its own discipline.

“The bottom line is correcting behavior,” Wright said. But he also acknowledged: “I don’t know how effective this is.” He noted that the village’s relatively new ordinance on vaping hasn’t deterred students from bringing the devices to school.

Greuter and other school officials say that while the tickets can be costly, young people need consequences. “It’s a product of their decisions — poor decisions,” she said. “While it might be expensive in the short term, the consequences of not stopping that behavior in the long term has much more serious consequences.”

That kind of thinking goes against research that has found that involving law enforcement in school incidents is harmful and counterproductive. Illinois officials just last month urged schools to reevaluate punitive disciplinary policies; the guidance did not address police citations.

Kip Heinle, a spokesperson for the Illinois School Resource Officers Association, said he thinks ticketing is uncommon and used as a “last resort.”

At the high school where he works in Madison County, Heinle said he’s probably written 10 tickets in 16 years. The other school resource officers he knows across the state have the same philosophy, he said: “Let the school handle as much as they can. … We don’t want to hem up a kid with a court date and fines and stuff like that.”

But the news organizations’ investigation found that ticketing was the most likely outcome when school officials involved police in student incidents. In the roughly 200 Illinois districts examined for the investigation, police were involved about 17,800 times in the last three school years, records show. Sometimes police arrested students; sometimes they took no action. In more than half the incidents, they issued a ticket.

In 66 of those districts, police ticketed students at least 50 times in three years, the Tribune-ProPublica investigation found. Police issued at least 100 citations to students in 36 districts.

Jennifer Fee and Blake in the kitchen of their Groveland home with their dogs

Across the state, police ticketed students most frequently — about 3,300 times — for possessing tobacco, e-cigarettes or other vaping materials. Many towns have passed new vaping ordinances in response to concerns about underage use. Students were ticketed for possession of drugs or drug paraphernalia — almost always related to cannabis — about 1,900 times.

Fights among students led to more than 700 tickets, and police issued more than 1,200 tickets to students for disorderly conduct, which could include anything from using profanity to slapping someone.

The investigation also found that police had issued more than 1,800 tickets for truancy across at least 40 municipalities. More than 1,000 of those tickets were issued after Jan. 1, 2019, when a state law went into effect that prohibited schools from notifying authorities about truant students so police can ticket them.

Carpentersville police issued 649 truancy tickets to students at Dundee-Crown High School between January 2019 and December 2021, the most truancy tickets issued in any district the reporters examined. The fines totaled nearly $50,000.

Police and school officials in the city of Harvard, near the Wisconsin border, have worked together to issue 105 truancy tickets since the law went into effect.

“It’s all on what the school wants to do,” said Harvard Deputy Chief Tyson Bauman. “The school official has to be the person who says, ‘Yes, issue a ticket.’”

Sixteen truancy tickets were issued to Harvard high school students on March 1 alone.

Administrators at the Harvard school district and at Dundee-Crown did not respond to requests for comment.

Bradley-Bourbonnais Principal Brian Wright said he thinks that when students may be breaking a village ordinance, the school is obligated to report them to the police.

“It is illegal and it shouldn’t be happening,” said Eve Rips, a former Loyola University ChildLaw Clinic fellow who has studied Illinois’ 2018 truancy law. “Schools should be following the law here, and it is a serious concern if they aren’t. Parents should be able to get these tickets dropped if they’re getting improperly ticketed.”

Superintendent Tony Sanders of School District U-46 in Elgin, the second-largest district in the state, said he was upset to learn from reporters that dozens of students in his district, including some at a middle school and two high schools, had been ticketed for truancy after the state ban took effect. He said principals and school resource officers have now been told to stop.

“It was clearly done against state law,” Sanders said.

For years in East Peoria, students were ticketed for truancy by the school’s truancy officer, who is not a police officer but had been given a book of police tickets. The high school handbook says students are considered truant if they repeatedly arrive more than five minutes late to school and warns tickets could be issued if phone calls, letters and home visits aren’t effective.

The tickets ordered students to the Tazewell County Courthouse, where they faced fines and court fees of $200.

After the Tribune and ProPublica questioned school officials in February about why the employee was writing truancy tickets in violation of state law, attorney Katherine Swise said in March that schools had stopped issuing the tickets. She declined to comment further, citing attorney-client privilege.

“We had been proceeding under this practice for a long time,” said Swise, whose law firm represents both the city and its schools. “Tickets are no longer being written.”

Tazewell County Courthouse 1 p.m., Sept. 27

Jennifer Fee leaned against the payment counter. Her 16-year-old, Blake, owed $350 for being found with a vaping device — considered drug paraphernalia by police — at Morton High School near Peoria.

“You know how much money this is? This is how much money I make for the week,” said Fee, who was working as a school janitor.

Fee initially was going to sign an agreement to pay off the ticket gradually. Then she decided to put the full amount on a credit card.

The court clerk told her it would be an additional $9.62 to process the credit card payment.

“Imagine how much money they’re making off of kids,” Fee said.

Confronted with hundreds of dollars in fines, parents often plead for extra time to pay or ask whether their children can do community service instead. They say the fines would eat up their entire paychecks and point out their children have no income.

But in most cases, families have only two choices: admit wrongdoing and agree to pay the amount offered by a prosecutor, or fight the ticket and risk paying a much higher penalty.

In the Tazewell County Courthouse last spring, Morton village prosecutor Pat McGrath sat at a long table at one end of the lobby telling a teenage girl that she could resolve a ticket for an e-cigarette for $25, plus $100 in court costs: “$125 out the door,” McGrath said.

Students in Tazewell County typically sign agreements setting up a payment plan for the fines and fees that come with their tickets, including a document that warns of the penalties for nonpayment. (Redaction added by ProPublica.)

They could fight back by hiring a lawyer or they could go to trial without one. The family chose to pay.

“She doesn’t have another option. She can’t hire an attorney,” the girl’s aunt told McGrath.

At the opposite end of the lobby, East Peoria prosecutor Austin Nichols told each family “I would be willing to offer you …” and then named a fine: $75 for tobacco, $250 for disorderly conduct, $100 for truancy. Plus $100 court costs in each case.

Susan McCoy’s son took one of Nichols’ deals to pay $350.50 in fines and fees for consumption of alcohol. The 17-year-old later said school workers had questioned him after he threw up at the bus stop, and he admitted that he’d drunk whiskey at home during the night.

“That’s a lot of money to certain people. It is a lot to me,” said McCoy, who worked at a shoe store at the time. The family couldn’t pay it all that day, so they agreed to a plan to pay $60 a month. Nearly a year later, McCoy had paid only about $100. “I hate to say I have more important bills that have to be paid, but I do.”

The Tazewell County Courthouse

When several families asked Nichols for community service instead of a fine, he told them the city doesn’t offer that option.

“He is 14. He can’t even get a job,” one boy’s guardian said to Nichols, frustrated with the $175 the freshman was charged for vaping at school. “I’m not paying it. I already lost $160 today losing work.”

Many municipalities add as much as $150 in administrative costs, mimicking court fees, to each fine. Some have made the hearings mandatory, making it impossible for students to avoid the fees.

Other communities don’t require students to enter a plea in person, allowing them to admit liability and pay the ticket cost ahead of a hearing date. But municipalities often penalize families who don’t pay promptly, and in some communities, the amount they owe can quickly grow.

The ticket issued to Amanda Piker’s son for tobacco possession lists an initial fine of $100 that would rise rapidly if not paid within 48 hours. (Redactions and highlighting added by ProPublica.)

That’s the case in Manteno, where Amanda Piker learned her son’s $100 ticket for tobacco possession would double if not paid within 48 hours. After two weeks, the penalty could increase to $750 plus a $50 fee.

Piker’s sixth-grade son was ticketed in 2019 after a friend gave him a vaping device and he put it in his backpack. School officials found the device after they searched his bag while he was in physical education class, she said.

“We were just absolutely shocked, but you had no choice. You have to pay,” said Piker. “People don’t believe me when I say Manteno does this.”

The financial harm can trail students after they leave school, the Tribune-ProPublica investigation found.

Kathryn Patterson’s son Chris was 16 when he was ticketed for possession of tobacco and drug paraphernalia at Hoffman Estates High School. She said she told village officials the family didn’t have $200 to pay for the tickets and asked that Chris be allowed to do community service instead. That wasn’t an option, she learned.

About three years later, her son got a letter from a collections agency. The amount due had grown to $270. “They waited until he was 18 and threw him into collections as he was trying to start his own life,” Patterson said. He has yet to pay, she said.

The cost of tickets issued to students at the village’s two high schools from August 2018 through September 2021 totaled nearly $37,000, records show. About $13,000 was unpaid.

At least 38 municipalities try to collect on juvenile debt, either through parents or from the students themselves once they turn 18, the Tribune and ProPublica found. Some use private collections companies. Others employ the state’s Local Debt Recovery Program, which allows the comptroller’s office to deduct money for unpaid debts from individuals’ tax refunds and payroll checks.

The village of Bradley has tried to collect unpaid fines from about 40 tickets issued to high school students from 2018 through 2020, totalling about $10,000. The village uses both a private collections company and the state comptroller’s program; Bradley has collected about $1,800 in student debt through the state program, records show.

Samantha Corzine and her daughters were living in a motel when the girls were ticketed at Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School for truancy and possession of cannabis. She said she told Bradley officials she didn’t have the money to pay the fines.

“They told me you have to figure out something because if they go to collections, they automatically get garnished from your wages and your tax forms,” she said.

And they were. Just as Corzine was trying to move into a home, she learned that $800 would be deducted from her tax refund in 2020, interfering with her plans to put that money toward a down payment. The family had to spend several additional months in the motel.

“I was devastated,” she said. “I could finally get my kids out of the motel situation and into an actual home, and it was down the drain because they took what I was expecting to get.”

McHenry Municipal Building 1:30 p.m., Dec. 9

Nathan, 16, stood with his father _at a lectern, ready to defend himself against a disorderly conduct ticket related to a fight on a school bus. This was his second appearance; Nathan had already entered a “not liable” plea in October and had been told to return for a hearing.

When his father, Joe Nepras, started to explain why Nathan shouldn’t have been ticketed, hearing officer Harry H. Semrow Jr. interrupted and noted Nepras wasn’t Nathan’s attorney. “I’m his father and that’s the next best thing,” Nepras said.

“Is it?” Semrow shot back.

“Do you know what an opening statement is?” Semrow asked. Nepras said no. “You don’t?”

Semrow told Nathan to raise his right hand but got distracted and never swore him in, leaving the student with his hand in the air.

Joe Nepras asked to share a letter a school dean wrote for the hearing that said Nathan had never been disrespectful to anyone at school and he “in no way initiated the fight on the bus.” The city prosecutor said the letter was hearsay and he would want the dean to testify.

Semrow decided to continue the case until another day so both sides could call witnesses. Nathan would have to come back yet again.

Hearings for municipal ordinance violations in Illinois were created to deal with parking tickets, then were expanded in the late 1990s to handle any violation of local laws: excessive noise, jaywalking, lawns overgrown with weeds.

Barack Obama, then a state senator, sponsored the legislation that empowered Illinois municipalities to broaden the use of the hearings, with a goal of easing the strain on the circuit courts. The law also allowed cities and towns to keep the fines and fees that tickets generate.

Around the same time, the mass shooting at Columbine High School prompted schools to start bringing in police to keep students safe, putting many more young people in contact with law enforcement.

These seemingly unrelated changes had an unanticipated outcome: students being ticketed by police and then funneled into systems designed for adults, not children.

At the hearings, students have little or no opportunity to explain the circumstances surrounding a school incident. There’s often no counseling or other help offered to kids who may need it, only punishment. And cases are decided by lawyers who are not trained to work with young people.

In fact, there are few requirements for the lawyers who oversee hearings. They must have been a lawyer in Illinois for at least three years and must complete “a formal training program” that includes studying the hearing rules and municipal code, observing other hearings and taking part in hypothetical cases. But there’s no certification process to ensure the training takes place.

Few cases are decided in students’ favor. The hearings use a lower standard of proof than criminal cases. Students can be found liable if the allegation is more likely to have occurred than not, and a ticket is itself considered evidence.

In hundreds of cases the Tribune and ProPublica observed, it was exceedingly rare that a student was not found to be at fault. Data obtained from suburban Crystal Lake showed that of the 1,888 ordinance violation cases on the city’s docket from May 2018 through December 2021 — which includes both adults and minors — only seven people were found not liable.

Students are frequently confused by the process. Hearing officers are not courtroom judges, yet they are often called “judge” or “your honor.” The hearing rooms often have a bailiff, and students sometimes are sworn in at a lectern.

Hearing officers like Harry H. Semrow Jr. are not courtroom judges, yet they are often called “judge” or “your honor.”

“Is this a courtroom?” a McHenry High School freshman asked as he walked into the city council chambers where his hearing was held. That afternoon, Semrow presided over a full docket in which nearly every case involved a student. He told the crowd they could be there for a while.

“I don’t care,” Semrow said. “I get paid by the hour.”

Records show he gets paid $150 an hour.

Students have the right to appeal the hearing officers’ decisions to a circuit court, but they are not always told about that option. At all but one of the four McHenry hearing dates reporters attended, Semrow did not inform students they could appeal.

Even though the city code calls for it, McHenry also no longer records the proceedings, having abruptly stopped in December soon after reporters began attending. McHenry Deputy Police Chief Thomas Walsh said state law does not require a recording, and he and the police chief decided it “created an unnecessary record.”

Contacted by reporters, Semrow declined to discuss the hearing process or the investigation’s findings. The principal at McHenry High School, Jeff Prickett, defended the use of municipal tickets for school incidents, saying it is a way “to restore justice.” Walsh said the ticketing process keeps young people out of criminal court while still providing consequences. But he said he and the police chief are evaluating the cost of the fines, including the $400 fine set by the city council for disorderly conduct.

Other local officials also say young people should be glad their misbehavior is being handled with a ticket instead of through the criminal justice system.

“I could refer it to juvenile court. You could face charges there,” John Grotto, a hearing officer in DeKalb, told a student with a ticket for cannabis possession. “Do you understand the seriousness of this?”

But it’s unlikely that a state’s attorney would prosecute a scuffle in the school hallway or underage possession of a tiny amount of marijuana. When matters are serious — if a weapon is involved, for example — police can and do arrest students.

“For the most part, these are not going to be prosecuted in juvenile court for truancy or tobacco. If they’re receiving a ticket, that’s in every case a net widening, not a diversion” from the legal system, said Stephanie Kollmann, policy director of the Children and Family Justice Center at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.

Blake, center, gets a hug from a friend as he and his mother, Jennifer Fee, at right, wait to attend a hearing with Blake’s aunt Becky Fee, second from right, and his cousin Anna, left, who had also received a ticket at school.

The local hearings do not provide young people with legal protections that are common in juvenile court. Children do not have a right to an attorney or an interpreter, for example.

“It is especially troubling that in the United States of America, where we see young people as a vulnerable population that deserves protection, that they are going toe-to-toe with a prosecutor with no help from someone who understands the law,” said Mae Quinn, director of the Youth Justice Clinic at the University of the District of Columbia law school who has studied the impact of municipal courts on juveniles.

The records created by the ticketing process also can follow a child. Reporters found details of some students’ violations in online case dockets and municipal records, including the offenses they were accused of, how much they were fined and even information about debt collection efforts.

While Illinois allows juvenile arrest and court records to be expunged — meaning they are erased from a person’s record — state law considers ordinance violations to be “adult offenses” that are ineligible for expungement.

“These records are visible to a lot of people,” said Hannah Berkowitz, a staff attorney with Legal Aid Chicago who has tried to find ways to get children’s citations expunged. “They can be seen. They can be used to make decisions that would hurt kids.”

Kameron, 12, and his 14-year-old brother, Phoenix, hang out on the steps of their East Peoria home. In January, Kameron received a ticket for “assault, battery, and affray” after shoving another seventh grader over a bottle of iced tea.

The process overall is at odds with the goals of the juvenile justice system, which seeks not to punish students but to help them get on a better path. It also is out of step with a national trend toward eliminating juvenile justice fines and other costs.

For many students pushed into this system, the closest thing to help that’s available to them is the well-worn advice of hearing officers.

“Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future,” Grotto, in DeKalb, likes to say.

“You run with the crows, you fly with the crows, you get shot with the crows,” Semrow told one McHenry student. “Think about that.”

Bolingbrook police station 9 a.m., Oct. 20

Middle school student Malachi bounced his leg and cracked his knuckles as he waited for his case to be heard in the Bolingbrook police station. The 12-year-old wore a button-down shirt he had picked out that morning.

Police had written him a ticket for battery after he got in a fight before school. He also was suspended for three days and had to enroll in a community program designed to “help keep the cuffs off kids.”

Malachi arrived at the police station, which serves as a branch of the county court, with his mother, his grandmother and his aunt, who is his guardian.

His grandmother gave the boy a hug and rubbed his back. “Take a deep breath,” she told him.

Malachi later said he was terrified. “I didn’t know at my age stuff could happen like that for doing what I did at school,” he said. “I felt like I was living an adult life and I didn’t want to be in that moment.”

Police gave Malachi, 12, a ticket for battery after he got in a fight. “I didn’t know at my age stuff could happen like that for doing what I did at school,” he said.

About 3,700 students attend Evanston Township High School. But in at least the last three years, the two school resource officers have not written a single ticket, records show.

The school, one of the largest in the state, offers a reminder: Police have discretion. They don’t have to ticket young people.

“There are times when staff or administration has said, ‘Can you arrest this student? Can you cite this student?’ The question isn’t can we, but is it best? It is not,” said Officer Loyce Spells, who has been stationed at the school for five years.

It’s not that students aren’t vaping or fighting. But when they do, school workers decide the consequences: detention, suspension, mandatory counseling.

“We cannot enforce our way out of these situations,” Spells said. “That does not foster and build stronger or positive relationships.”

In the Rochester school district near Springfield, school and police officials have agreed that the officer working at the high school shouldn’t be involved in routine discipline.

“That’s not the environment we want. That’s not what we want for kids,” said Rochester Superintendent Dan Cox. “We’re trying to create a better person. They need consequences, but we’ve got to have … teachable moments. I’m not being soft here. There’s discipline.”

Cox said that if there’s a fight at school, for example, “the principal is going to be the disciplinarian.”

In Chicago, the school district and police say they believe officers should not play a role in everyday disciplinary issues. A spokesperson for Chicago Public Schools said the district’s student code of conduct advises school administrators “against contacting police in non-emergency incidents.”

If there is criminal activity at school, such as a fight that involves a weapon or leads to an injury, “that is where we get involved” and maybe arrest a student, said Director Glen Brooks of the Chicago Police Department’s Office of Community Policing.

“If it is a disciplinary issue or behavior or noncriminal offense, it is really the school’s purview to handle those kinds of incidents,” Brooks said. “The idea here is not to fine children. We don’t go around trying to collect money from children.”

In California, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s police department said in 2014 that it would stop ticketing students at school for fighting, possession of tobacco or small amounts of marijuana, and other minor offenses, instead referring them to school administrators, counseling or other programs.

In Texas, citing concerns that police were ticketing students too often for misbehavior, lawmakers passed legislation in 2013 that prohibits ticketing for some offenses at school.

Police in some Illinois municipalities continue to write tickets, but young people are required to do community service or participate in counseling or an educational program rather than pay a fine.

Nathan and his mother, Michele Nepras, talk with a McHenry city prosecutor and a hearing officer, Semrow. Nathan tried to fight his disorderly conduct ticket, and the process wound up dragging on for months.

Students at New Trier Township High School in Winnetka aren’t fined because village officials decided options such as community service and apology letters are more beneficial to everyone involved. Nonetheless, the village still requires students to pay a $40 administrative fee. Round Lake, Glenview and Roselle, among other places, also offer community service in lieu of fines.

Police in Elgin recently began offering counseling with a social worker instead of imposing fines for tickets, part of the police department’s rethinking of how to best help younger residents.

From 2017 through 2020, Elgin imposed fines for disciplinary matters at the city’s three high schools in 78 cases, city records show; the penalties ranged from $50 to $1,000. In 2021, the city issued no fines for school tickets but ordered counseling in 14 cases, including for an Elgin High School student cited for disorderly conduct for pulling a fire alarm. She completed the counseling. Young people can still be fined if they don’t show up on their hearing date.

“When I took over, it was ‘fine, fine, fine,’” said Jeff Adam, a retired police lieutenant who began overseeing the city’s administrative hearings a decade ago. Gradually, he began to doubt that the fines helped children.

“When you slap a fine on a family trying to get by, you are not helping them,” he said. “The whole thing is to get these kids to come around. The fine doesn’t do that. Especially when kids can’t work. There had to be a better way.”

The Aftermath

In Joliet, the hearing officer who fined a girl for carrying pepper spray on her backpack said he overturned his decision hours later, after questions from a reporter prompted him to research the law.

“It doesn’t matter,” the mother said. “I wasn’t paying it anyway.”

In Pekin, Blake, who’d previously been ticketed for having a vaping device, was back at the Tazewell County Courthouse in March, this time for tobacco possession at school. He took the prosecutor’s plea offer to pay a $50 fine, plus $100 in court costs, and waited while his mother swiped her credit card for a total of $154.12.

Blake is paying off the ticket debt with paychecks from his new fast-food job.

In McHenry, Nathan finally got a resolution in late March for his ticket related to a school bus skirmish in September.

He had to leave school early again and headed to the city hall, this time without his dad, who was traveling for work. The day before, the family had decided to stop fighting the ticket; Nathan’s mother, Michele, said she was too fearful to speak in public, particularly in front of Semrow. The pair stood nervously in front of the hearing officer and agreed to plead liable and pay the $450.

Semrow didn’t remember the case right away and asked if the fight happened at school.

“On the bus,” Nathan said quietly.

“Close enough,” Semrow said.

Nathan was glad to be done. It was his fourth trip to city hall for the ticket. He was sick of missing school.

How We Reported the Story

Neither the state of Illinois nor the federal government tracks how often police give tickets to students in public schools for violations of municipal ordinances.

To understand how frequently and for what reasons police cited students, reporters from the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica filed more than 500 requests for public records with schools and law enforcement agencies under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.

The requests were sent to 199 school districts: high-school-only districts and large K-12 districts. The requests sought records that would show how many times police were involved in student incidents during the school years that ended in 2019, 2020 and 2021; how often students were arrested; and how often tickets were issued in those incidents. Reporters also asked for the race of students who had been referred to police.

Some school districts said they did not track whether police issued tickets to students, so reporters then filed requests with the hundreds of law enforcement agencies that have jurisdiction over high schools in those districts. The requests sought information on where each ticket was issued, the age of the ticketed person or an indication whether they were a juvenile, the race of the person ticketed, the offense and the amount of the fine.

From those records, reporters built a database documenting more than 11,800 tickets issued by police in 141 school districts during the three school years examined. The database included police tickets issued at a school address to a person younger than 18, while excluding tickets issued for traffic or parking violations or for curfew violations.

Reporters also collected information about ticketing in the 2021-22 school year in select districts, but this data was not included in the database.

In addition to logging the number of tickets issued by each police department at each school examined, reporters documented the reasons tickets had been issued, how the tickets are adjudicated in each community, what the possible fines and fees are, and whether the community attempts to collect unpaid juvenile debts.

If a school district or police department provided the race of the young people ticketed, that information was documented in a separate database used to analyze the rates at which students of color were ticketed in their schools.

Because the forms used to document tickets varied between districts and police departments, reporters made informed judgments to group tickets into broader categories. For example, reporters classified tickets for possession of drug paraphernalia and tickets for cannabis use into one category for drug-related tickets.

A separate team then took a selection of records and spot-checked them to ensure that data had been entered consistently and to look for systemic flaws in the data entry. No widespread problems were found; any small errors that were identified were fixed.

To understand how tickets are handled after they’re issued, reporters attended more than 50 hearings across Illinois, observing hundreds of cases. They spoke with dozens of families affected by the process; with school, police and municipal officials; with attorneys and hearing officers; and with juvenile advocates. Reporters consulted with families about how to identify young people in the story and, as a result, did not include full names in most cases.

Nine districts contacted by the Tribune and ProPublica did not provide records on police interactions at their schools: Belleville Township High School District 201, O’Fallon Township High School District 203, Streator Township High School District 40, Vienna High School District 133, Bethalto Community Unit School District 8, Collinsville Community Unit School District 10, Harlem School District 122, Indian Prairie Community Unit School District 204 and Community Unit School District 200 in Wheaton.

Twenty-three police departments either did not provide records or excluded information in ways that prevented reporters from determining whether tickets were issued to students at a school in their jurisdiction: Belvidere, Cahokia Heights, Calumet City, Channahon, Crete, Dolton, Fox Lake, Grayslake, Harvey, Kankakee, LaSalle, Lemont, Mount Prospect, North Chicago, Northbrook, Pinckneyville, Richmond, Rockton, Rolling Meadows, Streamwood, Summit, Waukegan and Wood Dale.

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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Editing by Steve Mills, Kaarin Tisue and George Papajohn; additional data analysis by Ruth Talbot and Agnel Philip; additional research by Alex Mierjeski; visual presentation by Laila Milevski, Michelle Williams, Maya Eliahou, Steve Rosenberg, Todd Panagopoulos and Raquel Zaldivar; engagement reporting by Adriana Gallardo and Ariana Tobin; copy editing by Colleen Barry and Jeff Carlson.

Jennifer Smith Richards has been a reporter at the Chicago Tribune since 2015. Jennifer’s data-driven investigative work often focuses on schools and disability. Most recently, she uncovered the misuse of seclusion and restraint in Illinois public schools and investigated sexual abuse and assault in Chicago schools. She previously wrote about education for more than a decade at newspapers in Huntington, West Virginia; Utica, New York; Savannah, Georgia; and Columbus, Ohio. She is a member of the ProPublica Distinguished Fellows program.

Armando L. Sanchez joined the Chicago Tribune as a photojournalist in 2014. He was born and raised in Austin, Texas, and graduated from Western Kentucky University in 2012.

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

Illinois law prohibits schools from fining students for disciplinary reasons, but an analysis by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica found that school officials have been referring students to the police, who then issue tickets for violating local ordinances. Search our interactive database, for a public school or district to see if reporters identified ticketing there.

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

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

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

Earlier this month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ratcheted up pressure on President Joe Biden’s administration by expanding the state’s sweeping border crackdown, announcing that he would bus immigrants to Washington, D.C., after they were apprehended for illegally crossing the border, as well as search commercial trucks entering Texas from Mexico.

During an April 6 press conference launching the additional efforts, Abbott did not explain that the busing is voluntary for immigrants. Texas cities and counties where migrants seeking to stay in the country are dropped off by the federal government must also request such a transport out of state before it occurs.

Then, about a week after his directive for vehicle safety inspections drew criticism for hampering border commerce, Abbott rescinded it, saying he’d reached agreements with four Mexican governors to strengthen security south of the border. The agreements mostly included measures already in place, but the governor claimed on social media last week that they demonstrated Texas had accomplished more to secure the border in two days than Biden had done during his time in office.

The measures are the latest examples of how Abbott and other state officials have used incomplete and sometimes misleading statements when promoting the purpose and effectiveness of Operation Lone Star. Abbott launched the initiative in March 2021, stating that it would help stop drug and migrant smuggling. In the past year, the governor has deployed more than 10,000 National Guard members, along with state Department of Public Safety troopers, to patrol the border, build barriers and arrest some migrant men on state criminal trespassing charges for crossing into the U.S. through private land.

The result has been a multibillion-dollar operation that has counted arrests for crimes with no connection to the border and included tallies of drugs captured across the state in communities that received no additional resources from the initiative, ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and The Marshall Project found. The news organizations’ investigation showed that while Abbott initially said the operation would focus on targeting Mexican cartel members and smugglers, misdemeanor trespassing charges soon accounted for the largest share of arrests.

The governor’s office has hailed the operation as a success, repeatedly saying that it has captured criminals and deadly drugs.

As part of the investigation, reporters identified instances in which Abbott and DPS officials pointed to goals and accomplishments that lacked important context or did not match reality. Here’s some of what we found:

Trespassing Charges Against Immigrants

Last May 31, Abbott signed a border disaster declaration, giving him expansive power similar to what he would have after a natural disaster. Among other things, the declaration of a disaster automatically increased penalties for trespassing to up to a year in jail. Three days later, the governor promoted the effort on Fox News during an interview with host Sean Hannity.

Statement: “I follow the law, and the law that I’m going to use will be legal ways in which Texas is going to start arresting everybody coming across the border. Not just arresting them, but because this is now going to be aggravated trespass, they’re going to be spending a half a year in jail, if not a year in jail.” — Abbott, Fox News, June 3, 2021

What Happened: Texas did not, in fact, arrest everyone coming across the border. Since Abbott announced the effort, more than 2,900 people have been arrested by state police for allegedly crossing into Texas via private property. Most of the arrests occurred primarily in two rural counties in the southwest part of the state, according to DPS data. Leaders of the state’s biggest border counties have declined to participate, saying in interviews that they urged comprehensive solutions, rather than the criminalization of immigrants. The news organizations found that misdemeanor trespassing charges made up about 40% of Operation Lone Star’s arrests from July through February. Hundreds of immigrants have since had their trespassing charges dismissed or rejected. Prosecutors and judges deemed certain arrests questionable after some immigrants said DPS troopers marched them through private property. State police and Border Patrol officials have denied the allegations. Body camera footage confirmed at least one of those accounts. Other charges were dismissed because people sought asylum. Democratic elected officials and attorneys have questioned the legality of the trespassing arrests and asked the Justice Department to investigate alleged human rights violations related to Operation Lone Star. The governor’s office has maintained the arrests are “fully constitutional.”

700 Gang Members

DPS officials and Abbott have often insisted on social media and during interviews on Fox News that the operation targets cartels and violent gangs such as MS-13.

Statement: “The Texas Department of Public Safety, during #OperationLoneStar have encountered over 700 criminal gang members.” — Texas DPS Facebook page, Sept. 7, 2021

What Happened: DPS officials have not provided any proof of the department’s citation of hundreds of gang arrests. The department denied a public records request from ProPublica, the Tribune and The Marshall Project, saying gang affiliation is not a metric that is tracked. The agency said that in some instances those people arrested have “active warrants, previous records, etc. that indicate certain gang affiliations.” The news organizations found multiple examples in arrest data and drug seizure information that raised questions about claims that the operation focused on dangerous cartels and smugglers. Among those examples were arrests with no links to the border.

Haitian Immigrants

In September, up to 15,000 Haitian immigrants camped under the international bridge in Del Rio, a small border city about 150 miles west of San Antonio, to ask for asylum. Their arrival followed the assassination of Haiti’s president, an earthquake that killed thousands and economic instability in Latin American countries where some Haitians had previously migrated after a previous earthquake struck Haiti in 2010. DPS troopers and Texas National Guard members lined up vehicles along the bank of the Rio Grande and formed what officials called a “steel barrier” to stop immigrants from crossing.

Statement: “[Border Patrol agents] said the surge of migrants across the border was stopped only when the Texas Department of Public Safety and the National Guard showed up to provide a steel barrier to prevent the migrants from coming across. As soon as the National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety showed up, literally with hundreds, if not thousands, of vehicles, that is when the illegal migration stopped. That is exactly what the Biden administration could do if they wanted to.” — Abbott, Fox News, Sept. 26, 2021

Texas is securing the border.Biden’s own Border Patrol agents said it was the Texas Dept. of Public Safety & Texas National Guard that stopped the migrant surge in Del Rio.As Biden fails, Texas will continue stepping up. pic.twitter.com/NrBb2zfcxQ

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) September 26, 2021

What Happened: Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement expelled or deported thousands of Haitian immigrants, clearing the bridge within a week. Mexican officials blocked others before they reached the border. The role of DPS and the National Guard in stopping the Haitian migrants is unknown. Neither Texas agency made arrests. It’s unclear how many people the agencies referred to federal officials for deportation during that period. Neither DPS or CBP responded to questions.

Spending on Border Security

Last year, Texas lawmakers tripled the amount the state spends on border security, with the bulk of the budget going to Operation Lone Star. The governor’s office received the largest share. The state later shifted nearly $500 million away from other agencies, including the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, to help pay for the National Guard deployment after costs exceeded what the Legislature had approved.

Statement: “Texas as a state is deploying more resources to the border than the United States of America as a country. Texas taxpayers alone, in just the next two years, we are spending $3 billion to secure a border. I think that’s far more than what the federal government is spending here in Texas, or here in the United States.” — Abbott, Fox News, Jan. 28, 2022

Because the federal government refuses to do its job, Texas will continue to respond in full force to protect our communities. pic.twitter.com/LytGiChL0p

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) January 28, 2022

What Happened: CBP’s annual budget for fiscal year 2022 is more than $16 billion, compared with the more than $3 billion Texas budgeted for border security over a two-year period. The federal agency declined to provide a specific breakdown for its expenditures in Texas. As of January, CBP had more than 8,000 Border Patrol agents in Texas. The figure does not include the number of customs officers stationed at international ports of entry in the state, which CBP did not provide.

Fentanyl Seized

Marijuana made up more than three-quarters of illegal drugs captured under Operation Lone Star from March 2021 to January, but Abbott has focused on fentanyl seizures while touting the initiative’s success. At a February event in Austin that featured his Democratic opponent Beto O’Rourke, staff for Abbott’s reelection campaign handed out prescription bottles with fliers stuffed inside that claimed the effectiveness of the operation in capturing fentanyl.

Statement: “Amount of fentanyl caught from Operation Lone Star: 887 lbs” — flyers stuffed into pill bottles labeled “fentanyl” and handed out by Texans for Greg Abbott at a Beto O’Rourke speaking event in Austin in February

Here’s what’s inside: pic.twitter.com/O4PTXLkBcf

— Madlin Mekelburg (@madlinbmek) February 10, 2022

What Happened: Abbott and his reelection campaign are citing figures that reflect fentanyl seizures across the state, including those that would have occurred without the operation. Of the 887 pounds of fentanyl that Abbott credited to Operation Lone Star in February, only about 160 pounds were seized in the 63 counties that the state included as part of the initiative. El Paso County accounted for all but 12 pounds of the fentanyl captured as part of Operation Lone Star. The county was among several that declined to sign on to the governor’s border disaster declaration and, as of November, when most of the fentanyl was seized, had not received extra resources as part of the program.

Immigrant Apprehensions

A year into Operation Lone Star, Abbott touted a reduction in immigrant apprehensions during an interview with the conservative news site Breitbart. He said the decrease showed that the operation was working.

Statement: “Working collaboratively with local law enforcement, we have now been able to cut in half the number of apprehensions of people coming across the border illegally in the Rio Grande Valley Sector. … The bottom line is the cartels have realized it’s a money-losing proposition for them to try to cross the border in Texas.” — Abbott, Breitbart, March 17, 2022

What Happened: Abbott correctly stated that the number of immigrants caught entering the Rio Grande Valley sector, which includes 19 counties in South Texas, fell by about 46% after the start of the operation. In March 2021, Border Patrol apprehended 62,685 immigrants. A year later, the apprehension numbers in that region had dropped to 44,073. But Abbott’s statement failed to acknowledge that the number of immigrants Border Patrol agents took into custody across the state remained at its highest levels in at least two decades, averaging about 110,381 a month since the operation launched. DPS has claimed reductions in immigrant apprehensions as a sign of the operation’s success and also, at times, said such decreases were something over which the state’s efforts had little control. In November, agency officials told the news organizations that DPS defined success as fewer migrants coming across the border. They later said a decline in apprehensions is not considered a measure of success because many factors can come into play, including policy decisions in Washington or an increase in the number of immigrants seeking to surrender to Border Patrol.

Busing Immigrants to Washington

Early this month, the Biden administration announced that it would discontinue Title 42, a Trump-era pandemic health order through which federal authorities turned away most immigrants at the border, even those seeking asylum. After the decision, Abbott announced a plan to bus immigrants to Washington, D.C.

Statement: “BREAKING: Governor Greg Abbott JUST ANNOUNCED that Texas is going to use charter buses to DROP OFF BIDEN’S ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS in Washington, DC. We want to MAKE SURE that Biden knows JUST HOW REAL this crisis is.” — Abbott’s campaign fundraising appeal on April 6, 2022

What Happened: The busing program is optional for immigrants, and Texas cities and counties where the federal government drops off migrants seeking to stay in the country must also request the transport. The program pays for buses and chartered flights for immigrants who have been released by the federal government and want to leave the state for Washington, D.C. In a statement, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Chris Magnus said Abbott is making CBP officials’ jobs more difficult by transporting migrants far from their immigration proceedings and not coordinating those moves with the federal government.

Our Investigation Into Operation Lone Star Also Found:

• The operation is nabbing not only immigrants, but also U.S. citizens and others with authorized status across a broad region of 63 counties, at times charging them for crimes with no connection to the border.
• After questions from the news organizations, DPS removed from its accounting more than 2,000 charges, including violent crimes as defined by the FBI, that the agency said did not reflect the operation’s mission. DPS officials said the agency is continuously improving how it collects and reports arrest data to “better reflect the mission” of securing the border.
• Texas spends more money on border security than any other state. Operation Lone Star is by far the most expensive of the state’s border operations, at a cost to taxpayers of more than $2.5 million a week and an additional estimated expense of $2 billion a year for the National Guard deployment.
• The amount of state funding legislators approved for border security grew from $110 million in 2008-09 to nearly $3 billion for the 2022-23 budget cycle. That doesn’t include nearly half a billion dollars the governor transferred from other agencies after last year’s legislative sessions.

Help Us Investigate Texas Border Security Initiatives

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by Samantha Hogan, The Maine Monitor

This article was produced by The Maine Monitor, a former member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Until this week, Maine was the only state that had no public defenders. But a last-minute push by state lawmakers has succeeded in securing money to hire Maine’s first public defenders. Now it will have five.

The decision, which will cost Maine lawmakers nearly $966,000, is a small first step for a state that The Maine Monitor and ProPublica found had regularly contracted private attorneys with criminal convictions and histories of professional misconduct to represent the state’s poor. The investigation also found that the Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services, or MCILS, routinely failed to enforce its own rules and allowed the courts to assign 2,000 serious criminal cases to attorneys who were not eligible because they had too little experience or had not applied to work on complex cases.

The new funding, which is a far cry from the tens of millions of dollars the MCILS’ director estimates is needed to overhaul the system, will establish a “rural public defender unit” to travel to courts across the state and provide direct legal representation to defendants who cannot afford to hire their own lawyer. The five public defenders will be employees of the MCILS, which is responsible for providing “efficient, high-quality representation” to adult and juvenile criminal defendants who cannot afford to hire an attorney.

“It’s helping us cover the areas of the state of Maine that do not have enough lawyers,” said Republican state Sen. Lisa Keim.

State Sen. Lisa Keim speaks at a press conference held by members of the Judiciary Committee on April 20 to advocate for the Legislature to commit $1.2 million to public defense services. Maine will use some of the money to hire its first five public defenders. (Samantha Hogan/The Maine Monitor)

Maine’s rural counties are staring down a looming crisis of not being able to find qualified attorneys for every indigent person that needs one, said MCILS Executive Director Justin Andrus, who added that that crisis is “imminent” in certain counties.

“The rural public defender program will prolong our ability to staff cases, assuming we’re able to implement it before we reach a crisis,” Andrus said. The addition of five public defenders is “not a solution, it’s a patch,” he added. MCILS will eventually need an estimated $51 million to open public defender offices in all 16 counties, according to Andrus.

MCILS was left out of the state’s $1.2 billion supplemental budget that lawmakers passed and Gov. Janet Mills signed last week. The legislative Democratic and Republican caucuses agreed on Monday to split the cost of hiring the public defenders for a much lower $1.2 million. The bill will go to Mills, who intends to sign it, according to her spokesman Lindsay Crete.

State Rep. Thom Harnett, the House chair of the Judiciary Committee, said: “Maine is the only state in the country that does not have a public defender office. That’s a problem. And this is a small but significant first step in addressing that because this group of five attorneys would be state employees and would be providing public defender services to indigent defendants. I don’t think the significance can be overblown.”

Public Defenders for Maine

Each county in Maine has a caseload that can support a public defender office, according to an ongoing analysis of historic caseloads handled by MCILS, Andrus said. He estimates that the total cost to pursue his vision would be approximately $60 million annually, which would allow MCILS both to contract with court-appointed attorneys and to employ public defenders in 16 offices to handle the county’s criminal, child protection and juvenile cases.

The estimate is based on a public defender office in 16 jurisdictions each staffed by 22 people including 10 lawyers, four investigators, four social workers, three paralegals and a supervisor to align with national best practices for supervision and support workers, Andrus said.

“I want a public defender office, which to me is that unit of 22 people, in every county,” Andrus told The Maine Monitor.

His announcement that he wants a broader public defender system marks a significant shift in perspective within MCILS, which has depended on court-appointed lawyers since it opened in 2010. Public defenders who are state employees will allow MCILS to direct attorneys to work on cases and supervise that work more easily, Andrus said. Even if Andrus gets the broader system that he wants, it would include both public defenders and private court-appointed lawyers.

Andrus’ opinion about the need for public defenders is not universally shared by the seven commissioners who oversee the state agency. Some of the nearly 300 defense lawyers who currently contract with MCILS to provide legal service also say that they will not leave their private law firms to participate in a public defender system.

Josh Tardy, the chairman of the commission, said he is supportive of having a dialogue about Andrus’ idea to add more public defender offices to supplement the work of court-appointed lawyers. The cost will need further discussion, he said.

For now the rural public defender unit is an opportunity to demonstrate its utility for MCILS, he said.

“It is a chance for the policymakers to see how a public defender model — and that’s a term that is very loosely defined — but how commission-employed attorneys can do and what they can do to move the needle with our overall mission,” Tardy said.

A public defender system is not a solution on its own. Many states have public defenders who are working for underfunded offices and are overburdened with cases. But the looming threat that MCILS may not be able to provide lawyers in every case is driving some critics of Maine’s public defense system to push for change.

A survey of Maine’s attorneys shows they are aging and closing law firms to retire, Andrus said. Younger attorneys are burdened with student loan debt and health care costs that make it financially difficult to take on court-appointed work — reimbursed at $80 an hour — while running a law office and also making a living, he said.

“To reasonably ensure that we can always staff a case in the future, MCILS requires the ability to tell an employee, ‘You are going to this place tomorrow to do this case,’” Andrus said.

Defendant Rights at Risk

MCILS has been criticized for not meeting Maine’s obligation to provide legal services to the state’s poor, but lawyers say the government is setting goals without providing the resources to achieve them.

The Sixth Amendment Center, which was hired by the Legislature to review the state’s indigent defense system, reported in April 2019 that MCILS could not reasonably oversee the attorneys the agency contracted with and that the state’s criminal docket was advancing at the expense of defendants’ constitutional rights. A report by Maine’s government accountability office later found serious problems with financial management of the state agency in November 2020.

Andrus and commissioners have worked for the past year and a half to bring MCILS into compliance with its own rules and proposed caseload limits, and to create an auditing procedure for lawyer billing and a supervision regiment to more closely monitor attorneys’ work on cases. None of the proposals are final.

Lawyers who accept court appointments to cases have had a mix of reactions to the proposals. At least one attorney said the caseload limits could prevent problems seen in other states where lawyers are assigned exorbitant caseloads by the courts. Other lawyers said they would hit the caseload limit midway through the year and leave counties that are already short on lawyers even more short-staffed.

MCILS needs an estimated 270 full-time lawyers to cover its annual pre-pandemic caseload at the proposed limits, Andrus said. That is roughly the number of attorneys currently contracted with MCILS to provide court-appointed legal services, though many also work on retained cases and practice other kinds of law.

The governor’s office said that MCILS needed to perform better oversight of attorneys before providing the agency with more resources. Andrus has not received instructions directly from the governor since the spring of 2021 about what still needs to change.

“I understood last year from every front that the objection to increasing our funding generally related to whether that was a worthwhile investment,” Andrus said.

Commissioners asked for $35.4 million in 2020 to open two public defender offices, raise attorney wages and hire employees for MCILS. Lawmakers voted to give MCILS $21.8 million in 2021, but the state’s appropriations committee ultimately only agreed to provide $18.5 million to the agency — which did not include any money for public defenders. Despite Andrus articulating to lawmakers that the agency still needed all the funding it asked for, MCILS did not get the remainder of the money.

Taylor Kilgore, who runs her own law firm in Turner and accepts court appointments to defend parents in child protection matters through MCILS, said it is frustrating that lawmakers and the governor do not see the agency as worthy of fully investing in. She complained that they aren’t providing alternative solutions to the ones Andrus is putting forward.

“I get really frustrated when I don’t understand what the Legislature expects MCILS to do without these resources. How can they reach this goal without the resources?” Kilgore said.

The message being sent is that MCILS needs to be punished for its past, Kilgore said. But the lack of funding and support for MCILS is only punishing lawyers working with the commission, she said.

Kilgore went without being paid for several months in 2017 when MCILS ran out of money because it was insufficiently funded by the Legislature. Her husband recalls asking Mills while she was campaigning for governor about funding for MCILS and how she planned to fix it.

“She went on and on and gushed to him about how she understood how it was wrong and that she was going to be that person who could listen. Her actions, at this point, don’t seem to be matching that sentiment,” Kilgore said.

Mills, approached for this story, did not respond to this critique; her office instead pointed to state budgets she had previously signed expanding funding to MCILS.

by Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Kirsten Berg

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This story is part of an ongoing collaborative reporting effort between ProPublica and FRONTLINE that includes the documentary film “Plot to Overturn the Election.” The film aired recently on PBS and can be viewed here.

By the time Leamsy Salazar sat down in front of a video recorder in a lawyer’s office in Dallas, he had grown accustomed to divulging state secrets. After swearing to tell nothing but the truth so help him God, he recounted that he was born in Venezuela in 1974, enlisted in the army and rose through its special operations ranks. He described how in 2007 he became the chief of security for Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan leader whose electoral victories had been challenged by outside observers and opposition parties. After Chávez died in 2013, Salazar said he provided intelligence on top Venezuelan officials involved in drug trafficking to American law enforcement agencies, which had helped him defect.

After about 45 minutes of Salazar telling his life story, the lawyer questioning him, Lewis Sessions, abruptly changed the course of the conversation. “I want to take a moment to get off the track,” said ​​Sessions, the brother of Republican Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas. “Why are you here? What has motivated you to come forward?”

“I feel that the world should know — they should know the truth,” Salazar answered. “The truth about the corruption. About the manipulation. About the lies.”

“The truth about what?” Sessions asked.

“In this case, it’s the manipulation of votes,” Salazar said. “And the lies being told to a country.”

That morning of Nov. 13, 2020, Salazar had a new sort of intelligence to share. He claimed to know that the 2020 U.S. presidential election had been rigged — and how.

Speaking through an interpreter, Salazar said that when he worked for Chávez, he had attended meetings in which the administration discussed how to develop specialized software to steal elections with representatives from Smartmatic, a voting technology company whose founders had ties to Venezuela. He recalled that during the 2013 presidential election, in a secret counting center in Caracas, the capital, he saw officials use software to change votes in favor of Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, after the polls closed. Watching the 2020 American election, he said, he noticed votes for Joe Biden jumping in a pattern that he thought was similar.

When Sessions asked if Salazar could draw a connection between the events in Venezuela and the recent American election, Salazar replied, “I can show the similarity.” In the 2020 election, Smartmatic machines were only used in Los Angeles, but Salazar explained away this discrepancy. He claimed that the company’s software had been “purchased” by Dominion Voting Systems, whose machines were used in such battleground states as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all of which had gone to Biden, sealing his victory over Donald Trump.

Salazar said in a subsequent court filing that he had taken his concerns about the election to “a number of reliable and intelligent ex-co-workers of mine that are still informants and work with the intelligence community.” (He did not specify whether he meant the U.S. or Venezuelan intelligence community.) From there, sources told ProPublica, his concerns reached a former intelligence officer active in Republican politics and then the conservative lawyer Sidney Powell.

Powell was on the hunt for just such information.

By the second week of November, it had become known in right-wing circles that she was working behind the scenes with the president’s legal team to challenge the results of the election. In an email to ProPublica, Sessions wrote that he “conducted the interview at the request of a person working with Sidney Powell’s legal team.” The day after the interview, Trump made Powell’s position official with an announcement on Twitter.

The following morning, Powell traveled to South Carolina, where a loose coalition of lawyers, cybersecurity experts and former military intelligence officers were gathering on a plantation owned by the defamation lawyer Lin Wood to search for evidence of election fraud. One person present at the plantation said that Wood and Powell treated the Salazar video “like the holy grail of evidence.” (In an email to ProPublica, Wood wrote that he was not part of any coalition and that he had only seen “a few minutes” of the video, in which he had “no interest beyond general curiosity.” Powell did not respond to requests for comment.)

There was just one problem. Salazar’s claims were easily disprovable. Hours after the video was recorded, Trump campaign staffers reviewed some allegations about Dominion that were almost identical, and it took them less than a day to discover they were baseless. The staffers prepared an internal memo with section headings that read: “Dominion Has No Company Ties To Venezuela,” “Dominion And Smartmatic Terminated Their Contract In 2012” and “There Is No Evidence That Dominion Used Smartmatic’s Software In The 2020 Election Cycle.” Independent fact-checkers came to the same conclusions. Dominion later released a statement calling a version of these allegations that Powell pushed in a lawsuit, “baseless, senseless, physically impossible, and unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.” A lawyer for Smartmatic wrote to ProPublica: “There are no ties between Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic — plain and simple.” He added that “Salazar’s testimony is full of inaccuracies,” strongly denied that Smartmatic’s technology was designed to steal Venezuelan elections, and said the company, which operates worldwide, has “registered and counted over 5 billion votes without a single security breach.” (Salazar did not respond to requests for comment.)

Salazar’s story was just one of many pieces of so-called evidence that members of the coalition have offered as proof that the 2020 election was rigged. That unfounded belief has emerged as one of the most potent forces in American politics. Numerous polls show that over two-thirds of Republicans doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Millions of those Republicans believe foreign governments reprogrammed American voting machines.

ProPublica has obtained a trove of internal emails and other documentation that, taken together, tell the inside story of a group of people who propagated a number of the most pervasive theories about how the election was stolen, especially that voting machines were to blame, and helped move them from the far-right fringe to the center of the Republican Party.

Those records, as well as interviews with key participants, show for the first time the extent to which leading advocates of the stolen-election theory touted evidence that they knew to be disproven or that had been credibly disputed or dismissed as dubious by operatives within their own camp. Some members of the coalition presented this mix of unreliable witnesses, unconfirmed rumor and suspect analyses as fact in published reports, talking points and court documents. In several cases, their assertions became the basis for Trump’s claims that the election had been rigged.

Our examination of their actions from the 2020 election to the present day reveals a pattern. Many members of the coalition would advance a theory based on evidence that was never vetted or that they’d been told was flawed; then, when the theory was debunked, they’d move on to the next alternative and then the next.

The coalition includes several figures who have attracted national attention. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who served briefly as national security adviser to Trump before pleading guilty to lying to law enforcement about his contacts with Russian officials, is the most well known. Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com who left his position after his romantic relationship with the convicted Russian agent Maria Butina became public, is the coalition’s chief financier and a frequent intermediary with the press. Powell, who represented Flynn in his attempt to reverse his guilty plea, spearheaded efforts in the courts.

Before Powell arrived at the plantation, Wood had filed a lawsuit in federal court in Atlanta against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that sought to stop him from certifying Biden’s victory. Soon after Powell showed up, Wood submitted an anonymized declaration from Salazar as evidence of how the election was corrupted. He then filed an emergency motion that sought access to Dominion machines in Georgia to “conduct a forensic inspection of this equipment and the data therein.” The case was eventually dismissed, but it would serve as a template for the series of high-profile lawsuits that Powell would file in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia.

Salazar’s declaration was central to the four lawsuits, and it went further than the assertions he had made in the video. His claim that he could show “the similarity” between anomalies in Venezuelan and American elections expanded to become an allegation that “the DNA of every vote tabulating company’s software and system” in the United States was potentially compromised.

Wood told ProPublica, “I was not involved in the vetting, drafting or filing any of the lawsuits filed by Sidney Powell,” though his name appears as “of counsel” in all four. A judge sanctioned him in the Michigan case, writing that “while Wood now seeks to distance himself from this litigation to avoid sanctions, the Court concludes that he was aware of this lawsuit when it was filed, was aware that he was identified as co-counsel for Plaintiffs, and as a result, shares the responsibility with the other lawyers for any sanctionable conduct.”

All the lawsuits would fail, with judges excoriating the quality of their evidence. It wasn’t just the evidence in the lawsuits that was flawed. In fact, much of the evidence that members of the coalition contributed to the stolen election myth outside the courts was also weak. Yet the coalition’s failure to prove its theories has not hindered its ability to spread them.

This is the story of how little untruths added up to the “big lie.”

When Powell and Rudy Giuliani, who was leading the Trump campaign’s legal team in challenging the vote, began investigating election fraud in November 2020, they quickly were inundated with tips. This flood increased once Wood and others began soliciting evidence on far-right message boards and mainstream social media platforms.

(Obtained by ProPublica)

Some of the participants at the plantation described the inundation of claims, which overwhelmed their inboxes, as a type of evidence in itself: There must be something to allegations of election fraud if so many people were making them. ProPublica spoke to eight sources with firsthand knowledge of the coalition’s efforts on the plantation, many of whom said they worked relentlessly in a chaotic environment. Tips that easily could have been dismissed as dubious instead were treated as credible.

In examining hundreds of emails sent to the plantation, ProPublica found that some were hearsay or anecdotes seemingly misinterpreting everyday events; others were internet rumors; and many were recycled narratives that some members of the coalition had pushed on social media. None of the tips that ProPublica examined provided concrete proof of election fraud or manipulation.

One of the first tips Powell and Giuliani promoted came from Joe Oltmann, a Denver-based conservative podcast host who said he had infiltrated an antifa conference call and had heard a high-level Dominion employee named Eric Coomer declare that he would make sure that Trump lost the election. Powell and Giuliani highlighted Oltmann’s claim at a press conference on Nov. 19, 2020, at the Republican National Committee headquarters.

By that time, Powell was paying for an investigator to travel to Denver, according to a person familiar with the events. The investigator, the source said, interviewed Oltmann at a brewery in Castle Rock, Colorado, and spent several days checking out his story. Not long after the press conference, according to the source, the investigator emailed Powell his assessment that Oltmann was at the very least embellishing, but she did not respond. Powell soon referred to Oltmann’s allegations in court filings in Georgia and Michigan; roughly a week later, she submitted an affidavit from Oltmann in the Arizona and Wisconsin lawsuits. Coomer has denied being on the call and has brought a defamation suit against Oltmann, Powell, Giuliani, the Trump campaign and others. Oltmann has never presented proof of Coomer being on the call, and in March 2022, the judge overseeing the defamation case sanctioned Oltmann, fining him almost $33,000 for failing to appear for a deposition. When Powell was asked in a July 2021 deposition if she had anyone look into Oltmann and “his background,” she said she did not recall. (Oltmann did not provide responses to questions about the investigator’s assessment.)

Within days of the investigator’s Oltmann probe, Powell turned to another dubious witness: Terpsehore Maras, a QAnon-promoting social media influencer and podcaster who goes by the online handle Tore Says.

In September 2020, in a civil consumer-fraud judgment in North Dakota, Maras had been found to have made false online charitable fundraising solicitations and to have created “an entirely fake online persona.” (Maras has claimed that the allegations against her remain “unproven” despite the legal finding and that “false identities were imperative for me to execute my duties,” which include being a “former private intelligence contractor, whistleblower, and investigative journalist.”)

Powell filed a declaration in early December 2020 from an anonymous individual in the Arizona and Wisconsin lawsuits. The individual claimed that there was “unambiguous evidence” that “foreign interference is present in the 2020 election” and pointed to a vast and unproven conspiracy that involved Dominion, George Soros, a company with an office in China, and the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations. The Washington Post later identified the declaration’s author to be Maras.

In the weeks after the election, Maras presented herself to Byrne as knowledgeable about election fraud. But he discovered that she was unreliable after he had a team of investigators debrief her. Byrne and Maras said the debriefing occurred after Powell filed the declaration.

In an email to another witness he had debriefed, Byrne described the investigators’ assessment: “Tore was taken out and interviewed by some people I know from the intelligence community who are absolutely on our side. They came back telling me: ‘She knows some things and has been behind the curtain, but she also lies, exaggerates, deflects, changes subject rapidly trying to throw people off, and we cannot rely on her for anything factual because we caught her in too many lies and exaggerations over three hours.’” (“I tried my best to deceive” the debriefers, Maras wrote on her blog in response to questions from ProPublica. “I was scared.”)

Byrne has since repeatedly promoted Maras’ right-wing activism, as he does in this September 2021 video, some of which revolves around questioning the legitimacy of the election. (“She’s a friend and an ally, and I know that she’s a little goofy,” Byrne told ProPublica in an interview, explaining that he had recently been impressed by work she had done on their shared causes. “I think she has relevant knowledge.”)

Byrne, Powell and other coalition members weren’t just relying on witness statements in their effort to prove the election was rigged. Some of them also pointed to multiple mathematical analyses. One that Powell and Byrne advanced came from a man named Edward Solomon. In the weeks after Nov. 3, 2020, Solomon produced a series of online videos purporting to demonstrate how algorithms adjusted the vote total in Biden’s favor.

Before Byrne and Powell highlighted Solomon’s voting analysis, he came to public attention briefly in 2016, after authorities seized 240 bags of heroin, 25 grams of cocaine and weapons from his home; he later pleaded guilty to selling drugs. (Solomon did not respond to requests for comment.)

One person who coalition members entrusted to vet Solomon’s analysis was Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence officer who was brought into the group by Flynn and who acknowledged to ProPublica that his mathematical expertise drew from “a long track record of baseball statistics.” In the end, his level of expertise didn’t matter; because of a server error, the emailed request to vet Solomon never reached Keshel, who said he had no memory of checking Solomon’s claims.

Byrne used Solomon’s analysis in his book, “The Deep Rig,” to make the case that the election was fraudulent. In February 2021, a month after the book was published, the University of Pennsylvania’s FactCheck.org reported that officials at the college Solomon had attended said that, though he had been a math major, he had never received a degree. The article quoted experts who pointed to flaws in Solomon’s analysis, especially that the “vote shares” he suggested were suspicious were “not at all surprising,” and a Georgia elections official who said that Solomon “shows a basic misunderstanding of how vote counts work.”

A paper posted that month by University of Chicago and Stanford researchers found that the numbers Solomon had said were suspicious were normal for a fraud-free election and that by not considering this, his analysis was a classic example of how “fishing for a finding” can “lead an argument astray.”

Byrne kept promoting Solomon’s work until at least July 2021, when he described him in a blog post as a “Renowned Mathematician.”

Five months after the FactCheck.org story and the research paper, Powell was asked in a sworn deposition which mathematicians or statisticians she relied on to support her belief that the election was fraudulent. She cited among others a “Mr. Solomon.”

In addition to relying on the flawed claims of Salazar, Oltmann, Maras and Solomon, Powell also promoted the assertions of an Arizona woman named Staci Burk, who had contributed to two fraud rumors after the election. In the first, Burk claimed that she’d spoken with a worker at a FedEx operations center in Seattle who had observed suspicious canvas bags marked as “election mail ballots” passing through the facility. The second involved a South Korean airplane flying fake ballots for Biden into Phoenix a few days after the election; Burk said that she had recorded a man who had confessed to the scheme.

A lawsuit that Powell filed in Arizona on Dec. 2, 2020, later included a “Jane Doe” witness who would “testify about illegal ballots being shipped around the United States including to Arizona.” Burk told ProPublica that she was the “Jane Doe.” The same day that Powell filed the Arizona lawsuit, she claimed at a rally outside of Atlanta to have evidence of “a plane full of ballots that came in,” and she continued pushing the idea, declaring in a Dec. 5 interview with the host of a YouTube channel, “We have evidence of a significant plane-load of ballots coming in.” The judge tossed the case before Burk could testify.

Burk’s theories proved false, and at least three coalition members were informed of this. Byrne said that he passed Burk’s claims to a contact at the Department of Homeland Security, who told him about a week later that it “had been looked into and there was nothing there.” This was in November 2020, before Powell filed her lawsuit. Byrne said that he let some of his associates know that Homeland Security had dismissed the claim but was unsure if he informed Powell. (He also said that later his contact showed renewed interest in the idea.)

On a phone call in late December, James Penrose, a former senior official for the National Security Agency who had been at the plantation and described himself as working for Wood and Powell, told Burk that he had spent $75,000 on a team of former FBI analysts turned private investigators to check out the theories. On the call, which she recorded, Penrose said that the investigators had tracked the claims about the South Korean airplane to the person who first made them. “When he was pressed, that guy admitted that he made it up because he hated the MAGA people that he worked with. And he was purposely trying to troll them by saying he saw ballots on the plane,” Penrose told Burk. “That created the rumor.” The man whom Burk recorded confessing to his involvement in the ballot scheme told Penrose’s investigators that in trying to impress Burk “he fabricated everything.”

“I mean, are you saying that it — that none of it’s true?” Burk asked. Penrose replied: “Yes. I’m saying that the entire thing was fabricated. It’s all bullshit.”

Penrose’s team had also checked out the Seattle FedEx incident, and he told Burk, “We’re not able to confirm anything that looked like conspiracy along those lines.”

Neither Penrose nor anyone associated with the coalition ever publicly released the findings of the investigation. (Penrose did not respond to requests for comment.)

Burk has since renounced her belief in the rumors she had once backed. “I obviously made a mistake believing lies,” Burk wrote to ProPublica. She said she had come to believe that some members of the coalition had manipulated her and her stories to further their ends. “As things unfolded over time, it became apparent I [was] used as a theatre set piece.”

Burk’s stories would shape the audit of the election results that Arizona legislators would later authorize — and which Byrne, Flynn, Powell, Wood and other associates helped fund, contributing about $5.7 million. The 2021 audit was criticized by elections experts and uncovered no proof of fraud.

“You have no idea how widespread the belief is in Arizona to this day that there’s 300,000 ballots that were brought in via an airplane,” said Doug Logan, a coalition member who worked with Penrose on the plantation and whose company Cyber Ninjas would run the audit. Logan said that Penrose told him that the woman’s theories were false. Still, Logan said, he had auditors examine ballots to check a range of theories, including whether bamboo fibers were mixed into the paper, which auditors believed could show that they were imported from Asia. “Our goal in the audit was to figure out what’s really true and deal with it,” Logan told ProPublica. “That’s why we did paper examination.”

No fibers were found.

Few pieces of evidence were more consequential to the stolen-election theory than a report that claimed to have found evidence of intentional election fraud in Dominion voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan. It was heralded as technical proof that votes were stolen for Biden. It was repeatedly promoted by the president. And Byrne and other proponents of the stolen election myth continued to refer to it when speaking to ProPublica reporters.

However, one of the authors of the report recently told ProPublica that the original version never found definitive evidence of election fraud in the Antrim voting machines.

“There was no proof at that specific moment,” the author, Conan James Hayes, said. He described finding what he considered a surprising number of errors in the data logs that he thought “could lead to” election fraud. “But there was no, like, ‘There was election fraud,’” he said, “at least at that time in my mind.”

Antrim had been the subject of national attention when, on election night, returns showed that Biden had unexpectedly won the Republican stronghold. The next day, the county clerk, a Republican who supported Trump, explained that officials had discovered that a clerical error had switched roughly 3,000 votes from the president to Biden. After the clerk’s office made corrections, Trump, as expected, had won the county with more than 60% of the vote.

Internal documents reviewed by ProPublica reveal that some members of the coalition almost immediately suspected that the mistake in Antrim was not human error. Rather, it was an incident in which the voting machine software hadn’t been surreptitious enough in stealing votes and unintentionally revealed itself. Their logic was simple: If they could do a forensic audit of the Antrim machines, they could finally establish how the election was stolen. The challenge was how to access the machines.

The day after Thanksgiving 2020, Byrne paid for a private plane to fly two cybersecurity specialists working with the coalition to Antrim: Hayes, a former professional surfer who had taught himself about computers, and Todd Sanders, a Texas businessman with a cybersecurity consulting business. Hayes and Sanders were turned away from the first two offices they tried, but at a third, a county worker agreed to unroll voting tabulation scrolls, which they photographed.

Highlighting discrepancies in the vote tally produced by the error, a Michigan lawyer won a court order to allow the machines to be formally accessed. On Dec. 6, Hayes, Sanders, a deputy for Giuliani and data forensic specialists engaged by Wood flew to Antrim, again on a private plane paid for by Byrne, and imaged the hard drives of a computer that was the county’s election management server.

Hayes and Sanders returned to Washington, where they examined the data and, in less than a week, assembled a report. Hayes and another individual familiar with the original version described it as a straightforward technical document, which noted aspects about the data that seemed suspicious but was cautious about claiming election fraud. Then the report was turned over to Russell J. Ramsland, the head of Allied Security Operations Group, a small security contracting company connected to Texas conservative circles.

When the report was released after a court hearing on Dec. 14, it was a very different document, according to Hayes and the other person familiar with the original version. It had “REVISED PRELIMINARY SUMMARY, v2” and Ramsland’s name at the top and his signature at the bottom, and it made an outright accusation. “The Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results,” it claimed. “This leads to voter or election fraud.” Allied Security, it said, had discovered enough proof of election fraud to decertify the results in Antrim.

Hayes’ and Sanders’ names were nowhere on the report. Hayes told ProPublica that the new “information must have been written by” Allied Security. (Sanders did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

It wasn’t just people associated with the original report who believed Ramsland’s version was flawed. An analysis commissioned by the Michigan secretary of state found that the report contained an “extraordinary number of false, inaccurate, or unsubstantiated statements,” including that “the errors in the log file do not mean what Mr. Ramsland purports them to” and were instead “benign” lines of code generated by processes that did not affect the vote outcome. A bipartisan investigation led by Republican legislators in Michigan declared that the Antrim theories are “a complete waste of time to consider.” (Ramsland did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about revising the report. But he did tell The Washington Post that the Michigan analysis only addressed 12 of Allied Security’s 29 “core observations.”)

Trump supporters immediately seized on the report as definitive proof that the election was rigged. Flynn tweeted, “MI forensics report shows a massive breakdown in national security & must be dealt w/ immediately. @realDonaldTrump must appoint a special counsel now.” Byrne and Flynn lobbied for Powell to become the special counsel.

In a statement, Giuliani said: “This new revelation makes it clear that the vote count being presented now by the democrats in Michigan constitutes an intentionally false and misleading representation of the final vote tally. The Electors simply cannot be certified based on these demonstrably false vote counts.” (Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment.)

Byrne described the report as a “BOMBSHELL,” posting it on his blog under the claim: “You wanted the evidence. Here is the evidence.”

Trump tweeted: “WOW. This report shows massive fraud. Election changing result!” Over the next three days, on social media, he promoted the Antrim report and suspicions about Dominion voting machines 11 times.

Late on the afternoon of Dec. 14, Trump’s personal secretary sent an email to the deputy attorney general with the subject line “From POTUS.” The Antrim report was attached to the email. An additional document included talking points (“This is a Cover-up of voting crimes”) and conclusions (“these election results cannot be certified in Antrim County”). That email launched Trump’s attempt to persuade the Department of Justice to assist in overturning the election results, according to a 2021 report by Senate Democrats. In the end, the deputy attorney general rebuffed the president, and officials in the department threatened to resign en masse if he was replaced.

When Trump demanded that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes,” enough for him to win the state, in a recorded phone call on Jan. 2, the president mentioned the Dominion conspiracy 10 times.

At the Jan. 6 “Save America” rally on the Ellipse, directly before Trump spoke, Giuliani took the stage and suggested that halting the certification of Biden’s victory was justified because of “these crooked Dominion machines.”

Trump’s speech emphasized the “highly troubling matter of Dominion Voting Systems” and the events in Antrim to explain that the election had been stolen.

Not long after, while Trump supporters made their initial assault on police barricades, Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona was on the House floor objecting to the certification of his state’s electoral votes — the beginning of the effort to block the certification of Biden’s victory by Congress. He cited as evidence “the Dominion voting machines with a documented history of enabling fraud.” About a minute later, Gosar’s speech was interrupted and then cut off. The crowd was storming the Capitol. One person in the throng raised a sign that read, “No Machines Dominion STEALS.”

In the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol, many of the same people who had pushed the claims about Dominion repackaged their theory of how the election was stolen. It relied on the same data and the same arguments, except now it had a new name.

This transformation happened after Dominion’s parent company filed a lawsuit against Powell for defamation in a Washington court on Jan. 8. She and others began talking less about Dominion and more about voting machines in general. Dominion would go on to sue Byrne, Giuliani and others for billions of dollars in collective damages, contending that they promoted and in some cases manufactured false claims. The defendants have each denied responsibility or wrongdoing. (Smartmatic USA Corp. also brought defamation suits against Powell, Giuliani and others, all of whom have denied wrongdoing.)

By the summer of 2021, Hayes and Sanders, the two cybersecurity specialists who had performed the Antrim operation, had become involved in an effort to prove a theory called Hammer and Scorecard. The theory had been making the rounds in conservative circles for more than five years, and Powell had promoted it before the 2020 election. It posited that a supercomputer called Hammer had been developed by the CIA and then commandeered by the Obama administration to spy on Americans, including Trump, Flynn and Powell. Around the time of the election, the theory expanded to suggest that Hammer was using a software called Scorecard to alter results in voting machines and that foreign governments had possibly gotten ahold of it.

Part of the usefulness of Hammer and Scorecard is that built into the theory is an explanation for why it can’t be disproven: It is so top secret that the person who could expose the conspiracy can’t. That person is a former Department of Defense contractor named Dennis Montgomery. The people promoting the theory claim he can’t reveal the evidence because he’s under a gag order imposed by the U.S. government.

Phil Waldron, a former Army colonel, a spokesperson for Allied Security and a member of the coalition who worked remotely with those on the plantation, said in an online interview that if the gag order against Montgomery were lifted, “Specifically what that would reveal is the level of foreign interference in the election.”

Montgomery has been accused of fraud by former associates, though no criminal charges have resulted from those accusations. In the aftermath of 9/11, he allegedly duped the Department of Defense and other federal agencies out of more than $20 million in part by selling them software that he claimed could unearth messages to terrorist sleeper cells hidden in Al-Jazeera broadcasts. (It does not appear that the government ever attempted to get the money back.) Once those claims collapsed, allies of Montgomery began spreading the idea of Hammer. In 2018, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed a suit Montgomery had filed against FBI Director James B. Comey, which attempted to expose an alleged government spy program, calling it “a veritable anthology of conspiracy theorists’ complaints.” (Montgomery did not reply to repeated requests for comment, but in the past he has denied the fraud accusations.)

The person behind the 2021 campaign pushing Hammer and Scorecard was Mike Lindell, the My Pillow magnate who has claimed to have poured about $35 million into efforts to prove the 2020 election was fraudulent. In July 2021, Lindell announced that he had gotten hold of a mysterious set of data that would prove the election was stolen. According to sources and messages reviewed by ProPublica, the data related to Hammer and Scorecard, though Lindell didn’t publicly name the theory or refer to Montgomery.

Lindell said he would reveal the data at a three-day “cyber symposium” he was hosting in August 2021 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Reporters, cybersecurity experts and elected officials — as well as anyone tuning in online — would finally see the proof that the election was fraudulent. Lindell said that independent cybersecurity experts would vet 37 terabytes of data at the symposium and posted an online offer of a $5 million reward to any attendee who could prove that “this cyber data is not valid data from the November 2020 election.” The event, he suggested, would result in Trump being returned to the presidency.

In the run-up to the symposium, before the independent experts did their analysis, the data was given to a group that included Waldron, Hayes, Sanders and Joshua Merritt, a self-described “white hat” hacker — all of whom had been associated with Allied Security at one time or another. (They called themselves the “Red Team” but coordinated on a group chat named “Purple Unicorns.”) Also on the team was Ronald Watkins, who has been identified by two independent forensic linguistic analyses as “Q,” the anonymous figure behind the QAnon conspiracy theory. (Watkins has denied on numerous occasions that he is Q; he did not respond to requests for comment.) Private communications reviewed by ProPublica show that he was in contact with people at the plantation in November 2020, advising them on how to set up secure systems to transfer information and helping with research into the Dominion theory.

Soon after arriving at Sioux Falls, it became evident to the Red Team that the data Lindell had provided wasn’t what was promised. “I have checked them all and they are NOT PROOF,” Watkins wrote in a text message to the rest of the team. “So there are a few files that could potentially be from hammer/scorecard in there, but that is only because it didn’t include a source. Since there is no source, it could be from anywhere — or even fake.”

“At the 11th hour, why do we still have zero proof,” another person on the chat wrote, frustrated that Montgomery hadn’t delivered on his guarantees. “If this software does exist, and the developer” — Montgomery — “is working with us, it shouldn’t take him 10 months to figure out how to extract data” that would prove his assertions.

According to Merritt, when the Red Team tried to inform Lindell two nights before the symposium was to start that the data contained no proof, the CEO yelled at them that they were wrong.

For months leading up to the event, conservatives who believed that the 2020 election was stolen had warned Lindell or an attorney working with him that promoting Hammer and Scorecard risked discrediting other efforts to prove the election was rigged. Two people, including election fraud activist Catherine Engelbrecht, the executive director of True the Vote, cautioned that they had had negative experiences with Montgomery and his representatives and that Hammer and Scorecard wasn’t credible, according to documents viewed by ProPublica and interviews with people familiar with the matter.

On the eve of the symposium, the Red Team learned that Montgomery would not be attending; he said he had suffered a stroke. The final proof of election fraud, which he was supposed to deliver last minute, was no longer going to arrive.

The event drew hundreds of thousands of viewers online, with more than 40 state legislators and others gathering in person. Onstage with Lindell, Waldron explained that the Red Team had looked at the data and “we’ve seen plausibility” and that a separate group of independent analysts would now comb through it.

By the end of the third day, the independent analysts — longtime election security and computer experts, some skeptical of Lindell’s claims and others sympathetic — appeared to have reached a consensus: None of the data contained the proof that Lindell had promised, according to accounts from five of them. In fact, much of the data turned out to be from the Antrim voting machines or harvested from other elections offices and was just a recycling of evidence that had already been discredited.

The data “was some gobbledygook,” said Bill Alderson, a cybersecurity specialist from Texas who had voted for Trump. Merritt told ProPublica that he feared that the hollowness of the data undermined other, more legitimate efforts to prove the election was stolen. Partway through the symposium, The Washington Times quoted him saying that “we were handed a turd.”

Waldron and Lindell, however, did not inform the crowd and those online what the analysts had found. On the last day of the conference, Waldron claimed to have “credible information on a threat in the data streams,” implying the evidence could have been sabotaged.

The day after the symposium ended — the day he had suggested that Trump would be returned to office — Lindell dined with the former president at Mar-a-Lago, a photo of which was leaked to Salon. At a rally, not long after, Trump called the symposium “really amazing,” and he has continued to praise Lindell’s efforts on his behalf. Lindell did not respond to a list of questions from ProPublica and instead wrote, “The election crime movement started November 3rd when the CCP” — the Chinese Communist Party — “and many others did a cyber attack on our election!”

In March 2022, ProPublica sent dozens of letters to the individuals named in this article and others that asked about factual problems with the evidence many had put forth as proof that the election was rigged.

Some of the responses were dismissive. “Stupid article,” wrote Michael T. Flynn’s spokesperson and brother, Joseph J. Flynn. “No one we care about will read it.”

Others contested the article’s findings. Russell J. Ramsland wrote, “So much of this narrative is false or highly misleading that I am not willing to respond point-by-point.”

Despite repeated requests, others did not respond. They include Sidney Powell, James Penrose, Phil Waldron and Todd Sanders.

Some, like Doug Logan, disputed that they had worked as part of a coalition. Others, however, felt it was an accurate description. “I was a member of said coalition,” wrote Seth Keshel.

“‘Coalition’ may not be the right word,” wrote Patrick Byrne, who said that he has spent $12 million on “election integrity” efforts through early 2022, often working in close coordination with Flynn. “We think of it as a network of fellow-travelers who were all volunteering to work to expose what we believed was a rigging of the election on November 3. But I can live with ‘coalition.’” Messages and documents reviewed by ProPublica reveal that the named individuals were in closer contact than has been publicly known, especially in the weeks immediately following the election.

On the whole, coalition members who responded to ProPublica doubled down on their belief in the stolen election myth. “I’ve not wavered on this,” Keshel emailed ProPublica. “I can spend hours with you showing you point after point after point to demand full investigation of this.” The single exception was Conan James Hayes, who wrote to ProPublica: “I don’t believe anything until I have all of the information to analyze, which to this point I do not have. So I can’t say either way.”

Over the course of months, Byrne acted as a champion of sorts for the coalition’s ideas, making himself available for numerous interviews and message exchanges. He also sent a 16,000-word letter in response to more than 80 fact-checking questions.

When presented with evidence that some of his past claims had proven incorrect, he acknowledged that there were instances when he and his allies had been wrong, especially when they were trying to interpret shifting information in the weeks after the election. He downplayed the weight they had put on claims about Dominion voting machines being exploited by foreign governments, though their own court filings and public statements from the time show this was their major claim. “I think that it’s picking at nits to look back at some of the stuff,” he said. He defended the coalition, saying, “I think they got the gestalt of it correct.”

Don’t pay attention, Byrne argued, to the many parts of the Antrim report that a technical expert commissioned by the Michigan secretary of state had debunked. (These errors included Allied Security’s central contention that Dominion machines were “purposefully designed” to create “systemic fraud” through a process known as “adjudication.” The machines in question did not have the “adjudication” software installed, according to the Michigan analysis.) Instead, Byrne stressed that what was now important was the claim that the voting machines’ security logs only went back to the day after the election, making it impossible to rely on any data on them. (The Michigan secretary of state expert found that logs were automatically overwritten to free up memory and that “the timing appears to be a coincidence,” though it said that having a limited amount of memory “is contrary to best practice.”)

Dominion voting machines, South Korean jets and Dennis Montgomery, Byrne suggested, weren’t central to the case. He repeatedly turned the conversation toward newer arguments for election fraud. He highlighted a March 2021 interim election audit report from a special counsel hired by Republican legislators in Wisconsin. The report’s primary claim was that a nonprofit had engaged in “election bribery” by providing funds to boost voter turnout in five urban areas, where voters are disproportionately Democratic. The special counsel raised the possibility that the report’s findings were serious enough that Biden’s victory in the state could be decertified. (A federal judge in October 2020 rejected the argument that the nonprofit’s work was illegal, and courts have repeatedly come to the same conclusion.)

Byrne continued to bring up new, supposedly bombshell claims. In his letter to ProPublica, he promoted a forthcoming documentary called “2000 Mules” by conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza that alleged that thousands of shadowy operatives filled drop boxes across the nation with ballots marked for Biden. “Videotapes of drop boxes, cell phone tower pings, and the testimony of a whistleblower,” Byrne wrote, “all point to about one million votes being stuffed” in Georgia.

There was always another report. Another debunking of the debunking.

Byrne acknowledged that no single piece of smoking gun evidence of election fraud had emerged, but he argued that the breadth of evidence that he and those with similar views had assembled made it inconceivable that elections weren’t corrupted.

What he was doing was necessary to save American democracy, Byrne had concluded. He was sure of it. “I’ve got my cards. You got your cards,” he said. “I’ll go all in.”

Help ProPublica Investigate Threats to U.S. Democracy

As the 2022 midterms approach, ProPublica wants to hear directly from the people involved in the administration of our elections — local clerks, canvassers, poll workers and more — about new challenges on the job. We’d like to stay in touch as this election season unfolds. Are you facing pressures you haven’t experienced before? Are you encountering onerous restrictions? Do you fear that fewer people in your community will vote or that fewer of their votes will count? Tell us why.

We’re also hoping to build relationships with academics, policymakers and other experts for future reporting. All of these responses will shape our ongoing coverage of this important issue.

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

We are the only ones reading what you submit. If you would prefer to use an encrypted app, see our advice at propublica.org/tips. You can message us on Signal at 347-244-2134.

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April 27, 2022: This story originally stated that James Penrose called Staci Burk in late December. According to Burk, the two spoke with each other but the call was initiated by a third party.

by Molly Parker, The Southern Illinoisan

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

Do you have a story about DCFS investigations? Do you live in southern or central Illinois? We want to hear from you for future stories.

I was raised on a rural route at the edge of the Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois. I didn’t know a single rich person growing up; we were all varying degrees of middle-class and poor. Still, I knew at a young age that some of the kids at my school went without some of the most basic necessities, let alone such extras as a new outfit from Walmart to start the school year. But it would be years before I fully realized the harshness of rural poverty — in particular, the ways isolation exacerbates financial challenges, as well as the lack of medical and social service providers and long distances necessary to travel to find them, often without any form of reliable public transportation. When poverty persists in a region, other problems take root.

After spending several years reporting in other states, in 2014 I returned to the region I had long called home. Since then, I’ve heard about how child abuse rates are higher in rural Southern Illinois than any other part of the state. And I wondered why these trends persist.

A year ago, ProPublica’s Vernal Coleman and Haru Coryne and I began looking for answers, which led to the story we published on Friday. Two findings, in particular, stood out to me: how often the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services’ staff returned to the same homes and how most of these families are investigated repeatedly not for abuse but for neglect, accused of failing to provide adequate food, shelter or supervision, or of exposing their children to dangerous situations, among other things. Our analysis found that both of these problems exist statewide. But the trends were most troublesome in Southern Illinois.

This may seem intuitive, given the region’s poverty. Many people living with low incomes provide adequately for their children despite their financial struggles, but poverty is widely considered a risk factor for neglect because of the added stressors it places upon a family. “In more situations than not, if you dig deep enough behind what is causing the neglect reports, poverty is a problem,” said Jerry Milner, a longtime child welfare official who led the Children’s Bureau under the Trump administration. “It goes unchecked, and then other things start happening in the lives of kids and families that may lead to something more serious.”

There’s a fresh conversation taking place in national child welfare circles about whether there’s a better way to help families facing repeated neglect allegations. Advocates for reform say direct financial aid and a robust array of community-based social services would benefit most far more than investigations that seek to determine fault, which can result in child removals to foster care. But politicians at the federal level have resisted investing in the kinds of changes the child welfare system needs, Milner said.

That is, in part, because “abuse and neglect” are so often mentioned in the same breath, making it easy to lose sight of the fact that they are not the same thing. “We’ve done a disservice in America by conflating the two,” said Jess McDonald, who headed DCFS during a tumultuous time in the 1990s, when Illinois’ foster care numbers reached an all-time high. As a result, “it makes you less sympathetic to these families cycling through neglect investigations.”

DCFS and child welfare agencies across the nation were primarily established to police abuse, and the tools they have at their disposal favor investigations and removals of children into foster care over family stabilization. Illinois, like other states, does have a program to keep families together, offering support services to parents when it deems it safe for the kids to remain in the home. But as even DCFS acknowledged to us, in Southern Illinois, those resources are fewer and farther between than in other parts of the state.

In a statement to The Southern and ProPublica, DCFS said that Illinois’ funding challenges, particularly during the administration of former Gov. Bruce Rauner, have resulted in fewer social service providers in the areas where they’re most needed. “I think it’s important for us to talk about the lack of resources in communities and the negative outcomes when you don’t have those resources,” DCFS director Marc Smith said in an interview. (Multiple attempts to reach Rauner for comment were not successful.)

What we found traveling across Southern Illinois over the past year, talking with families and the experts who work inside the system, is that parents who are repeatedly investigated for neglect often live in poverty, and many are struggling to provide for their children while dealing with weighty stressors on their lives, including addiction, depression or domestic violence. For too many, these cycles are generational.

One afternoon last fall, I sat in the kitchen with a Carterville mother as she prepared pizza rolls for her two children. She told me about how she’d fallen into a deep depression and turned to meth after her older child died in a car accident. She said she had been married as a young teenager and is a survivor of domestic violence. Despite DCFS’s repeated involvement in her life, she told me, she had yet to connect to the therapeutic help she needed. I met another mother from Dongola whose children were taken after a DCFS investigator found her home severely damaged by a leaky roof. The mother had made pleas to family and friends for help with fixing it dating back two years on her Facebook page.

Having given birth to twins last year, I am awash with a fresh wave of empathy for struggling, tired, overwhelmed parents. I love my children dearly, but when you’re sleep deprived and inexperienced, some days are long and hard — especially when my children are sick and the crying feels ceaseless, or when I’m stressed about bills and work obligations I can’t always meet. I don’t know how I would manage without a husband, a village of family and friends, a supportive workplace and enough money to hire babysitters on occasion so I have room to breathe.

So many of the parents I interviewed for this story have none of these luxuries.

Though we talked with many people, we centered our story on Alan Schott and his two daughters. Schott and the girls’ mother had been investigated at least 10 times. DCFS only ever substantiated claims of neglect against the family, and the girls were removed three times — and returned home three times as well. They are living with their father and great-grandmother today.

We chose to focus our story on the Schott family for a particular reason. News stories about child welfare tend to stake out one of two positions: They take agencies like DCFS to task for missing numerous and seemingly obvious red flags leading to a child’s death; or they draw attention to cases where children have been unnecessarily removed. Both of those situations are unfortunate, and deserving of attention.

But I’ve spent a lot of time thinking: What does DCFS do about cases where departmental and parental shortcomings collide in a gray area? These types of cases, though exceedingly typical, don’t receive the public policy attention they deserve.

There often aren’t any easy answers. But without adequate resources, DCFS is left with two bad options: either allowing chronic problems inside a home to fester to the point of crisis; or taking children from their families. Both options tear at the fabric of our communities. As the number of children in foster care across Southern Illinois has reached levels unseen for at least three decades, there’s urgency to ask these questions.

Help Us Investigate Child Welfare Services in Illinois

If you’ve recently been the subject of Illinois DCFS investigations, or had your children placed into foster care, we’re interested in talking to you about what was helpful that the system offered, and what wasn’t. Filling out our short questionnaire will help us do more reporting that matters to this community. We won’t be able to respond to everyone who reaches out, but we promise to read everything you submit. We take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these stories for the purposes of our reporting, and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.

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Vernal Coleman and Haru Coryne contributed reporting. Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

by Molly Parker for The Southern Illinoisan and Vernal Coleman and Haru Coryne, 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.

Do you have a story about DCFS investigations? Do you live in southern or central Illinois? We want to hear from you for future stories.

On a September afternoon last year, a state child welfare investigator drove into Alto Pass, a village in the rolling hills of Southern Illinois, to the home Alan Schott shared with his then-girlfriend and his two daughters. Someone had called the state’s child abuse hotline, claiming that Schott was neglecting the girls.

Though they were only 6 and 8, the girls knew enough to know why the investigator was at the door. The neglect allegation was at least the 10th report made to the state that Schott or the girls’ mother, who Schott had split up with several years before, was failing to properly care for them.

Schott’s elder daughter pleaded with her dad to “show them a couple things,” according to a recording he made of the encounter. “Just show them that we have electric. Here, I’ll show you that we have electric.”

Schott knew why the investigator was there, too. At 12, he had been taken from his parents and placed in foster care with relatives, including his grandmother; he didn’t return home for about two years. And though, with each of his daughters’ births, he had vowed to not let them fall into the child welfare system, by the time the investigator from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services came that day, the girls had already spent more than 2 1/2 years in foster care, and had only been back with their father for six months.

The investigator told Schott that there were concerns he was using methamphetamine, and school officials said his daughters were showing up to school dirty, according to court records. When he refused to let the investigator into the home or take a drug test — both of which, by state law, he is allowed to decline to do — she called the sheriff’s office for help.

Then she took the girls into temporary custody, which is within the discretion of DCFS investigators, within certain guidelines, to do. They were placed into foster care with Schott’s grandmother, the same woman who had cared for him when DCFS determined that his own parents could not, and who had cared for his girls when they had been placed in foster care before.

“I thought you guys were supposed to be for the kids, and for the families, but all you guys do is take them apart,” a frustrated Schott told the investigator. His elder daughter echoed: “Yeah, that’s all you do. That’s all you ever do.”

Alan Schott sits in his daughters’ bedroom at his ex-girlfriend’s home in Alto Pass, Illinois. Schott’s daughters, now ages 7 and 8, were living with the couple until they were taken by Illinois Department of Children and Family Services in September 2021. (Whitney Curtis for Propublica)

The Schotts are among thousands of families across Illinois who have moved in and out of the child welfare system — repeatedly investigated but often without getting the help they need to stabilize their lives. From January 2018 through June 2020, 33% of all confirmed reports of child maltreatment — about 17,500 cases — involved households with at least two previous investigations, according to DCFS investigative case data obtained and analyzed by The Southern Illinoisan and ProPublica.

In far southern and southeastern Illinois, the rural area marked by poverty and industry decline that the Schotts have long called home, the rate of repeat investigations was 42%, the highest in the state. The region is served by DCFS's Marion office and its satellite offices.

Seen one way, those numbers aren’t surprising: They show that many families that come to the attention of DCFS continue to struggle. But among child welfare officials and academics, the volume of repeat cases is a sign that the system is failing to live up to its mission not only to protect children, but to “increase their families’ capacity to safely care for them.” The pattern of repeated investigations involving a single family or child victim is called “recurrence.”

For decades, child welfare officials across the country have used recurrence rates as an indicator of an agency’s performance. Illinois has long had one of the highest recurrence rates in the nation, according to comparative data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (The most recent data available is for fiscal 2019.) The data measures confirmed maltreatment that recurs within six months, though both DCFS and the federal government note that there are caveats to the state-by-state comparisons because of differences in how maltreatment is defined and what circumstances prompt an investigation.

Recurrence is complex, driven by a variety of factors. But child welfare experts and families tied up in multiple investigations said DCFS’s resources aren’t adequate. Parents say that classes often aren’t helpful, drug counseling and mental health services can be hard to find, and direct financial aid is insufficient. And those problems have persisted for years.

For the past four years, DCFS’ inspector general, its internal watchdog, has called on the agency to ensure that families it has previously investigated are receiving the help they need. The U.S. Children’s Bureau, which provides funding and oversight to DCFS, has required voluminous corrective plans from DCFS detailing how it intends to improve child safety following investigations. The Illinois General Assembly and governor’s office have also pushed for improvement. When he took office in 2019, Gov. J.B. Pritzker ordered a review of the agency’s chief program intended to stabilize families and prevent recurrence, known as Intact Family Services, and promised to “change the direction of DCFS.”

Despite that pledge, Illinois’ recurrence rate reached a 10-year high in fiscal 2020, according to University of Illinois researchers, who monitor DCFS under the terms of a decades-old consent decree intended to improve the department’s handling of children in its care. DCFS itself acknowledged three times in its most recent strategic plan that its recurrence rates are “unacceptable.”

“It should be a wake-up call for all of us that the same families are experiencing the same difficulties over and over again,” said Jerry Milner, a longtime advocate for better child welfare policies and former associate commissioner of the U.S. Children’s Bureau in the Trump administration.

“Child welfare is going out, nothing is changing and we’ve got the same set of circumstances,” Milner added. “That should be a strong signal for us to look a lot deeper into what is happening.”

State Sen. Julie Morrison, a Democrat from Lake Forest, suggested the problem is largely invisible to lawmakers. She said the only reports legislators receive on families investigated on multiple occasions relate to child deaths; they don’t get information about the huge volume of repeat neglect investigations. She called that dearth of information a “glaring problem.”

DCFS director Marc Smith said Illinois’ mandates for professionals such as teachers and social workers to report maltreatment accusations are “very aggressive,” leading to increases in confirmed cases of abuse. Nonetheless, he acknowledged the problem, saying the agency will do everything it can to “reduce the recurrence abuse and neglect rate.”

Smith, a Pritzker appointee, emphasized that grappling with the poverty, unemployment and substance abuse that drive neglect is not DCFS’ task alone. He said DCFS, its sister human service agencies and the nonprofit organizations that share in the challenge have faced funding issues in large part because of Illinois’ persistent budget turmoil, particularly during the administration of Pritzker’s predecessor, Bruce Rauner.

Child welfare advocates say that federal and state lawmakers have failed to make more funding available to help families with chronic troubles, and in recent years the department has turned to the default tool for child welfare agencies: removing children from struggling families. That has fueled a 120% surge in the number of children in foster care across the Marion service area over the past decade, even as the total child population in the area has declined. Overall, when children enter foster care in Illinois, they linger there longer than anywhere else in the nation.

“Unacceptable” Rates of Recurrence

For two decades, DCFS has been called out for failing to address how often families reenter the child welfare system.

Department of Health and Human Services’s Children’s Bureau Federal performance reviews in 2003, 2010 and 2018 found that Illinois had failed to meet national goals regarding repeat child maltreatment.

Illinois’ DCFS In its 2020-2024 Child and Family Services Plan, the agency itself found that children and families “experience an unacceptable rate of recurrence of maltreatment and maltreatment in care that has been increasing over time.”

Illinois Auditor General In 2019, an audit ordered by the legislature identified numerous performance lapses that could contribute to recurrence. The 2021 follow-up found that DCFS had failed to implement several of the 13 recommendations from the 2019 audit.

University of Chicago In a May 2019 review ordered by Gov. J.B. Pritzker, researchers at the University of Chicago found that DCFS’s Intact Family Services program, which the state relies on to stabilize troubled families, was hampered by frequent policy shifts, miscommunication and insufficient follow-up for “high-risk” cases.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign The school’s Children and Family Research Center, which monitors the agency’s performance under a federal consent decree, reported that Illinois’ recurrence rate reached a new peak of more than 14% in fiscal 2020, following nearly a decade of steady increases.

DCFS officials said in a statement that the agency has taken steps to address long-standing issues, including streamlining how allegations are processed, making faster assessments of cases and focusing on staffing. “We feel very confident that we've made a lot of adjustments to make sure that the services that our families get are thoughtful — that our case workers are empowered to do as much as they can in the environment in which they're working with families,” said DCFS Director Marc Smith. “I feel confident that progress is being made.”

So when a DCFS investigator showed up at Schott’s door in September to again try to determine if he was neglecting his children, there was a good chance they would return to foster care. Their journey through the child welfare system raises an important question: For all the attention DCFS has given this family — and the thousands of other families facing intractable problems such as poverty, joblessness and substance abuse — are his daughters any closer to finding stability than when the agency first entered their lives?

A Family Under Stress

Cases that lead to a child’s death have always made headlines and sent shock waves through the child welfare system. But beyond those headlines are far more children who survive chronic neglect, children deprived of the basic care a parent or caregiver is expected to provide.

“We chronicle the numbers of dead kids. We talk about them: So many kids died at the hands of their parents because of abuse and neglect. Those numbers are out there, and they’re horrific,” said Morrison, who chairs the Senate’s Health Committee. “But it’s the kids you’re talking about, who are surviving, that we fail to see.” After years of living in trauma, she added, those children leave home “not the people who they have the right to be.”

And at that point, she said, “now, you’ve got an adult who we’re looking at trying to help recover.”

At 34, Schott has dark blond hair, a mustache and beard, and big aspirations. He speaks softly, sometimes mumbling, and talks often about how he’d like to one day go to law school to help other parents caught in the child welfare system. But he has also struggled to get up in the morning in time to get his daughters on the school bus, forgotten appointments and cycled through low-wage jobs and periods of unemployment.

Schott’s youth was not easy. By his senior year in high school, he dropped out and spiraled into depression and addiction. His father was arrested on multiple occasions, including for making methamphetamine, and spent time in federal prison. At 19, Schott was arrested for drunken driving, and he subsequently racked up some two dozen additional criminal charges and several misdemeanor convictions, most of them for marijuana possession. As a young adult, “I was just drinking myself to death,” he said.

He was at a bar when he met the woman who would become the mother of his children. Although numerous attempts to reach her for this article, including through family and friends, were unsuccessful, public records paint a little bit of a portrait of her. She left school in the 6th grade, though she later got her GED and took courses to become a dental technician, court records show. She told a probation officer she first used marijuana in elementary school, and she has used methamphetamine and opiates. She has been arrested on numerous occasions and has convictions for such offenses as burglary, armed robbery and possession of methamphetamine. She had three children before she met Schott; in the years since they got together, the pair have split up and reconciled several times, but they have not been a couple for several years.

When their first child arrived in 2013, Schott vowed to be a good father and stay out of trouble. “I ain’t never felt love like that before,” he said. But a year later, the baby and her half-siblings were placed in foster care following a DCFS investigation that began when one of the children, then 5, was spotted riding her bike unsupervised with a 3-year-old friend a half-mile from home, according to court records. The children were returned to their parents a few months later, Schott said, and his second daughter was born shortly after.

Children’s bikes are stacked in the yard of the home where Schott’s girls were living when they were removed in September 2021. (Whitney Curtis for ProPublica)

Over the next four years, DCFS investigated the family three more times for various allegations, including that the couple engaged in explosive fights in front of their daughters, provided inadequate supervision and used drugs, according to DCFS files that Schott obtained and shared with The Southern Illinoisan and ProPublica. (The files do not disclose who made the allegations to DCFS; the anonymity of people who make them is protected by Illinois law.)

DCFS did not substantiate those neglect claims. But that doesn’t mean the family wasn’t struggling. They were living in poverty with unstable housing and unreliable transportation.

In many ways, the child welfare system isn’t set up well to deal with families that cycle through investigations, often for neglect. Although neglect is frequently reported alongside physical or sexual abuse, 65% of substantiated repeat child maltreatment reports against families in Illinois involved neglect alone, according to a ProPublica analysis of case data from 2018 through mid-2020.

Neglect covers a broad range of conditions, including children being left at home alone while both parents are working; food or housing insecurity; failure to take children to the doctor’s office; substance addiction; or exposing children indirectly to violence.

Often, when an allegation of neglect is called in, the agency starts an investigation. Over the past three fiscal years, DCFS investigated about 254,500 cases. In about 23,000 of those cases, the allegations included forms of neglect that Illinois law considers potentially tied to poverty: inadequate food, clothing or shelter or environmental neglect.

If DCFS doesn’t remove the children, agency officials typically offer help to families through its Intact Family Services program, which can include substance and mental health counseling, domestic violence prevention programs and parenting classes. But families are not required to avail themselves of those services unless ordered to by a court, and the vast majority of families participate in no services at all — whether because they decline to use them or because the services aren’t available.

Since 2013, about 70% of the tens of thousands of Illinois children identified by DCFS each year as victims of abuse or neglect went without DCFS services, according to data compiled by the University of Illinois’ Children and Family Research Center. That’s in part, child welfare experts said, because child protective services have little to offer when poverty drives so many of a family’s troubles.

“When children aren’t receiving what they need, and it’s a neglect concern related to a family’s lack of resources, is child protection really the right response? How is that a helpful response?” asked Melissa Staas, a supervisory attorney with the Children and Families Practice Group at Legal Aid Chicago. “A better response is to support the family in accessing the resources they need.”

Schott and his family encountered these shortcomings firsthand, entering into cycles of investigations without effective interventions. (DCFS declined to discuss the family’s situation in depth, citing privacy concerns, although Schott had provided a waiver allowing it to talk to reporters about the family; the agency confirmed some basic facts about their case history.)

In the fall of 2018, when the younger girls were living with their mother, the older of the two missed several days of kindergarten, prompting a visit by school officials. When no one came to the door, the educators called the sheriff’s office for help, according to a deputy’s report. The responding deputy wrote that the interior of the home, a trailer that sat atop a hill overlooking a sewage lagoon in rural Jackson County, was covered in so much debris he had trouble walking around.

The trailer had two bathtubs — one containing food scraps, the other piled high with dirty clothes. The stove appeared to be the only source of heat, while parts of the trailer floor had rotted out. Records show DCFS later found that the girls’ mother had failed to provide adequate food and shelter.

DCFS took the girls into protective custody, then placed them with Schott’s grandmother, Peggy Schott, for the first time.

Peggy Schott sits in her living room. (Whitney Curtis for ProPublica) An Agency Mismatched

In Southern Illinois, the Schott story isn’t unique. A 2020 report found that in the Marion service area, which covers 27 rural counties in Southern Illinois, “performance has been consistently poor” around recurrence for at least seven years. Over a five-year period, from 2016 through 2020, about 19% of children identified by DCFS as victims of abuse or neglect were the subject of a confirmed maltreatment investigation again within a year, according to University of Illinois data, compared with about 13% statewide. These figures likely underestimate the scope of the problem, as they don’t capture families that, though their repeat investigations were ruled to be unsubstantiated, still face challenges in the home.

The lack of support for parents in the region is one reason. Mental health counseling and other services often have waitlists or require traveling long distances to appointments, said state Sen. Terri Bryant, a Murphysboro Republican, who sits on a legislative subcommittee focused on child welfare. “A lot of it is the absolute inability to get the people down here the services that they need,” she said.

Many regional social service providers that DCFS sends parents to for help “don’t have the doctoral-level therapists with the deep experience that some of these families desperately need,” said Joanna Wells, a clinical associate professor and director of the Southern Illinois University School of Law’s Juvenile Justice Clinic, which provides legal services to children in Jackson County.

One afternoon late last year, a woman appeared in court in Union County, which sits just south of Jackson County. Her children had been placed in foster care, and she’d been given a list of requirements she had to meet to get them back. Her lawyer told a judge the woman had completed all but one task: a class for parents whose children had been exposed to trauma. When asked why that task remained incomplete, the woman’s caseworker told the judge that the class was no longer offered. When it had been available, it was held 100 miles from where the mother lived.

“We need to have a service she can actually complete,” the judge said. Still, the judge declined to return the children to their mother, setting a next hearing for about five months later. The children, meantime, remained in foster care.

Peggy Schott’s house, where Alan Schott’s daughters were placed in foster care (Whitney Curtis for ProPublica)

Because of the depth of struggles many parents face, and the shortcomings of the system in the Southern Illinois region designed to address them, Wells said, “most cases do not close successfully.”

DCFS acknowledged families it deals with face greater challenges in some parts of the state, including Southern Illinois: Parents and caregivers in these underserved areas have fewer options for services, and often have to travel farther to take advantage of them. These regions tend to have higher rates of poverty, unemployment and drug use.

Smith, the DCFS director, tied those challenges directly to “aggressive” funding cuts to service programs, most recently during the Rauner administration. “Because those social services don’t exist in the community, an outcome of that is engagement with DCFS,” he said.

“We have to figure out, as a state, how do we get more resources in communities that are poor, that are rural, that are isolated and don’t have the support they need?” Smith said.

Multiple attempts to reach Rauner were unsuccessful.

Schott dealt with the fallout of those shortcomings. When DCFS took his girls from their mother’s home in 2018, he was in the middle of a three-week stint in jail connected to old charges for marijuana possession and DUI and couldn’t come up with $950 for bail. He figured he wouldn’t have any difficulty getting them back once he was released.

That wasn’t how it would go. With the girls placed in foster care after they were removed from their mother’s trailer, he became embroiled in court proceedings that would stretch on for 2 1/2 years as he worked to show he was fit to parent them. Though the process starts with DCFS, decisions about when to place children in foster care and when to return them are made by a judge.

Schott said that while his case wound its way through the legal system, he got little help from DCFS or Caritas Family Solutions, the private agency the state contracted with to manage the family’s case, in meeting the requirements imposed by the court for getting his daughters back. He was obligated to attend therapy, take parenting classes, submit to random drug tests and undergo a substance abuse assessment; the assessment from a drug treatment provider did not recommend further services, court records show. He was expected to find a job and a place to live; he had been living with his grandmother, but was no longer allowed to stay with her once the girls were placed in foster care there.

DCFS can provide families with up to $800 — or $2,400 with special permission from DCFS supervisors — in one-time emergency cash assistance to help with basic needs such as housing deposits, utilities and basic appliances when poverty conditions threaten to result in the removal of children or delay a family’s reunification. A 1991 consent decree that specifically addressed the issue of DCFS removing children into foster care because of poverty led to the creation of this cash assistance fund for families. That consent decree requires the agency to make reasonable efforts to remedy poverty-related conditions that are a factor in a parent retaining or regaining custody of their children.

Schott said DCFS never provided him or his children’s mother with cash assistance. “I asked them about helping her or helping me, either one, and they never helped us with anything,” he said.

DCFS confirmed that Schott qualified for the funding and never got it. The agency said Schott declined the help, telling his Caritas caseworker “he was employed and didn’t need any assistance.” Schott denied that he declined the help.

It is difficult to measure how many eligible families go without financial aid from the department, but data suggests that spending is not keeping up with need. From fiscal 2019 through 2021, DCFS closed investigations of roughly 19,400 families for poverty-related neglect. During that time, the department said it approved about 8,900 families for direct financial assistance. Families can qualify for funding even if neglect allegations against them are not substantiated. DCFS officials provided statistics showing that under Pritzker, the number of families in the Marion service area receiving financial aid has increased.

Schott’s aunt let him move into a vacant house she owns, about half a mile from where the girls were living with their great-grandmother on the outskirts of Murphysboro. But it needed renovations before DCFS would allow the girls to visit or move in, and he didn’t have a lot of time or money to make them.

He also didn’t own a reliable vehicle. He’d picked up work at a pasta manufacturing plant in Steeleville, 30 miles away from Murphysboro. To get there, he had to catch a van with other employees, which he said cost him about $60 a week. Getting to all of his appointments to fulfill the court’s orders required hitching rides and borrowing cars.

He also had to schedule his work shifts around in-person therapy and parenting classes, which met three times weekly in the early months of his case. He’d already taken the parenting class once before, when the children were previously in foster care, but he tried to make the best of it. “You can always learn things from what they’re trying to teach you,” he said.

But the drug test requirements made his schedule that much more hectic. At the beginning of his case, Schott said, the phone calls came about once a month, and they came without warning. When he was summoned, he’d have to find a way to leave work early and travel to Carbondale, about 40 miles away.

Schott completed the bulk of court-ordered obligations within about a year of his girls entering foster care. The court had set a goal of returning the Schott children to their parents within 12 months, so Schott figured he was close to getting them back.

But he wasn’t close. His daughters spent another 18 months — 30 months altogether — in foster care before he regained custody. This is not atypical. For the roughly 4,600 Illinois children exiting foster care in fiscal 2019, the latest year for which federal data is available, the median length of stay in the state’s custody was 31 months. That is far longer than any other state or district in the nation: Washington, D.C., was next at 21 months, and then Alaska at 20.

DCFS’s Interventions on Behalf of the Schott Girls:

• Number of investigations: at least 10
• Number of times children were removed to foster care: 3
• Number of times they were returned to the family: 3

In March 2021, the judge in the Schott family’s case terminated the mother’s parental rights, ruling she had failed to make reasonable progress toward the completion of mandated services. The judge returned the girls to Schott, starting with a two-month trial period. Schott remembers being filled with pride.

“I cried because that judge has been on my ass ever since I was 19 and got that DUI and stuff. I mean, she’s really been on my ass,” Schott said. “I never expected to hear that woman say she was proud of me or want to shake my hand or none of that. And that’s what she did at that court date.”

A Hard Transition

For Schott and scores of other parents, regaining custody marks a critical point in the life of their case. It’s a moment that “requires additional support from the agency, not less,” said DCFS officials in a recent report about its efforts to curb its recurrence rates.

But in that same report, the agency acknowledged that it doesn’t always give that transition the attention it deserves. “Returning children to parents also requires a significant amount of preparation,” the report said, “and the data suggest that is not happening, with an observed high degree of need for the parents and children, and the maltreatment happening soon after reunification.”

Schott said the girls’ return to his home didn’t come with much help. His caseworker met with him a few times; Schott said the meetings mostly involved assessments of his home and didn’t delve into the more routine, day-to-day challenges of parenting he encountered.

Schott found the transition difficult. He had little experience fixing his daughters’ hair or picking out their clothes for school in the morning. Because he routinely stayed up late, he had a hard time waking up in time to get them ready for school.

Books and DVDs belonging to Schott’s daughters sit on a shelf in their bedroom at Schott’s ex-girlfriend’s home. (Whitney Curtis for ProPublica)

In late March 2021, just two weeks after the girls returned to Schott’s care, DCFS received a call that they were coming to school dirty. On the morning the report was made, the girls hadn’t shown up for school at all, and someone had gone to their home to wake everyone up, the agency was told. DCFS launched an investigation and learned of additional troubles.

The girls were frequently missing school, and when they did arrive, they were often late, the older girl without her glasses and backpack. Her schoolwork and behavior began slipping, it was reported to the agency. One of the girls told the investigator that the house had no hot water. Schott told DCFS that his hot water heater had broken and he was working to get a new one.

Asked about its response to the Schott’s family, Caritas directed all questions to DCFS. DCFS did not answer a question about what help was offered to the family during the transition, other than to say Caritas was providing unspecified services at the time of the investigation. Schott eventually obtained a water heater on his own, according to DCFS.

Schott’s Caritas caseworker told the investigator she visited the house regularly, and, while cluttered, it was not a safety risk for the children. She reported that the family was poor but said that she did not have other concerns. She said that, as for the father, he was getting a chance to raise his daughters. DCFS eventually determined that the allegation was “unfounded.”

Meanwhile, the court awarded Schott full custody in May and closed his case. In court records, his caseworker noted as strengths that he was willing to participate in recommended services to improve his parenting, that he had provided for a safe place for them to live together and that he “loves his children.”

Four months later — the day his daughter tried to show investigators that the electricity worked — DCFS removed the girls, sending them back to their great-grandmother Peggy’s. In a statement, DCFS said that the investigator made the decision to place the children into temporary protective custody because the investigator had been unable to observe the home or confirm that Schott was not using drugs. When Schott received the list of what he would have to do to get his children back, it was almost identical to the one he had just completed.

It’s the kind of situation that frustrates Jackson County State’s Attorney Joseph A. Cervantez, whose office petitions the court to place a child in foster care if it agrees with DCFS’s recommendation to do so. He said the system offers “the same thing over and over again. Whether there are good results or bad results, it continues to be the same.”

A Swing Toward Removals

In Illinois, as elsewhere, child welfare officials repeatedly turn to placing children in foster care to solve persistent problems in their homes. Removals peaked in fiscal 1997, when the state had more than 51,000 children in foster care. Those numbers fell dramatically over the following years and bottomed out in 2017, when the tally dropped to 14,000. Today, about 19,500 children live in foster care — the highest since 2002. Part of the issue is that calls to the agency’s hotline have shot up, leading to more investigations. But the foster care population has grown faster than the number of substantiated maltreatment investigations, suggesting that the response to maltreatment is swinging toward removing kids from their parents’ custody and placing them in foster care.

Unlike in the 1990s when Chicago and Cook County drove the state’s high foster care rates, prompting lawsuits against DCFS and reforms, increases over the past five years have been largely driven by less-populated regions across central and southern Illinois, and drawn far less attention.

Over the past few years, children from the Marion service area were placed into foster care at a rate four times higher than in Cook County relative to their share of the population. Across Illinois, 91% of children entered foster care for reasons of neglect rather than abuse in 2020, according to Child Trends, a national research organization that analyzes state child welfare data reported to the federal government.

The Illinois child welfare system, which includes DCFS, regional courts and social service providers, is struggling to manage the volume of new cases. A reporter’s observation of more than 10 hours of juvenile court in two Southern Illinois counties offered a glimpse into the upheaval. The reporter heard multiple stories that showed the system sagging under the strain of removals, including one child sleeping in a service provider’s office and another in a foster family’s bathroom due to a shortage of available foster care placements.

To DCFS’ Smith, the increasing removals are just one byproduct of rising DCFS engagement with families, and a “lagging indicator” of inadequate service options for families in need. Still, he stressed that the agency works hard to keep families together, petitioning courts to order kids removed from their homes into foster care only when there is an “urgent and immediate necessity.”

The burden of caring for children in the child welfare system frequently falls to relatives, who are often the first choice to serve as foster parents.

In Schott’s case, that role fell to Peggy Schott, an 87-year-old widow and Army veteran who had worked for three decades as a forklift driver. Her little white house is decorated with figurines outside, and framed pictures of family and Jesus Christ inside. It often smells of something she’s cooking. When the girls moved in with her, she placed a tiny table with two chairs for them in her kitchen.

But only weeks after they arrived, DCFS bounced them to another foster care home. The decision to place them with people who were not relatives caught the family by surprise.

On a Monday in early November, a Caritas caseworker called Peggy Schott to let her know the girls could no longer live with her. Schott had allowed her grandson to see his daughters without a Caritas worker present, as the agency required, according to a follow-up letter from DCFS explaining the move. Alan Schott had visited on a day when he and his grandmother had expected the caseworker to be there, and when she arrived the next day, Peggy Schott volunteered the information that her grandson had visited — evidence, she later said, that it had been an innocent mistake. She recalled the hour or so he spent with the girls as uneventful. The four of them had dinner together, and Alan Schott helped his daughters with their homework.

She could also point to positive reviews of her earlier care for the girls. Caseworkers had described her as a stable force in their lives. She made sure they went to school, were seen by doctors and attended therapy for emotional issues. Regardless, the caseworker told her someone would pick them up Friday to drive them to their new placement.

Peggy Schott had planned to keep the girls home from school that day and tell them what was going to happen. She hoped they could spend their final hours together doing something fun as a family. But while the girls were at school on Wednesday, a Caritas caseworker called and said she would pick them up at school. Someone would come by later to get their belongings.

Peggy Schott sits in the bedroom of one of her great-granddaughters. (Whitney Curtis for ProPublica)

“It just upsets me because they’re just hurting those girls more and more,” Peggy Schott said that day, upon learning of the change of plans. “They’ve been through so much. And I mean, right now, they’re so mixed up. I just can’t comprehend what this is doing to those girls.”

She called the school, pleading to talk to the girls, or for someone to pass along the message to them that this wasn’t her decision. After she’d placed multiple frantic calls, a school official connected her to her younger great-granddaughter. “Grandma loves you and I’m going to miss you,” she told her on the phone. “But they’re going to take you away from me.” “OK,” a tiny, quavering voice answered back, the only word the child could muster before hanging up the phone.

The burden of breaking the news to the older child fell to her teacher. When Peggy Schott reached her other great-granddaughter, the girl bellowed between sobs, “Where are we going?” She didn’t know what to tell the girl; she didn’t know herself.

“Remember to say your prayers every night, OK?” she said.

Five months later, the separation had taken an emotional and financial toll. Peggy Schott was worried about the girls, and about her grandson, who was becoming increasingly distraught.

As his daughters’ time in foster care dragged on, Alan Schott began to sense them growing distant. “I don’t know what to do about this situation,” he said after one visit with the girls.

“I don’t know why they’re keeping my kids from me,” he added. “I need my kids. I deserve my kids.”

Alan Schott had the right to challenge the state’s neglect case in court and was given a public defender to represent him. But when he and his grandmother concluded that the lawyer wasn’t giving the case the attention they felt it deserved, Peggy Schott took more than $5,000 from her savings to hire an attorney.

Delays by lawyers for both sides pushed the proceedings back to mid-February, well past a 90-day deadline to have the case heard — meaning more time the girls spent in foster care.

Alan Schott arrived at the courthouse in Jonesboro on the morning of the hearing wearing a Carhartt jacket and work boots. He was nervous. Two days earlier, he’d met with his lawyer, who told him the case would be difficult to win.

For about two hours, Alan Schott listened as a teacher, the principal and the lunchroom supervisor from his daughters’ school detailed their concerns. They said that while living with their father, the girls had been registered for school several weeks late, and often showed up wearing dirty or torn clothes and with their hair matted. The school employees testified that the girls seemed hungry, finishing their lunches and often asking for seconds. “I still think about her every day,” the older girl’s teacher testified. “Is she OK? How’s she doing?”

Alan Schott and his grandmother said they had taught the girls to eat everything on their plates and that the girls had been well-fed at home.

Alan Schott’s lawyer, Charles McGuire from the Southern Illinois Law Center, questioned why more hadn’t been done to help the family when school officials grew concerned. “He was never given the chance to raise these children,” the lawyer said.

Judge Amanda Byassee Gott later explained how she agonized over coming to a decision. The case, she said, “quite frankly is a very close call by this court.” She said she was “very concerned” for the girls’ well-being under their father’s care. But the state, she determined, had not proved that he had neglected them.

Later that day, a caseworker drove the girls to their great-grandmother’s house, where Alan Schott and his daughters would stay until they could find their own home.

At left, a balloon Alan Schott gave his children when they returned home floats on the ceiling of their bedroom. At right, Schott brushes his younger daughter’s hair. (Whitney Curtis for ProPublica)

DCFS was out of their lives again, with little to suggest that this most recent ordeal with the agency had delivered any stability. If anything, Alan Schott and his grandmother said, the experience felt more traumatic and disruptive than helpful. The girls were excited on the day they came home, but things got harder in the following weeks. The younger child, in particular, didn’t want to let her father out of her sight. The move back home also meant another school change, their fourth transfer in a year.

“It’s traumatizing to them, me, the rest of the family, and putting a burden on everybody,” Alan Schott said. “It’s crazy and they shouldn’t be allowed to do that.”

Alan Schott eats lunch with his younger daughter. (Whitney Curtis for ProPublica)

About the Data: How We Analyzed Child Welfare Investigations in Illinois

To understand why DCFS investigates the same families repeatedly, the Southern Illinoisan and ProPublica obtained a database of cases from the department through a public records request. Reporters identified a specific population of families within this database: those with at least two prior investigations, regardless of when those investigations took place. They then focused on substantiated cases of abuse or neglect involving these families from 2018 through mid-2020. The resulting subset of cases represented families who continued to struggle despite repeated interventions.

By measuring repeat investigations at the family level, the newsrooms took a different approach from that of DCFS in its public reporting. Like many state child welfare agencies, as well as the U.S. Children’s Bureau, DCFS uses “recurrence” to track repeated cases of abuse and neglect. Recurrence measures the percentage of children subjected to maltreatment who experience a second report of abuse or neglect within a set period of time, e.g., 6 or 12 months. Yet definitions of recurrence vary among government agencies and researchers, and none of them fully captures those families who, regardless of short-term recurrence, accumulate multiple investigations over a period of years. Neither DCFS’s annual report nor research published by the University of Illinois (which monitors the agency) measures longer-term involvement with the agency in this way.

The findings have a few important caveats. By focusing on families with multiple prior investigations without regard for when those investigations took place, the analysis included families whose cases may have occurred years apart and involved different children. By only looking at instances of substantiated maltreatment, the analysis did not include families who have been investigated multiple times without ever having an allegation substantiated. The analysis does not include investigations of licensed child care facilities, such as group foster homes, residential treatment centers or day care providers, as well as non-licensed institutional settings like jails. Changes in the department’s case-tracking procedure prevented the reporters from examining cases opened before 2018. Nonetheless, for each investigation opened in 2018 onwards, the database detailed the number of prior cases involving that family, even if those prior cases were before 2018. Cases opened after June 2020 were too recent to have outcomes in the database and so were excluded.

Finally, data on child welfare investigations is complex. Families who receive services are more likely to experience repeat investigations, which may be attributable to, among other factors, increased surveillance by caseworkers, University of Illinois researchers note. Further, bias and false reports can contribute to recurrence, and child welfare experts caution that repeated investigations involving the same parent don’t always signal a problem within the household. The data reflects the way the department interacts with its most persistently troubled families — not the frequency with which Illinois families commit repeated acts of abuse or neglect.

Help Us Investigate Child Welfare Services in Illinois

If you’ve recently been the subject of Illinois DCFS investigations, or had your children placed into foster care, we’re interested in talking to you about what was helpful that the system offered, and what wasn’t. Filling out our short questionnaire will help us do more reporting that matters to this community. We won’t be able to respond to everyone who reaches out, but we promise to read everything you submit. We take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these stories for the purposes of our reporting, and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.

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Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

by Jerry Mitchell, Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting

This article was produced by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a former member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Conditions at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman state prison violate the Constitution, the U.S. Justice Department said Wednesday.

“Our investigation uncovered evidence of systemic violations that have generated a violent and unsafe environment for people incarcerated at Parchman,” Kristen Clarke, the U.S. assistant attorney general for civil rights, said at a press conference. “We are committed to taking action that will ensure the safety of all people held at Parchman and other state prison facilities.”

The department began investigating Parchman in February 2020 after the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica reported on increases in grisly violence, gang control and substandard living conditions. The news organizations found that state lawmakers had known about these problems for years and had done little to fix them.

In one example, a cellphone video appeared to show a fight at Parchman. Prisoners can be heard egging on the violence. Prison officials declined to authenticate the video, but several inmates said it matched details of the facility. Prison authorities later reported that a man was killed around the same time the video was circulating on social media.

“I’ve got him in a chokehold,” one inmate boasts.

Another inmate cheers him on: “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Dead. Oh, yeah. Dead. Deaaaaad.”

After the report, U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and others called on the DOJ to investigate.

U.S. Attorney Clay Joyner of Oxford said: “Prisons have a constitutional obligation to keep safe the incarcerated persons who depend on them for their basic needs. Mississippi violated the rights of persons incarcerated at Parchman by failing to keep them safe from physical violence and for failing to provide constitutionally adequate mental health care.”

In a 59-page report, the DOJ said the prison had failed to protect inmates from violence at the hands of others, provide adequate mental health treatment or take sufficient suicide prevention measures. The report said penitentiary officials had subjected prisoners to “prolonged isolation in solitary confinement in egregious conditions that place their physical and mental health at substantial risk of serious harm.”

DOJ officials say they are committed to working with the state to ensure that prisoners’ civil rights are protected. Joyner told reporters that Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain, who was appointed in 2020, has already implemented some changes.

Responding to the department’s allegations, Gov. Tate Reeves said, “We have made significant strides at Parchman in the last two years, everything from significantly reducing the number of inmates at Parchman all the way to working with the Legislature this year to get funding to increase the number of officers we have.”

Parchman has a long history of being one of the nation’s worst prisons, but by 2011, it had turned a corner. After ‌nearly four decades‌ ‌of‌ ‌court‌ ‌monitoring‌ ‌and‌ ‌an‌ ‌infusion‌ ‌of‌ ‌taxpayer‌ ‌dollars,‌ ‌new‌ ‌facilities‌ ‌had‌ ‌been‌ ‌built.‌ ‌Prisoner‌ ‌abuse‌ ‌had‌ ‌declined.‌ ‌A‌ ‌judge‌ ‌ended‌ ‌federal‌ ‌oversight‌,‌‌ ‌and‌ ‌Mississippi‌ ‌was‌ ‌once‌ ‌again‌ ‌entrusted‌ ‌with‌ ‌the‌ ‌care‌ ‌of‌ ‌its‌ ‌inmates.‌

In the years that followed, conditions at Parchman began to deteriorate. By 2017, accreditation for the prison had lapsed. Ron Welch, a Jackson lawyer who represented the state’s inmates until the monitoring ended, called the prison’s conditions an “unbelievable nightmare.”

The DOJ report said that Parchman inmates have been subjected to “an unreasonable risk of violence due to inadequate staffing, cursory investigative practices and deficient contraband controls,” adding that “these systemic failures result in an environment rife with weapons, drugs, gang activity, extortion and violence, including 10 homicides in 2019.”

Six homicides took place in 2020, three of them in a single week in January, when one inmate was stabbed 89 times, another 75 times and a third strangled to death, according to the report.

Another killing took place in October 2020, when several individuals stabbed an inmate 12 times in Unit 30’s shower. “The sole correctional officer assigned to watch the approximately 180 incarcerated persons in that area did not observe any signs of disturbance from her position in a tower removed from the floor,” the DOJ report said. “Approximately three hours after the stabbing, an incarcerated person alerted the officer that another incarcerated person needed help, and she called for backup. When help arrived, they found the victim unresponsive, and he was pronounced dead a few minutes later.”

An inmate told an investigator with the Mississippi Department of Corrections, or MDOC, that the killing was gang related. The DOJ report said state investigators blamed the death on a staff shortage but did not “investigate the alleged gang cause or take any interest in what happened to the apparently unrecovered weapon.”

The DOJ said this homicide illustrates how Parchman inmates are “on their own. It further demonstrates how MDOC’s cursory investigations fail to address the underlying causes for violence, such as gang activity, or the location of the weapon after the incident to prevent future violence.”

The DOJ cited MDOC’s “gross understaffing” in its report: “Although MDOC has made some efforts recently to recruit and hire more staff, Parchman has been operating with roughly half the needed staff since at least 2018.”

Because of that lack of staffing, the report alleged, two inmates in Unit 30 were stabbed on Jan. 21, 2020, but did not receive medical care until a dozen hours later when they were discovered. One inmate died later that day from skull fractures, rib fractures and other injuries. Another homicide took place just a few hours later.

Between 2014 and 2021, the number of correctional officers plummeted from 1,591 to 667. The inmate population shrank during that time from 21,919 to 16,945.

“The lack of supervision and staff presence on Parchman housing units creates an authority vacuum — where individuals incarcerated at Parchman rather than staff control the day-to-day operations of the units,” the report said. “As evidence of this absence of authority, persons confined to Parchman have openly defied contraband restrictions, posting photos of themselves on social media, or posting photos and videos of decrepit conditions in a cry for help. Unless MDOC institutes effective, necessary remedies to alleviate Parchman’s staffing and supervision crises, staff and incarcerated persons will remain at an unreasonable risk of serious harm.”

Even after succeeding in getting lawmakers to provide raises to correctional officers, Cain said it’s been difficult to recruit because of competition for workers.

The report said that MDOC fails “to identify incarcerated persons in need of mental health care. Parchman has too few qualified mental health staff to meet the mental health care needs of persons confined at Parchman, which results in serious harm.”

DOJ officials also said that MDOC failed “to identify individuals at risk of suicide and houses them — often unsupervised — in dangerous areas that are not suicide resistant.” In addition, MDOC fails to adequately train officers to identify signs and symptoms of suicidal behavior, the report said. Twelve individuals incarcerated at Parchman died by suicide in the last three years, all in single cells.

“The problems at Parchman are severe, systemic, and exacerbated by serious deficiencies in staffing and supervision,” the report said.

Former Corrections Commissioner Pelicia Hall repeatedly asked the Republican-controlled Legislature for more money to hire guards and to fix up Parchman’s maximum-security block, known as Unit 29, but the request went nowhere, despite MDOC saying publicly that the unit was “unsafe for staff and inmates.”

On New Year’s Eve in 2019, “a fight in Parchman’s Unit 29 sparked what would become a prison riot lasting several weeks,” according to the report. “In the months leading up to the riot, there had been widespread reports about unlivable and unsanitary conditions through Parchman; violent murders and suicides on the rise; staffing plummeting to dangerous levels; and mounting concerns that gangs were filling the void left by inadequate staff presence and gaining increasing control of Parchman through extortion and violence.”

Despite those crises, Parchman staff were “caught off guard, utterly overwhelmed, and ultimately unable to adequately and quickly respond to fighting and significant injuries in multiple buildings,” the report said.

DOJ officials say their investigation of conditions at South Mississippi Correctional Institution, Central Mississippi Correctional Facility and Wilkinson County Correctional Facility is continuing.

The DOJ is encouraging those with relevant information to contact it by phone at 833-591-0288 or by email at Community.MSDoc@usdoj.gov.

by Emily Hopkins and Andrea Suozzo

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

On Thursday, ProPublica added staff COVID-19 vaccination data to the Nursing Home Inspect database. The project already lets researchers, reporters and the public search deficiency reports and other data across more than 15,000 nursing homes in the U.S. Now, users can quickly compare staff vaccination rates across states and between nursing homes.

More than a year after COVID-19 vaccines became widely available in nursing homes nationwide, the facilities have gone a long way toward blunting the virus’s threat to their most vulnerable residents.

Today, 88% of nursing home residents and 89% of employees are fully vaccinated, outstripping the rate among the general public. Even as cases soared to record levels in January with the rise of the omicron variant, the death rate of nursing home residents was a fraction of what it was during the surge at the end of 2020.

But with the pandemic now in its third year, thousands of workers have found a way to avoid getting vaccinated, claiming what experts say are questionable medical exemptions from a federal mandate for health care employees, which went into effect this year.

Although few reasons exist for claiming a medical exemption, nearly 20,000 nursing home workers nationwide, or about 1 in 100, have obtained them, according to a ProPublica analysis of federal data. That rate is three times that of nursing home residents, a notably vulnerable group, who didn’t get the vaccine for medical reasons.

Dr. Jana Shaw, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse who studies vaccine hesitancy, said she thinks medical exemptions are being abused. “Previous research has shown, as we started mandating vaccinations, people will find avenues to get out of the obligation of getting vaccinated,” she said.

For every million doses of the vaccines available in the U.S., there have been fewer than six incidents that were serious enough to warrant not getting the vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.

The consequences of an unvaccinated staff can be deadly. A recent study by a group of U.S. university researchers found that higher vaccination rates among nursing home employees could have reduced COVID-19 deaths among residents by nearly one-half during a two-month period last summer. The virus has now killed more than 150,000 nursing home residents and staff since the pandemic began.

About 1.7 million of 1.9 million nursing home workers across more than 15,000 U.S. facilities have gotten fully vaccinated since the shots became available in early 2021, according to CDC data as of late March. Since the announcement of a federal mandate for health care workers, more than 500,000 of those workers got their vaccinations, raising the national vaccination rate from 65% in September to 89% in late March.

But staff vaccination rates vary by state and by facility. One in six nursing facilities has a vaccination rate of less than 75%, according to CDC data. Nursing homes in Rhode Island, for example, have a vaccination rate of 99%; nursing homes in Montana have a vaccination rate of 77%.

Even in Areas With High Staff Vaccination Rates, Some Homes Lag

The percentage of staffers at each U.S. nursing home who were fully vaccinated as of late March. Each dot represents one nursing home.

Note: The vaccination rate is shown if a home reported data within the three most recent weeks. Data: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Andrea Suozzo/ProPublica)

The number of staff members who have claimed a medical exemption, meanwhile, has increased from about 9,400 when the mandate was announced to just under 20,000 as of late March. The data is self-reported by nursing homes and may contain some errors.

Many of the employees claiming medical exemptions cluster in the same nursing homes: In 27 of Ohio’s more than 900 nursing homes, over 15% of employees have claimed medical exemptions — more than in any other state. And in California, where only 4% of the state’s nursing home workers are unvaccinated, 23 facilities have claimed exemptions for 15% or more of their staff.

In more than a dozen facilities, a third to a half of the staff members have said they have a medical reason to forgo getting vaccinated. Those clusters have raised questions among scientists, said Tim Leslie, a researcher at George Mason University who has studied vaccination rates.

“That suggests some level of organization to achieve that outcome,” he said.

The CDC recommends that even people who had a nonserious allergic reaction to a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine take the full course. Only those with truly life-threatening allergies to the vaccine or one of its ingredients should avoid it, the CDC has said.

A far larger group — 164,000 workers — has declined to get the vaccine for another reason, which can include a religious objection. The federal government doesn’t track the number of religious exemptions.

Between medical exemptions and workers who refuse the vaccine for other reasons, more than 1 in 5 nursing home workers in Montana, Wyoming and Ohio have yet to get vaccinated — the highest rates in the country, according to the CDC data.

In a statement, the American Health Care Association/National Center for Assisted Living, which represents long-term care facilities, said nursing homes are committed to getting their employees vaccinated. It noted that unvaccinated workers must take precautions to prevent the spread of infection.

“Each hesitant staff member has their own unique reason(s) for choosing not to get the vaccine,” the statement said. “Despite rampant misinformation spreading online, the industry has made significant progress. We have found that it takes a multi-pronged, persistent approach to help increase vaccination rates.”

Facilities with unvaccinated workers face graduated penalties that could result in losing federal funding as a “final measure,” according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that regulates nursing homes. The agency has the data to identify facilities with unusually high rates of medical exemptions, but it has instructed state inspectors to review the exemptions only during routine visits rather than during special inspections. It could be months before visits are made to some facilities.

CMS has told inspectors not to examine religious exemptions.

The gaps in vaccination, the potential abuse of exemptions and the current enforcement program have advocates for residents concerned that too many nursing home workers will remain unvaccinated.

“If you don’t really believe it should be a mandate, don’t make a mandate,” said Tony Chicotel, a staff attorney with California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform. “If you do think it should be a mandate, then enforce it.”

In a statement, a CMS spokesperson said that the agency “remains pleased by progress to-date” and that its goal is to bring nursing homes into compliance rather than discipline facilities. It said, too, that exemptions “could be appropriate in certain limited circumstances.”

“No exemption should be provided to any staff for whom it is not legally required or who requests an exemption solely to evade vaccination,” the statement said.

At least one facility has been cited by state regulators for an employee claiming a false medical reason to forgo the vaccine. Inspectors issued a deficiency to Premier Washington Health Center in Washington, Pennsylvania, after an employee obtained a medical exemption for multiple sclerosis. The condition is not among those the CDC lists as qualifying for an exemption; the employee was later granted a different exemption, according to the state’s inspection report.

Officials at Premier Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

In Michigan, 20 facilities that until initially reported large numbers of exemptions are operated by NexCare WellBridge Senior Living, which has 26 nursing homes in the state, according to its websites. The company reported that more than 500 of its roughly 3,300 employees had claimed a medical exemption as of Feb. 27. Only 32 residents in those facilities didn’t get the vaccine because of medical reasons as of that date.

The company revised its data after ProPublica questioned it. The company’s facilities are now reporting 54 medical exemptions across 10 facilities; 16 facilities are now reporting no medical exemptions.

Holli Titus, a company spokesperson, said in a statement that exemption requests “are not indicative of the nursing home, but of our country’s (and certain regions’) overall vaccine hesitancy.”

“NexCare and WellBridge remain confident that state surveyors will find our vaccination records in order and in compliance with federal regulations,” she said, adding later that the reporting process for vaccinations “caused confusion” among nursing home companies. The company “will continue to evaluate the reporting process and make adjustments if more clarification becomes available.”

Leslie, the health researcher, said people who are reluctant to get vaccinated will seek ways around the mandates. He observed this among California schoolchildren after the state in 2015 eliminated a personal-belief exemption for vaccines kids must get to attend school. The following year, the rate of medical exemptions nearly tripled, according to his research.

Leslie found that the increase was even higher in counties that had previously reported the highest rates of personal exemptions, suggesting that some parents who were hesitant to get their children vaccinated had found physicians willing to grant them medical exemptions.

“We were surprised at the level of medical exemptions, and we were concerned that they had turned into another avenue for hesitant parents,” he said.

The nation’s nursing homes will soon face another challenge: waning immunity of those who have received COVID-19 vaccines. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized second boosters for people 50 and older and for some immunocompromised adults. But many nursing home staff members and residents still have not received their first booster shot.

Only 44% of nursing home employees have received a booster shot, driven in part by delays in their initial vaccinations. In contrast, 69% of nursing home residents have received their first booster.

Booster Adoption Lags Among Nursing Home Staffers Data: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Andrea Suozzo/ProPublica)

In its statement, CMS said that it considers workers who have completed the initial vaccine series to be fully vaccinated, a definition the CDC also uses, and that boosters remain optional. It did not say if it would require boosters in the future.

Dr. Brian McGarry, a health services researcher at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York who has studied the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines in nursing homes, called lags in administering boosters to residents a “policy failure,” especially when compared with previous efforts to quickly get residents vaccinated in early 2021.

“The right time to do it would be before the omicron wave, and we missed the boat on that,” he said.

With that wave fading, most U.S. cities have relaxed coronavirus restrictions, even as experts warn that a more transmissible subvariant has become the dominant strain. That is prompting fears that another surge is looming.

“The mandate was the last push,” Shaw, the New York physician, said. “I don’t think we have much more left.”

Ruth Talbot contributed reporting.

by Ruth Talbot

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

On Thursday, ProPublica added staff COVID-19 vaccination data to the Nursing Home Inspect project.

The virus has killed more than 150,000 nursing home residents and staff since the beginning of the pandemic. Experts say that staff vaccination is a key part of protecting residents from outbreaks in their homes, but thousands of workers remain unvaccinated despite a federal COVID-19 vaccination mandate for health care employees. Some of those unvaccinated workers are claiming medical exemptions, which doctors say should be rare.

Nursing Home Inspect already lets the public, researchers and reporters search deficiency reports and other data across more than 15,000 nursing homes in the United States. Now, users can quickly compare staff COVID-19 vaccination and booster rates across states and between nursing homes.

Each state page allows users to sort homes by vaccination rate, making it easy to identify homes in your state with very low or very high vaccination rates. For each nursing home, a chart allows users to see how the home compares with both state and national averages.

Additionally, we have removed the COVID-19 case and death count data from the database because the figures were reported cumulatively and do not provide an accurate picture of recent outbreaks.

If you write a story using this new information, or you come across bugs or problems, please let us know!

by Karim Doumar

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our data newsletter, which you can sign up for here.

One of the most basic functions of data journalism is to independently verify government officials’ claims.

So when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and state officials started to boast that Operation Lone Star — a now multibillion-dollar initiative launched in March 2021 to battle cross-border crime — had resulted in thousands of arrests, multiple drug seizures and numerous referrals of unauthorized immigrants to the federal government for deportation, we asked for the underlying data. It was immediately clear that examining the operation’s achievements would be a challenge.

ProPublica’s joint investigative unit with The Texas Tribune partnered with The Marshall Project to collect and analyze the data state agencies were keeping about the operation and report out the findings. I chatted with Marshall Project data reporter Andrew Rodriguez Calderón to learn more about how the newsrooms used data to identify questions about the state’s narrative surrounding Operation Lone Star.

(By the way, The Marshall Project is an investigative newsroom focused on criminal justice. It produces incredible work that you can get it in your inbox by signing up for one of these newsletters.)

As Calderón told me, Texas’ Department of Public Safety sent records about Operation Lone Star last summer in response to requests from our reporters. But the data the agency initially gave us was a mess.

There were two releases that came from three different departments with dissimilar ways of recording arrests and charges. In most cases, each row of the data represented one charge (and it’s important to note that an arrest can result in multiple charges), but the way the charges were entered was not standardized or easy to understand. This made it nearly impossible to analyze.

A small sample of data the state provided last summer.

“We were trying to reconcile all of those datasets to turn them into one master representation,” Calderón said.

Four reporters — Calderón and his Marshall Project colleague Keri Blakinger, along with Lomi Kriel and Perla Trevizo from the ProPublica-Texas Tribune partnership — spent hours combing through thousands of rows and manually comparing the arrest data with the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report and the Texas penal code in order to standardize the charges and then group similar charges into buckets.

That meticulous data review was both frustrating and galvanizing for the team of reporters, who wondered how Abbott and other state officials had drawn the conclusions underlying their nearly weekly public statements.

“We hadn’t been able to shape this data to be able to say something about it. So how were they doing it?” Calderón asked as he explained the process.

In November, the state sent the reporters new data that standardized the charges, making it easier to analyze. DPS officials asked reporters to ignore the previous data the agency released, saying it only included charges from some of the counties conducting arrests. The new dataset covered charges from Operation Lone Star’s launch in March 2021 through November, and it included counties beyond the border.

Now, the rows included a column classifying each charge as a felony or a misdemeanor, and there was a column with standardized charges. This meant that Calderón could run a simple script to help categorize the charges into groupings.

“Part of the goal of cleaning the data was for us to be able to classify them as drug charges or vehicle charges or violent charges or traffic offenses, that sort of thing,” Calderón said.

The state later sent us a second comprehensive dataset, which went through December, and then a third, which expanded the time period through January.

We used the third data set to conduct the analysis. Bolstering this data with additional reporting led us to these conclusions about the state’s claims:

• The state’s data includes arrests and charges that had no connection to the border.
• The arrest data includes work done by troopers stationed in the targeted counties before Operation Lone Star’s launch.
• Arrest and drug seizure data does not show how the operation’s work is distinguished from that of other law enforcement agencies.

In response to the findings, the governor’s office maintained that “dangerous individuals, deadly drugs, and other illegal contraband have been taken off our streets or prevented from entering the State of Texas altogether thanks to the men and women of Operation Lone Star.” But DPS and Abbott have provided little proof to substantiate such statements.

And the team found another wrinkle in the state’s narrative as it conducted its analysis. Reporters compared the three different datasets with one another, looking at how the data changed over time.

Calderón compared the different datasets the team had received from the state using what’s called an anti-join function.

A join function takes two datasets, finds matching rows and combines their columns. An anti-join does the opposite. Instead of adding sheets together, it analyzes two sets of similar data and outputs only the rows that are different between them.

Using this function, Calderón found that by the time DPS gave the news organizations the third dataset in January, more than 2,000 charges had been removed. The state stopped counting them toward Operation Lone Star after the news organizations started asking questions.

Asked by the news organizations why such charges were not excluded from the operation’s metrics at the start, DPS officials said they are continuously improving how they collect and report the data “to better reflect the mission” of securing the border. The officials said it wasn’t valid to say charges had been removed.

But in the explanation at the bottom of the story, reporters clarify:

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

Basically: We stand by our analysis.

Being systematic about data and documenting every step might take time on the front end, but it makes the process more transparent, easier to replicate and stronger overall.

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

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

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

In October 2005, Texas Gov. Rick Perry traveled to the border city of Laredo and announced Operation Linebacker, a new initiative that he said would protect the state’s residents from terrorist groups such as al-Qaida.

Without pointing to evidence, Perry said such terrorist groups, along with drug cartels and gangs, were attempting to exploit the U.S.-Mexico border. A press release from the governor’s office said Perry warned that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, criminal organizations could “import terror, illegal narcotics and weapons of mass destruction.”

Perry said Texas would step in to fill the gaps left by the federal government, increasing state law enforcement presence along the border and providing new investigative tools. He stopped short of directly attacking President George W. Bush or the Republican-led Congress. “The state of Texas cannot wait for the federal government to implement needed border security measures,” Perry said, explaining that the state would use $10 million in funding that included federal grants for the operation. Two months later, the governor highlighted his border security efforts while announcing his reelection campaign.

Over the next 17 years, Perry and his successor, Gov. Greg Abbott, persuaded the Texas Legislature to spend billions of dollars on border security measures that included at least nine operations and several smaller initiatives. Each time, the governors promised that the state would do what the federal government had failed to: secure the border.

The pronouncements often coincided with their gubernatorial campaigns or times when they were considering bids for higher office. Perry and Abbott also ramped up their political attacks on the federal government during periods when Democrats held the presidency or a majority in Congress.

In 2007, with Bush still in office but Democrats in control of Congress, Texas allocated $110 million in state funding to border security. The figure swelled to nearly $3 billion last year as Abbott criticized newly inaugurated President Joe Biden, claiming Biden had not done enough to stop drug and human smuggling.

Texas Governor Receives Record Funding for Border Security

State funding for border security grew from $110 million in 2008-2009 to nearly $3 billion for the 2022-2023 budget cycle. The most recent legislative session marked the first time that the Texas governor’s office received the largest share of border security funding, representing nearly half of the appropriations for the two-year period.

Source: Texas Legislative Budget Board appropriations reports (Lomi Kriel, ProPublica/Texas Tribune. Andrew Rodriguez Calderón, The Marshall Project)

In launching Operation Lone Star in March 2021, Abbott claimed the initiative would “combat the smuggling of people and drugs into Texas.” About four months later, the governor also directed state police and the National Guard to arrest some immigrant men on criminal trespassing charges for crossing the border through private property.

Abbott, who is seeking reelection, expanded the operation in the past two weeks. He directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to inspect every commercial truck crossing into the U.S. through the state, a move that has drawn criticism for hampering border commerce. Abbott discontinued the inspections days later, saying he’d reached agreements with his Mexican counterparts to increase enforcement south of the border. Some of the security measures included in the agreements had already been in place in Mexico.

The governor also started busing immigrants, who are processed and released by the federal government, to Washington, D.C., on a voluntary basis. Abbott said both measures were in response to the Biden administration’s decision to bring an end, in May, to Title 42, a pandemic-era emergency health order under which most immigrants, including those seeking asylum, could be immediately turned away from the border.

An investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and The Marshall Project last month revealed that the numbers the state reported to demonstrate Operation Lone Star’s success have included arrests that had nothing to do with the border or immigration and drug seizures from across the state made by troopers stationed in targeted counties prior to the operation.

The way the governors and their administrations have tracked success has fluctuated over the years, offering little clarity into whether the state is closer to securing the border today than it was nearly 20 years ago.

Neither the governor’s office nor the DPS, the main agency leading border security efforts, can provide a full breakdown of the state-led operations since 2005, their duration, their cost to taxpayers and their accomplishments. Because the state has declined to provide such information, the news organizations compiled a partial list of recent border operations and their outcomes using news releases and media coverage, as well as reports by both the Texas Legislative Budget Board, the state’s top budget analysts, and advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union.

Perry could not be reached for comment through a representative. Abbott’s office didn’t respond to questions about tracking the success of the state’s initiatives and the continued need for border operations. Instead, Abbott spokesperson Renae Eze repeated the governor’s claims that the latest operation was a response to the federal government’s failure under Biden to secure the border. She reiterated that Operation Lone Star kept “millions of deadly drugs and thousands of criminals and weapons” off the streets.

Department of Public Safety agents arrest a man for trespassing on private property as part of Operation Lone Star in Kinney County, Texas. (Verónica G. Cárdenas for ProPublica/The Texas Tribune) 2005 Operation Linebacker

Description: Launched to reduce border crime and violence, the operation was led by the Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition, which represents law enforcement agencies across the region. The initiative allocated federal criminal justice grants through the governor’s office to local law enforcement for patrols in “high threat” areas. It sent at least 200 DPS troopers to the border temporarily, permanently assigned 54 DPS investigators to the region and deployed National Guard members to provide training for local law enforcement, according to the Associated Press reports and press releases from the governor’s office.

Stated reason: Perry pointed to the 9/11 attacks as justification for the operation. “Al Qaeda and other terrorists and criminal organizations view the porous Texas-Mexico border as an opportunity,” he said in a statement. The governor praised the federal government for providing 1,000 new Border Patrol agents and making other investments, but said the Republican-led Congress needed to do more.

End date: 2006

Cost: Roughly $10 million in federal criminal justice grants distributed through the governor’s office.

Claimed success: The initiative seized more than $3 million in cash, along with drugs worth more than $77 million and weapons valued at more than $36,200, according to a 2015 Legislative Budget Board report. The state’s budget analysts also noted a lack of consistent reporting on border security that they said made it difficult to determine whether funding was appropriately allocated or if the expected outcomes were achieved.

Reported concerns: A November 2006 analysis from the El Paso Times found that 16 participating sheriff’s departments spent federal dollars, intended to fight drugs and crime, to instead enforce immigration laws. Officers caught undocumented immigrants seven times more often than they arrested criminals, according to the newspaper. The El Paso Times also obtained state reports from the operation that did not show any terrorism-related arrests over a six-month period.

2006 Operation Rio Grande

Description: The operation aimed to “attack ruthless, transnational criminal enterprises and gangs,” Perry said in a press release. The initiative, which the governor launched in February, became the umbrella operation for several smaller measures. (Perry’s office counted the narrower initiatives as individual operations). Those measures deployed additional resources, including National Guard members, for approximately three-week periods to border regions including El Paso, Laredo and Del Rio.

Stated reason: Perry pointed to several incidents that had taken place in Mexico, including the arrest of four Iraqi men reportedly headed to the U.S., to justify the need for the operation. “There is not only great concern that the drug trade is becoming more aggressive, but that terrorist organizations are seeking to exploit our porous border,” Perry said at the time. “The state will not wait for Washington to take all the necessary actions.” The governor did not mention Bush or the Republican-led Congress.

End date: October 2006

Cost: Unclear. A spokesperson for Perry told The Brownsville Herald that as part of Operation Rio Grande, Texas sent nearly $25 million to local law enforcement agencies between October 2005 and September 2006, but the article did not specify how much was spent on individual operations. The funding was a combination of state and federal dollars.

Claimed success: On Oct. 17, 2006, Perry touted a crime reduction of about 60% in participating border counties. The El Paso Times reported that Steven McCraw, who at the time was the Texas Homeland Security director, acknowledged the figure did not prove there had been a sustained drop in crime or reflect issues such as criminals shifting their activities to another area. Instead, it represented the average decrease compared to the previous year in several counties where law enforcement “surges” had been carried out at varying times over a four-month period.

Reported concerns: Experts told the newspaper that Perry and state officials failed to account for other reasons that crime could fall before and after the operations or what types of crimes had declined. A Border Patrol spokesperson also told the newspaper that illegal border crossings had dropped dramatically before the state-led operations began.

2007 Operation Wrangler

Description: Launched in January, the initiative included the work of more than 6,800 local, state and federal law enforcement personnel. They focused on known “smuggling corridors” along the border and in areas hundreds of miles away such as Dallas. The operation deployed vehicle, marine and air support to the border.

Stated reason: Perry recognized Mexico’s newly elected President Felipe Calderón for cracking down on drug cartels, but cited continued violence in that country as a reason for ramping up border security funding. He said the operation was needed to “send a message to drug traffickers, human smugglers and criminal operatives that their efforts to exploit our international border will come at a great cost to them and their illegal operations.”

End date: July 2007

Cost: Unclear. A 12-day National Guard deployment under the operation cost $1.1 million, according to the Legislative Budget Board.

Claimed success: Perry said the initiative arrested “hundreds of criminals” and seized “thousands of pounds of illegal drugs” during the first “high intensity phase” that ran from Jan. 17 to Jan. 29. More than 2,770 people were sent to federal immigration officials for deportation and 136 people were detained on human smuggling charges during that period, according to the release. That April, Perry claimed another phase of the initiative had reduced crime by 30% in the El Paso area during a 30-day period. A review of news reports by ProPublica, the Tribune and The Marshall Project was unable to find evidence that the governor provided data to substantiate those claims.

Reported concerns: After about a week, the Mexican Consulate in Dallas raised concerns about racial profiling to the Dallas Morning News. A consulate spokesperson said dozens of people were stopped for traffic violations and illegally asked for their immigration documents. The spokesperson pointed out state and local officials were not authorized to enforce federal immigration law. In response to the allegations, a spokesperson for Perry’s office told the news organization that while the operation didn’t target immigrants, law enforcement officers were within their rights to call in immigration officials if they discovered people were in the state without authorization.

Operation Border Star

Description: The initiative focused on reducing crime in targeted regions along the border by deploying local and state resources, including an undisclosed number of National Guard members, to coordinate with Border Patrol. The San Antonio Express-News reported in 2012 that the initiative provided money to law enforcement agencies along the Rio Grande for border-related expenses and aided information-sharing between federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.

Stated reason: Without providing proof, Perry claimed Mexican cartels were using gangs, like the Salvadoran group MS-13, to support their operations by “torturing, kidnapping and murdering citizens on both sides of the border.” Perry’s office wrote in a 2008 editorial that more than 430 people with “terrorist ties” had been arrested after crossing into Texas illegally since March 2006. A 2021 report by the Cato Institute, a libertarian organization in Washington, D.C., found that between 1975 and 2020, just nine people who were later convicted of planning a terrorist attack had entered the country illegally. Three of them came across the southern border, according to the report.

End date: Ongoing. The Legislative Budget Board wrote in a 2015 report that all border operations since October 2007 had been folded into Border Star.

Cost: Unclear. In 2007, the Legislature budgeted $110 million in state funding for border security. The allocation included money for Border Star, but it is not clear how much was specifically intended for that operation. The governor’s office awarded at least $43 million to local jurisdictions from 2008 through 2017 as part of Operation Border Star, according to records released to ProPublica, the Tribune and The Marshall Project.

Claimed success: Less than a month after the operation’s launch, Perry’s office claimed in a press release that the initiative had seized more than 11,000 pounds of marijuana, 35 pounds of cocaine and 7 pounds of methamphetamine. The governor also attributed the arrest of 170 unauthorized immigrants in that period to the initiative. Perry’s office claimed that a reduction in calls for assistance to local law enforcement reflected a decrease in criminal activity. The news organizations did not find media stories or reports examining his claims of decreases in criminal activity.

Reported concerns: The operation led to a high level of traffic enforcement, but few substantial drug seizures, according to an ACLU analysis of performance measures for 11 local law enforcement agencies. “Given that traffic stops do not yield effective results for combating organized crime, law enforcement would make better use of resources by investigating serious crimes,” the ACLU concluded in the report.

2012 Operation Drawbridge

Description: A program led by DPS, border sheriffs and Border Patrol that began by installing and monitoring 500 low-cost motion-detecting cameras on participating farms and ranches near the Texas-Mexico border. (The number of cameras has since grown to about 5,500.) As part of the operation, information is shared with federal, state and local law enforcement, who can respond when the cameras are triggered. The operation’s start date is unclear, but a news release by DPS stated that the initiative had had a sustained impact on human and drug smuggling since January 2012.

Stated reason: In announcing additional funding for the operation in October 2012, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples said the cameras were needed to protect landowners harmed by drug and human trafficking.

End date: Ongoing

Cost: Unclear. In 2016, DPS pointed to $4.8 million in expenditures since 2012 after installing about 3,300 cameras. In 2021, the Legislature provided an additional $10 million for the cameras, according to state financial reports.

Claimed success: DPS said in an April 2015 news release that the operation apprehended more than 56,200 people and seized more than 112 tons of drugs. The agency didn’t include proof of those claims.

Reported concerns: State Sen. César Blanco, an El Paso Democrat who was a state representative at the time, was among those who questioned the state’s role in enforcing immigration and the security of the camera system. The operation was a continuation of a 2008 camera program that made only 26 arrests over four years at a cost of roughly $153,800 per arrest, according to the El Paso Times.

2013 Operation Strong Safety

Description: The operation consisted of a three-week deployment of DPS troopers, Texas military personnel and other state law enforcement to the Rio Grande Valley, according to DPS officials. The initiative focused on “conducting around-the-clock saturation patrols on, above and along the Rio Grande River to detect and interdict a substantial percentage of drug and human smuggling activity.” It also included roadside DPS checkpoints.

Stated reason: In a news release, DPS said the operation was launched to address “significant criminal activity,” a “significant number of commercial vehicles on the roadways” and “unsafe driving practices.” The agency tied the three target issues to cartels, saying “increases in Mexican cartel smuggling activity decreases the safety and security of the Rio Grande Valley.”

End date: Oct. 4, 2013

Cost: Unclear.

Claimed success: DPS reported to the state’s budget board that drug seizures in the Rio Grande Valley dropped when the operation was active, from Sept. 15 to Oct. 4, 2013, an indicator that state officials have at times presented as proof of success. The agency compared the three weeks of the operation to the previous three-week period and found a decrease of 49% in marijuana seizures, 42% in cocaine seizures and 95% in methamphetamine seizures, according to news reports.

Reported concerns: State Rep. Terry Canales, a Democrat from the Rio Grande Valley, was among several lawmakers who questioned McCraw in 2013 about the legality, cost and geographic scope of the initiative. Canales said his office had received about 100 calls that claimed DPS checkpoints targeted poor neighborhoods and immigrant communities. Neither DPS officials nor McCraw answered the lawmaker’s questions, Canales’ staff told the Texas Observer.

2014 Operation Strong Safety II

Description: Perry deployed 1,000 Texas National Guard members and hundreds of DPS troopers to the border in June to assist law enforcement in decreasing drug and human smuggling in the Rio Grande Valley.

Stated reason: The governor and DPS cited a growing number of Central American children coming across the southern border, many of them through Texas, beginning in 2013. They said the rapid increase directly benefited Mexican cartels, which profited from smuggling fees and exploited the fact that Border Patrol agents were diverted from their regular duties. Perry, who was considering another run for president, blamed President Barack Obama for the influx. “I don’t believe he particularly cares whether or not the border of the United States is secure. And that’s the reason there’s been this lack of effort, this lack of focus, this lack of resources,” Perry said in a July 2014 interview with ABC News.

End date: Unclear. It morphed into Operation Secure Texas after Sept. 1, 2016, according to the Legislative Budget Board.

Cost: The estimated weekly cost was $1.3 million. It’s not clear how much was ultimately spent on the operation, but between 2014 and 2015, the Legislative Budget Board reported that the state spent about $124 million on Strong Safety II.

Claimed success: Perry boasted repeatedly about the initiative, saying Border Patrol apprehensions dropped as a result of the state’s operation. He did not explain how the state’s efforts led to decreases in federal apprehensions. In a report to the Legislature in February 2015, DPS also took credit, citing a decrease from 6,000 Border Patrol apprehensions in the first week of the operation to fewer than 2,000 after three months.

Reported concerns: While DPS touted seizing 150 tons of illegal drugs in six months, data obtained by the Austin American-Statesman showed the agency contributed to less than 10% of the operation’s drug seizures, with the rest coming from other law enforcement agencies, particularly the Border Patrol. Separately, Adam Isacson, a policy analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, told FactCheck.org that Operation Strong Safety’s role was “minimal at best,” and a report by his organization argued that a combination of the federal government sending more Border Patrol agents and a crackdown by Mexico on immigration from Central America likely contributed most to the drop in apprehensions.

2015 Operation Secure Texas

Description: The initiative included 250 additional DPS troopers permanently stationed in the border region, plus a company of Texas Rangers. It also funded aircraft, boats and vehicles, as well as surveillance cameras and a training facility to address “cross-border corruption and other criminal activity,” Abbott wrote in a letter to then-Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson in September, the month the operation launched.

Stated reason: The initiative was a continuation of Operation Strong Safety, a multi-agency effort to “deny Mexican cartels and their associates unfettered entry into Texas, and their ability to commit border-related crimes, as well as reduce the power of these organizations,” according to DPS Director Steven McCraw.

End date: A Texas Monthly article said that the operation ended in 2018, but records obtained by ProPublica, The Tribune and The Marshall Project included a 2019 grant application to the governor’s office from Kleberg County that mentions additional workload under the operation as one of the reasons that the county wanted a prosecutor dedicated to border crimes.

Cost: In the letter to Johnson, Abbott said the bulk of the $800 million appropriated for border security in fiscal years 2016 and 2017 was dedicated to the operation. He did not give specific numbers.

Claimed success: DPS troopers assigned to the operation captured 7,508 pounds of marijuana, made 561 criminal arrests and issued more than 17,000 traffic citations from September through December 2015, according to presentations by the agency to the Texas Public Safety Commission.

Reported concerns: Lawmakers questioned the results of the operation during a public meeting of the Texas House Committee of Homeland Security and Public Safety in September 2016. “Are we actually more secure simply because we’ve done those things, and is there a number that will show us that in 2014 we were less secure?” asked former state Rep. Alfonso “Poncho” Nevárez, a Democrat from Eagle Pass. News reports from the time do not say if McCraw responded to the question.

2021 Operation Lone Star

Description: Under the operation that launched in March 2021, Abbott deployed more than 10,000 Texas National Guard members and DPS troopers to the border to combat drug smuggling and unauthorized immigration. For the first time, some immigrants are being arrested on state criminal trespassing charges after crossing into the U.S. on private property. The National Guard is also helping build border barriers and creating what Abbott and DPS call a “steel curtain,” a combination of vehicles, concertina wire and shipping containers, to deter anyone seeking to cross.

Stated reason: About two months after Biden’s inauguration, Abbott blamed the new administration for what he called an escalating crisis at the border. When the governor launched the operation, the number of people crossing into the state via the southern border had reached a two-decade high. Under Title 42, more than three-quarters of immigrants apprehended from January through March were immediately turned away.

End date: Ongoing

Cost: DPS estimates spending about $2.5 million per week for up to 1,600 troopers involved in the mission. The Texas Military Department estimates that the current deployment of 10,000 National Guard members will cost an additional $2 billion a year, nearly five times what the Legislature had budgeted for the deployment. The cost doesn’t include additional funding for related expenses such as jails, public defenders and grants awarded to local governments through the governor’s office.

Claimed success: State officials have touted more than 13,000 criminal arrests, tens of thousands of pounds of drugs seized and more than 230,000 unauthorized immigrants referred to the Border Patrol.

Reported concerns: An investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and The Marshall Project found that the state’s claims of success have been based on shifting metrics that included taking credit for uncovering crimes that had no links to the border, work conducted by troopers who were in the region before the operation began, and arrests, drug seizures and immigrant apprehensions made in conjunction with other agencies. More than nine months into the operation, DPS told the news organizations that it had removed about 2,000 charges it deemed not related to border crime from a dataset of arrests credited to Operation Lone Star. The state faces several lawsuits and calls for investigation from Democrats, lawyers and advocacy groups following media reports detailing alleged civil rights violations and court rulings raising questions about the constitutionality of the trespassing arrests. Despite DPS and Abbott’s office highlighting human trafficking and smuggling arrests, the largest share of arrests are of people accused of trespassing on private property. The Army Times and the Tribune have also reported about poor working conditions and suicides among National Guard members deployed under the operation.

A military vehicle in Del Rio, Texas. (Verónica G. Cárdenas for ProPublica/The Texas Tribune)

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by Paul Kiel

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Nikki Spretnak loved being an IRS agent. Being able to examine the books of different businesses gave her an intimate view of the economy. But over the years, she became more and more conscious of a chasm between the business owners she was auditing and herself. It wasn't so much that they were rich and she, a revenue agent in the IRS office in Columbus, Ohio, was not. It was that, when it came to taxes, they lived a privileged existence, one that she, a mere W-2 recipient, did not share.

Over the past year, along with a team of my colleagues at ProPublica, I’ve spent countless hours scrutinizing the tax information of thousands of the wealthiest Americans. Like Spretnak, I’ve seen behind the veil and witnessed the same chasm. Doing my own taxes in the past was never a thrill, but only this spring did I fully realize what a colorless and confined tax world I inhabit.

For me, and for most people, filing taxes is little more than data entry. I hold in my hand my W-2 form from my employer and dutifully peck in my wages. Next come the 1099 forms that list my earnings from dividends or interest, and again my finger gets to work. The IRS has a copy of these forms, too, of course, making this drudgery somewhat pointless. By the end of it, there, in black and white, is my income.

The financial reality of the ultrawealthy is not so easily defined. For one, wages make up only a small part of their earnings. And they have broad latitude in how they account for their businesses and investments. Their incomes aren’t defined by a tax form. Instead, they represent the triumph of careful planning by skilled professionals who strive to deliver the most-advantageous-yet-still-plausible answers to their clients. For them, a tax return is an opening bid to the IRS. It’s a kind of theory.

In that tax world, nearly anything is possible. Stephen Ross is one of the world’s most successful real estate developers, a billionaire many times over, the owner of the Miami Dolphins. Ross, a former tax lawyer, once praised tax law as a particularly “creative” endeavor, and he is a master of the craft. His tax returns showed a total of $1.5 billion in earnings from 2008 to 2017, but he didn’t pay a dime in federal income taxes during that time. How? By mining a mountain of losses he claimed for tax purposes, as ProPublica reported. Look at Ross’s “income” for any of those years, and you’ll see numbers as low as negative $447 million. (He told ProPublica he abides by the tax laws.)

Texas billionaire Kelcy Warren owns a massively profitable natural gas pipeline company. But in an orgy of cake eating and having, he’s able to receive hundreds of millions of dollars from his company tax-free while reporting vast losses to the IRS thanks to energy-industry and other tax breaks, his records showed. (Warren did not respond to our questions.)

Based on those reported “incomes,” both Ross and Warren received COVID stimulus checks in 2020. We counted at least 16 other billionaires (along with hundreds of other ultrawealthy people, including hedge fund managers and former CEOs) among the stimulus check recipients. This is just how our system works. It’s why, in 2011, Jeff Bezos, then worth $18 billion, qualified for $4,000 in refundable child tax credits. (Bezos didn’t respond to our questions.)

A recent study by the Brookings Institution set out with a simple aim: to compare what owners of privately held businesses say they earn with the income that appears on the owners’ tax returns. The findings were stark: “More than half of economic income generated by closely held businesses does not appear on tax returns and that ratio has declined significantly over the past 25 years.”

That doesn’t mean business owners are illegally hiding income from the IRS, though it’s certainly a possible contributor. There are plenty of ways to make income vanish legally. Tax perks like depreciation allow owners to create tax losses even as they expand their businesses, and real estate developers like Ross can claim losses even on appreciating properties. “Losses” from one business can also be used to wipe out income from another. Sometimes spilling red ink can be lots of fun: For billionaires, owning sports teams and thoroughbred racehorses are exciting loss-makers.

Congress larded the tax code with these sorts of provisions on the logic that what’s good for businesses is good for the economy. Often, the evidence for this broader effect is thin or nonexistent, but you can be sure all this is great for business owners. The Brookings study found that households worth $10 million or more benefited the most from being able to make income disappear.

This isn’t just about a divide between rich and poor. Take two people, each earning $1 million, one through salary, the other through their business. Though they may live in the same neighborhood and send their kids to the same private school, they do not share the same tax world.

Under the current system, said John Sabelhaus, a former Federal Reserve economist and one of the study’s authors, “if you’re getting a W-2, you’re a sucker.”

This basic divide is also apparent in how tax laws are enforced. To the IRS, the average worker is an open book, since all their income is disclosed on those W-2s and 1099s. Should they enter an errant number on their tax return, a computer at the agency can easily catch it.

But that’s generally not true for private businesses. Such companies are often tangles of interrelated partnerships that, like densely grown forest, can be hard to penetrate. Auditing businesses like these “certainly is a test of endurance,” said Spretnak, the former IRS agent.

If she managed to solve the puzzle of how income flowed from one entity to another, she moved on to a stiffer challenge. It didn’t matter if what she saw made her jaw drop. She had to prove that the business’s tax geniuses had exceeded even what the generous tax laws allowed them to do. Often, she found, they had. Making her findings stick against a determined and well-funded opponent was her final hurdle.

By the time Spretnak retired in 2018, the IRS had gone from merely budget-constrained to budget-starved. Thousands of skilled auditors like her have left, not to be replaced. Audits of the wealthy have plummeted. Business owners have still more reason to be bold.

On the other side of the chasm from the W-2er, there’s still another tax world, one that’s even more foreign than that of business income. It’s the paradise of unrealized gains, a place particularly enjoyed by the major shareholders of public companies.

If your company’s stock shoots up and you grow $1 billion richer, that increase in wealth is real. Banks will gladly lend to you with such ample collateral, and magazines will put you on their covers. But if you simply avoid selling your appreciated assets (that is, realizing your gains), you haven’t generated income and therefore owe no tax.

Economists have long argued that to exclude such unrealized gains from the definition of income is to draw an arbitrary line. The Supreme Court, as far back as 1940, agreed, calling the general rule of not taxing unrealized gains an “administrative convenience.”

From 2014 to 2018, the 25 wealthiest Americans grew about $400 billion richer, according to Forbes. To an economist, this was income, but under tax law, it was mere vapor, irrelevant. And so this group, including the likes of Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett, paid federal income taxes of about 3.4% on the $400 billion, ProPublica reported. We called this the group’s “True Tax Rate.”

Recently, the Biden administration took a major step toward the “True Tax Rate” way of seeing things. It proposed a Billionaire Minimum Income Tax for the ultrawealthy that would treat unrealized gains as income and tax them at 20%.

To say that the idea’s fate in the Senate is uncertain would probably be overstating its chances. It is nevertheless a landmark proposal. Instead of the usual talk of raising income tax rates on the rich, the Biden proposal advocates a fundamental rethinking.

In the tax system we have, billionaires who’d really rather not pay income taxes can usually find a way not to. They can bank their accumulating gains tax-free and deploy tax losses to wipe out whatever taxable income they might have. They can even look forward to a few thousand dollars here and there from the government to help them raise their kids or get through a national emergency.

You can think of efforts to change this system as a battle between the rich and everybody else. And sure, it is. But it’s also an effort to pull those other tax worlds down to the terra firma of the wage earner, to make it so a W-2 isn’t the mark of a sucker.

by Brittany Freeman, Rocky Mountain PBS

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

A Colorado House of Representatives committee narrowly voted Wednesday to advance a bipartisan measure aimed at limiting homeowners associations’ powers to file foreclosure cases based on fines for community-rule violations, capping such penalties and increasing due process for homeowners.

Colorado law allows HOAs to seek judicial foreclosure against homeowners who are at the equivalent of six months behind on their routine dues, also known as assessments. But that total can include other charges, such as fines, late fees and collection costs — including the HOA’s legal fees.

As Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica reported last week, HOAs across the state have initiated more than 2,400 foreclosure cases — including those involving fines — from January 2018 through February 2022. Those cases continued during the pandemic, as HOAs were not subject to government moratoriums that prevented many mortgage lenders from foreclosing.

“It is absolutely heartbreaking to hear people losing their homes over fees,” said Rep. Edie Hooton, D-Boulder, who voted in favor of the bill. “I would like to see some real meaningful progress on the HOA laws in Colorado.”

House Bill 22-1137 would not stop HOAs from seeking to foreclose against homeowners who are behind on their routine assessments but would prohibit foreclosures in situations where the association’s lien against the home consists only of fines or the costs of collecting them. The proposal would also prevent HOAs from charging daily fines and would cap penalties at $500 per violation, the bill’s sponsors said.

“One person came to us and told us about a fee that started out at $150 and ended up being $3,000. So it racks up pretty quickly and accumulates, and we want to stop that,” Rep. Naquetta Ricks, D-Aurora, one of the bill’s sponsors, told Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica. “If you buy your property and you’ve been paying your mortgage, and now you have a small violation or a fee, is it right for an HOA to be able to foreclose and kick you out of your home? No, it’s not right.”

The Transportation and Local Government committee heard testimony on the bill in early March but did not take a vote until Wednesday. In the interim, the bill’s sponsors met with community stakeholders, including those representing the HOA industry.

Representatives for the Community Associations Institute, a trade organization for HOAs and their managers, told Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica that they support the overall goal of eliminating foreclosures based solely on HOA fines. But they oppose several provisions of the current proposal, including the cap on fines, while hoping to find common ground as the bill moves forward.

“This means that, if a homeowner wants to paint their house pink, has that request denied and does it anyway, the homeowner will be allowed to violate the rules for an extra $500.00 payment. The association’s only option to enforce the covenant will be to then take the owner to court. It’s better to levy a fine that actually makes breaking a rule unattractive,” said the Community Associations Institute’s Lindsay Smith, an HOA attorney.

The bill also requires HOAs to notify homeowners of delinquencies several times in different ways, including posting a notice on the home. HOA leaders have argued that such provisions could increase management costs. HOA homeowner advocate Stan Hrincevich said he disagrees with the argument that the proposal would result in increased costs for homeowners who pay on time, saying HOAs typically bill such costs directly to delinquent homeowners.

Rep. Kevin Van Winkle, R-Highlands Ranch, voted against the bill and told the committee that HOAs are run by volunteer boards, and that homeowners who disagree with the decisions being made in their community have the option of joining the board to change things. “This micromanages on such a microscopic level it’s actually quite incredible,” he said.

The committee passed the bill by a vote of 7-6, with several lawmakers pointing to the dozens of foreclosure cases filed against homeowners in the Master Homeowners Association for Green Valley Ranch as a call to action.

“It is imperative that we address this problem,” said Rep. Meg Froelich, D-Greenwood Village, who added that the issue is at a “crisis point.”

The bill will still need to clear the full House and the Senate.

by Sarah Alvarez, Outlier Media

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

In response to reporting by Outlier Media and ProPublica showing how DTE Energy disconnected electric accounts for nonpayment during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Detroit City Council is calling for the power company to enact a one-year pause on electricity and gas shut-offs.

The resolution, passed at a City Council meeting on Tuesday, cites the findings of an Outlier-ProPublica story last month that analyzed disconnections in Michigan and found DTE shut off accounts 208,000 times between April 2020 and December 2021.

The investigation by the news organizations found that DTE’s rate of electricity shut-offs — disconnections as a proportion of customers — outpaced the six other utilities in Michigan that are owned by private investors and have their prices regulated by the state. Using federal data, the story also compared DTE’s electric rates with other similar utilities in the state. DTE’s residential rates were the second highest in Michigan.

The council began drafting a resolution a week after the investigation was published, and member Gabriela Santiago-Romero introduced it along with another colleague during the group’s most recent meeting. “She’s concerned about the prices of DTE rising and the burden that puts on residents of the city and of her district,” said Hank Kelley, a senior policy analyst for Santiago-Romero, who co-sponsored the resolution with council member Angela Whitfield Calloway.

Santiago-Romero tested positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday and was unavailable to talk.

“We’re still in a pandemic, evidenced by the fact that the council member was impacted just today,” Kelley said. “This impacts people’s ability to work and pay their bills.”

DTE has more than 2 million customers in its service area, which includes Detroit and covers most of Southeast Michigan. The company has told state regulators it has half a million customers living in poverty.

At the onset of the pandemic in 2020, DTE had the shortest moratorium on disconnections of any large utility in the state, three months. The council resolution asks DTE to voluntarily begin a new moratorium on shut-offs, “given the lasting economic impacts of the pandemic, thereby giving its customers some relief.”

The City Council sent its request for a moratorium to DTE executives and to its board of directors; the resolution also requested company leaders come before council to discuss the company’s rates.

Christopher Lamphear, manager of corporate communications for DTE, echoed the utility’s previous skepticism of moratoriums when asked about the council request. “Moratoriums are not always in the best interest of residents because they only allow debt to grow as energy use continues,” he said. “It is important to connect customers to the funds and assistance available, which DTE redoubled efforts to achieve when the pandemic began.”

Lamphear did not disclose how DTE will respond to the resolution. However, he said in an email that the city's Public Health and Safety Committee has invited DTE to provide a response at a future meeting.

He also said DTE is committed to its customers and has helped connect them to more than $100 million in assistance last year, while also forgiving $2.6 million in customer debt in 2020.

He said the City Council is expecting an official response from DTE when the two sides meet, but the timing was undecided.

The Michigan Public Service Commission, the state body responsible for regulating utility companies, also received a copy of the council resolution. The MPSC declined to comment on the resolution but a spokesman said, “The MPSC remains focused on affordability for utility customers and improving assistance programs available for low-income customers.”

DTE has asked the MPSC to allow the company to increase electric rates in order to raise an additional $388 million in annual revenue. The MPSC has until October to decide whether to approve the rate increase.

The MSPC has approved six rate increases for DTE since 2011. In each case, the commission gave DTE about half as much as it requested. DTE’s last rate increase was in the beginning of 2020; the utility said it delayed asking for a rate increase until this year because of the pandemic.

DTE’s residential rate, measured as the cost of electricity per kilowatt-hour, is the second highest among investor-owned utilities in Michigan, behind the Upper Peninsula Power Company, a utility with only about 50,000 customers in the northern part of the state. It is also higher than the price charged by the largest utility in each of the other Great Lakes states of Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. DTE, however, points to monthly bills across the country and says those figures put it at or below the national average.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has intervened in the current rate case, with an eye toward the impact on consumers. “AG Nessel agrees that energy affordability is essential and has been working hard at reducing or eliminating rate increase requests through advocacy before the MPSC,” her press secretary, Lynsey Mukomel, said.

As for shut-offs for nonpayment, Mukomel said Nessel’s office “is investigating these issues in DTE’s current electric rate case, which allows the office to conduct discovery on these very issues.”