ProPublica

by Mary Hudetz

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.

As he has promoted the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, has lamented the toll that processed foods have taken on the health of Americans, in particular Native Americans.

Prepackaged foods have “mass poisoned” tribal communities, he said last month when he met with tribal leaders and visited a Native American health clinic in Arizona.

Weeks later, in testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, he said processed foods had resulted in a “genocide” among Native Americans, who disproportionately live in places where there are few or no grocery stores.

“One of my big priorities will be getting good food — high-quality food, traditional foods — onto the reservation because processed foods for American Indians is poison,” Kennedy told the committee. Healthy food is key to combating the high rates of chronic disease in tribal communities, he said.

Yet even as the president tasks Kennedy’s agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture with improving healthy eating programs, the USDA has terminated the very program that dozens of tribal food banks say has helped them provide fresh, locally produced food that is important to their traditions and cultures.

That program — the USDA’s Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement program — began under President Joe Biden in late 2021 as a response to challenges accessing food that were magnified by the pandemic. Its goal was to boost purchases from local farmers and ranchers, and the funding went to hundreds of food banks across the country, including 90 focused on serving tribes.

In March, the Trump administration decided the program did not align with its priorities. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins defended the cut of a half-billion dollars by calling the program a remnant of the COVID era.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in a statement, a USDA spokesperson said the department continues to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars through more than a dozen other nutrition programs that help families meet their nutrition needs. For tribal communities, the spokesperson said, that includes the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations for low-income households.

When that program started in the 1970s, it offered processed foods colloquially known as “commodities.” Over the years, the government has added salmon, frozen chicken, produce and other more nutritious options for tribes to include in recipients’ monthly food packages. But few tribes who participate in the Food Distribution Program can purchase food directly from farmers and ranchers, as they were able to do with the now-canceled grant program. Instead, most choose from the USDA’s list of approved and available foods.

Kelli Case, an attorney for the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative at the University of Arkansas, said the program cut by the Trump administration was widely considered an overwhelming success because tribes selected foods based on their nutritional needs and “what people actually want to eat.”

“Having the opportunity to tailor a program makes a huge difference,” she said.

On reservations, the problems addressed by the now-canceled program had been an issue for generations, perpetuated by a string of federal policies, Case added. The pandemic merely “highlighted and exacerbated those issues,” she said.

For instance: In the 1800s, tribes in the West began losing access to traditional food sources — such as berries, salmon and bison — even though treaties promised tribes the right to hunt and fish. Some were removed from their homelands.

The federal government instead provided tribal members with food rations — flour, lard, sugar, coffee and other staples. At the same time, the forcible removal of Native children to boarding schools upended families’ ability to pass along knowledge about the foods they hunted and harvested.

The now-canceled grants helped fill a void, tribes said.

First image: Jason Belcourt, the Chippewa-Cree Tribe’s sustainability coordinator. Second image: Two of the tribe’s bison bulls at the Buffalo Child Ranch. (Aaron Agosto for ProPublica)

On the Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation, in an especially remote stretch of Montana, Jason Belcourt said he believed the Chippewa-Cree Tribe was finally getting closer to providing nutritious, local food to every tribal member in need. He expects the tribe’s USDA funding for local food purchases to run out within weeks.

The funding — $400,000 in the past several years — helped the tribe buy beef and produce from local ranchers and farmers. The money supplied roughly 250 households on a reservation where the nearest supermarket is about 20 miles away.

“We wanted to make sure that we didn’t turn away anybody,” Belcourt said. “There are families that go without meals; there are kids that go without meals.”

The tribe also used the money to help harvest bison from the tribe’s herd, which Belcourt said has “done wonders, not only in terms of the food value.” The harvests became community events where younger tribal members learned how their ancestors butchered and used the buffalo. A sense of tribal identity was being restored, he said.

“There’s a lot of cultural sharing. There’s a lot of remembrance from the old timers of what their grandparents told them and how to use the buffalo,” Belcourt said. “And, believe it or not, there’s some healing that’s going on.”

The harvests will continue, Belcourt said. But it’s unclear how he will make up for the loss of $150,000 in funding that the USDA previously awarded the tribe for local food purchases over the next year.

Other tribes are similarly concerned about the future.

The Walker River Paiute in Nevada was the first to receive one of the grants to source local food, including $249,091 in 2022. The community, 115 miles southeast of Reno, used most of the money on locally sourced produce and eggs, according to the USDA. Of the reservation’s 830 residents, both Native American and not, 40% had received food purchased using the grant, according to the tribe.

“I truly believe no one knows the needs of our tribal citizens better than the tribe,” Amber Torres, then the tribe’s chairman, said in a news release.

In late March, a dozen nonprofits that advocate for Native Americans sent a letter to USDA Secretary Rollins, urging her to reinstate the “critical” program as a step toward respecting the sovereign status of tribes. At a recent meeting with USDA officials, tribal leaders again emphasized that they want a say over the food distributed on their reservations.

First image: A community garden run by the Help Lodge to foster food sovereignty and sustainability on the Rocky Boy's Reservation. Second image: Empty planter shelves in an unused greenhouse at the Help Lodge. Funding cuts have made it difficult to maintain a full staff. (Aaron Agosto for ProPublica)

Tribal communities still have access to the handful of federal food programs. However, last year, the Government Accountability Office, the watchdog arm of Congress, found that some posed barriers to people’s ability to get the food they want or need.

For example, individuals who accept the commodity program’s offerings cannot also receive assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps. As a result, a household’s needs can go unmet. Sometimes SNAP offers essential cooking ingredients — oil, seasoning or yeast — that the commodity program may not provide, according to the study.

(The local food program was not included in the GAO report.)

On the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana, the USDA’s local food program had become a reliable fixture, especially since the federal commodity program was paused there, said Tescha Hawley, who is Gros Ventre, or Aaniiih, and a social worker on the reservation. Structural problems had shuttered the building where the commodity program food was warehoused.

A nonprofit Hawley founded, Day Eagle Hope Project, helped her tribe secure $2 million from the USDA to buy fresh local food and process bison meat from its herd. Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribal members who are capable of gathering wild, nutrient-rich berries exchange them for payment through the grant. She distributed the food first from a shipping container on her property and later a community center.

Over the past few years, the tribe and her nonprofit have distributed thousands of pounds of food. She anticipates the money that remains from past grant funding cycles will run out this winter. For people who can get to a grocery store, up to 45 miles away from some of the reservation’s communities, many will have to make SNAP benefits stretch at a time when food prices are rising.

“So that means even less food for the month,” Hawley said. “People will go without.”

Belcourt said he has begun seeking other grants, and a tribal staffer makes runs to collect food donations in Havre, more than 20 miles away, and Great Falls, about 90 miles away.

“We don't have a Plan B,” Belcourt said of the abruptly canceled grant. “Given the short notice, it’s tough to find a funder in that timeframe.”

by Aliyya Swaby

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

The day after a teenager opened fire in a Nashville high school cafeteria early this year, officials in the district scrambled to investigate potential threats across their schools. Rumors flew that the shooter, who killed a student before turning the gun on himself, had accomplices at large.

At DuPont Tyler Middle School, the assistant principal’s most urgent concern was a 12-year-old boy. James, a seventh grader with a small voice and mop of brown hair, had posted a concerning screenshot on Instagram that morning, Jan. 23. He was arrested at school hours later and charged with making a threat of mass violence.

The assistant principal had to complete a detailed investigation called a threat assessment, as required by Tennessee law. First, she and other school employees had to figure out whether James’ threat was valid. Then, they had to determine what actions to take to help a potentially troubled child and protect other students.

Threat assessments are not public, but the district gave ProPublica a copy of James’ with his father’s permission. School officials did not carry out the threat assessment properly, according to experts who reviewed it at ProPublica’s request. Instead, the school expelled James without investigating further and skipped crucial steps that would help him or protect others. (We are using the child’s middle name to protect his privacy.)

The way school officials handled James’ case also exposes glaring contradictions in two recent Tennessee laws that aim to criminalize school threats and require schools to expel students who make them — with minimal recourse, transparency or accountability.

One obvious issue in the threat assessment, according to the experts, appeared on Page 20. That page features a checklist of options for how the school could address its concerns about James, including advising his parents to secure guns in their home and ensuring he has access to counseling.

Schools should take steps like these even when a student is expelled, according to John Van Dreal, a former school administrator who has spent decades helping schools improve their violence prevention strategies. Officials at James’ school opted for none of the options they could have taken. Instead, the assistant principal wrote under the list in blue pen, “student was expelled.”

“That’s actually about the most dangerous thing you can do for the student,” Van Dreal said, “and honestly for the community.”

Van Dreal’s name appears in tiny print at the bottom of each page of James’ threat assessment, because he helped the school district set up its current process. After ProPublica shared details about James’ case, Van Dreal said, “What I’m hearing is probably more training and more examples are needed.”

One page of the threat assessment form, created by John Van Dreal, used in James’ case (Obtained by ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Nashville’s school district does not collect data on how many threat assessments it does or how many result in expulsions, according to spokesperson Sean Braisted. “The goal is always to ensure the safety and well-being of all students while addressing incidents appropriately,” Braisted wrote. He later declined to answer questions ProPublica asked about James’ case, although James’ father signed a privacy waiver allowing the school to do so.

Tennessee schools must submit data to the state on how effective their threat assessments are — but the state does not release that information to the public. School districts are required to get training on threat assessments, but lawyers and parents say they often carry them out inconsistently and use varying definitions for what makes a threat valid.

Two recent contradictory Tennessee laws make it even harder to handle student threats. One mandates a felony charge for anyone who makes a “threat of mass violence” at school, without requiring police to investigate intent or credibility. The other requires schools to determine that a threat of mass violence is “valid” before expelling a student for at least a year.

James’ alleged threat was a screenshot of a text exchange. One person said they would “shoot up” a Nashville school and asked if the other would attack a different school. “Yea,” the other person replied. “I got some other people for other schools.” The FBI flagged the post for school officials and police. James told school officials that he reposted the screenshot from the Instagram page of a Spanish-language news site.

The Tennessean published a story in April detailing James’ arrest and overnight stay in juvenile detention. The story, and the ones ProPublica and WPLN published last year on other arrests, shows how quickly police move to take youth into custody.

Schools in Tennessee are supposed to follow a higher standard than police when it comes to investigating threats of mass violence: They’re supposed to determine whether a threat is valid. For instance, in Hamilton County, a few hours southeast of Nashville, school officials chose not to expel two students even after police arrested them for threats of mass violence, ProPublica and WPLN previously reported.

Yet when James’ father appealed his son’s expulsion at a March school district hearing, the assistant principal said repeatedly that James had to be expelled simply because he’d been arrested. “We did not investigate further,” she said. James’ father shared an audio recording of the hearing with ProPublica.

James, who turned 13 in February, is small for his age, still awaiting the teenage growth spurt of his three older brothers. At the hearing, his voice was soft but assured as he explained what happened. He said he understands why he shouldn’t have posted the screenshot. But he said he wanted to warn others and feel “heroic.”

Melissa Nelson, a national school safety consultant based in Pennsylvania who trains school employees on managing threats, reviewed James’ threat assessment at ProPublica’s request and concluded that “this is gross mismanagement of a case.”

“This tool has not been used as intended,” she said. “They didn’t do a behavior threat assessment. They filled out some paperwork.”

After the police took James away, assistant principal Angela Post convened a team of school employees to decide whether to expel him. They used a threat assessment form that Van Dreal had developed, one of the most commonly used across the country, to guide them on how to respond.

According to Van Dreal, Metro Nashville Public Schools is in an early phase of using the form, and its staff have flown to Oregon at least once to learn from his consulting group.

Van Dreal tells school officials to use the threat assessment to collect information about a student in trouble and address behavior that could signal future violence. If school officials worried that James was planning an act of violence, they should have pursued some of the many options outlined in the threat assessment to get him help and protect the school from harm.

Instead, they chose none of those options.

Experts said that is one of the biggest mistakes school officials make. “Even if a child is expelled, what I always train is: Out of sight, out of mind doesn’t help,” Nelson said. “Expelling a child doesn’t deescalate the situation or move them off the pathway of violence. A lot of times, it makes it worse.”

School officials also failed to seek out more information that could have helped them figure out whether the threat was valid. Post checked a box acknowledging that she hadn’t notified James’ parents of the threat assessment. She wrote beside it, as an explanation, “student was arrested and expelled.” On a line asking whether James had access to weapons, Post wrote that the threat assessment team did not know.

Interviewing parents is a crucial part of the process, said Rob Moore, a Tennessee psychologist who has helped schools conduct threat assessments for more than two decades. “When you sit in that room with those parents and you collect data from them, you really get a sense of things that teachers would never know, that the administrators would never know.”

Although school officials did not opt to investigate further or to monitor James, the threat assessment indicated they had concerns he may pose a threat. In response to a question about whether James’ caregivers, peers or staff were concerned about his potential for acting out aggressively, Post checked yes and wrote, “He has little to no supervision in discipline structures at home but might think he could get away with it.”

And although James told school administrators he was not a participant in the text thread he shared on Instagram, Post wrote that he had indicated a plan and intention to harm others. “See attached image. Shows location, intent to harm, targets and date,” she wrote, referencing a screenshot of James’ Instagram post. She also wrote that he had a motive: “The post indicated that he was being made fun of. See attached image.”

The threat assessment included questionnaires from James’ teachers; three out of four said they did not have concerns about potential aggression. One teacher, who taught James social studies, cited his disciplinary history: using racial slurs, fighting another student and “researching racially motivated things” on the school computer. “Dad seemed disengaged in conference & somewhat unaware of the child’s school or social or personal issues,” she wrote.

James’ dad and stepmom did not know that the threat assessment accused them of lax supervision at home. That’s because they didn’t even know the threat assessment existed until ProPublica told them about it, more than a week after it took place.

Upon reading the document, their first emotion, after shock, was anger. They said they hadn’t known about the incident with the racial slur, and it was not directly referenced in a copy of James’ disciplinary history. But they felt upset at the insinuation that they had not been involved in James’ life. “We’ve been asking for help, for grades, tutoring,” his dad, Kyle Caldwell, said. “And we really didn’t get any.”

James relaxes at home with his dad, Kyle Caldwell, and the family dog. James was put on court supervision following his arrest. (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)

James said that in early September, his social studies teacher taught the class about World War II. He said the teacher didn’t answer enough of his questions, so he started searching online. The school flagged that he had looked up swastikas. “I didn’t know much about it,” he said. “That’s why I searched it.”

As part of his discipline, the school prohibited him from using its computers. His stepmother, Breanne Metz, shared emails she sent to James’ teachers explaining she and Caldwell were worried about his grades and wanted to help him catch up.

James had been struggling with his parents’ contentious divorce; after his mom lost custody of him, he hadn’t been able to see her in months. Worried, his dad and stepmom arranged for him to see a school counselor. James said the counselor tried to connect with him through their mutual love of video games over about five sessions, which was nice, though “it didn’t really help.” Post wrote in the threat assessment that James had “disclosed confidential information to the school counselor that would support a feeling of being overwhelmed or distraught.”

Then James lost his best friend: Lieutenant Dan, a three-legged pitbull-lab mix named after a character from the movie “Forrest Gump.” Dan joined the family when he and James were both 1, and he died of cancer last November. As James describes it, he was at capacity with the emotions he was dealing with, and his dog’s death was the tipping point. “When someone you love or something you love for your whole life passes away, you can’t hold it,” he said. He sat in class feeling sad and exhausted.

Records show school staff talked with James’ parents about his attendance at school and he was disciplined for not complying with an unspecified request. Then in mid-December, he began a fight with another student, who had been “horseplaying” with him “off and on” and went too far, according to the school report. The following month, he was arrested and expelled.

In the days after the arrest, Caldwell considered hiring a lawyer. Reading the threat assessment “added the urgency” for him to finally make the call. “The puzzle pieces weren’t coming together in their story,” he said. “It really looked like they were going to try to be sweeping their stuff under the rug.”

In mid-March, James sat at the oval table in the district conference room next to his father and across from assistant principal Post. He wore a gray vest over his T-shirt in preparation for an appeal hearing that would determine whether he would be allowed back in school. It had been nearly two months since he had set foot on district property.

Caldwell brought his private lawyer, a rare resource for a school hearing. He showed up that morning nervous but eager to make his case directly to school administrators. The public rarely gets insight into what happens at a school appeal hearing, but Caldwell shared an audio recording with ProPublica.

Post started by reading aloud the social media post that landed James in trouble, stumbling over the shorthand and unfamiliar internet slang. Then, it was James’ turn to speak for himself.

Lisa Currie, the school district’s director of discipline, asked him to explain why he had reposted the screenshot of the texts. “You do understand that once you reposted them from somewhere else, it gave the appearance that this was a conversation that you were having?” she said.

“I just wanted to let people know, feel heroic,” James said. “I didn’t want more people to get hurt.”

James enjoys building and painting the model F-15E fighter jet his dad bought him. (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)

Over the next 40 minutes, Caldwell’s lawyer questioned Post about the process the school used to determine whether James should be expelled. When he pressed her for direct responses, Post repeatedly said that law enforcement and not the school held the primary responsibility for investigating the threat. Although the law requires schools to use a threat assessment to determine if the threat is “valid,” Post and her team based the expulsion entirely on the police’s arrest.

Once local police take over a case, she said, “then it’s not really our investigation anymore.”

“Was it your assessment at the time that he wrote this statement, like physically typed it out on a computer and posted it?” the lawyer asked.

“We did not make that determination,” Post said.

She said school staff did not look deeply through James’ disciplinary history as part of the threat assessment. “That’s not necessarily the purpose of the threat assessment,” she told the lawyer. Because James had been expelled and arrested, “there would not be a reason to be concerned about the return of a student.”

Currie indicated that Post’s approach was supported by district leaders. “The purpose of the threat assessment is to determine appropriate supports and interventions around the students while they’re in the building,” she said. Post and Currie did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment or to written questions.

Post told the lawyer she couldn’t remember whether school staff investigated the origin of the original threat.

“So if there was an actual threat made and somebody else authored this threat, then we don’t know who that is. Would that be a fair statement?” the lawyer asked.

“That is possible,” Post responded. She said James didn’t initially say that he had shared the post to warn others and it wasn’t her place to decide whether he intended to make a threat. “I don’t want to think, ‘Oh, he’s not going to do that.’ And then something just like the previous day happened,” she said, referring to the Antioch High School shooting. Once James was arrested, “it’s in MNPD’s hands,” Post said, referring to the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department.

The lawyer asked Post to explain whether the threat assessment could ever have changed school officials’ decision to expel James: What if school officials found out that the threat was not valid? “Had y’all come on information that he had not written these texts,” he asked, “would it have changed the punishment?”

“We would have had to let our [school resource officer] know and they would have had to go through the MNPD channels,” she said.

“You did not at that time know whether he wrote those text messages or not?” the lawyer asked again.

“Correct,” Post said.

Then, it was Caldwell’s turn to speak. He criticized the school’s decision to leave him out of the initial disciplinary process. He would have explained to James why he should go through “appropriate channels” to report a threat instead of posting it on Instagram. “As a dad,” he said, “there was a teachable parent moment that I didn’t get to have.”

As the hearing came to a close, Currie told Caldwell to expect a decision soon.

The arrest and expulsion cleaved James’ life in two. He now begins many sentences with the phrase “before everything happened.” Before everything happened, he would ride his bike with his brothers and friends to explore the forested land and abandoned houses in the surrounding neighborhoods. They found all sorts of strange garbage: a fire engine’s license plate, wooden pictures of “demonic rituals,” a dentist chair adorned with rusty handcuffs.

James looks for four-leaf clovers in his backyard. (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)

He was able to come home from his night in detention in exchange for agreeing to pretrial diversion with six months of court supervision, a common outcome for students charged with threats of mass violence. While under supervision, he wasn’t allowed to use the computer or phone unsupervised by an adult and was mostly restricted to the streets around his house. “It’s a big neighborhood, but once you get used to it, it’s small,” he said.

The court recently lifted his supervision, earlier than expected. Because he had completed the terms of pretrial diversion, his case was dismissed.

His parents declined Metro Nashville Public Schools’ offer to enroll him in the local alternative school, which primarily serves kids with disciplinary issues who were suspended or expelled from their original schools. Instead, they enrolled him at an online public charter school; he starts in the fall.

As James waited to hear the result of the expulsion hearing, he followed the schedule his dad and stepmom created for him — less a rigorous academic curriculum than a routine to keep him occupied while his stepmom takes calls in her home office. He gets most excited about the hands-on activities, like building and painting the model F-15E fighter jet his dad bought him online.

One night in early April, tornadoes touched down just outside Nashville. James, his five siblings, and two dogs huddled with Caldwell and Metz in the windowless laundry room; the kids wore helmets in case of falling debris. When they got up the next morning, groggy but unharmed, Caldwell checked the mailbox: A letter from the school district was inside.

District officials had reviewed the information from the hearing and determined that “there was not a due process violation of MNPS’ expulsion process.” James was still expelled. Caldwell had prepared his son for this outcome so that he wouldn’t be devastated. James would later joke that the storm had delivered the bad news.

The letter gave the family the option to escalate the appeal through the district process. But the odds of winning and the costs of retaining the lawyer made the effort feel futile. The more the family fought back, the more anxious the 13-year-old felt about his future. Would he feel even worse if they lost again? Would people start to think of him as a bad kid?

That afternoon, talking with his dad about the letter, James quietly considered these questions. Then he went outside to watch the storm clouds.

Paige Pfleger of WPLN contributed reporting.

by Nicole Santa Cruz

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

When a homeless man questioned the Phoenix police’s authority to stop him in February 2020, an officer grabbed him and knelt on his neck while another officer shocked him with a Taser. Another unhoused man said officers threw away his belongings, telling him, “You guys are trash and this is trash.” Other people experiencing homelessness were regularly cited and arrested by the city’s officers during early morning hours for “conduct that is plainly not a crime.”

Those were among the abuses alleged by the Department of Justice last June, following a nearly three-year investigation into the city of Phoenix and its police department. The investigation marked the first time the DOJ had found a pattern of violations against homeless people, including that officers and other city employees illegally threw away their belongings.

In addition, DOJ investigators found that officers disproportionately cited and arrested people experiencing homelessness. They comprised 37% of all Phoenix Police Department arrests from 2016 to 2022, though homeless people account for less than 1% of the population. Investigators said many of those stops, citations and arrests were unconstitutional.

The wide-ranging probe also found officers used excessive force, discriminated against people of color, retaliated against protesters and violated the rights of people with behavioral health disabilities — similar issues to those the DOJ has documented in troubled law enforcement agencies in other cities.

But federal officials announced Wednesday that they had abandoned efforts to compel the city and police to address those issues. The DOJ closed its investigations and retracted findings of constitutional violations in Phoenix and five other jurisdictions, including Trenton, New Jersey. Beyond that, the Department of Justice said it was dismissing Biden-era lawsuits against several other police departments, including in Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed by police five years ago.

The DOJ said requiring the cities to enter consent decrees, which are intended to ensure reforms are enacted, would have “imposed years of micromanagement of local police departments by federal courts and expensive independent monitors, and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of compliance costs, without a legally or factually adequate basis for doing so.”

The city of Phoenix said in a statement that it has “tirelessly focused on enhancing policy, training and accountability measures to ensure the best public safety for everyone who lives, works and plays in Phoenix.” In recent years, the city has enacted policy changes including employee training and the implementation of body-worn cameras.

Legal experts told ProPublica the wrongdoing the DOJ uncovered in Phoenix should be corrected — even though city officials will be under less pressure to act.

“It is a very real shame and a disservice to the residents of these communities to end the work, to stand down and unwind the investigations and to purport to retract the findings,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

The report’s retraction, along with last year’s Supreme Court decision allowing cities to arrest and cite people for sleeping outside even when they have nowhere else to go, could further embolden cities and police departments to marginalize homeless people, said Brook Hill, senior counsel with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a legal advocacy group that focuses on racial justice issues. “They will feel like they have a license to do the sweeps and to otherwise make life in public view uncomfortable for unhoused people,” he said.

Indeed, just last week California Gov. Gavin Newsom urged all local governments in that state to “use their authority affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court” to address encampments.

After the DOJ began the Phoenix investigation in August 2021, Fund for Empowerment, an Arizona advocacy group for homeless people, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona sued the city and police department to stop what attorneys called “unconstitutional raids” on unsheltered people. Its lawsuit accused the city of failing to provide housing and instead turning to encampment removals to clear sidewalks and other areas. “The City has made its message to unhoused individuals clear: engaging in sleep and other essential life activities on the city’s public grounds will lead to detention, arrest, displacement, and the loss of the individual’s personal effects,” the Fund for Empowerment alleged in court documents.

Nearly a month later, a judge issued an injunction preventing the city from enforcing its camping ban against people who can’t find shelter, as well as from seizing and throwing away people’s belongings. The lawsuit is ongoing.

The DOJ’s June 2024 report stated that even after the injunction and new city policies were in place, city officials continued to arrest people for camping and to destroy people’s belongings without notice or the opportunity to reclaim them.

ProPublica, as part of its investigation into cities’ handling of homeless people’s possessions, found that Phoenix rarely stored property seized from encampments. From May 2023 to 2024, the city responded to 4,900 reports from the public involving encampments, according to its records. The city said workers, trained to assess which items are property and which are trash, found items that could be stored at only 405 of the locations it visited. Not all of those belongings required storage because people may have removed them between a report of an encampment and the city’s arrival. The city stored belongings 69 times.

In January 2024, the city issued its own report in anticipation of the DOJ’s allegations. The city said it found nothing to support accusations that police “interfered with the possessions of people experiencing homelessness.” Phoenix officials also said in the report that although the city and police department “welcome additional insights” from the DOJ, they were unwilling to be subjected to a consent decree, a binding plan in which an appointed monitor oversees implementation of reforms.

Attorneys and advocates said that the DOJ’s decision has no bearing on lawsuits filed by private attorneys alleging civil rights violations, including against people who are homeless. The ACLU this week also launched a seven-state effort to file records requests to hold police departments accountable, it said.

Elizabeth Venable, lead community organizer with the Fund for Empowerment, who also helped the DOJ connect with the unhoused community in Phoenix, said she viewed the federal findings as a victory for unhoused people. Despite the retraction by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Venable said, the report still has weight.

“No matter what Pam Bondi says, people are not going to forget it, especially people who learned about something that they were horrified by,” she said.

by Molly Redden

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When top Trump adviser Stephen Miller threatened on May 9 that the administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus in response to an “invasion” from undocumented immigrants, he was operating on a fringe legal theory that a right-wing faction has been working to legitimize for more than a decade.

“The Constitution is clear — and that of course is the supreme law of the land — that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,” Miller said earlier this month in response to a question about Trump’s threat to suspend habeas corpus, the legal right of a prisoner to challenge their detention. Days after Miller’s remarks, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem issued the same warning when a member of a House panel asked her if the number of illegal border crossings meets the threshold for suspending the right. “I’m not a constitutional lawyer,” Noem said. “But I believe it does.”

Hard-liners have referred to immigrants as “invaders” as long as the U.S. has had immigration. By 2022, invasion rhetoric, which had previously been relegated to white nationalist circles, had become such a staple of Republican campaign ads that most of the public agreed an invasion of the U.S. via the southern border was underway.

Now, however, the claim that the U.S. is under invasion has become the legal linchpin of President Donald Trump’s sweeping anti-immigrant campaign.

The claim is Trump’s central justification for invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport roughly 140 Venezuelans to CECOT, the Salvadoran megaprison, without due process. (The administration cited different legal authority for the remaining deportees.) The Trump administration contends they are members of a gang, Tren de Aragua, that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is directing to infiltrate and operate in the United States. Lawyers and families of many of the deportees have presented evidence the prisoners are not even members of Tren de Aragua.

The contention is also the throughline of Trump’s day one executive order “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” That document calls for the expansion of immigration removal proceedings without court hearings and for legal attacks against sanctuary jurisdictions, places that refuse to commit local resources to immigration enforcement.

So far, no court has bought the idea that the U.S. is truly under invasion, as defined by the Constitution or the Alien Enemies Act, on the handful of occasions the government has used the argument to justify supercharged immigration enforcement. Four federal judges, including one Trump appointee, have said the situation Trump describes fails to meet the definition of an invasion. Tren de Aragua “may well be engaged in narcotics trafficking, but that is a criminal matter, not an invasion or predatory incursion,” U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein wrote. Indeed, Trump’s own intelligence agencies found that Maduro is not directing the gang. The Supreme Court has not ruled on the question but froze any more deportations without due process on May 16.

The Trump legal push has been in the works for years. After Trump left the White House, two of his loyalists, former Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli and his now-two-time budget chief Russell Vought, quietly built a consensus for the invasion legal theory among state Republican officials and ultimately helped persuade Texas to give it a test run in court.

Former Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli, first image, and President Donald Trump’s two-time budget chief Russell Vought (Bloomberg and Tom Williams/Getty Images)

Most legal scholars reject the idea that the wave of undocumented immigration fits the original definition of what an invasion is, but they worry nonetheless. When U.S. District Judge Stephanie L. Haines, a Trump appointee, issued a preliminary ruling earlier this month that allowed Trump to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, she did not label immigrants “invaders.” Instead, she proposed that Tren de Aragua was “the modern equivalent of a pirate or a robber.”

If the Supreme Court ultimately takes up the invasion question, a ruling like Haines’ offers a blueprint for sidestepping the issue while giving Trump what he wants, or for embracing the invasion theory wholesale, legal scholars said.

“All this really comes down to the issue of whether the United States Supreme Court is going to allow a president to behave essentially as an autocratic dictator if he’s prepared to make entirely fictitious factual declarations that trigger monarchical power,” said Frank Bowman, a legal historian and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Law.

Under the Constitution, if the United States is invaded, Congress has the power to call up the militia and can allow the suspension of habeas corpus, the constitutional right that is the core of due process. The states, which are normally forbidden from unilaterally engaging in war, can do so according to the Constitution if they are “actually invaded.”

The Alien Enemies Act, an 18th century wartime law enacted during a naval conflict with France, also rests on the definition of an invasion. It allows the president to expel “aliens” during “any invasion or predatory incursion … by any foreign nation or government.” It has only ever been invoked three times, during the War of 1812 and World Wars I and II.

Habeas corpus has likewise been suspended only a handful of times in the Constitution’s nearly 240-year history, including during Reconstruction, to put down violent rebellions in the South by the Ku Klux Klan; in 1905, to suppress the Moro uprising against U.S. control of the Philippines; and in Hawaii after Pearl Harbor in order to place Japanese Americans under martial law. In each of these cases, the executive branch acted after receiving permission from Congress.

An exception was in 1861, when President Abraham Lincoln unilaterally suspended habeas corpus at the outbreak of the Civil War. This provoked a direct confrontation with Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, who ruled that only Congress was empowered to take such an extraordinary step. Congress later papered over the conflict by voting to give Lincoln the authority for the war’s duration.

Today, nearly every historian and constitutional scholar is in agreement that, when it comes to suspending habeas, Congress has the power to decide if the conditions are met.

“The Constitution does not vest this power in the President,” future Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in 2014. “Scholars and courts have overwhelmingly endorsed the position that, Lincoln’s unilateral suspensions of the writ notwithstanding, the Constitution gives Congress the exclusive authority to decide when the predicates specified by the Suspension Clause are satisfied.” Even then, the Constitution only allows Congress to act in extreme circumstances — “when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University who has closely followed these arguments, argues there is virtually no evidence that the drafters of the Constitution thought of an “invasion” as anything other than the kind of organized incursion that would traditionally spark a war.

“The original meaning of ‘invasion’ in the Constitution is actually what sort of the average normal person would think it means,” Somin said. “As James Madison put it, invasion is an operation of war. What Vladimir Putin did to Ukraine, that’s an invasion. What Hamas did to Israel, that’s an invasion. On the other hand, illegal migration, or drug smuggling, or ordinary crime — that’s not an invasion.”

In 1994, Florida Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles Jr. filed the first modern-day lawsuit arguing otherwise. The Haitian and Cuban refugee crises had spawned a new wave of anti-immigration sentiment, and hard-liners accused the federal government of owing states billions for handling immigrants’ supposed crimes and welfare claims. Chiles, who died in 1998, took the concept one step further. He filed a $1.5 billion suit claiming the U.S. had violated the section of the Constitution stating the federal government “shall protect each [state] against Invasion.”

Federal courts slapped down his lawsuit — and a spate of copycat suits from Arizona, California, New York and New Jersey — and the legal case for calling immigration an invasion died out.

In the late 2000s, a group of far-right voices began to revive this approach. Ken Cuccinelli was among the first and most strident. He was an early member of State Legislators for Legal Immigration, part of a powerful network of anti-immigration groups that pioneered efforts like ending birthright citizenship. The organization contended that immigrants were “foreign invaders” as described in the Constitution.

Cuccinelli evangelized for the theory as he rose from a state legislator to an official in Trump’s first Department of Homeland Security.

“Under war powers, there’s no due process,” Cuccinelli told Breitbart radio shortly before his appointment in the first Trump administration. “They can literally just line their National Guard up with, presumably with riot gear like they would if they had a civil disturbance, and turn people back at the border. … You just point them back across the river and let them swim for it.”

Cuccinelli got traction after Trump’s reelection loss. He joined a think tank Vought had founded as its immigration point man. During his time in the first Trump administration, Vought became frustrated that the president’s goals were frequently thwarted. He founded the Center for Renewing America, dedicated to a sweeping vision of remaking the government and society — what ultimately became Project 2025.

In remarks to a private audience at his think tank in 2023, Vought, who is now Trump’s budget chief and the intellectual force behind Trump’s unprecedented executive power grab, said he specifically championed the term “invasion” because it “unlocked” extraordinary presidential powers.

“One of the reasons why we were very, so insistent about coming up with the whole notion of the border being an ‘invasion’ because there were Constitutional authorities that were a part of being able to call it an invasion,” Vought said. Documented and ProPublica obtained videos of Vought’s speech last year. Vought and Cuccinelli did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2021 and 2022, Cuccinelli, with Vought’s help, mounted press conferences and privately urged Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas to proclaim that their states were being invaded.

After Arizona’s then-attorney general, Mark Brnovich, released a legal opinion in February 2022 proclaiming violent cartels had “actually invaded” and opened the door for Ducey to deploy the state’s National Guard, Vought bragged to his audience that he and Cuccinelli had personally provided draft language for the opinion. In a previous email to ProPublica, Brnovich acknowledged speaking to Cuccinelli but said his opinion was “drafted and written by hard working attorneys (including myself) in our office.”

Ducey never acted on the invasion theory. But Abbott was more receptive. He invoked the state’s war powers, citing the “actually invaded” clause, in a 2022 open letter to President Joe Biden. “Two years of inaction on your part now leave Texas with no choice,” he wrote. Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for Abbott, said the governor “declared an invasion due to the Biden Administration’s repeated failures in upholding its constitutional duty to secure the border and defend states.”

Abbott ordered the banks of the Rio Grande river to be strung with razor wire and a shallow section to be obstructed by a 1,000-foot string of man-sized buoys and blades and signed a law, S.B. 4, giving state authorities the power to deport undocumented immigrants.

When the Justice Department sued, Abbott’s administration argued in legal briefs that its actions were justified in part because his state was under “invasion.” Twenty-three Republican attorneys general filed a brief in agreement.

“In both scope and effect, the wave of illegal migrants pouring across the border is like an invasion,” their brief read. “The Constitution’s text, the principle of sovereignty in the federal design, and the broader constitutional structure all support the conclusion that the States have a robust right to engage in self-defense. Contained within that right is presumptively acts to repel invasion.”

Texas’ invasion argument did not prevail. The 5th Circuit has blocked S.B. 4., and a lower court and a three-judge panel skewered Abbott’s constitutional argument in the buoy case. In 2024, the full 5th Circuit ruled under another law that Abbott was entitled to leave the floating barriers in place. It avoided ruling on Texas’ invasion claim altogether — but not without one judge dissenting. Trump appointee James Ho argued courts have no ability to second-guess executives about which threats rise to the level of an invasion and justify military action.

In his speech, Vought credited “the massive take-up rate” of the invasion legal theory to his and Cuccinelli’s behind-the-scenes efforts. Now the concept is being taken seriously by the president’s top advisers as they threaten to upend a core civil liberty.

“The definition of ‘invasion’ has broad implications for civil liberties — that’s pretty obvious,” Somin said. “They’re trying to use this as a tool to get around constitutional and other legal constraints on deportation and exclusion that would otherwise exist. But they also want to use it to undermine civil liberties” for U.S. citizens.

Molly Redden is covering legal affairs and how the second Trump administration is attempting to reshape the legal system. You can send her tips at molly.redden@propublica.org or via Signal at mollyredden.14.

by Robert Faturechi, Pratheek Rebala and Brandon Roberts

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

The week before President Donald Trump unveiled bruising new tariffs that sent the stock market plummeting, a key official in the agency that shapes his administration’s trade policy sold off as much as $30,000 of stock.

Two days before that so-called “Liberation Day” announcement on April 2, a State Department official sold as much as $50,000 in stock, then bought a similar investment as prices fell.

And just before Trump made another significant tariff announcement, a White House lawyer sold shares in nine companies, records show.

More than a dozen high-ranking executive branch officials and congressional aides have made well-timed trades since Trump took office in January, most of them selling stock before the market plunged amid fears that Trump’s tariffs would set off a global trade war, according to a ProPublica review of disclosures across the government.

All of the trades came shortly before a significant government announcement or development that could influence stock prices. Some who sold individual stocks or broader market funds used their earnings to buy investments that are generally less risky, such as bonds or treasuries. Others appear to have kept their money in cash. In one case unrelated to tariffs, records show that a congressional aide bought stock in two mining companies shortly before a key Senate committee approved a bill written by his boss that would help the firms.

Using nonpublic information learned at work to trade securities could violate the law. But even if such actions aren’t influenced by insider knowledge, ethics experts warn that trading stock while the federal government’s actions move markets can create the appearance of impropriety. The recent trades by government officials, they said, underscore that there should be tighter rules on how, or if, federal employees can trade securities.

“The executive branch is routinely engaged in activities that will move the market,” said Tyler Gellasch, who, as a congressional aide, helped write the law on insider trading by government officials and now runs a nonprofit focused on transparency and ethics in capital markets. “I don’t think members of Congress and executive branch officials should be trading securities. To the extent they have investment holdings, it should be managed by someone else outside their purview. The temptation to put their own personal self-interest ahead of their duties to the country is just too high.”

There is no evidence that the trades by government officials identified by ProPublica were informed by nonpublic information. Still, when government officials trade stock at opportune times, Gellasch said, even if it was based on luck and not inside information, it undermines trust in government and the markets

“It then becomes a thing where our markets look rigged,” he said.

In response to questions from ProPublica, the officials who made the trades either said they had no insider information that would help them time their decisions or did not respond to questions about the transactions.

Questions about trades based on nonpublic information have swirled around Congress for years and began anew after Trump’s tariffs announcements led to wild swings in the market. Lawmakers’ trades are automatically posted online and, after multiple congressional stock-trading scandals, are widely scrutinized as soon as they become public.

But less attention is paid to the trades of executive branch employees and congressional aides whose work could give them access to confidential information likely to influence markets once made public.

Last week, ProPublica reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media, the president’s social media company, on April 2. After the market closed that day, Trump unveiled his “Liberation Day” tariffs, sending the market reeling. Bondi’s ethics agreement required her to sell by early May, but why she sold on that date is unclear. She has yet to answer questions about the trades, and the Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Earlier this week, ProPublica reported that Sean Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, sold shares in almost three dozen companies on Feb. 11, two days before Trump announced plans to institute wide-ranging “reciprocal” tariffs. A Transportation Department spokesperson said Duffy’s account manager made the trades and that Duffy had no input on the timing.

Using insider government information to buy or sell securities could violate the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge, or STOCK, Act. But no cases have ever been brought under the law, and some legal experts have doubts it would hold up to scrutiny from the courts, which in recent years have generally narrowed what constitutes illegal insider trading.

Thousands of government employees are required to file disclosure forms if they sell or buy securities worth more than $1,000. In many cases, the records are available only in person in Washington, D.C., or through a records request. The documents do not include exact amounts bought or sold but instead provide a broad range for the totals of each transaction.

ProPublica examined hundreds of records for trades shortly before major tariff announcements or other key government decisions. Trump, of course, repeatedly said on the campaign trail that he intended to institute dramatic tariffs on foreign imports. But during the first weeks of his term, investors were not panic selling, seeming to assume that his campaign promises were bluster. Several tariff announcements by Trump early on shook the markets, but it wasn’t until he detailed his new tariffs on April 2 that stocks dived.

Among those who sold securities before one of Trump’s main tariff announcements was Tobias Dorsey. Dorsey, a lawyer in the executive branch since the Obama administration, was named acting general counsel for the White House’s Office of Administration in January, when Trump was inaugurated. The division provides a range of services, including research and legal counseling across the president’s staff, including the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which helps craft trade policy. In his LinkedIn bio, Dorsey describes his duties since 2022 as giving “expert advice on a wide range of legal and policy matters to help White House officials achieve their policy goals.”

On Feb. 25 and 26, disclosure records show, Dorsey unloaded shares of an index fund and nine companies, including cleaning products manufacturer Clorox and engineering firm Emerson Electric. The total dollar figure for the sales was between $12,000 and $180,000. (He purchased one stock, defense contractor Palantir, which was selling for a bargain after recently plummeting on news of Pentagon budget cuts.)

At the time of Dorsey’s trades, investors were still largely in denial that Trump was going to go through with the massive tariffs he had promised during the campaign. But the next morning, Trump posted on social media that significant tariffs on Mexico and Canada “will, indeed, go into effect, as scheduled” in several days, and that “China will likewise be charged an additional 10% Tariff on that date.”

The S&P 500, a stock index that tracks a wide swath of the market, fell almost 2% that day alone and ultimately dropped nearly 18% in six weeks.

In an interview, Dorsey said the sale was made by his wife from an account belonging to her. He said she decided to sell around $20,000 worth of shares so they could make tuition payments and that he had no nonpublic information on the impending tariff announcements. The kind of work he does as a career employee, he said, focuses not on public policy, but on how the White House operates, including personnel, workplace technology, contracts and records issues.

“I’m not advising Stephen Miller or Peter Navarro,” he said, referring to top policy advisers to the president. “I’m advising the people running the campus. … I don’t have access to any sensitive political information.”

Another well-timed set of transactions was made by Marshall Stallings, the director of intergovernmental affairs and public engagement for Trump’s Trade Representative. The office helps shape the White House’s trade policy and negotiates trade deals with foreign governments.

On March 25 and 27, Stallings sold between $2,000 and $30,000 of stock in retail giant Target and mining company Freeport-McMoRan. The sales appear to have been an abrupt U-turn. He had purchased the shares less than a week earlier. Days after Stallings’ sales, Trump unveiled his most dramatic tariffs. Target stock fell 17%. Freeport-McMoRan fell 25%.

Stallings and the Trade Representative’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

A longtime State Department official, Stephanie Syptak-Ramnath, who until April was ambassador to Peru, also appeared to make a bet against the stock market. On March 24 and 25, she sold between $255,000 and $650,000 in stocks, and bought between $265,000 and $650,000 in bond and treasury funds (along with $50,000 to $100,000 in stocks). Then, on March 31, two days before Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement, she sold between $15,000 and $50,000 of a broad-based stock fund. When the market started to plummet, she bought back the same dollar range in another stock fund. Syptak-Ramnath said she did not have any information about the administration's decisions beyond what was publicly available. The trades, she said, were “undertaken as a result of family obligations” and in “response to a changing economy.”

A second longtime State Department official, Gautam Rana, who is now ambassador to Slovakia, sold between $830,000 and $1.7 million worth of stock on March 19, a week before Trump declared new tariffs on cars and two weeks before his “Liberation Day” announcement. The shares he sold were largely broad-based index funds. Rana declined to comment for this story.

Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer, said executive branch employees who don’t have nonpublic information and want to trade stock should consult with ethics officials before doing so, thereby allowing an independent third party to assess their actions.

“If you trade and you don’t seek advice in advance, you kind of do it at your own risk, and if you’re asked about it, you have to hope there aren’t factors that make someone question your motivations,” Canter said. “If you seek ethics official advice, you have some cover.”

Executive branch employees are barred from taking government actions that would narrowly benefit them personally, and some are required to sell stock in companies and industries they have purview over in their jobs. But like members of Congress, they are allowed to trade securities.

Since Trump’s tariff announcements and walkbacks began causing fluctuations in the market, questions have been raised about whether anyone has profited off advance notice of the moves. After Trump unexpectedly rolled back some of his tariffs in early April, causing stocks to surge, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned on social media that “any member of Congress who purchased stocks in the last 48 hours should probably disclose that now.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene bought between $21,000 and $315,000 of stock the day before and the day of the announcement. In a statement, Greene said a financial adviser controls her investments: “Since my portfolio manager makes my trades for me, I usually find out about them when the media asks.”

ProPublica’s review of disclosures also found trades by congressional aides that took place before the market tumbled.

Michael Platt, a veteran Republican staffer who served in the Commerce Department during Trump’s first term and now works for the House committee that handles administrative matters for the chamber, restructured his portfolio in March. An account under his wife’s name sold off between $96,000 and $390,000 in mostly American companies, and purchased at least $45,000 in foreign stocks and at least $15,000 in an American and Canadian energy index fund. Some stock forecasters considered international markets a relatively safe haven if Trump went through with his tariffs. Platt did not respond to requests for comment.

Stephanie Trifone, a Senate Judiciary Committee aide, sold stock in mid-March and bought at least $50,000 in treasuries. A spokesperson for the committee’s Democratic minority said Trifone had no nonpublic information about the tariffs and her trades were conducted by a financial adviser without her input. Kevin Wheeler, a staffer for the Senate Appropriations Committee, made a similar move. In late February, he and his spouse offloaded between $18,000 and $270,000 in funds composed almost entirely of stocks and bought between $50,000 and $225,000 in bonds. A spokesperson for the Appropriation Committee’s Republican majority said Wheeler had no nonpublic information about Trump’s tariff plans and that a financial planner made the trades after advising Wheeler to take a more conservative approach with his portfolio.

Another staffer, Ryan White, chief of staff to Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, bought shares worth between $2,000 and $30,000 in two precious metals mining companies two days before Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement. He continued buying more shares in the companies, Hecla Mining and Coeur Mining, in the following days.

Precious metals can be a safe haven during a bear market turn, but those stocks, like the rest of the market, declined after Trump’s tariff announcements.

Two days after White’s last purchase in April of the mining companies’ shares, however, the firms got some good news. A bill White’s boss introduced to make it easier for mining companies like Hecla and Coeur to operate on public lands was approved by a Senate committee, an important step in passing a bill. (White added to his Hecla shares earlier this month and sold his stake in Coeur.)

White told ProPublica that “all required reporting and ethics rules were followed.” Any suggestion that the committee passing the bill played a role in his stock purchases “is a stretch and patently false,” he said, adding that the legislation “has not become law and even if it does, would take decades to have any appreciable impact.”

Update, May 22, 2025: This story has been updated to include a statement from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

by Dana Brozost-Kelleher, Isabelle Senechal and María Inés Zamudio, Invisible Institute

A team of reporters from the nonprofit journalism organizations Invisible Institute and ProPublica have reviewed more than 300 sexual assault and misconduct complaints that were filed over the past decade against Chicago police officers.

But experts say that’s likely an undercount.

We need your help to understand the scope and scale of this issue. We want to talk to people who have experienced sexual misconduct or sexual assault by Chicago police. For this investigation, we defined police sexual misconduct as sexual assault, unwanted, inappropriate touching or comments, and sexual harassment by police officers either on or off duty. Researchers and advocates say sexual misconduct is a “spectrum of behavior.”

This behavior can include but is not limited to:

• A Chicago police officer flirting with someone, including by asking for their phone number for reasons not related to a case or by making other inappropriate comments while on duty
• A Chicago police officer asking someone for sexual favors in exchange for not ticketing or arresting them
• A Chicago police officer sexually assaulting or making unwanted physical contact with someone, including when the officer is off duty

You can share your experience in the form below. Please also get in touch if you are a current or retired Chicago police officer who has information you can share on this issue.

If you prefer to speak with a reporter directly, you can contact the reporting team by calling or texting 312-488-9552. You can also send a message to reporter María Inés Zamudio on Signal, which is more secure, at mizamudio.95.

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

As journalists, our role is to write about issues. We cannot provide legal advice or other support. However, there are resources available. We know these cases can stem from painful experiences, and support is available if you need it:

• The National Sexual Assault Hotline is available online or by calling 800-656-4673.
• The National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available online or by calling or texting 988.
• The Chicago Rape Crisis Hotline can be reached at 888-293-2080.
• Resilience in Chicago offers support groups, trauma-informed counseling and advocacy support for survivors.
• Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation (CAASE) offers legal advice and can make referrals for survivors.
• The Network offers support for survivors of domestic violence.

Andrew Fan, Maheen Khan, Maira Khwaja and Trina Reynolds-Tyler of Invisible Institute contributed reporting, and Ashley Clarke of ProPublica contributed research.

by María Inés Zamudio and Dana Brozost-Kelleher, Invisible Institute

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Invisible Institute and co-published with the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Alexus Byrd-Maxey had just finished her second month at the Chicago police academy, well on her way to fulfilling her childhood dream.

The South Side native wanted to become a detective so she could bring closure to families who have lost loved ones to homicides by arresting those responsible.

Byrd-Maxey, then 26, was proud of herself for making it this far: completing college classes, applying to the academy multiple times, passing a background check and physical tests. She was delighted to be part of the academy despite the sacrifices it required, including leaving her toddler son most mornings at 5 a.m. and having her mom spend thousands to buy her new uniforms and equipment.

“Actually sitting in those chairs at the academy was very rewarding,” she said.

But on March 17, 2023, an encounter with a fellow recruit derailed that dream. On that day, she was leaning over a classmate’s computer, helping him log on to do their lesson. As another recruit walked behind her, she said she felt his hands on her waist and his body pressed up against her. He was close enough, she told reporters, that she felt “his penis on my butt.”

She recalled that she confronted him immediately — hoping to hear remorse in his voice. Instead, she said, she saw him smirk.

“That’s when I knew,” she said. “You’re not sorry.”

Help Us Report on Sexual Assault and Misconduct by the Chicago Police Department

In the days that followed, Byrd-Maxey wrestled with how to report her fellow recruit, a man named Eric Tabb, or whether to let it go.

At the same time, police department investigative records show, Tabb started telling other recruits that Byrd-Maxey had overreacted and that he had only tapped her on the shoulder so he could get to his seat.

The following week, when Byrd-Maxey reported the incident to her class leader, he talked to fellow recruits and they downplayed the encounter. A recruit who allegedly witnessed the incident and was friends with Tabb later told investigators that Byrd-Maxey was “trying to victimize herself.”

The academy instructor never filed a sexual misconduct complaint. Two and a half weeks later, Byrd-Maxey was fired from the academy for supposedly cursing and using gang language — allegations she has denied. Tabb soon became an officer and began patrolling streets.

But he didn’t last long.

Eight months after Byrd-Maxey was fired, Tabb was arrested for allegedly grabbing a fellow officer’s genitals repeatedly over her uniform after roll call in their police precinct.

That woman, too, had been in the academy with Byrd-Maxey. Two additional female recruits also have said Tabb assaulted them, and witnesses allege yet another was assaulted but did not report it, meaning five of 17 women in his academy class have given similar accounts, investigative files show.

Tabb now faces multiple felony charges, including aggravated criminal sexual abuse.

He has pleaded not guilty, and the criminal case is ongoing. He declined to comment.

Police department records, including interviews and investigative files obtained by the Invisible Institute and ProPublica, together with court records, highlight how police officials failed to intervene while Tabb was at the academy and head off potential harm to other women.

Reporters identified 14 officers who disciplinary records suggest may be repeat offenders, having been accused of sexual assault in the last decade and of at least one other incident of sexual misconduct. Five of those officers faced criminal charges and were convicted, in some cases pleading to a lesser offense that was not a sex crime, and three others have ongoing criminal cases.

In reviewing more than 300 sexual misconduct and assault complaints against Chicago police officers, the Invisible Institute and ProPublica found a pattern of the department failing to vigorously investigate accusations of sexual assault by officers, whether those complaints were lodged by fellow cops or members of the public. The claims were often downplayed or ignored, sometimes allowing officers to abuse again and again.

A 2017 U.S. Department of Justice investigation into Chicago police found officers frequently minimized the seriousness of sexual misconduct accusations against colleagues and didn’t employ best-practice investigative techniques. Police, the investigation found, closed cases without conducting full investigations.

Police spokesperson Don Terry declined requests for an interview but said in a statement that the department “takes all allegations of sexual assault seriously, including allegations against CPD members.” He said the department has “zero tolerance for sexual misconduct and any member in violation will be held accountable.”

He also said the department works with victim advocacy groups “to assist in the appropriate reporting of sexual assault allegations against department members in a way that eliminates barriers to reporting and provides support services to the survivors.”

That Tabb allegedly assaulted women while training to become a police officer is particularly troubling. The police academy is where aspiring officers learn the department’s culture. Recruits get their first lessons in how officers should behave in uniform — and out of it. They also have fewer job protections while undergoing their academy training, so they can be easily dismissed if they break the rules. Four other academy recruits have filed sexual misconduct or harassment complaints in the last four years. Records show three of the complaints ended in no discipline for the accused officer and one is still ongoing.

“I think of it as behavior that you’re sort of taught in the first few years on the job, starting with your field training officer, what you can get away with,” said Philip Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University who has done extensive research on police misconduct and created a national database of officer arrests. “They learn that it’s accepted behavior within that culture, within that squad, or that shift, quite often. And I do think that it’s behaviors that escalate.”

In June 2023, a little over two months after Byrd-Maxey was kicked out of the academy, the department implemented its first sexual misconduct policy, one it had been working on before she began her training.

Former Chicago police Officer Eric Tabb walks out of a Chicago courthouse after a hearing. He faces multiple charges, including aggravated criminal sexual abuse. (Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica) A Pattern of Missed Opportunities

The Chicago Police Department has a long history of failing to identify and deal with patterns of troubling behavior within its ranks.

Officers who stole from suspects were able to do so repeatedly before getting caught. Detectives who coerced confessions, sending innocent people to prison and costing the city tens of millions of dollars in legal settlements, did so without ever being disciplined. And some cops who abused and tortured Chicagoans did so for years before they were stopped.

This failure of the department to police its own officers has also had devastating consequences for people who have accused officers of sexual assault or harassment.

In 2019, then-Superintendent Eddie Johnson praised the department’s internal investigation of 13-year police veteran Officer Corey Deanes, who had been accused of sexual misconduct by four women. He called it a “testament to our ability to police ourselves.”

But what Johnson didn’t mention was that the department allowed Deanes to police the city’s streets for nearly a year despite two allegations of sexual misconduct. It took the city’s civilian police oversight agency to identify his behavior and stop him.

Deanes was suspended for seven days in 2011 for sexually harassing a woman during a traffic stop. He insisted on getting her phone number, then called or texted nearly 30 times. He told investigators he had no official reason to pull the woman over but did so because he wanted to talk to her.

Six years later, in August 2017, he again was accused of abusing his position while pulling over a 23-year-old woman during a traffic stop. Deanes, according to internal affairs records, made inappropriate comments to her and threatened to write the woman a ticket if she did not give him her phone number. Then Deanes allegedly hugged her and, though she resisted, touched her buttocks before leaving without giving her a ticket.

The woman reported the incident to the Chicago police and to the Independent Police Review Authority, the civilian oversight agency at the time. Police records and a lawsuit brought by the woman indicate it took police investigators more than a year to interview her, and the department lost an opportunity to get Deanes off the streets. The city settled the woman’s lawsuit for $100,000.

In July 2018, another Chicago woman reported Deanes. She had called 911 for help after arriving home late at night and finding a stranger on her porch. Deanes, who responded to the call, allegedly asked her personal questions, commented on her body and touched her inappropriately, according to internal affairs records.

“I felt so violated,” the woman, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, told Invisible Institute and ProPublica. “I called you for help and I got harassed. That is not OK.”

The woman reported the incident to the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, the latest iteration of the review board. Launched in 2017 as part of a wider series of reforms, COPA and its new leaders hoped to bring an additional focus to investigating claims of domestic violence and sexual assault committed by officers.

Yet another woman filed a complaint against Deanes two weeks after the incident with the 911 call. This time, COPA identified a pattern. Andrea Kersten, then COPA’s head of investigations, notified the police department’s Bureau of Internal Affairs about the three incidents and pushed for a criminal investigation.

Deanes was arrested in May 2019 and charged with two misdemeanor counts of battery, one felony count of aggravated battery, and three felony counts of official misconduct for the three separate incidents. He pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of misdemeanor battery in 2020 and received two years probation. He was stripped of his Illinois state certification, preventing him from working as a cop.

A letter from the Chicago Police Department’s Bureau of Internal Affairs outlining the allegations against then-Officer Corey Deanes and suggesting his case be closed after he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery in 2020. (Obtained by Invisible Institute. ProPublica redacted identifying information for the sending, receiving and approving officers; other redactions original.)

The woman who encountered Deanes after the 911 call said she’s disappointed that it took so long for the department to take action. “Police will have each other’s backs no matter what heinous things they do,” she said.

Deanes declined to comment for this story.

COPA has taken steps to improve its handling of sexual misconduct cases to identify officers who repeatedly engage in misconduct. Under Kersten’s leadership, the agency created a Special Victims Squad of trained investigators in 2019 to pursue these cases, including those with limited evidence beyond the accuser’s word. COPA also entered into an agreement that allowed other agencies to conduct joint interviews with victims to enhance collaboration and to reduce the risk of retraumatizing victims by limiting retellings of their assault.

Kersten stepped down as the head of COPA in February after facing a possible no-confidence vote from an oversight board and ongoing lawsuits against Kersten and COPA. A lawsuit filed by the Fraternal Order of Police, the union representing Chicago police officers, alleged that COPA and Kersten have exhibited an anti-police bias that unfairly affects investigations and how officers are disciplined. A federal judge dismissed the suit in April.

Kersten declined to comment for this story, but in her resignation letter she disputed the claims against her. COPA’s interim chief administrator said the agency remains committed to pursuing investigations of sexual misconduct.

“We are working on growing our SVS section to a fuller unit with more staff who will receive specialized training to handle these investigations,” the administrator, LaKenya White, said in a statement.

While COPA participated in the investigation into Byrd-Maxey’s claims, internal affairs led the criminal investigation into the matter.

The Chicago Police Education and Training Academy (Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica) “I’m Not Going Nowhere.”

Last fall, Alexus Byrd-Maxey had come to accept what she called God’s will — that she would not become a Chicago police officer.

Since being fired from the academy, she had struggled with depression and anxiety as she tried to rebuild her life. She went back to work as a waitress at a North Side restaurant. Yet every time she saw her police uniforms hanging in her closet, she grieved a life she would never have.

“I feel like I was stripped away from it,” she said.

She thought she was doing the right thing in reporting Tabb, whether he was disciplined or not.

Byrd-Maxey’s police equipment and uniform from her time as a police recruit (Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica)

It wasn’t long after Byrd-Maxey tried to alert the academy about Tabb that a second incident occurred. At the end of August 2023, Tabb attended a birthday celebration at a Wrigleyville bar with other recruits. He joined a female recruit on the dance floor and, according to investigative reports and court records, touched her breast, buttock and crotch over her clothes and also grabbed her face and tried to kiss her. He was so aggressive, a witness told investigators, that a mutual friend had to intervene to get him away from the recruit.

A few days later, according to investigative files and court records, Tabb attended a “star party,” an unofficial celebration for graduating recruits receiving their badge number. Another recruit told investigators he saw Tabb grabbing a third female recruit’s genitals over her clothes. The recruit’s boyfriend confronted Tabb, according to a witness. That same night, Tabb touched a fourth recruit’s buttocks, according to interviews with police investigators and court records.

In the immediate aftermath, the three women said nothing, and soon Tabb was officially on the force.

After about three months, a fifth female officer accused Tabb of touching her crotch over her uniform several times when she stood up after roll call to adjust her duty belt.

The woman went to her supervisor despite her fears. “I was afraid that any type of confrontation or anything would not work out for me,” she later told investigators. “I felt powerless,” the woman said, crying.

She said Tabb grabbed her crotch a second time.

“He sat back in his chair and he had a slight smile on his face with his hand up to his chin,” she said in a recorded interview with investigators. “It looked to me like, I don’t know, like he was proud of what he did.”

During the investigation into that incident, officials uncovered the allegations against Tabb that involved his off-duty behavior toward recruits. Two of the three recruits stepped forward to report Tabb’s behavior because they said they wanted to support the final alleged victim.

An internal affairs report outlining the investigation into Tabb’s first alleged assault. (Obtained by Invisible Institute. ProPublica redacted identifying information for the sending and receiving officers and those who reported and received reports of the incident; other redactions original.)

Even though Byrd-Maxey had been the first to report his behavior, no one contacted her for 15 months about the criminal case against Tabb. When she learned about it, she decided to attend his next court hearing.

On a Tuesday morning in March, Byrd-Maxey entered the busy Cook County criminal courthouse with her mom, Jauntaunne Byrd-Horne. They walked past the black Doric columns and the tall golden lamps on their way to a courtroom, where a hearing was scheduled in Tabb’s case. For the first time in nearly two years, she was going to see him.

Her mom made herself a T-shirt to ensure her daughter’s pain was acknowledged. In bold white letters against a black background, the front of the shirt read: “What about Tabb’s first police academy victim 03/17/2023?”

Byrd-Maxey and her mother sat in the courtroom’s first row. A few minutes later, Tabb arrived with his parents and sat behind them.

At issue was a request from prosecutors asking to have the additional allegations related to off-duty incidents considered as evidence of a pattern of behavior: similar victims, similar assaults. Dan Herbert, Tabb’s defense attorney, said his client was innocent. He tried to blame Byrd-Maxey for the claims involving all the off-duty recruits, implying she had a grudge against Tabb.

Byrd-Horne, left, and Byrd-Maxey stand outside the George N. Leighton Criminal Courthouse after a March hearing in the case of former police Officer Eric Tabb. (Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica)

Records show that before she was fired, Byrd-Maxey tried to report Tabb multiple times. She talked to her class leader — a fellow recruit who is put in a leadership position — on the Monday following the Friday incident. Records show the class leader discussed the incident with superiors and placed more emphasis on Tabb’s version, which was supported by other recruits. No one filed an official complaint.

Almost three weeks later, conflict erupted in class. Byrd-Maxey claimed Tabb verbally attacked her, and Tabb accused her of doing the same, records show. After class, Byrd-Maxey said, she went to her instructor to tell him about the incident in the computer lab.

Byrd-Maxey was fired the next day, accused of saying “shut your bitch ass up” in class and using gang-related language. Though their names were redacted, investigative files show seven recruits, including Tabb, filed complaints against Byrd-Maxey for engaging in this behavior. She denies the allegations.

The next day, Byrd-Maxey returned to the police academy to file the sexual misconduct complaint herself. She also accused two instructors of wrongful termination. During that investigation, several recruits sided with Tabb, including three who told investigators they were in the computer lab at the time.

By the time internal affairs cleared Tabb of Byrd-Maxey’s complaint on Sept. 20, 2023, he had allegedly assaulted three other women from his academy class.

During the court hearing, Tabb’s attorney attacked the credibility of those officers for not reporting the alleged abuse the moment it happened.

“They’re police officers. They have a duty to report misconduct,” Herbert said. “And they’re probationary police officers, which as the court well knows, they can be fired for any reason, unless it’s an illegal reason. They can be fired for not reporting misconduct. I think that’s what happened in this case.”

After the hearing, Byrd-Maxey spotted Tabb in the courthouse lobby. She locked eyes with him as their paths crossed.

“I’m here. I’m not going nowhere,” she said afterward.

Byrd-Maxey and her mother embraced outside the courthouse, an acknowledgment of the toll reporting Tabb had taken on them both.

Yet she doesn’t regret it.

“I wouldn’t change anything, even though it cost me mentally and financially,” she said. “I wouldn’t change it because, at the end of the day, I had the right motive to be heard and to avoid this from happening again.”

Methodology

Invisible Institute reporters spent over a year identifying allegations of sexual assault and sexual misconduct by Chicago police officers, then created a database from those allegations. We reviewed hundreds of complaints obtained through public records requests and a lawsuit.

Reporters obtained investigative files from the Chicago Police Department’s Bureau of Internal Affairs, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, and its predecessor agency, the Independent Police Review Authority. Reporters read the original investigative files, examined evidence and reviewed lawsuits, court records and media accounts.

The Invisible Institute and ProPublica compiled a dataset of more than 300 complaints after excluding dozens of cases where body camera footage contradicted the allegation, where non-police witnesses affirmed the police account, or where a secondhand allegation was not corroborated.

This investigation would not be possible without previous litigation that pushed for disciplinary records to be open to the public despite resistance from the city. Those lawsuits include Bond v. Utreras, Green v. Chicago Police Department and Kalven v. Chicago, which was brought by Jamie Kalven, founder of the Invisible Institute, and led to the publication of police misconduct complaints on the Civic Police Data Project site.

This story was published with the support of a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, in conjunction with Arnold Ventures.

Andrew Fan, Maheen Khan and Isabelle Senechal of the Invisible Institute contributed reporting and data analysis. Mariam Elba of ProPublica contributed research and Agnel Philip of ProPublica contributed data analysis.

by Jennifer Berry Hawes and Mollie Simon, with additional reporting by Cassandra Garibay

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

When Hurricane Helene plowed over the Southeast last September, it caused more inland deaths than any hurricane in recorded history. The highest per capita death toll occurred in Yancey County, a rural expanse in the rugged Black Mountains of North Carolina devastated by flash flooding and landslides.

On Monday, we published a story recounting what happened in Yancey. Our intent was to show, through those horrific events, how highly accurate weather warnings did not reach many of those most in harm’s way — and that inland communities are not nearly as prepared for catastrophic storms as coastal ones. No one in Yancey received evacuation orders — and many, including those living in high-risk areas and caring for young children and frail older people, didn’t flee because they didn’t see clearer signs of urgency from the county.

Much has been written about Helene, but very little focused on evacuation orders. During four months of reporting, we found that the responses of local officials across western North Carolina’s mountain counties differed a great deal. We also found that the state lags behind others in terms of what it requires of its county-level emergency managers and that legislators paused for almost a decade an effort to map landslide hazards in the counties that were hardest hit by Helene.

Here are five key discoveries from our reporting:

1. Some counties in harm’s way issued evacuation orders. Others did not.

To determine which cities and counties communicated evacuation orders, we reviewed more than 500 social media posts and other types of messaging that more than three dozen North Carolina jurisdictions shared with their residents in the lead-up to the storm. We compared that with a letter Gov. Roy Cooper sent to then-President Joe Biden seeking expedited disaster relief.

We found that by nightfall on Sept. 26, the day before Helene hit, three counties near Yancey issued mandatory evacuations, targeted toward people living close to specific dams and rivers, and at least five counties issued voluntary evacuation orders.

McDowell County, just southeast of Yancey, took particularly robust actions to warn residents about the storm, including issuing both mandatory and voluntary evacuation orders in enough time for people to leave. Henderson County, southwest of Yancey, targeted a voluntary evacuation order at residents living in floodplains that have a 1 in 500 chance of flooding annually, and its directions were clear: “The time is now for residents to self-evacuate.”

Get in Touch

We are continuing to report on the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, and we want to know: Is there one thing the storm destroyed that you would have saved had you evacuated? To share, leave us a voicemail at 828-201-2738.

Yancey and at least four other nearby counties also did not issue evacuation orders. Yancey’s emergency manager, Jeff Howell, told us he doubted the county commissioners would support issuing orders or that local residents would heed them given the area’s culture of self-reliance and disdain for government mandates, especially regarding property rights. But some Yancey residents said they would have left or at least prepared better.

Although local officials received repeated warnings — including one that said the storm would be among the worst weather events “in the modern era” — some argued that they couldn’t have done more to prepare because the storm’s ferocity was so unprecedented.

We found that inland mountain communities too often lack the infrastructure or planning to use evacuations to get residents out of harm’s way in advance of a destructive storm like Helene. Some officials in Yancey, for instance, said that they weren’t sure where they would have directed people to go in the face of such an unprecedented onslaught of rain and wind.

In recent years, far more people died in the continental U.S. from hurricanes’ freshwater flooding than from their coastal storm surges — a dramatic reversal from a decade earlier. That’s largely due to improved evacuations along the coasts.

Several Eastern states — including Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia — have adopted plans called Know Your Zone to execute targeted evacuations when storms approach. But these plans don’t often extend very far inland, even though warming ocean temperatures create stronger storms. Powerful storms that are not hurricanes can also turn deadly. In February, storms killed at least 24 people in Kentucky. More have died since in other storms.

2. Disaster messaging varied considerably by county.

To understand how local officials communicated disaster warnings to their residents, we compiled a timeline of alerts and warnings sent out by the National Weather Service and then scoured contemporaneous social media posts that more than three dozen jurisdictions were sharing with their residents. We found big disparities.

For instance, in addition to issuing evacuation orders, McDowell County put out flyers in English and Spanish that warned of life-threatening flash floods and urged all people in vulnerable areas to “evacuate as soon as possible.” Many did.

And about 36 hours before Helene hit, Haywood County’s sheriff warned in a brief video message that a “catastrophic, life-threatening event is about to befall” the county, which has one of the larger populations in western North Carolina. The emergency services director, standing beside him, emphasized: “This message is urgent.” The sheriff then asked residents, starting that night, to “make plans or preparations to leave low-lying areas or areas that are threatened by flooding.” He ended with: “Please, seek safety — and do so now.”

Almost an entire day later, with Helene closing in, officials in rural Yancey were among those who used less-direct wording. In Facebook posts, they asked residents to “please prepare to move to higher ground as soon as you are able” and advised “now is the time to make plans” to go elsewhere as the final hours to leave before nightfall wound down. In one post, they softened the message, adding, “This information is not to frighten anyone.”

ProPublica interviewed dozens of survivors in Yancey, including many who told us that in retrospect they were looking for clearer directives from their leaders.

3. Unlike several nearby states, North Carolina does not require training for local emergency managers.

At the heart of evacuations are emergency managers, the often little-known public officials tasked with preparing their areas for potential disasters. Yet, education and training requirements for these posts vary considerably by state and community.

Get in Touch

We plan to continue reporting on Helene’s aftermath to understand what lessons could better prepare communities and local emergency managers for future storms, as well as how the rebuilding effort is unfolding. If you are a Helene survivor or a North Carolina emergency responder and would like to share tips with us, please email helenetips@propublica.org.

Yancey’s emergency manager had taken the job seven years before Helene hit after a long and robust Army career. He had no emergency management experience, however. In the years before Helene, he had been asking the county for more help — but by the time the storm arrived, it was still only him and a part-time employee.

Florida recently enacted a law mandating minimum training, experience and education for its counties’ emergency managers starting in 2026. Georgia requires its emergency managers to get the state’s emergency management certification within six months. But North Carolina doesn’t require any specific training for its local emergency managers.

4. North Carolina began examining landslide risks by county, but powerful interests stood in the way.

More than 20 years ago, North Carolina legislators passed a law requiring that landslide hazards be mapped across 19 mountain counties. They did so after two hurricanes drenched the mountains, dumping more than 27 inches of rain that caused at least 85 landslides and multiple deaths.

But a few years later, after only four of those counties were mapped, a majority of largely Republican lawmakers gave in to real estate agents and developers who said the work could harm property values and curb growth. They halted the program, cutting the funding and laying off the six geologists at work on it.

Almost a decade later, in 2018, lawmakers jump-started the program after still more landslide deaths. But it takes at least a year to map one county, so by the time Helene hit, Yancey and four others in the storm’s path of destruction weren’t yet mapped.

Without this detailed hazard mapping, emergency managers and residents in those areas lacked the detailed assessment of risk to specific areas to make plans before landslides clawed down the mountains, killing far more people. The U.S. Geological Survey has so far identified 2,015 Helene-induced landslides across western North Carolina.

The geologists back at work on the project are almost done mapping McDowell County. They would have finished it last year, but Helene derailed their work for a time.

5. We could find no comprehensive effort (yet) to examine lessons learned from Helene to determine how counties can prevent deaths from future inland storms.

Helene left many lessons to be learned among inland communities in the paths of increasingly virulent storms. But as North Carolina figures out how to direct millions of dollars in rebuilding aid, there has so far been no state inquiry into the preparedness of local areas — or what could better equip them for the next unprecedented storm.

Yancey County’s board chair said that he expects the county will do so later, but for now its officials are focused on rebuilding efforts.

A review commissioned by North Carolina Emergency Management examined its own actions and how its staff interacted with local officials. It found the agency severely understaffed. But it didn’t examine such preparedness issues as planning for evacuations or the training requirements for local emergency managers.

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News, and Megan O’Matz and Joel Jacobs, ProPublica

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Dr. Phil, the powerhouse TV personality, has long dispensed practical advice to anyone hoping to avoid financial ruin — advice he’s shared with his millions of viewers. “No. 1 is avoid debt like the plague,” he’s said.

On other episodes of his syndicated talk show, he’s urged people to pay off their costliest obligations first: “You got to get rid of that high-interest debt.”

Yet for thousands of people mired in debt, Dr. Phil’s eldest son has been part of the problem, an investigation by ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News found.

Jay McGraw, a TV producer, became involved in the payday lending industry over a decade ago and has been affiliated with a range of financial services businesses, more recently launching a firm that sells used cars online at costly interest rates and targets Texans with low or no credit.

Earlier this year, McGraw settled a federal civil suit that had accused him of playing a key role in CreditServe Inc., a financial technology consulting firm that helps arrange small-dollar consumer loans online — with interest rates that can exceed 700% — via a company owned by a Native American tribe in Alaska.

The tribal lending operation, Minto Money, is based in the log cabin village of Minto, 50 miles northwest of Fairbanks, and has delivered a new revenue stream to the community since its inception in 2018. But it’s also created a rift within the tribe, as some members are appalled by the burdens inflicted on poor and desperate people.

“It’s bringing in a lot of money. But it’s off the misery of the people on the other end who are taking out these loans,” said Darrell Frank, a former chief of the tribe. “That’s not right. That’s not what the elders set this tribal council up for.”

There’s documented harm. As of July 2024, the Federal Trade Commission had received more than 280 consumer complaints about Minto’s lending operations. That total includes complaints forwarded from the Better Business Bureau, where Minto Money holds an “F” rating. Customers who took out loans — which range from $200 to $3,000 — pleaded for relief from onerous terms that allowed Minto Money to claw back the sums multiple times over through automatic bank withdrawals.

Dr. Phil and Jay McGraw attend a ceremony honoring Dr. Phil with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic)

“This loan is outrageous with interest over 700%!” one person complained to the Better Business Bureau about having paid $4,167 on a $1,200 loan from Minto Money. “I am one step away from filing from bankruptcy.”

A federal suit filed in Illinois in November by five Minto Money borrowers contends that McGraw has provided “tens of millions of dollars” in capital for the loans. CreditServe provides the infrastructure to market, underwrite and collect on them while “the Tribe is merely a front” and shares in only a small percentage of the revenue, according to the suit.

It called McGraw the “enterprise’s principal beneficiary,” asserting that he and CreditServe’s CEO, Eric Welch, have collected “hundreds of millions of dollars of payments made by consumers.”

The suit alleged that McGraw and the other defendants, including Minto Money, violated state usury laws and federal prohibitions against collecting unlawful debt. A confidential settlement resolved the lawsuit in early May but left open the possibility that other Minto Money customers could file similar suits in the future.

A. Paul Heeringa, who is representing McGraw, Welch and CreditServe, wrote in an email to reporters that “our clients cannot comment on any of your questions, or the case generally, other than to say that the allegations in the Complaint are not facts and were not proven to be true, and that our clients categorically deny the allegations.”

CreditServe was set up by a Hollywood lawyer who has represented the McGraws, California records show. Its principal address in the Larchmont Village neighborhood of Los Angeles is a box in a mail shop that also has served as the published address for many other McGraw family companies.

There is nothing in the public record linking Dr. Phil — whose full name is Phil McGraw — to the lending businesses, including CreditServe.

A lawyer for Phil McGraw said McGraw declined to comment for this story but shared a short statement from a spokesperson for Merit Street Media, which airs “Dr. Phil Primetime.”

“Dr. Phil knows his son Jay to be a smart, strong, caring human being and while he does not know his business Dr. Phil supports him 100%,” the statement said. “The suggestion that Jay’s business ignores or is even comparable or relevant to advice from Dr. Phil or Dr. Phil Primetime on Merit Street Media is false and only included in your article as click bait.”

Lori Baker, chief of the Minto tribal government, said in an email that the Minto Village Council had no comment in response to questions about the lending operations and members’ concerns.

Among critics of Minto’s lending operation, the idea that outsiders can’t be trusted is central to their opposition.

One Minto elder who no longer lives in the community worries that strangers are taking advantage of the tribe and its loan customers alike. The elder asked not to be named because of concerns about reprisals for criticizing the lucrative business.

“They are exploiting our village,” the elder said. “It is not right taking from poor people to get yourself rich.”

The full moon sets over homes in Minto, a small community about 50 miles northwest of Fairbanks, Alaska. (Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News) Distant Partners

Jay McGraw got into the lending business as he branched out from other ventures. Minto got into it to help the people of the village.

By the time the company that would become CreditServe was formed in 2011, McGraw had obtained a law degree, gone into the film production business with his father, pioneered a highly successful daily syndicated medical advice show called “The Doctors” and written a series of self-help books for teens.

More quietly, he ventured into the high-interest lending business. Corporation papers in 2013 listed McGraw as the president of Helping Hand Financial Inc., a company that offered payday loans online at CashCash.com. “Get the CashCash You Need Fast!” the firm’s website exhorted.

The following year, when CreditServe Inc. filed an amendment to its articles of incorporation with the California secretary of state, it showed McGraw as president and secretary. Helping Hand Financial dissolved in 2017, but CreditServe remained in business. In both ventures, McGraw teamed up with Welch.

McGraw is not currently listed in California records as a top officer at CreditServe. But the federal suit in Illinois describes his role as significant. “McGraw and Welch dominate CreditServe and are responsible for all key decisions made by it,” the complaint states.

Welch declined to comment for this story.

He and McGraw are also named on corporation papers for Cherry Auto Finance Inc., formed in 2021, which offers easy financing for used cars online at cherrycars.com, appealing to subprime borrowers. The site posts estimated annual percentage rates of 22.4%.

Just as desperate borrowers turn to unconventional and high-interest loans, a few dozen Native American tribes in dire need of economic rescue have been drawn to the business side of that same industry.

The community of 160 in Minto faces the same challenges as many Native villages in Alaska, which are set in hard-to-reach places on ancestral hunting and fishing lands. Village leaders have struggled to build an economy in a remote place with few jobs, spotty internet and sky-high costs.

In 2018, Doug Isaacson, a non-tribal member working for Minto’s economic development arm, brought Minto an idea that could help the village. Isaacson — the former mayor of North Pole, a city outside Fairbanks that revels in its association with Christmas — suggested that the tribe get involved in the lending business. Tribes in America are in demand as business partners because they can claim that, as sovereign entities, their operations are exempt from state interest rate caps. Critics of such lending partnerships have called them “rent-a-tribe.”

To the tribal council, the lending business sounded like a way to create jobs and bring in much-needed revenue. The household income in Minto is about 30% lower than the statewide median. But groceries are more expensive and gas costs $7 a gallon.

Minto adopted a Tribal Credit Code, stating that “E-commerce represents a new ray of economic hope for the Tribe and its members.”

The Illinois lawsuit contends that on paper, the tribe appears to control the lending operation, but CreditServe provides the key services, including “lead generation, technology platforms, payment processing, and collection procedures.” Most of the money also flows to CreditServe, which has an office in suburban Austin, Texas, according to the suit.

McGraw’s lifestyle stands in sharp contrast to those living in Minto. He owns a lakeside mansion in the Austin area, valued at over $6 million. A real estate listing noted that the gated home features a “glass ceiling, life-size fireplaces, 2nd floor tower and an 85 foot infinity pool & spa overlooking miles of unobstructed views,” with “guest house, elevator tram and boat dock.”

The Instagram pages for McGraw and his wife, a former Playboy model, portray a life of affluence, with photos of excursions to Paris, Napa Valley, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Cabo San Lucas and Palm Beach. There are golf outings and time on a yacht.

In Minto, people live in single-story log homes. They enjoy trapping wolves and beavers, hunting geese and watching school basketball games. Many worry about protecting the land and wildlife.

“Used to see a lot of moose by the village; right now just two,” minutes of a 2020 Minto fish and game advisory committee meeting state. “Global changes have really affected us.”

Minto’s household income is about 30% lower than the statewide median, and gas costs $7 a gallon. (Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News) Money and Controversy

There are no outward signs in the village of a massive online lending operation. The headquarters listed on the Minto Money business license is the address of the tribe’s two-story lodge, which houses the tribal council offices, a nutrition program for elders, a community gathering space, and rooms rented to tourists and hunters.

The business license is signed by Shane Thin Elk, listed as commissioner of Minto’s financial regulatory body, tasked with oversight of the lending businesses. Thin Elk is a member of a different tribe and doesn’t live in Alaska. Reached by phone, he hung up on a reporter.

The tribe started with a single lending website — Minto Money — and later launched another, Birch Lending. Neither company lends to people in Alaska.

Once it got underway, the lending business took off. The Illinois lawsuit contends that “McGraw, CreditServe, and Welch have collected more than $500 million dollars from consumers” over the last four years.

Minto’s take was small in comparison. Still, it has made a difference.

ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News obtained documents for Minto Money showing dramatic growth, from $2 million in annual revenue in 2020 to nearly $7 million in 2022. A former tribal lending manager for the operation, Cameron Winfrey, said that in 2024 that figure reached $12 million for all its lending operations.

Minto Money’s and Birch Lending’s websites both warn, “This is an expensive form of borrowing and is not intended to be a long-term financial solution.” (Obtained by ProPublica)

Online lending “has thus far surpassed all expectations and provided enormous benefits to our community,” Winfrey wrote to the Minto Village Council in a January 2024 letter.

In an accompanying report, he listed some of the benefits that the lending business generated. He noted that $1.8 million was distributed to the Village Council in 2023, up about 50% from the prior year. Money went to the Minto library and computer lab as well as community organizations.

Winfrey also wrote that $627,000 was paid out in salaries and benefits in 2023 for employees of the tribe’s economic development corporation, known as BEDCO, and its subsidiaries, which includes Minto Money. He told ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News that only a few people in Minto work for the lending operation.

Notably, the profit enabled the tribe to do what most tribes cannot: help fix its local school.

Yukon-Koyukuk School District Superintendent Kerry Boyd said the Minto tribe’s economic development corporation offered a surprise windfall when district officials discovered rising material and construction costs for a new gymnasium had increased the price tag by millions of dollars.

The tribe paid more than $3.2 million to finish the new gym, she said. A 2024 letter from BEDCO to the Minto tribal council stated that the money donated to the gym came from lending revenue.

In her more than 16 years running the district, Boyd had never seen such a generous donation. “I said, ‘Wow, this is almost unheard of.”

Students play games in the recently remodeled gym at the Minto School. The gym was funded with a $3.2 million gift from the economic development arm of Minto’s tribal government. (Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News)

Many residents can’t say for sure where the lending money is going but point to newfound largesse. Folks get their heating fuel tanks filled by the tribal government. Some members receive “hardship” grants. There was money for a youth center. Musical instruments for the worship center. Dogsled races. A holiday party.

Still, some tribal members wonder why more money isn’t spread around. A handful of residents are calling for audits, greater transparency and federal investigations.

Some people thought the lending business would seed other economic development and lead to regular dividend checks. Instead, there is infighting and bitterness about who in the tribe receives the money. The division pits year-round Minto residents against members who live outside the village, in Fairbanks or elsewhere.

“If you don’t live in Minto, you don’t get shit,” said lending opponent Frank, the former chief. He is seeking an audit and a halt to the enterprise.

Once a tribe starts taking in large sums, it’s rare for internal disputes to go public.

“It’s a blessing and a curse,” one tribal member said recently. “We’re blessed that we get all this money, and it’s a curse because with money comes greed.”

“And some people don’t know the difference.”

First image: Lori Baker, chief of the tribal government, speaks to an audience at the Minto Community Hall on the day she was reelected to the position. Second image: People gather for an evening event at the Minto Community Hall. (Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News) Unhappy Customers and Legal Threats

Isaacson, the non-tribal Alaskan who promoted the idea, has shrugged off concerns about legal problems.

In a 2023 email obtained by reporters, Isaacson wrote, “Lawsuits are the cost of doing business these days.” He noted that “in no century have money lenders ever been revered, but they have always been essential.” (Isaacson told reporters he no longer works on tribal lending operations and could not comment.)

The Minto tribe’s business entities have been sued in federal court by consumers at least 17 times. The tribe has argued that arbitration agreements signed by borrowers, as well as tribal sovereign immunity, protect the businesses from lawsuits. In at least one suit, it expressly denied the characterization of Minto Money as a “rent-a-tribe” operation.

Several federal cases have been dismissed on sovereign immunity grounds, but more often they have settled quickly without reaching the discovery phase that could reveal more details about the lending operation’s structure.

It’s unlikely that the legal risks will end with the private settlement in the Illinois case. Ten days after that settlement, the plaintiffs’ lawyers filed a new federal suit on behalf of three different borrowers, making the same allegations against McGraw, Welch, Minto Money and CreditServe. The latest suit adds a debt collection agency as a defendant.

Across the country, other tribal lending operations have been subject to large settlements in recent years, including a tribe in Wisconsin that also is alleged in federal lawsuits to have partnered with CreditServe, among other outside entities. That tribe, the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, settled a federal class-action lawsuit in Virginia last year for $1.4 billion in loan forgiveness and $37 million in payments to customers and lawyers on the case. Of that, $2 million came from tribal council members named in the suit, while the rest came from business partners. (CreditServe was not named in the Virginia case or settlement.)

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which already had a spotty record of overseeing high-interest lending, is being gutted by the Trump administration. But a handful of states have pushed back against tribal lenders. In December, in response to complaints, the Washington State Department of Financial Institutions issued a warning advising consumers that Minto Money and Birch Lending are not registered to conduct business in the state. And in late April, the Massachusetts Division of Banks publicly advised borrowers to avoid predatory loans “including from tribal lenders,” listing Minto Money and Birch Lending as examples.

Minto Money already avoids lending in 10 states, primarily where attorneys have acted forcefully to protect consumers, though Massachusetts and Washington are not among the states it shuns.

In recent months, the tribal council consolidated its control over the lending business, removing Winfrey from both his position as Minto Money’s general manager and his seat on the council after a bitter dispute. Tribal leaders criticized his performance.

But Winfrey, who said Minto Money ranked among the country’s top-earning tribal lending businesses during his tenure, believed he was ousted because he had started asking too many questions about where the money was going.

He had planned to pitch the idea of tribal lending to other Alaska villages.

“They need the money,” he said one afternoon in February. But by May, he had met with only one community. Leaders there were wary of the idea, and Winfrey said that he, too, had started having second thoughts.

“They said, ‘Isn’t this a rent-a-tribe thing?’ I flat out said, ‘Yes. That’s exactly what it is.’ ”

The “tribe gets pennies,” he told an Anchorage Daily News reporter. “It should be the other way around, where the tribe gets all the funds and CreditServe gets crumbs.”

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen

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.

A short video taken inside an Illinois school captured troubling behavior: A teacher gripping a 6-year-old boy with autism by the ankle and dragging him down the hallway on his back.

The early-April incident would’ve been upsetting in any school, but it happened at the Garrison School, part of a special education district where at one time students were arrested at the highest rate of any district in the country. The teacher was charged with battery weeks later after pressure from the student’s parents.

It’s been about eight months since the U.S. Department of Education directed Garrison to change the way it responded to the behavior of students with disabilities. The department said it would monitor the Four Rivers Special Education District, which operates Garrison, following a ProPublica and Chicago Tribune investigation in 2022 that found the school frequently involved police and used controversial disciplinary methods.

But the department’s Office for Civil Rights regional office in Chicago, which was responsible for Illinois and five other states, was one of seven abolished by President Donald Trump’s administration in March; the offices were closed and their entire staff was fired.

The future of oversight at Four Rivers, in west-central Illinois, is now uncertain. There’s no record of any communication from the Education Department to the district since Trump took office, and his administration has terminated an antidiscrimination agreement with at least one school district, in South Dakota.

In the April incident, Xander Reed, who has autism and does not speak, did not stop playing with blocks and go to P.E. when he was told to, according to a police report. Xander then “became agitated and fell to the ground,” the report said. When he refused to get up, a substitute teacher, Rhea Drake, dragged him to the gym.

Another staff member took a photo and alerted school leadership. Principal Amy Haarmann told police that Drake’s actions “were not an acceptable practice at the school,” the police report said.

Xander’s family asked to press charges. Drake, who had been working in Xander’s classroom for more than a month, was charged about three weeks later with misdemeanor battery, records show. She has pleaded not guilty. Her attorney told ProPublica that he and Drake did not want to comment for this story.

Tracey Fair, the district’s director, said school officials made sure students were safe following the incident and that Drake won’t be returning to the district. She declined to comment further about the incident, but said school officials take their “obligation to keep students and staff safe very seriously.”

Doug Thompson, chief of police in Jacksonville, where the school is located, said he could not discuss the case.

A screenshot from a recording of a CCTV video shows Xander Reed being dragged down the hallway by a teacher at the Garrison School. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Xander’s mother, Amanda, said her son is fearful about going to Garrison, where she said he also has been punished by being put in a school “crisis room,” a small space where students are taken when staff feel they misbehave or need time alone. “He has not wanted to go to school,” she said. “We want him to get an education. We want him to be with other kids.”

Four Rivers serves an eight-county area, and students at Garrison range from kindergartners through high schoolers. About 70 students were enrolled at the start of the school year. Districts who feel they aren’t able to educate a student in neighborhood schools send them to Four Rivers; Xander travels 40 minutes each way to attend Garrison.

The federal scrutiny of Garrison began after ProPublica and the Tribune revealed that during a five-year period, school employees called police to report student misbehavior every other school day, on average. Police made more than 100 arrests of students as young as 9 during that period. They were handcuffed and taken to the police station for being disruptive or disobedient; if they’d physically lashed out at staff, they often were charged with felony aggravated battery.

Garrison School is part of a special education district that’s supposed to be under federal monitoring for violating the civil rights of its disabled students. (Bryan Birks for ProPublica)

The news organizations also found that Garrison employees frequently removed students from their classrooms and sent them to crisis rooms when the students were upset, disobedient or aggressive.

The Office for Civil Rights’ findings echoed those of the news investigation. It determined that Garrison routinely sent students to police for noncriminal conduct that could have been related to their disabilities — something prohibited by federal law.

The district was to report its progress in making changes to the OCR by last December, which it appears to have done, according to documents ProPublica obtained through a public records request.

But the records show the OCR has not communicated with the district since then and it’s not clear what will come of the work at Four Rivers. The OCR has terminated at least one agreement it entered into last year — a deal with a South Dakota school district that had agreed to take steps to end discrimination against its Native American students. Spokespeople for the Education Department did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

Scott Reed, 6-year-old Xander Reed’s father, said he and Xander’s mother were aware of the frequent use of police as disciplinarians at Four Rivers and of OCR’s involvement. But they reluctantly enrolled him this school year because they were told there were no other options.

“You can say you’ve made all these changes, but you haven’t,” Scott Reed said. For example, he said, even after confirming that Drake had dragged the 50-pound boy down the hall, school leadership sent her home. “They did not call police until I arrived at school and demanded it” hours later, he said.

“If that was a student” that acted that way, “they would have been in handcuffs.”

Scott and Amanda Reed, Xander’s parents, enrolled their son in Garrison School after being told they had no other options. (Bryan Birks for ProPublica)

New ProPublica reporting has found that since school began in August, police have been called to the school at least 30 times in response to student behavior.

Thompson, the police chief, told ProPublica that, in one instance, officers were summoned because a student was saying “inappropriate things.” They also were called last month after a report that a student punched and bit staff members. The officers “helped to calm the student,” according to the local newspaper’s police blotter.

And police have continued to arrest Garrison students. There have been six arrests of students for property damage or aggravated battery this school year, police data shows. A 15-year-old girl was arrested for spitting in a staff member’s face, and a 10-year-old boy was arrested after being accused of hitting an employee. There were at least nine student arrests last school year, according to police data.

Thompson said four students between the ages of 10 and 16 have been arrested this school year on the more serious aggravated battery charge; one of the students was arrested three times. He said he thinks police calls to Garrison are inevitable, but that school staff are now handling more student behavioral concerns without reaching out to police.

“I feel like now the calls for service are more geared toward they have done what they can and they now need help,” Thompson said. “They have attempted to de-escalate themselves and the student is not cooperating still or it is out of their control and they need more assistance.”

Police were called to the school last week to deal with “a disturbance involving a student,” according to the police blotter in Jacksonville’s local newspaper. It didn’t end in an arrest this time; a parent arrived and “made the student obey staff members.”

by Robert Faturechi and Brandon Roberts

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

Two days before President Donald Trump announced dramatic plans for “reciprocal” tariffs on foreign imports, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sold stock in almost three dozen companies, according to records reviewed by ProPublica.

The Feb. 11 sales occurred near the stock market’s historic peak, just before it began to slide amid concerns about Trump’s tariff plans and ultimately plummeted after the president unveiled the details of the new tariffs on April 2.

Disclosure records filed by Duffy with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics show he sold between $75,000 and $600,000 of stock two days before Trump’s Feb. 13 announcement, and up to $50,000 more that day.

Transportation secretaries normally have little to do with tariff policy, but Duffy has presented himself as one of the intellectual forefathers of Trump’s current trade agenda. As a congressman in 2019, his last government position before Trump elevated him to his Cabinet post, Duffy introduced a bill he named the “United States Reciprocal Trade Act.” The proposed legislation, which did not pass, in many ways mirrors Trump’s reciprocal tariff plan. Duffy worked on that bill with Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro. Trump’s tariffs were “the culmination of that work,” Duffy posted online, referring to his own bill in the House.

Trades by government officials informed by nonpublic information learned in the course of their official duties could violate the law. However, it’s unclear whether Duffy had any information about the timing or scale of Trump’s reciprocal tariff plans before the public did.

Trump had repeatedly promised to institute significant tariffs throughout the campaign. But during the first weeks of his term, investors were not panic selling, seeming to assume Trump wouldn’t adopt the far-reaching levies that led to the market crash following his “Liberation Day” announcement.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a Transportation Department spokesperson said an outside manager made the trades and Duffy “had no input on the timing of the sales” — a defense that ethics experts generally consider one of the strongest against questions of trading on nonpublic information.

His stock transactions “are part of a retirement account and not managed directly by the Secretary. The account managers must follow the guidance of the ethics agreement and they have done so.”

“The Secretary strongly supports the President’s tariff policy, but he isn’t part of the administration’s decisions on tariff levels,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson dismissed the notion that knowledge of Trump’s coming tariffs could constitute insider knowledge because “President Trump has been discussing tariffs since the 1980s.”

Duffy is the second Cabinet secretary to have sold stock at an opportune time.

Last week, ProPublica reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media, the president’s social media company, on April 2. A government ethics agreement required Bondi to sell the shares within 90 days of her confirmation, a deadline that would have given her until early May, but why she sold on that date is unclear. After the market closed that day, Trump presented his tariffs, sending the market reeling.

Following ProPublica’s story, at least two Democratic members of Congress called for investigations. Bondi has yet to answer questions about whether she knew anything about Trump’s tariff plans before the public did. The Justice Department has not responded to questions about the trades.

Disclosure forms for securities trading by government officials do not require them to state the exact amount bought or sold but instead to provide a broad range for the totals of each transaction.

Duffy's disclosure records show he sold 34 stocks worth between $90,000 and $650,000 on Feb. 11 and Feb. 13. Per the ethics agreement he signed to avoid conflicts of interest as head of the Transportation Department, he was required to sell off stock in seven of those companies during his first three months in office. Cabinet members are typically required to divest themselves of financial interests that intersect with their department’s oversight role, which in Duffy’s case involve U.S. roadways, aviation and the rest of the nation’s transportation network. The ethics agreement was dated Jan. 13, and Duffy was confirmed by the senate on Jan. 28, meaning he had until late April to sell. His spokesperson said he provided his account manager with the ethics agreement on Feb. 7.

The stocks he sold in the other 27 companies were not subject to the ethics agreement. Those shares were valued somewhere between $27,000 and $405,000, according to the records. Among them were Shopify, whose merchants are impacted by the tariffs, and John Deere, the agricultural machinery manufacturer that has projected hundreds of millions of dollars in new costs because of Trump’s tariffs.

Other companies Duffy sold, like gambling firm DraftKings and food delivery service DoorDash, are less directly vulnerable to tariff disruptions. But even those companies will be impacted if Americans have less disposable cash to spend. Few stocks were not hit hard by Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements. The S&P 500, a broadbased index, fell almost 19% in the weeks that followed Duffy’s sales and 13% specifically after Trump unveiled the details of his reciprocal tariff plan. Since Trump unexpectedly walked back much of those initial tariffs, the market has rebounded.

There’s no indication that the cash from Duffy’s sales was immediately reinvested. He appears to have held on to parts of his portfolio, including a Bitcoin fund, treasuries, S&P 500 funds and stock in Madrigal Pharmaceuticals, an American biopharma company. (Duffy also purchased some Microsoft shares, one of the stocks he’s prohibited from holding, days earlier on Feb. 7, only to sell them on Feb. 11 with the rest of his sales.)

Trades by government officials informed by nonpublic information learned through their jobs could violate the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge, or STOCK, Act. The 2012 law clarified that executive and legislative branch employees cannot use nonpublic government information to trade stock and requires them to promptly disclose their trades.

But no cases have ever been brought under the law, and some legal experts have doubts it would hold up to scrutiny from the courts, which in recent years have generally narrowed what constitutes illegal insider trading. Current and former officials have also raised concerns that Trump’s Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission would not aggressively investigate activities by Trump or his allies.

The president’s selection of Duffy to lead the Department of Transportation was somewhat unexpected. Duffy, who came to fame when he starred in the reality show “The Real World” in the late 1990s, had last held public office in 2019 during Trump’s first term when he served as a Wisconsin congressman.

As a lawmaker, Duffy introduced the bill that would have made it easier for Trump, or any president, to levy new tariffs, a role that had long been largely reserved for Congress. The bill would have allowed the president to impose additional tariffs on imported goods if he determined that another country was applying a higher duty rate on the same goods when they were coming from America.

The bill did not pass, but Trump has essentially assumed that power by justifying new tariffs as essential to national security or in response to a national emergency. His Feb. 13 announcement called on his advisers to come up with new tariff rates on goods coming from countries around the world based on a number of restrictions he said those countries were placing on American products — not just through tariffs, but also with their exchange rates and industry subsidies.

Even the public rollout of Duffy’s bill and Trump’s tariffs were similar. Duffy released a spreadsheet showing how other countries tariffed particular goods at a higher rate than the U.S. Trump also used a spreadsheet during his rollout to show that his new tariffs were the same or lower than the trade restrictions other countries had placed on American goods.

More recently, Duffy has been a booster of Trump’s trade policies.

“LIBERATION DAY!!🇺🇸🇺🇸We’re not gonna take it anymore!💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻,” he tweeted two days after Trump unveiled his reciprocal tariffs on April 2. “This week, @POTUS took a historic step towards stopping other countries from ripping off the American worker and restoring Fair Trade. In Congress, I helped lead the US Reciprocal Trade Act with @RealPNavarro and the @WhiteHouse to expand the President’s tariff powers in his first term. I am so proud to have been able to share the culmination of that work, Liberation Day, with my family this week. Thank you at POTUS!”

by Jennifer Berry Hawes, with additional reporting by Cassandra Garibay

“This Shits Crazy”

In their last phone call before bed, Janicke Glynn tries to reassure her husband. He is away visiting a sick relative, and a Weather Channel forecast of Hurricane Helene’s imminent collision with the North Carolina mountains is leaving him uneasy. The storm, more than 400 miles wide, is expected to strike their small community the next morning, Sept. 27.

Janicke encourages him to focus on his family up in Boston. That is more important. She is fine. It’s been raining a lot, but the house is fine. Everything is fine. He’ll fly home tomorrow. She will see him then.

“Love you.”

First image: Janicke Glynn celebrates finishing part of the renovation of her and her husband’s dream property. Second image: John Glynn with the couple’s two rescue dogs. (Courtesy of John Glynn)

Janicke, a 46-year-old French Canadian, isn’t worried. She feels a deep spiritual connection to their home in Yancey County, a remote and ruggedly sublime expanse in the shadow of trendier Asheville. Nestled on a mountainside draped in maple and birch, perfumed by mountain laurel, their property is surrounded by the Black Mountains, ancient protectors of this magical place. Mount Mitchell, the tallest among them — the tallest in the eastern U.S. — is their backyard.

When the power goes out, Janicke lights candles and opens a door. She loves to hear the creek just beyond, a normally burbling carrier of rainfall down the mountain. But after two days of rain, it is starting to roar even before Helene’s arrival. She settles onto a living room couch with a little rat terrier, Troopie, one of their two rescue dogs.

Seven years have passed since she and John first looked at this property. He was thinking about retirement spots by the time they married in 2016 after keeping up a long-distance relationship for nearly a decade. Both were sick of the harsh Northern winters, and Janicke longed to rekindle the bond she’d felt with the natural world growing up in rural Canada. When she got out of the car to look at the property, she heard the creek and felt an instant harmony with the place. It had a 1940s stone house up on a hill, two wood-paneled cottages tucked along the creek and five acres where she envisioned tending lush gardens.

When she wondered if it cost too much, John argued that wasn’t the right question.

“Do you want to live here?” he asked.

“I want to die here, Johnny.”

Janicke Glynn spent years nurturing her beautiful gardens. (Courtesy of John Glynn)

After John falls asleep in his hotel, Helene makes landfall on the Florida panhandle about 500 miles south of the Black Mountains. As its massive bands close in, Janicke stays up listening to the storm and texting a tenant who rents one of their cottages, about 40 yards away right on the creek.

He types, “This shits crazy over here.”

Janicke knows he is anxious. Hours earlier, he sent her a screenshot of a National Weather Service post on Facebook that warned Helene could become one of the region’s worst events “in the modern era.” He worried about what the forecasted 9 to 14 inches of rain, expected to fall onto the high peaks in the morning, would do to the already swollen rivers.

The post described “catastrophic, life-threatening flooding.” Her response was typically upbeat: “Thanks, Mother Nature is powerful!”

He’d been thinking he might drive to his brother’s place in Charlotte, but Janicke offered up her house if the cottage flooded. They hadn’t heard of evacuation orders or seen other signs to indicate anyone else seemed terribly concerned.

Inland vs. Coastal Responses

The response to Helene was far different on the Florida coast. Evacuation orders were swift and targeted, the routes to safety clearly conveyed. Had Helene hit North Carolina’s coast, the same likely would have happened. But as coastal areas have become far better at warning and evacuating people, inland communities too often remain ill prepared, with devastating results: In recent years, five times as many people died in freshwater drownings due to hurricanes’ extreme rainfall than from coastal storm surges in the continental U.S. — a dramatic reversal from a decade earlier.

As the hours pass and Helene closes in, Janicke’s tenant texts her, “My nerves are shot.”

He soon shows up at her door with a bag and his 15-year-old cat, Mama Kitty. The creek is pounding the foundation of his cottage and seeping inside. Its increasingly violent flow fills the air with a searing white noise as it races down the mountain past houses, horse pastures and barns. Cattail Creek Road, the main way in and out of the area, winds right alongside it.

Few people along Cattail fully realize the looming danger. Some of them sleep. One man laments that he will miss his flight in the morning. A woman downloads ebooks to have something to occupy her time if the internet goes out. Another assures a loved one that the storm will quickly pass before dawn.

Susie and Brian Hill bought their historic farmhouse the year before Helene. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

Like Janicke Glynn, Brian Hill lives close to Cattail Creek. Closer, even. His century-old farmhouse sits about 15 yards from the banks. Unlike Janicke, he is starting to worry. Late the night of Sept. 26, he peers outside and is caught off guard by the creek’s fast-rising water.

Whoa, it’s really full, he thinks.

But as far as he knows, Cattail Creek has never flooded the house where he lives with his wife, Susie, and 9-year-old daughter, Lucy. Both are asleep. He tries to be quiet, but a sudden noise jolts him — boom, boom boom. It shakes his house like fireworks. He peers outside and realizes that somewhere up the mountain, the water is dislodging boulders. They are crashing down.

Around midnight, someone knocks on their door. It’s a firefighter warning that the creek has risen so high that it blocks the road in one direction. Soon, there could be no way out. “I can’t tell you what to do,” the man says. But he urges them to move to higher ground.

Brian and Susie grab their little girl and their dog, then rush out to their pickup truck. In the darkness, they drive up a hill that overlooks their property.

Up the north fork of Cattail Creek, as the water rises, no first responder knocks on Janicke Glynn’s door.

Tudy Creek, Friday Morning A Precarious Place to Be

Overnight, Helene churns across Georgia, then clips the northwest corner of South Carolina. Before sunrise, the storm collides with the Black Mountains, particularly the towering frontal wall called the Blue Ridge Escarpment. The high peaks shove the massive storm up into the cooler atmosphere.

Up in the chillier air, that water condenses. As Helene’s bands lash the Black Mountains, the storm begins to dump enormous amounts of water onto the already saturated peaks. In the morning, from 7 to 10 a.m. alone, about 8 inches of rain will fall atop Mount Mitchell. Because all that water must go somewhere, the deluge creates two critical threats: flash flooding and landslides. Both pose extraordinary danger. But landslides can destroy with far less warning.

The Cane River is about to get pummeled by both. Hemmed in by mountains, it forms the spine of one major valley in Yancey County. One of its tributaries, Cattail Creek, extends off that spine like an arm reaching east. Another, Tudy Creek, reaches west.

(Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Several peaks wrap around Tudy Creek. High atop a particularly craggy one, the rainfall gets a toehold beneath soil clinging to a very steep and slightly concave slope of rock. Soil and rock will begin to slide with the water. Following the creekbed, the flow will gain velocity and weight and hurtle downhill with enough power to uproot trees and dislodge boulders.

In its path, a group of longtime neighbors live in a tranquil enclave of homes.

Among them is Ray Strickland, who retired a decade ago after 37 years as pastor of a local Baptist church. A hardworking man who still helps at the family construction company, Ray lives by the Scripture he often used during his first year at Laurel Branch Baptist, Psalm 66: “Make a joyful noise unto God.” His wife, Susan, a sweet woman with short grey hair, worked as a dental hygienist and performed as a clown named Jubilee at hospitals, nursing homes, parties — even the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Along with several of their neighbors, they raised their children here. Two newer neighbors moved here from Florida, weary of all the hurricane threats.

Ray and Susan Strickland, riding the Great Smoky Mountain Railroad a couple of years ago (Courtesy of Ginnie Strickland Beverly)

On Friday morning, the neighbors are all in their homes. Little do they know that the swath of land on which their houses sit was created, at moments back in geological time, by landslides. They had careened down steep slopes, probably following creekbeds, and dumped huge amounts of material here. That created a flatter spot to build houses in this otherwise rugged place.

In a storm like Helene, it’s also a precarious place to be. If the topography enabled a landslide here before, it could do so again.

Unfinished Warning

The neighbors might have been aware of the landslide threat if the state had finished a hazard mapping program that North Carolina legislators created 20 years ago. They acted after storms caused at least 85 landslides that killed five people. But when developers and real estate agents pushed back, lawmakers who didn’t want statewide regulations halted the program for almost a decade.

They restarted it in 2018 — after more landslide deaths. But Yancey County still hasn’t been mapped. Neither have four other counties in Helene’s path.

Given it already has been raining a lot, Ray and Susan worry most about their 43-year-old son, Aaron, who lives on the other side of the mountain with his two young children. In April, water seeped into his basement.

When Ray texts Aaron around 7 a.m., just as Helene is arriving in Yancey, he responds, “flooding.”

The curt tone isn’t like him. He and his parents normally stay in daily contact, so Ray and Susan figure they’ll try him again later.

Then their cell service cuts out. Without it, they’re among those in pockets across the county who don’t get the National Weather Service’s 8:50 a.m. emergency warning for Yancey: “The risk of life-threatening landslide activity continues to increase. … This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION.”

The storm worsens. Wind roars. So much water flows down the mountain that Tudy Creek — normally about 4 feet across — swells and merges with another creek to form a violent river that rages down the road between them. Water seems to gush through every crevice in the mountain bedrock.

Around 9 a.m., when the deluge settles between the storm’s bands, Ray heads to the back of their house where rocks are hitting the foundation. Susan ventures outside near the road, then meets Ray on their front porch. They’ve never seen anything like this. While Ray holds an umbrella, Susan records video with her phone.

Ray glances up. The tops of towering trees shake. Then a 20-foot wall of trees, boulders and mud rockets straight at them.

“Ray!” Susan screams.

“Good Luck, Everyone”

First responders were out overnight blocking off access to roads as they vanished beneath two of Yancey’s major waterways — the Cane and South Toe rivers — and the creeks that feed them. In this rural county, home to 19,000 people, the firefighters are all volunteers. So is the rescue squad.

The county commission recently received a draft of an emergency operations plan that warned, “A mass casualty event has the potential to quickly overwhelm the limited existing emergency medical resources in Yancey County.”

Now, on Friday morning, the wind and rain turn fierce. At 45, Sheriff Shane Hilliard hasn’t seen anything like it during his entire life here. Just before 8 a.m., he texts his mother to check in, but he doesn’t get a response. His parents live right on the South Toe River in the house he grew up in. His 92-year-old grandmother lives alone next door.

Rain whips downtown Burnsville, the county seat where the sheriff and other officials gather in the Emergency Operations Center. This command post is basically three desks, a conference table and four big TVs on the wall in a building near the courthouse.

In an adjacent building, calls pour into the county’s 911 center.

Landslides claw down the mountains. Hurricane-force winds splinter trees. Rivers snatch cars and rip apart homes. People climb into attics or swim through windows. A firefighter makes a distress call as the Cane River near Cattail Creek swamps his trailer. A deputy trying to rescue a family from their flooding home becomes trapped with them.

Dispatch blasts out an all-call: First responders must get off the roads. It’s too dangerous.

Cattail Creek Turns Violent

Across the street from Ray Strickland’s church, Cattail Creek decimates the community at around 10 a.m. on Sept. 27.

(Courtesy of William Pagan)

Watch video ➜

Jeff Howell, Yancey County’s emergency management director, watches the radar as storm imagery shifts to red. Helene’s rainfall now resembles blood-filled lungs hanging over the Black Mountains.

Howell, who has deep roots in the area, took the job seven years ago after three decades in the Army and Army Reserves. He had no experience with emergency management, so it’s been a lot of learn-as-you-go. For years he asked for extra hands, but as Helene approached, the department was just him and a part-time employee.

Uneven Training

Required education and training for emergency managers varies considerably by state. Florida recently enacted a law mandating minimum training, experience and education starting in 2026. Georgia requires directors to get the state’s emergency management certification within six months. But North Carolina doesn’t require specific training for its county emergency managers, who are tasked with enormous life-and-death decisions.

Now Howell faces the biggest test of his time in the office.

Over the past week, he watched each forecast turn more ominous, with western North Carolina in a bullseye of the heaviest rainfall. Yesterday around noon, a lead meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s regional office ended its final briefing before Helene’s arrival with a grim, “Good luck, everyone.”

The office also issued a public statement that warned, “Landslides, including fast-moving debris flows consisting of water, mud, falling rocks, trees, and other large debris, are most likely within small valleys that drain steep slopes.”

Around the same time, weather service staff also took to social media to post the dire message that Janicke Glynn’s tenant had seen: “This will be one of the most significant weather events to happen in the western portions of the area in the modern era.”

“We cannot stress the significance of this event enough,” it added. “Heed all evacuation orders from your local Emergency Managers.”

Flooding from the South Toe River in Yancey County on Sept. 27 around 9 a.m., first image, and around 11 a.m., second image (Courtesy of Zachary O’Donnell)

Unlike in South Carolina, where the governor typically makes evacuation decisions, in North Carolina, local and county governments primarily make them. Howell, the official who would recommend evacuation orders to the county commission chair, didn’t do so. In this largely conservative place — fresh off a culture war battle over a Pride display at the local library — he didn’t think the chair would go for them. Nor did he think residents would heed orders, given many locals’ disdain for government mandates and their pride in self-reliance.

Lack of Detailed Plans

Howell and other county leaders noted that while coastal areas are used to thinking about evacuations, inland communities, especially in the mountains, don’t deal with hurricanes nearly as often.

While the commission chair said he would have considered a request from Howell, he didn’t think Yancey had detailed enough plans in place to know where to advise people to evacuate given the size of the storm and the complexity of mountain terrain.

With the ongoing challenge of rebuilding, Yancey County has not formally examined its preparedness for the disaster, but the county chair expects it will do so later. In April, the state Emergency Management agency released a report it had commissioned on its response to Helene and its interactions with local officials, but the report doesn’t probe evacuations.

People who survived Helene say it’s true that not everyone would — or could — have heeded an order. But some say they would have left, or at least prepared better. Many, including those living in high-risk areas and caring for young children and frail older people, didn’t evacuate because they didn’t see clearer signs of urgency from the county.

By nightfall on Sept. 26, the day before Helene struck, three nearby counties issued mandatory evacuation orders for certain areas and at least five issued voluntary ones. Among Yancey’s rural neighbors, one of the most robust responses to Helene came from McDowell County. Officials there issued voluntary and mandatory evacuation orders for specific areas, launched two door-knocking campaigns to warn people in high-risk places, and put out flyers in English and Spanish that warned of life-threatening flash floods and urged all people in vulnerable areas to “evacuate as soon as possible.” Many did so.

Yancey also did some door knocking. Howell joined first responders urging people in the most obviously dangerous places to consider leaving. Not everyone appreciated the warning. Howell got an earful before finally convincing a man to leave a campground almost encircled by the South Toe River.

Like officials across the region, Howell took to Facebook as well. Around lunchtime on Sept. 26, he shared the weather service’s latest grim briefing and suggested people make plans to stay somewhere else if they live near flood-prone areas. But while the weather service aimed to alarm people into action with its dire post, Howell thought it best not to panic them.

So he softened the message, adding, “This information is not to frighten anyone.”

“We Need to Go Back Now!”

About 150 yards up the hill from their century-old house, Brian and Susie Hill huddled in their pickup truck with their little girl and dog overnight as rain poured and darkness enveloped Cattail Creek.

Now, a few hours after sunrise, they watch their house drown.

They would have left if the county had issued a mandatory evacuation order, especially for Lucy’s sake. Still, if they hadn’t gotten that middle-of-the-night knock on the door from the firefighter, it could have been worse.

Susie hands her cellphone to the child to distract her from the sight beyond the truck’s windows. The creek rages. It surrounds their house, pounding it with waves and ripping the porch and doors off. Windows cave in.

They bought the white farmhouse, with its mountain views, a year ago and have been busy restoring it — slowly, on two public school teacher salaries. This is a place where their daughter can run outside on 6 acres, where a neighbor’s horses graze in a field next door, where they can gather around the fire pit at night and listen to the creek. Susie raises chickens and tends a garden filled with asparagus, blueberries and strawberries.

People like Susie and Brian come to Yancey County, and stay here, and die here, for the majesty of two forces: the mountains and the rivers. The ancient mountains protect; the rivers nourish. They provide hiking, whitewater rafting, kayaking and the meditations of so many tranquil creeks.

Now it feels like both have betrayed them. Along Cattail, people watch the landscape of their happiest memories vanish beneath floodwaters.

Janicke Glynn and her tenant, who is sheltering at her house, were up all night listening to the storm. He feared what was happening to his cottage down by the creek. Janicke remained calm, lighting candles when the power went out and trying to ease his worry. He’d gone through a tough time last year, losing family and dealing with heartbreak, and they’d become close friends.

But at the first crack of daylight, his emotions fray when Janicke ventures outside to pick up branches and sticks. Rain still drenches the mountainside, and wind gusts with enough force to bend trees. Janicke wants to keep her paradise unmarred. He doesn’t want anyone to get hurt. When he runs out after her, yelling at her to come back inside, she reluctantly complies.

Floodwaters Tear at the Creekside Cottage

Janicke Glynn’s tenant filmed his home at 8 a.m. Sept. 27.

(Courtesy of Janicke Glynn’s tenant)

Watch video ➜

When the rain and wind ebb just before 10 a.m., they step outside to assess the damage together. Hemlock hedges block the view of his cottage, so they head down toward it. The creek has calmed a bit as well. As they slip closer, they see the windows are busted and his belongings dragged out. Everything inside is churned up.

Janicke is fearless. But her tenant is unnerved. He thinks they are acting way too comfortable. Standing beside the battered cottage, he hollers, “I think we should go back to the house!”

Janicke steps closer to the water.

“We need to go back now!” he screams.

A gush of water rushes under her. From a dozen feet away, she turns toward him. As she does, the current rips down the cottage and then swallows them both.

Across the Ruins

Ray Strickland wonders if he is dead. The retired pastor realizes he is in a small pocket of empty space encased in debris from their home. Light reaches through a hole. Something pins his leg.

When he yells to his wife, Susan, she does not answer.

An opening. The light. If he leaves his boot, he can wriggle free. When he climbs out of the pile, destruction surrounds him. A car alarm blares. A smoke alarm screams. Water rages by.

Ray sits on a boulder, dazed. Drywall sticks out of one ear. Blood runs down his arm. What looks like road rash covers his skin. Yet he feels strangely serene. If God takes him now, that’s his will.

Some time passes. Then a man’s voice. Someone is yelling his name. It is Pete Lewicki, who lives in the next house down from him. But Pete is across a wide river blazing past the rubble. Ray hollers at him to get back.

Pete Lewicki jumped into action after the landslide. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

Pete doesn’t listen. When he was in the Navy, he worked in search and rescue. Now that training kicks back in. To reach Ray, he and his 24-year-old son haul over ladders and move logs to create a makeshift bridge. Pete slips crossing the slick ladder. Floodwater tears at him as he climbs back up.

When he reaches Ray, Pete finds the man is shaking — and is eerily calm.

Once they get Ray out of the wreckage of his home and into their house, Pete’s wife wraps him in a blanket and finds dry clothes for him. Pete promises he will be back.

A landslide barreled through their enclave. Ray’s house is gone. So is the house just above Ray’s at the top of their road. So is its freestanding garage apartment, where an older man named James Andrews lived. Trees and boulders block the way. Pete makes it, then spots James. He is dead, pinned beneath a huge tree. Pete covers the body with a bedsheet in the debris.

As Pete heads back to his house, Ray comes outside. He is thinking more clearly now and is certain his wife, Susan, is in the mound of debris where he’d been trapped. They had been near each other when the landslide hit. He leads Pete and two other men from down the road to the small hole he’d crawled through in the ruins. The men inch down into it.

Pete spots Susan. She is 3 feet down from where Ray’s blood pooled in the wreckage. It’s clear she has died.

He remembers her smile, which she used to brighten people’s lives. Almost every day, she and two neighbor ladies, both recently widowed, walked up and down the road together. When they walked by shortly after Pete moved in, Susan stopped and came over to give him a big, welcoming hug. Pete, a veteran with neck tattoos who has post-traumatic stress disorder, deeply appreciated her gesture.

They all know that Susan is buried too deep to get her out themselves. Ray, her husband of almost 50 years, tells them to stop trying. It’s a miracle he is alive, and he doesn’t want anyone else to get hurt.

The Wreckage of the Stricklands’ Home

Pete Lewicki filmed a video around 11 a.m., after a landslide barreled down Tudy Creek.

(Courtesy of Pete Lewicki)

Watch video ➜

Looking across the ruins, Pete sees the landslide’s path down the steep slope above their road. The debris flow had barreled more than a mile down the mountain, leaving an expanse of mud and rocks. He had never seen this magnitude of destruction, not even during his 40 years living in Florida, where hurricanes repeatedly flooded his home. A massive mound of trees and remnants of the destroyed houses sits piled against a neighbor’s garage. A widow lives there with her parents, who are 86 and 89. Pete heads over to check on them.

When he gets there, he sees that Marie-France Herman, the woman who lives at the top of the road, is there with them. She is caked in mud with a black eye and a nasty gash on her ankle. Inside the house, they are all slogging through mud almost to their knees. But getting out means crossing the landslide’s path to reach another neighbor’s house, an A-frame that looks, somehow, unscathed.

After many precarious moments, they all make it. Ray joins them.

The neighbors share notes about what they all just survived. When the landslide hit, Marie was looking out at the worsening storm through an antique door. An 81-year-old distant relative in poor health who lives with her was sitting nearby at the kitchen table when Marie spotted trees toppling down the mountain like dominoes.

The next thing she remembers, water slammed into her. She expected to drown. Instead, she got her head above water and climbed onto some logs.

She has lost everything, even her husband’s ashes. And she doesn’t know where her relative is.

Unreachable

The rain finally lets up by late morning on Sept. 27, but the rivers and creeks rage with so much water flowing down the slopes. Hilliard, the sheriff, heads to the 911 center, which is running off a generator. The calls coming in terrify him and the other county leaders. Floodwaters fill homes. Rivers ravage roads. People watch neighbors get swept away in cars and on foot. Landslides careen down slopes.

At 10:51 a.m., the 911 center suddenly falls silent.

The sheriff and others look at one another: What just happened?

What was left of Yancey’s cell service has now failed. Landlines are already out. So is the internet.

Emergency responders are left with only their radio system. And that is quickly overwhelmed. It takes eight to 10 tries to get a call out, if they can even get one out. Many just get error tones.

Finally, somehow, the sheriff gets through to the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association director in Raleigh. “I need help!” he pleads.

But help won’t be coming, not any time soon.

Yancey County Sheriff Shane Hilliard (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

County-to-county communications across the region barely function. The state Emergency Management agency is severely understaffed, slowing its response.

As Helene’s deluge flows down the Black Mountains, it inundates rivers on all sides of the peaks, claiming dozens of lives and destroying communities in every direction. One county over from Yancey, a family of four — including two little boys — are swept to their deaths while fleeing their home. To Yancey’s south, floodwater swallows little towns en route to Asheville. A nearby landslide kills 11 people from one family and two firefighters coming to their aid. Raging water decimates downtown Chimney Rock, a tourist village, heading to Lake Lure, a resort town. The National Weather Service blasts out an alert: “DAM FAILURE IMMINENT!”

Minutes later, at 11:15 a.m., state transportation officials tweet, “All roads in western NC should be considered closed.”

Get in Touch

We will continue to tell the stories of Helene’s devastation, and we want to know: What is one thing the storm destroyed that you would have saved had you evacuated? To share, leave us a voicemail at 828-201-2738.

Hilliard knows little of this is happening. With the 911 center silent, cellphones and landlines and internet all down, officials inside the Emergency Operations Center abandon it. The command center is useless. They cannot help anyone from here.

Not long before noon, the sheriff heads out with a crew in the county’s large armored military surplus vehicle. They cannot get far. Downtown Burnsville is an island. Roads and bridges in all directions are submerged, washed away, blocked by trees or smothered in the liquefied mud of landslides. Places like Tudy Creek and Cattail Creek are unreachable.

Cattail Creek at around 10 a.m. on Sept. 27 (Courtesy of Douglas Rodgers)

Everyone in the vehicle falls silent. A look the sheriff has never seen falls over their faces: They are afraid. His radio squawks. Someone from the South Toe Fire Department hollers his name. Firefighters made it to the river where the sheriff’s parents and elderly grandmother still live.

His parents’ house is gone, washed away. And they cannot find his parents.

He yells for them to check next door at his grandmother’s house.

They tried, the voice says. But her house is gone, too.

“Where Are We?”

On Sunday morning, two days after the storm hit, Aaron Strickland still hasn’t heard from his parents. After Helene subsided, he and his girlfriend went to the local fire station where her son, a volunteer firefighter, worked overnight. He and other firefighters returning from distress calls described an apocalyptic level of destruction.

But none of them mentioned Tudy Creek, and Aaron figures that’s a good thing.

When his girlfriend finds a county building with working Wi-Fi, he’s relieved to finally make some calls. He dials his parents, but the call won’t go through. He is able to reach his sister, Ginnie Strickland Beverly, who lives a few hours away in Winston-Salem.

Ginnie is distraught. Like so many people unable to reach loved ones trapped inside Helene’s destruction zone across western North Carolina, she has been scouring news sources and Facebook, gathering scraps of details about what’s happened. She heard crews airlifted a dead person out from Cattail Creek. But she hasn’t been able to find anyone who reached Tudy Creek.

“Have you made it up to Mom and Daddy’s yet?” she asks.

Worry sets in. Aaron hangs up and hurries out. Maybe he can get there himself.

At the first bridge, police are directing traffic, so Aaron stops to see what he can find out. This is a small community, and he sees familiar faces. One is the mother of a childhood friend who lives at the base of Tudy Creek. Aaron has known her his entire life. When she sees him, she hurries over and wraps him in a hug.

“Honey, I’m so sorry,” she says. For a moment, they look at each other. Aaron isn’t sure what she means.

“Your mom is gone,” she blurts out. His father, Ray, is hurt. She doesn’t know how badly. Her son just made it down from there. A landslide. Some bodies. Aaron doesn’t hear much else.

Desperation consumes him. So does a plan.

Aaron Strickland, Ray and Susan’s son, drives along the devastated Cane River area. (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

Normally, it takes 20 minutes to drive around the mountain from his place to his parents’ house. But as a crow flies, it’s more like 2 or 3 miles over the mountain. Growing up, that mountain was Aaron’s playground.

He and his girlfriend’s son, the volunteer firefighter, drive to an airstrip at the top of the mountain, then hike down toward his parents’ house. As they slip on slick mud and wet leaves, fear propels them. Aaron fights back images of his father with a head wound or broken bones, or worse. He shoves away thoughts of his mother, for now.

They come upon what looks like a landslide, its mud like quicksand pocked with holes and mangled trees. To Aaron, it appears 100 yards wide. They must go around it over toppled trees and boulders.

Finally, they spot a creek. It flows down a channel scoured out that looks 30 yards across and 20 feet deep. Aaron has hiked all over these mountains, and the only creeks up here are slim little things 3 or 4 feet wide, a few inches deep.

“Where are we?” he asks.

At last, they see an old logging road. There is only one on this mountain, and it leads to the top of his parents’ road on Tudy Creek. But when they reach where it should dead end into their street, piles of mud, trees and boulders 20 feet high and 50 yards across block their path. When they scale it, Aaron looks out over the expanse of fallen trees, boulders, mud and debris.

Oh my God.

He clambers down toward the spot where his parents’ house — the home he grew up in, the tan split-level with the long front porch — should be standing. Terror replaces his desperation.

Chunks of the Stricklands’ foundation next to where their house once stood (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

The woman who told him about his mother’s death also said his father was at their neighbor Rita Thacker’s house. Aaron’s heart thunders. His stomach churns. He scrambles up the steep, muddy bank toward Rita’s. Huge fallen trees block his view. Climbing through dense branches and leaves, he looks for holes to wiggle through.

Finally he sees Rita’s beautiful A-frame. He hears voices. He hadn’t considered that other people might be there with his dad and Rita. Busting through the last branches, he pops out looking at her backyard.

Rita is standing right there with another neighbor and that woman’s elderly parents. They turn to the commotion. Aaron spots his dad.

Ray is standing with his back to him. But he is standing. He is talking. He is OK.

Aaron sprints over and wraps his arms around his father. No contact for days, terrible, awful stories coming in, running on fumes, little sleep, the shock of his mom’s death, fear for his dad’s safety, inability to communicate, all of that bursts out in the tears of this moment.

He has rarely seen his dad with a three-day scruff, so he sets his hand on his face to feel it. “It’s the best you’ve ever looked,” he says.

With no way to contact anyone, no running water or power or passable roads, the neighbors relied on each other since the landslide. One is a nurse who treated the physical wounds. Pastor Ray has fed spiritual needs — and hauled 5-gallon buckets down to gather water to flush the toilets. Rita has a gas stove, so they cook. This morning, they made waffles.

Aaron with a photo of his mother, Susan, who was one of three people killed in a landslide on Tudy Creek (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

As his adrenalin ebbs with relief, Aaron turns to the destruction.

His parents’ house looks like a giant hand crushed it. The body of Aaron’s 71-year-old mother, the woman who took him with her to clown conferences when he was a kid, is buried so deep in the mound of debris that it will take heavy equipment to get her out. He finds one of her old Bibles.

Almost a mile down the mountain, neighbors find the body of Marie’s elderly relative.

A New Fear

Janicke Glynn’s husband landed in Charlotte shortly after the storm hit, and during the two days since he has turned frantic. He hasn’t been able to reach her — or anyone else in the area. Nor can he get back to Cattail Creek. Every road he tries is blocked by flooding, landslides and police who turn him back. He is staying at a hotel 80 miles from Burnsville with no electricity.

Finally, on Sunday afternoon, he gets a text from their tenant. It comes from someone else’s phone, a newer one that can get a satellite connection.

“I’m so sorry Janicke is gone,” it reads.

Their tenant adds that he almost died too. When the cottage collapsed, a freight train of water and mud consumed Janicke. But when it smashed into him, it shoved him closer to the main house. He grabbed a spindly shrub and clung to it, praying that it wouldn’t snap and he might see his family again.

Eventually, screaming for help, he pulled himself out. But he could not find Janicke.

Now, he is trying to hike to the local fire station for help. He has no glasses, his skin is shredded in spots, and he’s bleeding from a deep gash in one knee. The station is a few miles away but feels unreachable with no roads and infinite destruction to cross. He promises John he will call when he can get service.

The remnants of the flash flood that destroyed the cottage where the Glynns’ tenant lived (Courtesy of John Glynn)

In Yancey County alone, 11 people died due to Helene. Per capita, that’s twice the rate of deaths as any other county in North Carolina. Yancey bore the brunt of the storm’s highest recorded wind gust and its highest recorded rainfall — both on Mount Mitchell. Thirty inches fell there over three days at the most inundated site, half of it before Helene’s arrival. Hundreds of landslides raked the county’s slopes.

Across the South, officials attribute 250 deaths to the storm. Of those, 107 died in North Carolina. Helene is the deadliest inland hurricane on record, by far.

Freshwater flooding was the top killer.

The sheriff learns his parents and his grandmother are alive after a harrowing escape through floodwaters. But across the South Toe River, a family of four who came to Yancey after fleeing the war in Ukraine were swept away.

Flooding damaged the pews, first image, and hymnals, second image, of Laurel Branch Baptist Church, where Ray Strickland served as a pastor for 37 years. (First image: Courtesy of Ginnie Strickland Beverly. Second image: Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica.)

Jeff Howell, the emergency management director, retired earlier this year and still remains haunted. During his time in the Army and Army Reserves, he was deployed three times for three wars in three decades. None got to him like Helene. He couldn’t shoot back at the storm.

In hindsight, he feels that he and others notified folks as best they could given the unprecedented nature of Helene’s assault.

It’s true that no one alive had ever seen destruction of this magnitude in the region. But the National Weather Service warnings about the storm — “catastrophic, life-threatening flooding” and “severely damaging slope failures” and among the worst “in the modern era” — proved prescient.

When Brian and Susie Hill emerged from their truck the morning of Sept. 27, they found their once-gorgeous property resembled a moonscape of mud and rocks. Inside their home, it looked like someone put the contents of their lives into a blender. But when they slogged into their daughter’s bedroom shortly after the floodwaters receded, they found her stuffed animals still on the top bunk where she left them before Helene hit. They were perched just above the water line and were the only thing she cared about salvaging.

The little girl had been so stoic. But when they left the house with her stuffed animals, she finally cried.

Lucy’s stuffed toys (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica)

About a week later, the Hills are living at a friend’s house. Susie is grateful that Lucy can play with the family’s three young sons and keep her mind off things. The sadness of all they have lost subsides for a moment — and is quickly replaced by a new fear.

She and Brian live on public teachers’ salaries. They have 28 years left on their mortgage. Because their house isn’t in a flood zone, they don’t have flood insurance.

She gets a pause on their mortgage. But it’s only for three months. She can think of just one place to turn to next for the magnitude of help they need. On her cellphone, through the fog of trauma, she types in “FEMA.”

The South Toe River (Juan Diego Reyes for ProPublica) How We Reported This Story

This recounting of what happened when Helene struck Yancey County is based primarily on the stories shared with us by survivors, many of whom don’t appear by name in the story but whose experiences deeply inform it. We also relied on their videos and photographs of the storm’s onslaught, which they provided so that the rest of us could better understand the severity of the storm and what they experienced when left in its bullseye. In addition, we reviewed hundreds of videos of hurricane footage uploaded to social media. Our reporting included multiple visits to Yancey and other areas of western North Carolina devastated by the storm. In total, we reached out to more than 100 people living in our focus area along the Cane River, Tudy Creek and Cattail Creek in Yancey and interviewed dozens of survivors who live there. We also spoke with loved ones of nearly all who were killed in these communities.

Public records including emergency call logs, death records and weather data buttressed their accounts. So did interviews with many of the local officials who oversaw the response and first responders who saved lives during the storm, then rescued those who were trapped afterward.

To understand the warnings that officials and residents received, we compiled a timeline of the National Weather Service’s Helene-related alerts, reviewed its briefing packets for local officials and watched the final webinar its staff had with officials before Helene hit. We then scoured contemporaneous social media posts to understand what warnings and directives local governments across the mountain counties shared with their residents. In total, we reviewed more than 500 messages from more than three dozen jurisdictions in the lead-up to the storm.

We depended on key experts in the region to understand the science behind Helene and its destructive power. These included Trisha Palmer, warning coordination meteorologist, and Pat Moore, a lead meteorologist, at the National Weather Service’s Greenville-Spartanburg office, which serves western North Carolina. We also turned to geologist Philip Prince and Jennifer Bauer, co-owner and principal geologist of Appalachian Landslide Consultants, among other experts.

We plan to continue reporting on Helene’s aftermath to understand what lessons could better prepare these communities and others for future storms, as well as how the rebuilding effort is unfolding. If you would like to share tips with us, please email helenetips@propublica.org.

What Did Helene Take From You?

One man lost six electric guitars and four amps. One woman lost the town memorabilia kept in a landmark store that was in her family for generations. Some lost cars and homes. Many experienced the greatest loss of all, a dear friend or family member.

As we continue to tell the stories of Helene’s devastation of western North Carolina, we want to know: What is one thing the storm destroyed that you would have saved had you evacuated?

To let us know, leave a voicemail at 828-201-2738. We appreciate you sharing your story, and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering this information for the purposes of our reporting, and we will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.

Graphics and development by Lucas Waldron. Design by Anna Donlan. Visual editing by Shoshana Gordon and Donlan. Research by Mollie Simon.

by Talia Buford

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

We are pleased to announce the journalists chosen as the 2025 cohort of the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program.

The program was established in 2023 to expand the ranks of editors with investigative experience in newsrooms across the country and help better reflect the nation as a whole. Nine journalists from across the country will join four ProPublica staffers for this year’s program.

This program is funded by the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, which supports journalism, film and arts organizations whose work is dedicated to social justice and strengthening democracy.

Participants will undergo a five-day intensive editing boot camp in New York, with courses and panel discussions led by ProPublica’s senior editors. After the boot camp, participants will gather virtually every two months for continuing development seminars and be assigned a ProPublica senior editor as a mentor for advice on their work and careers.

“By providing investigative editing tools to journalists across the country, we aim to ensure that there will be more accountability reporting in more newsrooms across the country,” said Ginger Thompson, a managing editor at ProPublica. “It’s an effort we have long considered one of our highest priorities.”

Introducing the 2025 cohort of the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program:

Alejandra Cancino is a senior reporter at Injustice Watch, a Chicago-based nonprofit newsroom investigating the Cook County court system. Her award-winning investigations focus on the intersection of government and business, combining data with personal stories to expose systemic failures. Most recently, she co-authored a five-part narrative series that exposed how the judicial system favors landlords’ property rights over their tenants’ rights. The project was recognized with an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award. In 2022, Cancino spent a year editing and training emerging journalists at City Bureau, a nonprofit organization focused on Chicago’s marginalized communities. Previously, she covered manufacturing, economic development and labor as a business reporter at the Chicago Tribune. She is a 2025 recipient of Chicago’s Studs Terkel Award, which honors a journalist’s body of work. Cancino serves on the Investigative Reporters and Editors board and is a former president and board member of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Chicago Headline Club.

Daarel Burnette II is a senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Before joining the Chronicle in 2022, he served as an assistant managing editor and reporter for Education Week and the bureau chief of Chalkbeat Tennessee, a news organization based in Memphis. He has worked as an education reporter at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Minnesota Star Tribune, and the Louisville Courier Journal. He also worked as a general-assignment reporter at the Chicago Tribune. He received his undergraduate degree in print journalism from Hampton University and a master’s degree in politics and journalism from Columbia University.

Daphne Chen is the investigations editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a former investigative data reporter for the news organization. In 2022, Chen was part of a reporting team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for a project that uncovered how electrical fires disproportionately endanger poor Black renters. Previously, she was a data reporter for USA Today, where she revealed that state officials repeatedly sent children to live with foster parents accused of abuse. She also spent a year as a reporting fellow in Cambodia.

Nic Garcia is The Texas Tribune’s regions editor, leading a team of reporters who live across the state and tell the story of Texas policy and politics from the ground up. In 2022, his team produced a series on Texas’ failing water infrastructure — especially in rural communities — that propelled a statewide investment in water. Garcia joined the Tribune after a year as politics editor at The Des Moines Register in Iowa. He also was a senior writer at The Dallas Morning News, where he was named journalist of the year and won a second place Headliner award for his COVID-19 coverage. A Colorado native, Garcia covered the Colorado legislature for The Denver Post. His analysis of lobbying records inspired changes to the state’s lobbying laws.

Nicole Lewis is the engagement editor for The Marshall Project, leading the organization’s strategic efforts to deepen reporting that reaches communities most affected by the criminal legal system. She previously served as a senior editor at Slate, where she led a team of writers covering the array of legal issues before the Supreme Court for the publication’s jurisprudence section. In 2020, she was the lead reporter on a first-of-its kind political survey of the incarcerated, which received an honorable mention for an Investigative Reporters and Editors Philip Meyer Award for the project’s pioneering use of social science research methods. Prior to The Marshall Project, Nicole reported for The Washington Post’s America desk and the Fact Checker. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Andrea Lopez-Villafaña is the managing editor at Voice of San Diego. She is also a co-host on the VOSD Podcast, the most popular local public affairs podcast in San Diego, and writes a weekly newsletter, Cup of Chisme. She previously worked as a reporter at The San Diego-Union Tribune, where she covered the city’s neighborhoods.

Jennifer Palmer is an investigative reporter at Oklahoma Watch. She has more than two decades of news reporting experience and her work has been recognized with awards in public service reporting and investigative reporting. She started her career covering police and courts at the Rio Grande Sun, a scrappy weekly in northern New Mexico, where her reporting led to the ouster of a prominent judge. Before joining Oklahoma Watch, she previously worked as a reporter at the Omaha World-Herald and The Oklahoman. She is a native of Norman, Oklahoma, and a graduate of the University of Oklahoma.

Chastity Pratt is the national education editor at The Washington Post. Prior to joining the Post in 2024, she was the education bureau chief at The Wall Street Journal, a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and covered education at the Detroit Free Press, Newsday and The Oregonian. Over the years, she has helped train students and journalists for Harvard College, the Education Writers Association and Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Milton Valencia is The Boston Globe’s criminal justice editor in metro, overseeing coverage of crime, policing and public safety. He was previously deputy editor of the Globe’s inaugural Money, Power, Inequality team, which focuses on addressing the racial wealth gap across the region. Milton started as a reporter at the Globe in 2007. In that role, he reported from the Globe’s City Hall bureau, helping lead coverage of Boston’s historic 2021 race for mayor. In 2020, he was part of a Globe police accountability team that exposed corruption and mismanagement in the Boston Police Department. He also spent several years covering the federal justice system, including the death penalty trial of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. He was part of the staff that won the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the bombings. Milton began his career at local newspapers in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. He holds a degree in philosophy and public policy from the University of Massachusetts, Boston and lives south of Boston with his wife and their two children.

Additionally, four ProPublica staffers will join this year’s cohort. They are:

Peter DiCampo is a visuals editor at ProPublica, where he primarily works with local partner newsrooms across the country through the Local Reporting Network. His visual editing and art direction have been awarded by the National Press Photographers Association, the Society for News Design, The Society of Publication Designers and the Online Journalism Awards. Prior to joining ProPublica, he was NPR’s international visual editor. Before turning to editing, he worked for more than a decade as a freelance photojournalist, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. He co-founded Everyday Africa, a collective of photographers using social media to broaden coverage of Africa beyond the headlines, and The Everyday Projects, a global community of photographers and a visual literacy nonprofit. He was a 2019 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, and he is the recipient of grants and awards from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Code for Africa, the Magnum Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, Pictures of the Year International and the Pulitzer Center, among others.

Duaa Eldeib is an investigative reporter at ProPublica. She has examined failures that have led to a stillbirth crisis in the U.S., the ways in which insurance companies interfere with mental health treatment and the fatal consequences of delaying care during the pandemic. She was a reporter and producer on the documentary “Before a Breath.” Her reporting has sparked legislative hearings, spurred government reform and led to the exoneration of a mother who was wrongly convicted of murder, as well as the release of young men who were incarcerated as juveniles and later sent to adult prison for minor offenses. Before joining ProPublica, she worked at the Chicago Tribune, where she and two colleagues were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. She was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting twice — first in 2023 for her series on stillbirths and again in 2025 as part of the team covering access to mental health care.

Hannah Fresques is the deputy data editor at ProPublica. She has edited data-driven investigations on the aftermath of Texas’ abortion ban, high-interest tribal lending and a salmonella outbreak. She joined the organization in 2016, and her work as a reporter and editor has earned recognition from Investigative Reporters and Editors Philip Meyer Journalism Awards, as well as the Online News Association and Sigma Delta Chi Journalism awards. Before working in journalism, Fresques conducted evaluations of education policy for a nonprofit research organization. She holds a master’s degree in quantitative methods for social sciences from Columbia University.

Andrea Wise is the visual strategy editor at ProPublica, where she edits photography, illustration and other forms of visual journalism. She is also the co-founder of Diversify Photo, a nonprofit organization amplifying the voices of visual creatives from underrepresented groups in the global visual media landscape. She commissioned and led a yearlong photo essay that was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service as part of ProPublica’s reporting on the harmful consequences of state abortion bans and was also Pictures of the Year International’s Online Storytelling Project of the Year. That body of work was also recognized with a National Magazine Award for Public Interest, George Polk Award for Medical Reporting, Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism, and Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Journalism, among other honors. Her photo editing and art direction have also been recognized by Pictures of the Year, the National Press Photographers Association, the Society of Publication Designers, and the Society for News Design. She holds a bachelor’s with honors in studio arts from Trinity College and a master’s in photography from Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

by Mark Olalde

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

Days after President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term, the acting head of the Environmental Protection Agency sent an email to the entire workforce with details about the agency’s plans to close diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and included a plea for help.

“Employees are requested to please notify” the EPA or the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources agency, “of any other agency office, sub-unit, personnel position description, contract, or program focusing exclusively on DEI,” the email from then-acting Administrator James Payne said.

No employees in the agency, then more than 15,000 people strong, responded to that plea, ProPublica learned via a public records request.

Trump has made ending diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs a hallmark effort of his second term. Many federal employees, however, are declining to assist the administration with this goal. He signed an executive order on his first day back in office that labeled DEI initiatives — which broadly aim to promote greater diversity, largely within the workplace — as “illegal and immoral discrimination programs” and ordered them halted. His pressure campaign to end DEI efforts has also extended to companies and organizations outside the government, with billions of dollars in federal funding for universities frozen as part of the fight.

Corbin Darling retired from the EPA this year after more than three decades with the agency, including managing environmental justice programs in a number of Western states.

“I’m not surprised that nobody turned in their colleagues or other programs in response to that request,” he said, adding that his former co-workers understood that addressing pollution that disproportionately impacted communities of color was important to the agency’s work. “That’s part of the mission — it has been for decades,” Darling said.

Payne’s note to agency employees listed two email addresses — one belonging to the EPA and one to the Office of Personnel Management — where EPA employees could send details about DEI efforts. ProPublica submitted public records requests to both agencies for the contents of the inboxes from the start of the administration through April 1.

The Office of Personnel Management didn’t respond to the request, although the Freedom of Information Act requires that it do so within 20 business days. The agency also did not answer questions about whether it received any reports to its anti-DEI inbox.

The EPA, meanwhile, checked its inbox and confirmed that zero employees had filed reports. “Some emails received in that inbox did come from EPA addresses but none of them called out colleagues who were still working on DEI matters,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement in May.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

“The optimist in me would like to believe that maybe it is because, as an agency, we are generally dedicated to our mission and understand that DEIA is intrinsic in that,” a current EPA employee who requested anonymity said. “On the flip side, they’ve done such a good job immediately dismantling DEIA in the agency that folks who are up in arms might have just been assuaged.”

Although DEI programs are often internal to a workplace, the administration also put a target on environmental justice initiatives, which acknowledge the fact that public health and environmental harm disproportionately fall on poorer areas and communities of color. Environmental justice has been part of the EPA’s mandate for years but greatly expanded under the Biden administration.

Research has shown, for example, that municipalities have planted fewer trees and maintained less green space in neighborhoods with a higher percentage of people of color, leading to more intense heat. And heavy industry has often been zoned or sited near Latino, Black and Native American communities.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, who was confirmed in late January, has boasted about cutting more than $22 billion in environmental justice and DEI grants and contracts. “Many American communities are suffering with serious unresolved environmental issues, but under the ‘environmental justice’ banner, the previous administration’s EPA showered billions on ideological allies, instead of directing those resources into solving environmental problems and making meaningful change,” he wrote in an April opinion piece in the New York Post.

The EPA spokesperson said employees with more than 50% of their duties dedicated to either environmental justice work or DEI were targeted for layoffs. The agency “is taking the next step to terminate the Biden-Harris Administration’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Environmental Justice arms of the agency,” the spokesperson said.

EPA environmental justice offices worked on a range of initiatives, such as meeting with historically underserved communities to help them participate in agency decision-making and dispersing grants to fund mitigation of the carcinogenic gas radon or removal of lead pipes, Darling explained.

“A sea change isn’t the right word because it’s more of a draining of the sea,” Darling said. “It has devastated the program.”

by Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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

Texas lawmakers are pushing to impose steep penalties on local governments that don’t post campaign finance reports online, after an investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found some school districts weren’t doing so.

The initial posting requirements, designed to make election spending more transparent, went into effect nearly two years ago. Most of the school district leaders said they had no idea they were out of compliance until the newsrooms contacted them. Even after many districts uploaded whatever documentation they had on file for their trustee elections, reports were still missing because candidates hadn’t turned them in or the schools lost them.

“I was surprised and disappointed,” said Republican state Rep. Carl Tepper, who authored the online posting requirement. “I did realize that we didn’t really put any teeth into the bill.”

Tepper is aiming to correct that with a new bill this legislative session. He cited the newsrooms’ findings in a written explanation of why the state needs to implement greater enforcement.

The measure would require the Texas Ethics Commission, the agency that enforces the state’s election laws, to monitor thousands of local governments’ websites across the state and to notify them if any campaign finance reports are missing. If those government agencies do not upload the records that candidates have turned in within 30 days of the state’s notice, the commission can fine them up to $2,500 every day until they comply.

The proposed measure also recommends the state allot funding for the ethics commission to hire two additional staff members, whose job would be to monitor all local government entities that hold public elections in the state’s 254 counties and roughly 1,200 cities and towns. The newsrooms previously found the agency did not have any staff dedicated to enforcing compliance in local elections and, instead, investigated missing or late reports only when it received a tip.

The bill has cleared the Texas House but still needs approval from the Senate by May 28 if it has a chance of becoming law.

The superintendent of Galveston Independent School District, which was among those that ProPublica and the Tribune found hadn’t posted any campaign finance reports online last year, said the measure would help schools like his.

“I do like the suggestion of a 30-day period to achieve compliance after an issue is reported,” Matthew Neighbors said of the new proposal in an emailed statement. “Our district, for example, had no objections to posting the necessary campaign information once our new employees were aware of the requirements.”

Kelly Rasti, the associate executive director of governmental relations for the Texas Association of School Boards, said districts do not flout the law intentionally. Rasti said the employees tasked with handling school board election documentation are not always well versed in the state’s regulations but that the association plans to provide additional resources later this year.

District employees are accustomed to handling a plethora of education-related paperwork and reporting requirements imposed by the state. But “elections are just different, and they seem to have ever-evolving laws and rules associated with them,” Rasti said.

Notably, Tepper’s bill would not directly require the ethics commission to penalize or follow up with candidates who fail to turn in their reports. He initially included a provision in his bill that would make candidates ineligible to run for office if they didn’t file those records, even if they won an election. He told the newsrooms that he cut the penalty after realizing the logistical challenges it might present.

That means the ethics commission must still decide whether to investigate and fine any of the candidates and officeholders for the state’s estimated 22,000 local elected positions should they miss a filing. By contrast, candidates who run for statewide office are automatically fined by the commission if they don’t make a deadline.

Tepper’s ultimate goal is to create a unified system in which the ethics commission compiles campaign finance records for state and local candidates in one central database, rather than leaving local filings scattered across thousands of city, county and school district government websites. The Republican lawmaker withdrew his proposal to create such a system in 2023 after the commission estimated it would cost $20 million, but he told the newsrooms that he hopes to gain enough support to make that investment next session, in 2027.

For now, he sees his proposal as a necessary advance.

“I’m a big believer in incrementalism,” said Tepper. “This is another step toward better enforcement.”

by Doug Bock Clark

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

Last week, North Carolina Democrats scored a victory when Republican Judge Jefferson Griffin, who’d lost a tight race for the state’s Supreme Court, finally conceded defeat after a six-month legal battle to throw out ballots that he contended were illegitimate.

But that same morning, the party suffered a setback that may be more consequential: losing control of the state board that sets voting rules and adjudicates election disputes.

The board oversees virtually every aspect of state elections, large and small, from setting rules dictating what makes ballots valid or invalid to monitoring compliance with campaign finance laws. In the Supreme Court race, it consistently worked to block Griffin’s challenges.

The conservative takeover comes after the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a law stripping the power to appoint board members from North Carolina’s Democratic governor and gave it to the Republican state auditor.

Although a board spokesperson said its chair was traveling and unavailable to answer questions about how the new Republican majority would reshape North Carolina elections, experts said it will likely make it easier for challenges like Griffin’s to succeed and reduce expansive access to early voting.

It will “tilt the playing field to the advantage of the GOP,” said Gene Nichol, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies democracy in the state.

The party that controls the board holds significant power over who votes, how those votes are counted and who ultimately wins races.

Ann Webb, the policy director for Common Cause North Carolina, a liberal voting advocacy organization, called the shift “very consequential” and said she was worried the new board would seek to remove voters whose registrations have missing information from the state’s rolls and tighten requirements for people seeking to register or have provisional ballots count.

Conservatives called Democrats’ concerns overblown, particularly after years of Democratic control. Mitch Kokai, a senior political analyst at the John Locke Foundation, a conservative North Carolina think tank, conceded the board’s new majority might alter early voting locations or voter ID rules, over which the parties are divided. But he pointed out that many board decisions are made unanimously, not split along party lines.

“There is some sense that in the age of Trump there is some grand scheme to throw out election results and let the GOP win despite how people voted,” Kokai said. “I don’t think you’re seeing the stage being set for anything like that.”

Historically, the board’s five members have been appointed by North Carolina’s governor, with three of them coming from the governor’s party. Since 2016, the governor has been a Democrat.

When Josh Stein won a four-year term last fall, a Republican supermajority in the state legislature passed a law, then overrode his predecessor’s veto, to transfer this power to the state auditor. It was an unusual step. No other state has elections overseen by the state auditor.

Stein sued to block the law and, initially, a lower court sided with him. But in April, the state’s Court of Appeals, which has a Republican majority, issued a three-sentence decision overturning the lower court’s ruling without hearing oral arguments.

The next day, the state auditor named two new Republican members to the elections board, flipping control of it to conservatives. One is a former legislator who led efforts to redraw the state’s congressional districts in conservatives’ favor. The other was the longtime head of a conservative think tank with a history of advancing unsubstantiated voter fraud claims.

After swearing in the new members last week, the board’s first move was to fire its executive director, Karen Brinson Bell, replacing her with the general counsel to the speaker of the North Carolina House, a Republican. The board denied Bell’s request to address her staff during the meeting, but she subsequently released a statement that a spokesperson provided to ProPublica in response to a request for comment.

“We have done this work under incredibly difficult circumstances and in a toxic political environment that has targeted election professionals with harassment and threats,” she said of the board’s employees. “I hope we return to a time when those who lose elections concede defeat rather than trying to tear down the entire election system and erode voter confidence.”

Experts say the just-concluded battle over the Supreme Court seat provides a window into how changes at the elections board could affect future races, especially close ones with contested results. North Carolina is a swing state, and there have been several such cases in recent years. After the 2018 election, the board ordered a new election for a U.S. House of Representatives seat when a Republican victory was found to be tainted by an illegal absentee ballot scheme.

Before the 2024 election, right-wing activists discussed ways to overturn close election losses using a plan similar to the one Griffin put into action, according to a recording of a call obtained by ProPublica.

In the month after suffering a 734-vote loss to incumbent Democrat Allison Riggs, Griffin asked the elections board to toss out tens of thousands of ballots, mostly because information about the voters who cast them was missing from the state’s election database. The board, then majority Democrat, dismissed his challenges, concluding that voters had followed the rules in place at the time and that much of the missing information reflected administrative or clerical errors. Then Griffin sued.

Gerry Cohen, a former counsel for the legislature who is now a Democratic member of the Wake County Board of Elections, said it was “a real possibility” that a Republican-controlled state board “would have approved some of Griffin’s challenges” to throw out ballots. If that had happened, Riggs could have fought the board’s decision in the courts and won, but she would have then been litigating against the board rather than on the same side as it.

The law that gave the state auditor the power to appoint members of the state election board also gives him similar authority over North Carolina’s county election boards, which will mean each of them will be controlled by Republican majorities by the end of next month.

County boards approve locations and times for early voting, which is when the vast majority of North Carolinians vote. Experts predicted this could lead some boards to reduce the number of polling sites in areas that have more Democrats, like college campuses, or to close polls when Democratic voters are more likely to use them, such as Sundays when Black churches conduct “souls to the polls” voter drives.

Kokai contends that such changes aren’t necessarily meant to suppress the vote, if they even happen, and doubts they’d have much of an effect on Democratic turnout.

“If you really do care about voting, you do it,” he said. “If you go a mile off campus to do other things, you can do it to vote, too.”

Liberals, however, expect the revamped board to work hand-in-hand with the Republican-controlled legislature to transform elections in other ways.

“Things are going to look very different,” Webb said, in the 2026 midterm elections.

by Heather Vogell

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Update, May 15, 2025: This story has been updated to reflect the FAA’s announcement late Thursday that it had approved Starship 9 launch, which came after publication.

British officials told the U.S. they are concerned about the safety of SpaceX’s plans to fly its next Starship rocket over British territories in the Caribbean, where debris fell earlier this year after two of the company’s rockets exploded, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica.

The worries from the U.K. government, detailed in a letter to a top American diplomat on Wednesday, follow the Federal Aviation Administration’s decision last week to grant SpaceX’s request for a fivefold increase in the number of Starship launches allowed this year, from five to 25. Growing the number of launches of the most powerful rocket ever built is a priority for SpaceX head Elon Musk, who is also one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers.

Of particular concern to British officials is the public’s safety in the British Virgin Islands, Anguilla and the Turks and Caicos Islands — all of which could face debris risk from Starship 9.

After the explosion in January, residents of the Turks and Caicos reported finding pieces of the rocket on beaches and roads. A car was also damaged in the Starship 7 accident. Seven weeks later, after receiving the FAA’s blessing to proceed, SpaceX launched Starship 8 from Boca Chica, Texas, but it too exploded after liftoff. Air traffic in the region was diverted, and burning streaks from the falling rocket were visible in the sky from the Bahamas and Florida’s coast.

The British letter to a U.S. State Department official, Ambassador Lisa Kenna, asks the U.S. to consider changing the launch site or trajectory of Starship 9. If that isn’t possible, the request — from Stephen Doughty, the United Kingdom’s minister of state for Europe, North America and U.K. Overseas Territories — asks that agencies like the FAA consider altering the launch’s timing to minimize safety risks and the economic impact for the British territories.

The letter also requests that the U.S. government provide the United Kingdom more information on increased safety measures that will be put in place before Starship 9 launches, and that British territories be given enough warning to communicate with the public about those measures.

“We have been working closely with US Government partners regarding Starship Flight 9 to protect the safety of the UK Overseas Territories and to ensure appropriate measures are in place,” a  UK government spokesperson said Thursday in response to ProPublica’s questions about the letter.

The State Department did not respond to requests for comment.

On Thursday afternoon, the FAA said it was “in close contact and collaboration with the United Kingdom and the Turks and Caicos Islands, as well as other regional partners, as we continue to evaluate SpaceX’s license modification request for its proposed Starship Flight 9 launch.”

Hours later, though, after this story originally published, the agency announced it had approved Starship 9’s launch, pending the completion of an investigation into the previous explosion.

The agency also said it was expanding the "Aircraft Hazard Area" for the mission, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Caribbean, potentially affecting 175 flights. That hazard area nearly encompasses the Turks and Caicos Islands in their entirety, according to the FAA’s environmental assessment. The agency said the changes were due to the prior Starship’s problems and because SpaceX plans to reuse a previously launched Super Heavy booster rocket — something it will be doing for the first time.

Turks and Caicos’ Providenciales International Airport will need to close during the duration of the launch window, the assessment said. Airspace over a portion of The Bahamas will be closed, too.

The FAA said the launch has been scheduled outside peak transit times to minimize disruptions.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. But the company has said it learns from its mistakes. “With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability,” the company said after the Starship 8 accident. “We will conduct a thorough investigation, in coordination with the FAA, and implement corrective actions to make improvements on future Starship flight tests.”

Musk — who sees the uptick in launches as critical to the development of technology that could help land astronauts on the moon and ultimately Mars — has been less diplomatic.

He downplayed the January explosion as “barely a bump in the road” and seemed to brush off safety concerns, posting a video of the flaming debris field with the caption, “Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!”

SpaceX has not announced the date of the Starship 9 launch, but news reports have said it could happen as soon as May 21.

The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, which licenses launches and reentries, is undergoing a leadership shakeup. Three top executives, including the head of the office, announced in April that they were accepting voluntary separation offers.

Musk has been leading efforts to shrink the federal government through the departures of thousands of federal workers. Critics say he has an inherent conflict of interest because his businesses are regulated by agencies such as the FAA and rely on their approvals.

Musk said in a February interview that “I’ll recuse myself if it is a conflict.” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said Thursday that “All administration officials will comply with conflict of interest requirements.”

Last year, the FAA proposed $633,000 in fines against SpaceX for violations related to two previous launches. Musk, in turn, accused the FAA of engaging in “lawfare” and threatened to sue it for “regulatory overreach.” The administrative case remains open.

The number of rocket launches has increased dramatically in recent years, leading pilots and academics to warn about a growing danger in the air for flights that have only minutes to get out of harm’s way when a mishap — as explosions and other failures are called in industry parlance — occurs.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia found in a study published in January that the risk space objects pose to aircraft is rising. They said that the chance of an “uncontrolled reentry” from a rocket over a year is as high as 26% for some large, busy areas of airspace, such as those found in the northeastern U.S., in northern Europe or near major cities in the Asia-Pacific region.

A large union for airplane pilots told FAA officials in January that the Starship 7 breakup “raises additional concerns about whether the FAA is providing adequate separation of space operations from airline flights,” according to a letter sent the day after the rocket exploded.

“The ability of the FAA Air Traffic Control to respond in a timely fashion to an unanticipated rocket anomaly needs to be further evaluated,” said the letter from the Air Line Pilots Association, which represents 79,000 pilots at 42 U.S. and Canadian airlines. It asked that flight crews receive more information about high-risk areas before a launch so they can “make an informed and timely decision about their need to potentially reject flight plans that route their aircraft underneath space vehicle trajectories.”

In a response, the FAA said it would review its processes to see whether more can be done to prepare flight crews before a launch.

Capt. Jason Ambrosi, the union’s president, said in a statement emailed to ProPublica that changes are necessary. “Any safety risk posed to commercial airline operations is unacceptable.”

by Tim Golden

Leer en español.

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In what could be a significant escalation of U.S. pressure on Mexico, the Trump administration has begun to impose travel restrictions and other sanctions on prominent Mexican politicians whom it believes are linked to drug corruption, U.S. officials said.

So far, two Mexican political figures have acknowledged being banned from traveling to the United States. But U.S. officials said they expect more Mexicans to be targeted as the administration works through a list of several dozen political figures who have been identified by law enforcement and intelligence agencies as having ties to the drug trade.

The list includes leaders of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s governing party, several state governors and political figures close to her predecessor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the U.S. officials said. They insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive policy plans.

The governor of the Mexican state of Baja California, Marina del Pilar Ávila, confirmed that she and her husband, a former congressman, were told their U.S. visas were revoked because of “a situation” involving her husband. “The fact that the State Department has cancelled my visa does not mean that I have committed something bad,” she said at a news conference on Monday.

Sheinbaum said her government had asked U.S. officials to explain why Ávila was stripped of her visa but had been told that such matters are private and no further information was given.

The visa actions represent the latest political challenge for the new Mexican leader and her leftist National Regeneration Movement, known as Morena. Despite the country’s historic sensitivity to any hint of U.S. meddling, Sheinbaum has thus far bolstered her support at home by asserting Mexico’s sovereignty in discussions with President Donald Trump while also moving to meet his demands for action against the biggest traffickers.

Mexican journalists reported that U.S. immigration officials also pulled the visa of another border-state governor, Américo Villarreal of Tamaulipas, an assertion that the governor’s spokesperson dismissed as “unconfirmed.” (Villarreal has been frequently accused of having ties to drug trafficking, which he has denied.) Last month, the mayor of that state’s second-largest city, Matamoros, was stopped from crossing the border into Brownsville, Texas, but he, too, insisted he had not been formally stripped of his visa.

A State Department spokesperson declined to comment, noting that visa records are confidential under U.S. law.

Three U.S. officials said the visa actions will likely in some cases be accompanied by Treasury Department sanctions that block individuals from conducting business with U.S. companies and freeze financial assets they have in the United States. Ávila said that she did not have any U.S. bank accounts and faced no such sanction.

A spokesperson for the Treasury Department declined to comment on the sanctions plan.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller (Tom Brenner/The Washington Post/Getty Images)

When the administration imposed tariffs on Mexico in early March, it asserted that the country’s government had granted “safe havens for the cartels to engage in the manufacturing and transportation of dangerous narcotics, which collectively have led to the overdose deaths of hundreds of thousands of American victims.”

As part of what it has described as an all-out fight against fentanyl and other illegal drugs, the administration has designated some of the biggest Mexican trafficking gangs as terrorist organizations and explored the possibility of unilateral U.S. military actions against them, officials said.

The review of Mexican drug corruption was initiated by a small White House team that requested information from law enforcement agencies and the U.S. intelligence community about Mexican political, government and military figures with criminal ties.

Officials said the group has been shaping the administration’s security policy with Mexico under the leadership of a deputy White House homeland security adviser, Anthony Salisbury. It is overseen by the deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller.

A spokesperson for the White House declined to comment in response to questions about the group’s role in initiating the travel sanctions.

One official familiar with the team’s list said it overlaps with a file of about 35 Mexican officials that was compiled by Drug Enforcement Administration investigators in 2019, after López Obrador began shutting down Mexico’s cooperation with the United States in counterdrug programs.

That earlier effort sought to identify Mexican government figures who could be criminally prosecuted for aiding drug traffickers. It led to the 2019 indictment in the U.S. of the country’s former security chief, Genaro García Luna, and his conviction on drug charges five years later in a New York federal court.

The two former DEA officials in Mexico City who oversaw the compilation of the 2019 list, Terrance Cole and Matthew Donahue, also proposed that the State Department cancel the U.S. visas of some of the Mexican political figures named on it. Senior U.S. diplomats rejected that proposal.

Cole is now awaiting Senate confirmation as the Trump administration’s new DEA administrator.

Some current and former U.S. officials expressed concerns about the latest White House-led plan. They noted that the standard of proof required for both visa cancellations and Treasury sanctions is well below that of a criminal trial, which could encourage proponents of the measures to act on what might be less-than-solid information.

Officials said the visa actions were being taken under Section 212 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which stipulates that noncitizens can be found ineligible for entry to the United States if the government “knows or has reason to believe” that the foreigner “is or has been a knowing aider, abettor, assister, conspirator or colluder with others in the illicit trafficking” of illegal drugs. The law also allows the State Department to cancel the visas of relatives of a sanctioned official who may have benefited from their illicit gains.

One U.S. official said that while the visa withdrawals might send a powerful signal of the United States’ new willingness to challenge Mexican corruption, they could also stir new conflict between the two governments.

“We should be using all the resources of the government to go after these people,” the official said, referring to corrupt Mexican officials. “But the bigger question is: Does this work with President Sheinbaum? Are you going to lose an opportunity now with a Mexican government that has been very compliant on the drug front?”

A former Mexican ambassador to Washington, Arturo Sarukhaan, said further visa actions against prominent figures in Sheinbaum’s party would make it hard for her to continue claiming a “good” relationship with the United States despite Trump’s often openly confrontational tone.

“But at the same time,” Sarukhaan added, “it gives her — a nationalistic president with a very chauvinistic party behind her — a perfect excuse to say that everything bad that’s happening in Mexico with the economy and everything else is because of U.S. imperialism.”

López Obrador, who came to power in 2018, had promised to fight corruption as never before. Instead, he presided over an administration that denied having any corruption problem in its own ranks even as journalists produced report after report that officials close to the president and even his own sons were engaged in profiteering and graft.

Sheinbaum has struck a different tone. In a message to a Morena party congress on May 4, she warned the faithful about the dangers of cronyism, nepotism and corruption.

“All members of Morena should conduct themselves with honesty, humility and simplicity,” she said. “There cannot be any collusion with crime — whether organized or white collar.”

Correction

May 16, 2025: This story originally misstated how much time elapsed between Genaro García Luna’s indictment and his conviction. They were five years apart, not three.

by Jesse Coburn

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Kennell Staten saw Walker Courts as his best path out of homelessness, he said. The complex had some of the only subsidized apartments he knew of in his adopted hometown of Jonesboro, Arkansas, so he applied to live there again and again. But while other people seemed to sail through the leasing process, his applications went nowhere. Staten thought he knew why: He is gay. The property manager had made her feelings about that clear to him, he said. “She said I was too flamboyant,” he remembered, “that it’s a whole bunch of older people staying there and they would feel uncomfortable seeing me coming outside with a dress or skirt on.”

So Staten filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in February. It was the type of complaint that HUD used to take seriously. The agency has devoted itself to rooting out prejudice in the housing market since the Fair Housing Act was signed into law in 1968, one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And, following a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that declared that civil rights protections bar unequal treatment because of someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity, HUD considered it illegal to discriminate in housing on those grounds.

Then Donald Trump became president once more. Two days after filing his complaint, Staten received a letter informing him that HUD did not view allegations like his as subject to federal law — a stark departure from its position just a month prior. The news gutted him. “I went through pure hell just to get turned away,” Staten said. (The property manager disputed Staten’s account and said he was rejected for fighting on the property, which Staten denied. The property owner declined to comment.)

Staten’s complaint is one of hundreds impacted by a major retreat in the federal government’s decadeslong fight against housing discrimination and segregation, according to interviews with 10 HUD officials. Those federal staffers, along with state officials, attorneys and advocates across the country, described a dismantling of federal fair housing enforcement, which has been slowed, constrained or halted at every step. The investigative process has been hobbled. The agency is withholding discrimination charges that HUD officials say should already have been issued. Those accused of housing discrimination appear newly emboldened not to cooperate with the agency. And at least 115 federal fair housing cases have been halted or closed entirely since Trump took office, with hundreds more cases in jeopardy, HUD officials estimate.

These changes raise questions about the future of one of the enduring legacies of the civil rights movement, which advocates see as urgently needed today amid a historic housing shortage and rising complaints about housing discrimination.

“It’ll give free rein to companies, to states, to governments to take advantage of people, to refuse to respect their rights, without fear of response from the government. They know that no one is watching, no one will hold them accountable, so they can just do what they want,” said Paul Osadebe, a HUD attorney and union steward who litigates fair housing cases. “The civil rights laws that people marched for and fought for and died for, that Congress passed and at least sensibly expects to be enforced, that’s just not happening right now. It’s not happening. And people are really being harmed by it.”

Asked to comment on the findings in this story, HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett said in a statement: “HUD is committed to rooting out discrimination and upholding the Fair Housing Act. ProPublica continues to cherry pick examples to further an activist narrative rather than report the facts.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

“They know that no one is watching, no one will hold them accountable, so they can just do what they want,” said Paul Osadebe, a HUD attorney and union steward who litigates fair housing cases. (Alyssa Schukar for ProPublica)

For many victims of housing discrimination, HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity has long been the best path to winning justice. Recent investigations by the office and its state and local partners have led to millions of dollars in relief for victims and reforms from landlords, mortgage lenders and local governments.

When a California city began requiring property owners to evict tenants if the county sheriff’s department said they had engaged in criminal activity — regardless of whether they were convicted — it was a HUD investigation that led to a nearly $1 million settlement and a repeal of the ordinance. (The city did not admit liability.) The agency also secured a $300,000 settlement for a mother, daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend in Oklahoma who were allegedly harassed and assaulted by neighbors because the boyfriend was Black, to which the landlord responded by trying to evict the mother. (A representative for the property ownership company said company leadership has changed since the allegations.)

Such victories may be rare in the next four years.

“We are being gutted right now,” said one agency official, who, like others, requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. “And it feels like it’s not even the beginning.”

The Fair Housing Office’s staff of roughly 550 full-time employees is set to fall by more than a third through the administration’s federal worker buyout program, according to a HUD meeting recording obtained by ProPublica. Internal projections that have circulated widely among HUD staffers suggest far deeper cuts could follow.

Those accused of housing discrimination seem to have taken notice. HUD officials described an increase in defendants ignoring correspondence from investigators or even copying Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in their communication with HUD, seemingly in hopes the cost-cutting department will take their side.

“For them to face a consequence, they will need to be brought through a litigation process, which requires expenditure of litigation from the department, and they know that we don’t have those resources anymore,” one HUD official said. “They also feel emboldened that this administration will not consider the things that they are doing to be illegal.”

Some defendants have been more explicit about this. In one case, a midwestern city — which had allegedly allowed local politicians to block affordable housing in white neighborhoods — asked HUD officials if the agency still had the backing to pursue the case if the city walked away from the negotiating table, one official said. In another case, a public housing authority, also in the Midwest, rescinded a six-figure settlement it had offered two days prior, citing Trump’s newly issued executive order attacking “disparate-impact liability.” The housing authority had allegedly favored white applicants and denied applicants with even modest criminal records. HUD spent years building the case; it crumbled in 48 hours. (HUD officials shared details on these and other cases on the condition that ProPublica not name the parties or locations, as the deliberations are private.)

Without the support of agency leadership, HUD is in a weaker negotiating position, dimming the prospects of major settlements or reforms. In another case involving a public housing authority, this one on the East Coast, HUD is considering settling for no monetary penalty — although it would not have accepted less than $1 million under the prior administration, officials said. HUD found the housing authority excluded disabled applicants and that some of its buildings had tenants who were disproportionately white (which the authority has denied).

When settlement negotiations collapse, HUD regularly issues “charges of discrimination,” akin to filing a lawsuit. Four months into Joe Biden’s presidency, the agency had charged at least eight cases and announced major steps in another four. In the second Trump presidency, HUD has not filed a single charge of housing discrimination, officials said.

It’s not for a lack of credible complaints, HUD officials say. There are dozens stuck in limbo at the agency’s Office of General Counsel, HUD officials estimated, including several where officials had conducted lengthy investigations and determined a civil rights law had been violated. One such complaint involves a New York woman who said she was sexually harassed for years by a maintenance worker in her building. The worker allegedly grabbed her breasts and told her that to receive repairs she would have to call him after hours — allegations that HUD officials found to be credible. But Trump appointees have not allowed them to file a charge, officials said.

Lovett, the HUD spokesperson, said that “the Department is preparing multiple charges that will be issued within the next week against individuals who we believe violated the Fair Housing Act.” She did not respond to a request for details about those charges.

Many of the cases halted by HUD involve claims of housing discrimination because of someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Those appear to have been undermined by Trump’s “defending women” executive order, issued on his first day in office, which eliminated executive branch recognition of transgender people. Another executive order declaring English the country’s official language has paralyzed cases involving the requirement that housing providers who receive federal funds try to reach people with limited English proficiency. Other cases now in peril involve environmental justice, like disputes over the construction of pollution-emitting factories in poor, predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods. Race-based discrimination cases could be next on the chopping block, given the administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, some HUD officials fear.

Previously there were many channels through which the public could file housing discrimination complaints to HUD. In March, the agency shut down all but one of them (with limited exceptions), citing staffing reductions. Now complaint hotlines and inboxes go unmonitored, with answering machines informing callers: “The number you reached is no longer in use.”

Investigations have been thwarted. Staffers can no longer travel to look for witnesses, as staff credit cards now have $1 spending limits. Agency attorneys must seek approval from a Trump appointee for basic tasks, such as issuing subpoenas, taking depositions, assisting with settlement discussions and even merely speaking to other attorneys in and outside government. As that approval seems to rarely come, investigations languish, HUD officials said. Even routine settlements now require approval from a political appointee, exacerbating the case backlog and delaying relief for victims, officials said.

The dysfunction has at times taken more mundane forms. For around two weeks in March, the Fair Housing Office’s work slowed to a crawl after DOGE canceled, without notice, a contract that had enabled staffers to quickly send certified mail to people involved in cases, according to officials and federal contracting data. It was a crucial resource — the office mails tens of thousands of documents each year, and regulations require some correspondence to be certified. Without the contract, staff had to spend their days stuffing envelopes themselves. The contract was worth only around $220,000. In recent years, HUD’s annual discretionary budget has topped $70 billion.

Compliance reviews and discretionary investigations have also been affected. Typically that involves examining the policies and practices of developers, public housing authorities and other recipients of HUD funding to ensure that they abide by civil rights laws. Officials said such efforts have all but ceased, including an investigation into a housing authority that appeared to have a disproportionately low number of Latino tenants and applicants compared to the surrounding area. Larger, systemic investigations are similarly on ice.

The apparent retreat in fair housing enforcement extends beyond HUD. At the Department of Justice, which prosecutes many fair housing cases, staffers received a draft of the housing section’s new mission statement, which omitted any mention of the Fair Housing Act. (The DOJ declined to comment.) At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump appointee Russ Vought has sought to vacate a settlement with a company called Townstone Financial, which CFPB alleged had effectively discouraged African Americans from applying for mortgages. The agency is now proposing to return the settlement funds to the company. “CFPB abused its power, used radical ‘equity’ arguments to tag Townstone as racist with zero evidence, and spent years persecuting and extorting them,” Vought has said to explain the decision. (CFPB did not respond to a request for comment. Townstone’s CEO said that he welcomed the move to vacate the settlement and that the prior allegations were meritless.)

The federal government’s fair housing efforts are supported by a broad ecosystem of local nonprofits. They, too, have been destabilized. In February, HUD and DOGE canceled 78 grants to local fair housing organizations, saying each one “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” The funding represented a minuscule fraction of HUD’s budget but was essential to grant recipients. That includes groups like Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Greater Cincinnati, which was forced to pause investigations into racist mortgage lending practices and apartment buildings that may flout accessibility laws, according to Executive Director Elisabeth Risch. Four of the organizations filed a class-action lawsuit, arguing HUD and DOGE had no authority to withhold funding approved by Congress. The litigation is ongoing.

Many states do not have their own substantial fair housing laws, leaving little recourse for housing discrimination victims in large swaths of the country if HUD’s retreat continues. “In the state of Missouri, HUD was it for housing protections,” said Kalila Jackson, an attorney in St. Louis. “It’s a terrifying situation.”

Fighting housing discrimination was once seen as so imperative that President Lyndon Johnson described the Fair Housing Act as a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. “With this bill, the voice of justice speaks again,” he said when signing the legislation. “It proclaims that fair housing for all — all human beings who live in this country — is now a part of the American way of life. “

But advocates and HUD officials say that ambition never became a reality. “The fair housing laws were never fully implemented,” said Erin Kemple, a vice president at the National Fair Housing Alliance. “If you look at segregation throughout the country, it is still very high in most places.” And the Fair Housing Office has been chronically understaffed and underfunded by Republican and Democratic administrations alike. The office has long struggled to clear its docket.

In recent years, segregation has been on the rise by some measures. One study found that most major metropolitan areas were more segregated in 2019 than they had been in 1990. Another found that the Black homeownership rate is lower now than it was at the passage of the Fair Housing Act. And more housing discrimination complaints were filed in 2023 than in any other year since the National Fair Housing Alliance began tracking the figures three decades ago.

Some advocates fear that a four-year federal retreat from the issue could send the country sliding back toward the pre-civil rights era, when landlords and mortgage lenders could freely reject applicants because of their race, and when federal agencies, local governments and real estate brokers could maintain policies that perpetuated extreme levels of segregation.

HUD officials interviewed by ProPublica echoed those concerns, foreseeing a growing national underclass of poor renters suffering discrimination with little hope of redress. They can always file lawsuits, but, for those at the bottom of the housing market, costly litigation is hardly an option.

Even if today’s policies are undone by future administrations, there will be at least four years in which it may become easier for local zoning boards to block affordable housing, for mortgage lenders to retreat from nonwhite neighborhoods, and for developers to flout accessibility requirements in new buildings, HUD officials fear. The consequences of those changes could stretch far into the future. “Housing cycles are long,” one HUD official said. “This decimation will set us back for another several decades.”

April is Fair Housing Month, when HUD usually announces high-profile cases and holds events celebrating the Fair Housing Act. This April came and went without fanfare. HUD Secretary Scott Turner did release a two-minute video, in which he vowed to “uphold the Fair Housing Act so every American has the opportunity to achieve the American dream of homeownership.” He added: “A more fair and free housing market is truly part of President Trump’s golden age of America.”

Beyond that, Turner has had little to say about housing discrimination or segregation, beyond weakening a measure known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. HUD even eliminated the Fair Housing Office’s old website. The URL now redirects to HUD’s homepage, which features a photo of a suburban cul-de-sac with a heavenly sunset behind it and a quote from Turner, a former NFL player and Baptist pastor.

“God blessed us with this great nation,” it reads. “Together, we can increase self-sufficiency and empower Americans to climb the economic ladder toward a brighter future.”

by Joshua Kaplan, Brett Murphy, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

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In early February, Sharon Cromer, U.S. ambassador to Gambia, went to visit one of the country’s Cabinet ministers at his agency’s headquarters, above a partially abandoned strip mall off a dirt road. It had been two weeks since President Donald Trump took office, and Cromer had pressing business to discuss. She needed the minister to fall in line to help Elon Musk.

Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet company, had spent months trying to secure regulatory approval to sell internet access in the impoverished West African country. As head of Gambia’s communications ministry, Lamin Jabbi oversees the government’s review of Starlink’s license application. Jabbi had been slow to sign off and the company had grown impatient. Now the top U.S. government official in Gambia was in Jabbi’s office to intervene.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency loomed over the conversation. The administration had already begun freezing foreign aid projects, and early in the meeting, Cromer, a Biden appointee, said something that rattled Gambian officials in the room. She listed the ways that the U.S. was supporting the country, according to two people present and contemporaneous notes, noting that key initiatives — like one that funds a $25 million project to improve the electrical system — were currently under review.

Jabbi’s top deputy, Hassan Jallow, told ProPublica he saw Cromer’s message as a veiled threat: If Starlink doesn’t get its license, the U.S. could cut off the desperately needed funds. “The implication was that they were connected,” Jallow said.

In recent months, senior State Department officials in both Washington and Gambia have coordinated with Starlink executives to coax, lobby and browbeat at least seven Gambian government ministers to help Musk, records and interviews show. One of those Cabinet officials told ProPublica his government is under “maximum pressure” to yield.

In mid-March, Cromer escalated the campaign by writing to Gambia’s president with an “important request.” That day, a contentious D.C. meeting between Musk employees and Jabbi had ended in an impasse. She urged the president to circumvent Jabbi and “facilitate the necessary approvals for Starlink to commence operations,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by ProPublica. Jabbi told confidantes he felt the ambassador was trying to get him fired.

Lamin Jabbi, first image, head of Gambia’s communications ministry, and Sharon Cromer, U.S. ambassador to Gambia (Via the Facebook pages of Gambia’s Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, and the U.S. Embassy in Banjul, Gambia)

The saga in Gambia is the starkest known example of the Trump administration wielding the U.S. government’s foreign policy apparatus to advance the business interests of Musk, a top Trump adviser and the world’s richest man.

Since Trump’s inauguration, the State Department has intervened on behalf of Starlink in Gambia and at least four other developing nations, previously unreported records and interviews show.

As the Trump administration has gutted foreign aid, U.S. diplomats have pressed governments to fast-track licenses for Starlink and arranged conversations between company employees and foreign leaders. In cables, U.S. officials have said that for their foreign counterparts, helping Starlink is a chance to prove their commitment to good relations with the U.S.

In one country last month, the U.S. embassy bragged that Starlink’s license was approved despite concerns it wasn’t abiding by rules that its competitors had to follow.

“If this was done by another country, we absolutely would call this corruption,” said Kristofer Harrison, who served as a high-level State Department official in the George W. Bush administration. “Because it is corruption.”

Helping U.S. businesses has long been part of the State Department’s mission, but former ambassadors said they sought to do this by making the positive case for the benefits of U.S. investment. When seeking deals for U.S. companies, they said they took care to avoid the appearance of conflicts or leaving the impression that punitive measures were on the table.

Ten current and former State Department officials said the recent drive was an alarming departure from standard diplomatic practice — because of both the tactics used and the person who would benefit most from them. “I honestly didn’t think we were capable of doing this,” one official told ProPublica. “That is bad on every level.” Kenneth Fairfax, a retired career diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan, said the global push for Musk “could lead to the impression that the U.S. is engaging in a form of crony capitalism.”

The Washington Post previously reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has instructed U.S. diplomats to help Starlink so it can beat its Chinese and Russian competitors. Multiple countries, including India, have sped up license approvals for Starlink to try to build goodwill in tariff negotiations with the Trump administration, the Post reported.

ProPublica’s reporting provides a detailed picture of what that push has looked like in practice. After Gambia’s ambassador to the U.S. declined an interview about Starlink — a topic seen as highly sensitive given Musk’s position — ProPublica reporters traveled to the capital, Banjul, to piece together the events. This account is based on internal State Department documents and interviews with dozens of current and former officials from both countries, most of whom requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.

In response to detailed questions, the State Department issued a statement celebrating Starlink. “Starlink is an America-made product that has been a game changer in helping remote areas around the world gain internet connectivity,” a spokesperson wrote. “Any patriotic American should want to see an American company’s success on the global stage, especially over compromised Chinese competitors.” Cromer and Starlink did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the office of the president of Gambia. Jabbi made Jallow available to discuss the situation.

During the Biden administration, State Department officials worked with Starlink to help the company navigate bureaucracies abroad. But the agency’s approach appears to have become significantly more aggressive and expansive since Trump’s return to power, according to internal records and current and former government officials.

Foreign leaders are acutely aware of Musk’s unprecedented position in the government, which he has used to help rewrite U.S. foreign policy. After Musk spent at least $288 million on the 2024 election, Trump gave the billionaire a powerful post in the White House. In mere months, Musk’s team has directed the firing of thousands of federal workers, canceled billions of dollars in programs and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, which supported humanitarian projects around the world. African nations have been particularly hard-hit by the cuts.

At the same time, Musk continues to run Starlink and the rest of his corporate empire. In past administrations, government ethics lawyers carefully vetted potential conflicts of interest. Though Trump once said that “we won’t let him get near” conflicts, the White House has also suggested Musk is responsible for policing himself. The billionaire has waved away criticisms of the arrangement, saying “I’ll recuse myself” if conflicts arise. “My companies are suffering because I’m in the government,” Musk said.

In a statement, the White House said Musk has nothing to do with deals involving Starlink and that every administration official follows ethical guidelines. “For the umpteenth time, President Trump will not tolerate any conflicts of interest,” spokesperson Harrison Fields said in an email.

Executives at Starlink have seized the moment to expand. An April State Department cable to D.C. obtained by ProPublica quoted a Starlink employee describing the company’s approach to securing a license in Djibouti, a key U.S. ally in Africa that hosts an American military base: “We’re pushing from the top and the bottom to ram this through.”

The headquarters of Gambia’s Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, a Cabinet agency headed by Lamin Jabbi (Brett Murphy/ProPublica)

Musk entered the White House at a pivotal moment for Starlink. When the service launched in 2020, it had a novel approach to internet access. Rather than relying on underground cables or cell towers like traditional telecom companies, Starlink uses low-orbiting satellites that let it provide fast internet in places its competitors had struggled to reach. Expectations for the startup were sky high. Bullish Morgan Stanley analysts predicted that by 2040, Starlink would have up to 364 million subscribers worldwide — more than the current population of the U.S.

Starlink quickly became a central pillar of Musk’s fortune. His stake in Starlink’s parent company, SpaceX, is estimated to be worth about $150 billion of his roughly $400 billion net worth.

Although the company says its user base has grown to over 5 million people, it remains a bit player compared to the largest internet providers. And the satellite internet market is set to become more competitive as well-funded companies launch services modeled on Starlink. Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper, a unit of Amazon, has said it expects to start serving customers later this year. Satellite upstarts headquartered in Europe and China aren’t far behind either.

“They want to get as far and as fast as they can before Amazon Kuiper gets online,” said Chris Quilty, a veteran space industry analyst.

In internal cables, State Department officials have said they are eager to help Musk get ahead of foreign satellite companies. Securing licenses in the next 18 months is critical for Starlink due to the growing competition, one cable said last month. Senior diplomats have written that they hope to give Musk’s company a “first-mover advantage.”

Africa represents a lucrative prize. Much of the continent lacks reliable internet. Success in Africa could mean dominating a market with the fastest-growing population on earth.

A technician mounts a Starlink satellite dish on a house in Niamey, Niger. (Boureima Hama/AFP/Getty Images)

As of last November, Starlink had reportedly launched in 15 of Africa’s 54 countries, but it was beginning to spark a backlash. Last year, Cameroon and Namibia cracked down on Musk’s company for allegedly operating in their countries illegally. In South Africa — where Starlink has so far failed to get a license — Musk exacerbated tensions by publicly accusing the government of anti-white racism. Since Trump won the election, at least five African countries have granted licenses to Starlink: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho and Chad.

Now Musk’s campaign of cuts has given him leverage inside the State Department. A Trump administration memo that leaked to the press last month proposed closing six embassies in Africa.

The Gambian embassy was on the list of proposed cuts.

An 8-year-old democracy, Gambia’s 2.7 million residents live on a sliver of land once used as a hub in the transatlantic slave trade. For two decades until 2017, the nation was ruled by a despot who had his opponents assassinated and plundered public funds to buy himself luxuries like a Rolls-Royce collection and a private zoo. When the dictator was ousted, the economy was in tatters. Today Gambia is one of the poorest countries in the world, with about half the country living on less than $4 a day.

In this fragile environment, the telecom industry that Jabbi oversees is vitally important to Gambian authorities. According to the government, the sector provides at least 20% of the country’s tax revenue. Ads for the country’s multiple internet providers are ubiquitous, painted onto dozens of public works — parks, police booths, schools.

It’s unclear why Starlink’s efforts in Gambia, a tiny market, have been so intense.

Banjul, the capital of Gambia, during New Year’s celebrations (Muhamadou Bittaye/AFP/Getty Images)

Cromer’s efforts on behalf of the company started under the Biden administration, as she documented last December in a cable sent back to Washington. Last spring, Starlink began the process of securing necessary approvals from a local utilities regulator and the Gambian communications agency. The utilities regulator wanted Starlink to pay an $85,000 license fee, which the company felt was too expensive. Cromer spoke to local officials, who then “pressured” the regulator to remove “this unnecessary barrier to entry,” the ambassador wrote.

Gambian supporters of Starlink felt that its product would be a boon for consumers and for economic growth in the country, where internet service remains unreliable and slow. “The ripple effects could be extraordinary,” Cromer said in the December cable, contending it could enable telehealth and improve education.

Opponents argued that local internet providers were one of Gambia’s few stable sources of jobs and infrastructure investments. If Starlink killed off its competition and then jacked up its prices — in Nigeria, the company announced last year it would suddenly double its fees — authorities could have little leverage to manage the fallout. When Musk refused to turn on Starlink in part of Ukraine during the war there, it heightened concerns about handing control of internet access to the mercurial billionaire, industry analysts said. One Musk tweet about foreign regulators’ ability to police his company caught the attention of Gambian critics: “They can shake their fist at the sky,” Musk said in 2021.

The ultimate authority for granting Starlink a license lies with Jabbi, an attorney who spent years in the local telecom sector. Gambian telecom companies that don’t want competition from Musk see Jabbi as an ally.

Jallow, Jabbi’s top deputy, told ProPublica that the ministry is not opposed to Starlink operating in Gambia. But he said Jabbi is doing due diligence to ensure laws and regulations are being followed before opening up the country to a consequential change.

After Trump’s inauguration, Jabbi’s position pitted him against not only Starlink but also the U.S. government. In the weeks after the February meeting where Cromer reminded Jabbi about the tenuous state of American funding to his country, the ambassador told other diplomats that getting Starlink approved was a high priority, according to a Western official familiar with her comments.

The stance surprised some of Cromer’s peers. Cromer had spent her career at USAID before President Joe Biden appointed her as ambassador. Her tenure in Gambia often focused on human rights and democracy building.

In March, when Jabbi and Jallow traveled to D.C. to attend a World Bank summit, the State Department helped arrange a series of meetings for them. The first, on March 19, was with Starlink representatives including Ben MacWilliams, a former U.S. diplomat who leads the company’s expansion efforts in Africa. The second was with U.S. government officials at the State Department’s headquarters.

The meeting with the company quickly became contentious. Huddled in a conference room at the World Bank, MacWilliams accused Jabbi of standing in the way of his nation’s progress and harming ordinary Gambians, according to Jallow, who was in the meeting, and four others briefed on the event. “We want our license now,” Jallow recalled MacWilliams saying. “Why are you delaying it?”

The conversation ended in a stalemate. In the hours that followed, Starlink and the U.S. government’s campaign intensified in a way that underscored the degree of coordination between the two parties. The company told Jabbi it would cancel his scheduled D.C. meeting with State Department officials because “there was no more need,” Jallow said.

The State Department meeting never happened. Instead, 4,000 miles away in Gambia’s capital, Cromer would try an even more aggressive approach.

That same day, Cromer had already met with Gambia’s equivalent of a commerce secretary to lobby him to help pave the way for Starlink. Then she was informed about the disappointing meeting Starlink had had in D.C., according to State Department records. By day’s end, Cromer had sent a letter to the nation’s president.

“I am writing to seek your support to allow Starlink to operate in The Gambia,” the letter opened. Over three pages, the ambassador described her concerns about Jabbi’s agency and listed the ways that Gambians could benefit from Starlink. She also said the company had satisfied conditions set by Jabbi’s predecessor.

“I respectfully urge you to facilitate the necessary approvals for Starlink to commence operations in The Gambia,” Cromer concluded. “I look forward to your favorable response.”

In the weeks since, Jabbi has refused to budge. The U.S. government’s efforts have continued. In late April, Gambia’s attorney general met in D.C. with senior State Department officials, according to a person familiar with the matter, where they again discussed the Starlink issue.

Diplomats were troubled by how the pressure campaign could hurt America’s image overseas. “This is not Iran or a rogue African state run by a dictator — this is a democracy, a natural ally,” said another senior Western diplomat in the region, noting that Gambia is “a prime partner of the West” in United Nations votes. “You beat up the smallest and the best boy in the class.”

Gambia is not the only country being leaned on. Since Trump took office, embassies around the world have sent a flurry of cables to D.C. documenting their meetings with Starlink executives and their efforts to cajole developing countries into helping Musk’s business. The cables all describe a problem similar to what happened in Gambia: The company has struggled to win a license from local regulators. In some countries, ambassadors reported, their work appears to be yielding results. (The embassies and their host countries did not respond to requests for comment.)

The U.S. embassy in Cameroon wrote that the country could prove its commitment to Trump’s agenda by letting Starlink expand its presence there. In the same missive, embassy officials discussed the impact of U.S. aid cuts and deportations and cited a humanitarian official who was reckoning with America’s shifting foreign policy: “They may not be happy with what they see, but they are trying to adapt as best they can.”

In Lesotho, where embassy officials had spent weeks trying to help Starlink get a license, the company finalized a deal after Trump imposed 50% tariffs on the tiny landlocked country. Lesotho officials told embassy staff they hoped the license would help in their urgent push to reduce the levies, according to Mother Jones. A major multinational company complained that Starlink was getting preferential treatment, embassy documents obtained by ProPublica show, since Musk’s firm had been exempted from requirements its competitors still had to follow.

In cables sent from the U.S. embassy in Djibouti this spring, State Department officials recounted their meetings with the company and pledged to continue working with “Starlink in identifying government officials and facilitating discussions.”

In Bangladesh, U.S. diplomats pressed Starlink’s case “early and often” with local officials, partnered with Starlink to “build an educational strategy” for their counterparts and helped arrange a conversation between Musk and the nation’s head of state, according to a recent cable. The embassy’s work started under Biden but bore fruit only after Trump took office.

Their efforts resulted in Bangladesh approving Starlink’s request to do business in the country, the top U.S. diplomat there said last month, a sign-off that Musk’s company had sought for years.

Do you have information about Elon Musk’s businesses or the Trump administration? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Brett Murphy can be reached at 508-523-5195 or by email at brett.murphy@propublica.org.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester contributed reporting.