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With state law already banning transgender youth from accessing puberty blockers and hormones, a Missouri House committee met late into the evening Wednesday to debate adding more restrictions. Two statehouse hearing rooms overflowed with witnesses in favor and against bills in the House Emerging Issues Committee that would determine whether it should be compulsory for […]
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Brittany Wise ran through the options in her head.
It was a sunny April morning in Cobb County, Georgia, a suburban area northwest of Atlanta. Wise was heading back to the cul-de-sac of budget motels where her family was staying after receiving an eviction notice from her landlord in January when the blue lights appeared in her Chevy Tahoe’s rearview mirror.
The police officer had stopped Wise for an expired tag. But when he looked up her name, he discovered a bench warrant for a traffic ticket she hadn’t paid. She remembers that the officer was kind and gave her a warning about her tag. For her warrant, however, he told her that she had to go to jail.
Wise’s mind went to her children. Six of them were there in the SUV. The other two were walking up to the motel parking lot. In all, they ranged in age from 4 to 18. Wise, a 35-year-old single mother, had to figure out where they all would go.
Wise didn’t have any other family members nearby. She knew she could leave her children in the care of her oldest daughter. But one has autism and another has severe behavioral issues, which would be too much to put on a teenager, she thought.
So Wise asked the officer to contact the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services. She hoped that the agency could care for her children just for as long as she had to be in jail — which turned out to be three days.
When Wise got out of jail, however, DFCS didn’t return her children. The reason, according to court documents and the case plan the agency gave her, was that she lacked stable housing and income for her kids.
In recent years, child welfare advocates and policymakers across the country have been working to prevent situations like this, arguing that no parent should ever lose their children just because they can’t afford housing. A handful of states now have laws and policies prohibiting government agencies from taking children into foster care because of homelessness. Georgia has not adopted such a rule, but the state Court of Appeals has ruled a number of times that unstable housing and employment “in no way constitutes intentional or unintentional misconduct resulting in abuse or neglect” that would justify child removals.
But Wise’s experience illustrates how an inability to afford housing still stands between parents and their children in many child welfare cases in Georgia.
Between fiscal years 2018 and 2022, DFCS reported “inadequate housing” as the sole reason for removing a child in more than 700 cases, according to an analysis by WABE and ProPublica.
The analysis, using data from the federal Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, which tracks child removal cases in each state, also shows that in thousands of additional cases — about 20% of Georgia’s nearly 31,000 child removals during the five-year period — DFCS reported housing as one of multiple reasons. Housing was the third most reported reason after substance use and neglect.
Wise’s case is not included in the analysis because it began in April 2023.
When Georgia removes children for housing — either as the sole reason or in conjunction with other issues — it becomes something that parents must fix in order to regain custody of their children. Child welfare advocates and attorneys say that’s a uniquely difficult barrier to overcome. When families are facing other issues, such as a parent’s drug addiction or untreated mental health condition, DFCS often steps in and provides remedial services. But the agency rarely provides families with housing assistance.
According to a review of agency spending records for the same five-year period, DFCS spent more than $450 million on programs that can be used to keep families together. But the agency directed only a tiny portion — less than half of 1% — of the money toward housing assistance.
DFCS’ spending on housing assistance is noticeably smaller than in some other states. Several child welfare agencies, even in states with smaller populations than Georgia, dedicate millions of dollars more each year toward housing assistance.
Child welfare advocates say it doesn’t make sense for DFCS to do so little to help families with housing, given that the agency can end up spending just as much or more after taking children into foster care.
DFCS spends a minimum of $830 to $980 a month to house a child in foster care, according to the state’s published daily rates for foster parents. That’s roughly equivalent to the monthly fair market rate to rent a one-bedroom apartment in most of Georgia outside of metro Atlanta, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s estimates.
The cost for foster care can be significantly higher if a child has complex mental health or behavioral needs, as some of Wise’s kids do. Under the state’s current rates, specialized foster care for a single child in an institution or group home can reach $6,390 a month.
Josh Gupta-Kagan, who directs the Family Defense Clinic at Columbia Law School, said it’s baffling that DFCS would not provide housing assistance instead of removing children. “Why do we allow kids to be separated from their parents who we won’t help with housing — only to place them with strangers who we will help with housing?” he asked.
DFCS spokesperson Kylie Winton said the agency does refer families to outside resources provided by local nonprofits or other state agencies, in addition to the small amount of assistance DFCS offers directly.
But according to Winton, more housing assistance would not change the outcome for many families. When the state takes children into foster care, she said, housing often is not the sole — or even primary — reason. Most of the time, she said, another issue is driving the intervention.
“If a family is chronically unhoused and a connection to a community resource doesn’t resolve it, we typically find that there is a root cause issue, such as untreated mental health concerns or substance abuse,” Winton said in an email.
Citing confidentiality laws, Winton declined to comment on Wise’s case, even after WABE and ProPublica provided a waiver, signed by Wise, giving permission to the agency to discuss it. In Wise’s case plan, however, it did not list any serious underlying issues, beyond unstable housing and income, that explained why the court didn’t return her children.
Wise couldn’t understand how housing could be a justification in any case — but especially hers. That’s because the day of the traffic stop was not the first time she called DFCS. Months earlier, while she was trying to stave off her family’s eviction, she had reached out to the agency for housing assistance to maintain their stability — with no success.
As she confronted the loss of her children, Wise sat, with a scrunched-up tissue in her hand, alongside the advocate she met through that process, Sarah Winograd, who works to help parents avoid the foster care system, and explained what took place.
“I cried, I yelled, I prayed, I screamed,” Wise said. “Like, how did we get here?”
Wise shows a photo of her children. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)As a single mother of a large family, Wise had faced financial challenges before. In North Carolina, where she’s from, she occasionally had to call assistance programs or relatives when she couldn’t work or when bills left her without enough money for food. Still, she always had the necessities covered for her close-knit family, according to her oldest daughter, Halle Mickel, who’s now 19. “She did that and more,” Mickel said.
As for their housing, Wise rarely had to worry because for several years she’d received a federal housing voucher through a North Carolina agency.
It was only when Wise left the state in 2021, to get away from an abusive relationship, that housing became a serious issue for her family. She didn’t realize how hard it would be for her to find a place that would accept a family the size of hers in Georgia. Her voucher program gave her a limited amount of time to locate housing in the new state, and she exceeded that, causing her to lose her long-term assistance.
When Wise finally did find a four-bedroom townhome in Cobb County, it wasn’t cheap.
Wise paid the $2,200 a month at first with rental assistance through a local nonprofit. When that ran out, she tried to manage the amount on her own. She received roughly $1,800 in disability payments for her daughter with autism and for Mickel, who had survived cancer as a teenager, and supplemented that by working at a fast food restaurant and selling home-baked desserts at car washes and barber shops. “I did the best I could,” she said.
But Wise couldn’t keep it up. The school suspended her daughter with autism and her son with behavioral issues multiple times, and Wise lost work to watch them. Her rent payments became out of reach.
When the eviction notice came in January, Wise had already contacted all of the assistance programs she could find. All of them told her they were out of funds. So she turned to her last resort. “I picked up the phone and called DFCS because I thought they would be a resource for my family,” she said.
To Wise’s surprise, DFCS responded by opening an investigation. A caseworker came to the apartment, looked in her fridge, interviewed her kids and took samples of Wise’s hair and urine for a drug test. Wise didn’t have her case files from DFCS at the time, but, according to texts from her caseworker that Wise shared with WABE and ProPublica, the agency didn’t find anything worth pursuing. “There’s no concerns on our end,” the caseworker wrote to Wise in February.
As for Wise’s need for housing assistance — the reason she called DFCS in the first place — the caseworker said there wasn’t much that she could offer. She texted Wise information about different nonprofits, along with the number for Winograd, who’s now co-founded a nonprofit called Together With Families. But as far as what DFCS could do, she was clear: “The issue is funding. DFCS isn’t provided with government funding to house families,” the caseworker told Wise in a text.
Only one of DFCS’ family preservation programs, called Prevention of Unnecessary Placement, describes an option to help families with their rent, utilities or mortgage. The analysis of agency spending records shows that DFCS spent just $278,000 on housing assistance under this program in 2022. No other state agency in Georgia offers housing assistance specifically to families in the child welfare system.
By contrast, child welfare agencies in several states have spent significantly more on programs aimed at preserving families whose children are at risk of being removed or who are having trouble getting reunited because of housing. In 2022, New Jersey, which has a population similar in size to Georgia’s, dedicated more than $17 million for its program. Connecticut, with less than half the population, spent close to $20 million. California, which has four times greater population than Georgia, allocated exponentially more: nearly $100 million.
The New Jersey Department of Children and Families effort has served around 1,000 families, according to Assistant Director of Housing Kerry-Anne Henry. The agency has seen 90% of the families in its program stay housed after two years, she said.
“If we are really taking our charge seriously, as a child and family serving system,” Henry said, “we have to be responsive to their needs.”
Some child welfare agencies have also partnered with their states’ housing agencies to provide federal vouchers to families in their systems. The Family Unification Program from HUD offers vouchers for this purpose. According to HUD's data, Washington state, which has a population smaller than Georgia’s, has claimed around 2,000 vouchers. Ohio and neighboring North Carolina, which have populations similar in size to Georgia’s, have more than 900 each.
Georgia, on the other hand, has received 530. Only a handful of city and county housing authorities have claimed the vouchers — but Cobb County, where Wise lived, is not among them. DFCS has not worked with the state housing agency, called the Department of Community Affairs, to apply for the vouchers.
Philip Gilman, deputy commissioner for housing assistance and development, said in a statement that the department didn’t have staff capacity to handle these vouchers. For her part, Winton, the DFCS spokesperson, said the agency is reviewing the possibility of applying in the future.
Meanwhile, Winton said DFCS is working on a housing-focused effort of its own. As part of a pilot program in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, the state awarded a nonprofit $1 million to house 50 families over the course of the next year so parents can reunite with their children or remain with their children who may be at risk of entering foster care.
But child welfare advocates, like Ruth White of the Maryland-based National Center for Housing and Child Welfare, said DFCS shouldn’t be limiting housing assistance to a few dozen families. If the state is ever intervening because of housing, she said, the agency has a duty to help. “They should be serving every family that needs to be housed,” she said.
For Wise’s family, in the weeks leading up to the traffic stop in April, there were no other housing options. By the time she reached Winograd, Wise owed around $10,000 in rent and utility bills. The only plan Winograd could propose was for her organization to pay to relocate her family to Florida, where Wise’s grandmother lived — an arrangement DFCS accepted.
While Wise also agreed, she knew it couldn’t be a long-term solution. Her grandmother was in her 70s. Wise knew she couldn’t bring a family of nine into her home permanently.
Believing she could find a more sustainable solution on her own, Wise brought her family back to Cobb County a couple of weeks later. They paid daily for a hotel as she continued her search for housing assistance. She didn’t imagine that in another couple weeks she would have to call DFCS again — this time, because of a traffic stop — to get her kids.
Wise’s caseworker had told her that DFCS didn’t make housing assistance available to families, like hers, because that was not the agency’s job. “Technically,” the caseworker had texted her in March, “the DFCS agency is only responsible for the safety of children/housing children.”
Since the traffic stop that sent seven of Wise’s children to foster care, DFCS has paid for their housing. The cost of housing them has quickly exceeded the amount of her family’s overdue rent.
DFCS has been paying at least $6,200 a month. That estimate is based on the rates for foster parents set by the state and is the minimum possible amount required to cover seven children in their age range — not including any special subsidies for the two with additional behavioral needs.
The estimate doesn’t account for the administrative costs of paying case managers to visit the children in their foster homes, as they’re required to do in all cases. It also doesn’t cover the costs of transporters who take the children to and from court-ordered visitations, which could amount to hours of driving time.
While some of these expenses may be covered by federal funds, longtime parent attorney Amber Walden said she still has seen foster care costs add up to much more than the price of housing in many of the cases that she has handled over the years.
“How much money are we talking about with that — when you could just have them all in the same home with the parent?” Walden said.
As DFCS made these payments to foster care providers, the result has not only been that Wise was in a separate home from her children. They also have been in separate foster homes from one another.
Wise saw the effects of these disruptions on her children. One afternoon, as she was about to leave the county DFCS office after a meeting with staff, Wise learned her two sons were in the building. Although she was able to have an impromptu visit, that wasn’t the reason her sons were there — they had been fighting with their foster parents, Wise said the caseworker told her.
The caseworker brought the boys into the office while she figured out their next placement, Wise said. One was the son who already had behavioral issues. He had turned 9 in the month since he and her other children entered foster care. She had already told him that they’d have a celebration when they were all back home. As he played with toys in the DFCS office, she said he reminded her: “Mom, are we still gonna have my birthday? Are we still gonna get a cake?”
Wise reacts to the news that her two sons were being moved into a new foster placement after fighting with their foster parents. (Stephannie Stokes/WABE)Wise hung her head and rubbed the tears in her eyes as she walked out of the office. “It just makes me sad because I didn’t mean for them to go and be tossed around,” she said, “to go through all of this.”
Wise said she later learned from her caseworker that her sons had to spend that night in the DFCS office because the agency still could not identify a new placement for them.
In recent years, DFCS has frequently resorted to placing children in need of specialized care in offices and hotels — at an average cost of $1,500 a night, according to January 2023 testimony to the state legislature by DFCS Director Candice Broce. The costs, totaling more than $77 million between 2018 and 2022, have sparked hearings at the state Capitol. But state legislators charged with reviewing Georgia’s system have not proposed new prevention funding for families, including for their housing.
The need is clear to people who have worked for the agency, like Nikita Raper, who resigned this past summer after two years with Cobb County DFCS.
Raper said so much of her job as a child abuse investigator was scrambling to find housing resources for families, who were sleeping in their cars, staying in homeless encampments or getting kicked out of their hotels. All the time spent on these cases distracted caseworkers, like her, from instances of actual abuse, she said.
“More funding for the housing cases would offer relief to families and take them off the radar of DFCS so that we could focus on the bigger cases,” she said.
When she was with DFCS, Raper could access the Prevention of Unnecessary Placement program funds only if she could demonstrate the family wouldn’t need help again. “It’s really difficult to show that,” she said.
According to WABE and ProPublica’s spending analysis, Cobb County did not approve this funding for housing even once in the fiscal years 2021 and 2022. Wise said she never even heard about the program from her caseworker.
Living on her own, Wise has struggled even more to secure housing and employment that would comply with the requirements of DFCS and the judge in her case. When she was in contact with the agency in January, her caseworker referred her to any resources that would provide her family with basic shelter. But once her children were in foster care and her case was before the court, DFCS and the judge wanted her to show housing and income that were “stable.”
“The court finds these children have lived in unstable living environments long enough,” the order from late April said.
But DFCS has no statewide definition of stable housing. The agency said that’s because the meaning depends on the details of each individual case. Attorneys who work on Georgia child welfare cases in half a dozen counties said DFCS regularly requests that parents maintain a lease for six months before returning their kids.
This standard shows up even in cases where housing wasn’t initially a driving factor, said Darice Good, who has represented parents in Georgia for 20 years. “They won’t send the children home if there’s not stable housing,” she said.
Wise tried to fight the court’s requirement in her case. Right after she got out of jail in mid-April, she managed to obtain a spot at a homeless shelter for families, along with her daughter, Mickel, and she believed DFCS had no reason to not return her children there.
“I have no history of drugs & alcohol abuse, endangerment, physical, mental or emotional abuse I have caused on my family,” Wise wrote in her notebook to prepare for a virtual call with DFCS at the beginning of May. “I kept us safe!”
But Wise’s effort didn’t get her very far. In the call, which she recorded and shared with WABE and ProPublica, the facilitator said it was the judge’s decision to keep her children in foster care. Wise pushed back, asserting that the judge was acting on DFCS’ recommendation. The two were soon talking over each other for several minutes until the facilitator hung up.
Throughout this time, Wise was also working to get permanent housing. Winograd could finally identify a nonprofit that could pay back the rent at Wise’s old townhome. Wise was even able to move back in — but only temporarily. Right when the nonprofit was supposed to cut the check, it told Wise that it was reversing its decision: Upon further review, an email said, she didn’t meet the criteria for the funding program — including the ability to show that she could maintain her rent after she was caught up.
So, in mid-summer, Wise stayed with Mickel, who managed to get housing through a program for young adults. Wise found jobs, but they only paid around $10 to $15 an hour, and a couple of times she had to call out as soon as she was hired in order to make court hearings and visitations with her kids. She also found herself so concerned about her children that it was hard to work.
Wise soon found it was difficult to hold a job because she was so concerned about her children in foster care. (Stephannie Stokes/WABE)“Who can really function or focus in a situation where everything around you is on fire?” Wise said.
Winograd, who volunteered as an advocate for foster children before she started her work preserving families, said this is common among parents who have to prove stability to the child welfare system. “People might think, ‘OK, now, they don’t have the responsibility of their children, they don’t have to worry about child care, they don’t have to worry about doctors’ appointments,’” she said.
In reality, Winograd said, many parents struggle even more. “The mental health piece becomes a huge issue for them to be able to go and get stable because they’re so worried about their child,” she said.
Wise has since located transitional housing in North Georgia. She has also found the support of another nonprofit, which has offered rental assistance to help her obtain housing and stabilize her family. But the nonprofit will provide the rental assistance only if the court first agrees to return her kids — and the court has not made such an agreement.
Meanwhile, Wise’s children have now spent nine months in foster care. She still finds herself trying to make sense of the reason.
How is it “that we had to endure all of this catastrophe and chaos and trial and trauma, just because I couldn’t pay a couple of months of rent?” she said.
How We Analyzed the Effect Housing Has on Children Being Placed in Foster CareWe analyzed data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System to examine the reasons Georgia’s child welfare agency reported for taking children into foster care.
The AFCARS data, obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, required steps to clean and deduplicate before we could analyze it. We used unique identifiers for children called AFCARS IDs and dates when a child was last taken into foster care to remove duplicates. We then filtered the dataset to removals that occurred from July 1, 2017, to June 30, 2022, corresponding to Georgia’s 2018 to 2022 fiscal years. We then grouped by removal reason and counted the number of removals in which housing was reported, both alone and in combination with other removal reasons, and compared that to the total number of removals during the same period.
We chose not to compare the percentage of housing-related removals with other states because there are wide variations in how states report the reasons for taking children into foster care. In limiting the analysis to Georgia, our analysis was not affected by those differences.
The data used in this story was obtained from NDACAN via Cornell University and used in accordance with a terms of use agreement license. The Administration on Children, Youth and Families; the Children’s Bureau; the original dataset collection personnel or funding source; NDACAN; Cornell University; and their agents or employees bear no responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here.
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Washington state’s mapmakers had been working for almost a year to draw the lines that would shape the state’s elections for the next decade. Now they had five hours until the midnight deadline and they’d made little progress.
Promptly at 7 p.m. on Nov. 15, 2021, the five members of the state’s Redistricting Commission appeared in a public Zoom meeting. Chair Sarah Augustine, a nonvoting member, sat near an ice machine in front of a backdrop with the commission’s new logo, “Draw Your WA.” She called the roll and ratified the minutes. The commissioners appeared on screens, seemingly calling in from different locations. Augustine immediately announced that they wanted to caucus privately. She promised that staff would reappear about every 30 minutes to give updates. A sign announcing “Meeting on Break” flashed up.
In most states, lawmakers draw new districts every 10 years to accommodate changes in population and ethnic makeup. They’re usually exercises of raw political power allowing lawmakers to, in essence, choose their voters instead of the other way around. But in Washington, an independent panel of commissioners has long revised the maps to avoid the common pitfalls of such redistricting, which often disenfranchises people of color or results in gerrymandering.
This year, Augustine’s master’s degree in conflict resolution was failing her. The commission’s work had devolved into a partisan mess, the very thing it had been created to avoid. The two Democratic commissioners and their two Republican counterparts had fought over how to address complaints from the state’s growing Latino population that it didn’t have representation. As they tried to work out a deal, they were repeatedly distracted by lawmakers and at least one lobbyist who had gotten wind of the final meeting and wanted to weigh in.
In a desperate move, the commission opted for a charade, with the public Zoom as its cover. In reality, the four voting commissioners were secretly hashing out the maps in person at a Hampton Inn a healthy 40 miles outside the capital, Olympia. It was a violation of the rules for more than two members to negotiate in private. One commissioner balked and rented a room in a Marriott a short distance away.
Throughout the process, the members of this ostensibly independent body were consulting with their party leaders and state and national political operatives, and were relying on partisan funding. Throughout the night, a cadre of lawmakers continued to pepper the commissioners with requests as picayune as moving one constituent’s house into a different district.
Every half-hour, a staffer briefly came on camera to inform viewers that caucuses continued. An interpreter even signed for deaf viewers. No member of the public ever saw any maps they could comment on, however. Then the break notice would go up again. As one commissioner later joked to another, the spectacle was “the screenplay to a movie no one would want to watch.”
The commissioners blew past their midnight deadline as they scrambled to reach deals and haggled over the “price” of Latino representation. The two Democrats finally capitulated to Republican demands, allowing a map that they felt didn’t give Latinos enough representation. They hadn’t been able to finish the job but hoped the courts would resolve the issue.
The independent commission’s work had been a disaster. A federal judge threw out the map in August 2023 after determining it had discriminated against Latinos. The commissioners were fined for their public meeting deception.
It was an ignominious referendum on Washington’s redistricting model. As the nation grapples with ever-more-aggressive battles over access to voting, a review of what unfolded in Washington shows that independent commissions — still reformers’ best hope for fixing this problem nationwide — have not always succeeded in taking this central democratic function out of politicians’ hands.
While independent commissions usually make fairer maps than their legislative counterparts, all over the country some, like Washington, have stumbled. Several were not the bulwark against discrimination that supporters had hoped. In 2021, five states with independent commissions faced lawsuits over their maps. In New York, an independent commission bungled the job so badly that the state legislature stepped in to create new maps. Then a judge threw those maps out. The independent commission has been reconvened to create new congressional maps. Michigan’s new independent commission lost a federal lawsuit brought by Black voters in Detroit. A judicial panel has ordered the commission to redraw maps and the case is being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In Washington state, criticism of the commission’s work has been so intense that lawmakers decided not to reconvene the group to draw the new maps. Even good-government types have been aghast. Simone Leeper, a legal counsel for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, which handles voting-rights cases and represented Latino plaintiffs in Washington, says, “Going about this in this secretive way to trade away the rights of individuals is abhorrent to the concept of these commissions and what they're intended to do.”
A Pioneering ReformWashington was the third state in the nation to set up an independent commission. State voters approved it by constitutional amendment in 1983 after the Legislature, then led by Republicans, passed a redistricting plan that was found to be discriminatory by a federal court, which ordered new maps to be drawn.
Through several redistricting cycles, Washington’s commission worked smoothly, praised as a national model for how to fix the process of drawing lines for congressional and state legislative districts. The commission’s enabling legislation prohibited gerrymandering, or drawing lines to favor one party or undermine the voting power of a demographic group. Commission members could meet with lawmakers individually to hear specific requests, but public input was paramount since every voter had a stake in how the lines were drawn.
Today, 22 states have some type of independent commission to handle map-drawing, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.
Washington’s model is known as a bipartisan commission, which purports to be independent. But legislators still play a significant role. House and Senate majority and minority leaders choose four commission members by political affiliation, with one nonvoting member put in place to mediate. Liaisons for both political parties are assigned to monitor the commission and report back to caucuses. The commission gets around $2 million for staffing and expenses, but state political parties sometimes step in to cover expenses for studies or other activities that have a partisan slant.
The start of this redistricting cycle was dogged by controversy. Members chosen for the 2021 Washington commission had strong legislative ties. Republicans Joe Fain and Paul Graves and Democrat Brady Piñero Walkinshaw were former lawmakers. Democrat April Sims was an executive with the Washington State Labor Council, chosen by House Speaker Laurie Jinkins to represent the House Democratic caucus. Augustine, the nonvoting member, was chosen by the other members.
This commission began in rancor. Fain, a former senator from King County, had lost his 2018 reelection bid after a former Seattle city official publicly accused him of sexual assault. Fain denied the allegation, and the woman declined to press charges. But Walkinshaw and Sims sided with protestors and called, unsuccessfully, for Fain to resign. Fain did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
From the start, the commissioners faced pressure from the surging Latino population, which had grown by 14% since 2010 but still struggled to elect members of the House of Representatives. The growth had been particularly intense in the Yakima Valley agricultural region east of the Cascade Mountains, where the population includes many immigrant laborers from Mexico and South Texas.
The Yakima Valley farming region stretches for 80 miles and includes five counties, with three reporting majority Latino populations. Some small farming towns reported that as much as 80% of the population is Hispanic, according to UCLA Voting Rights Project founder Matt Barreto, who conducted an analysis of voting in the area.
Yet white Republicans for years had dominated political offices in the area, and Latinos complained they had been penalized by decades of “cracking,” a redistricting term that means splitting up communities to diminish their power. The valley’s Latino population was carved into three House districts that Latinos had little chance of winning.
Spanish-speaking voters won lawsuits against local governments to force changes, but little was done. “Time and time again, there have been findings and consent decrees, and other outcomes, that make clear that this community has persistently faced discrimination in voting,” said Campaign Legal Center’s Leeper.
In 2021, as the independent commission began its work, Latino activists were hopeful. Supporters of more representation testified at virtual public meetings. “There were so many voices,” said Susan Soto Palmer, an advocate and unsuccessful candidate for state and county office. At the public meetings, she described taunts she faced in Yakima from white voters when campaigning and the inadequate services for her community.
Susan Soto Palmer advocates for Latino voters in Washington state, who have been split up into multiple voting districts. (Amanda Lucier for ProPublica)The commission had been briefed by the attorney general’s office about the federal Voting Rights Act, which required that it draw election maps that give Latino populations the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.
Commission Democrats advised getting an expert analysis of the area’s voting patterns. But the two Republicans protested the hiring of UCLA expert Barreto because he had strong ties to national Democratic Party entities.
Senate Democrats paid for Barreto’s analysis. He concluded that the state must create at least one, possibly two, districts in the Yakima Valley with substantial Latino populations. The VRA requires that when a racial or ethnic group makes up a significant percentage of the electorate, the group should be able to elect candidates of its choice. Such a district is called a “performing” one. While that doesn’t always mean that the group needs to be a majority in a district, in this case, Barreto determined that a new district needed to have a Latino voting-age population of around 60%. Both Democratic commissioners proposed maps with a Yakima Valley district that had a greater than 60% Latino voting-age population.
The Republicans resisted such a proposal. They offered maps that were bare-majority Latino, giving the GOP a greater chance of winning the seat. Barreto said these proposals still cracked Hispanic voters.
Fain and Graves turned to the state GOP to pay a Seattle law firm, which produced a legal brief justifying a more conservative-friendly map. The lawyers urged them to avoid drawing a new district solely on the basis of race. In recent years, conservative legal experts have begun to argue that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause means that mapmakers cannot take race into account when drawing districts. The amendment supersedes the Voting Rights Act, they argue. The firm warned that the commission could face a lawsuit that claimed the map discriminated against non-Latino voters.
Jinkins, the House speaker, told ProPublica, “While the Washington approach has generally worked well for us, I’m always interested to understand what other states have learned and consider incorporating changes that make sense for Washington.” One model is California, which has been praised for creating a large commission with so many guardrails against legislative influence that it is now considered the gold standard.
“Meeting on Break”The commission’s November Zoom call made for excruciating video. The “Meeting on Break” sign stayed up for hours. Every so often, Augustine came on camera to report that private discussions continued. Staffers killed time with card games. Occasionally, a commissioner surfaced to cryptically describe what was happening behind closed doors.
Graves, one of the Republicans, looked bleary-eyed on camera, later revealing in a deposition that he had a three-month old at home and hadn’t slept for days. “I know it’s frustrating,” he told viewers.
In the days leading up to the Zoom, Graves had been driving a hard bargain behind the scenes, according to text messages and emails that surfaced later.
Graves and Fain texted on Nov. 7 about how they could extract a price from Democrats if the GOP agreed to their version of a 14th district. “If you had notes on the price for their 14, can you please send them to me?” Graves wrote Fain.
On Nov. 11, Graves emailed Democrat Sims to outline his latest “ever so slightly more Republican proposal” and to offer a brazen political trade. Republicans would give up some of their strength in the Yakima Valley, but only if Democrats would give them a more competitive district elsewhere.
“I will be interested to hear from you what you think is a fair price for this 14th,” Graves wrote Sims. Graves described to ProPublica his logic: He acknowledged his offer to Sims was “purely partisan,” but he said he and Sims had already agreed to draw a majority-Latino district and were fine-tuning.
“One of the requirements in our statute is that the plan cannot be drawn to purposely favor or discriminate against any political party. I was trying to avoid the kind of gerrymandering where one party gets substantially more representation than its pure votes would suggest,” he said.
He says he strongly supports independent commissions.
As they struggled to resolve the Yakima issue, commissioners kept getting distracted by lawmakers and lobbyists pushing their own agendas. Texts and emails from that evening and the days leading up to it, which were later produced in lawsuits, documented exchanges among commissioners and with legislators and special interests who were closely following the action.
The commission had no rules to limit ex parte communications. Attorneys in the lawsuits found that some records were never turned over. Sims, for example, acknowledged deleting some Nov. 15 texts that she considered personal.
That night, then-House Republican leader J.T. Wilcox texted with Graves, whom he had appointed. Graves said in a deposition that Wilcox had earlier passed along thoughts about how to shape his own district and “keep places … I have great affection for.”
That night, the two discussed a logjam that had developed between Fain and Walkinshaw, who were negotiating on congressional maps.
Graves told Wilcox that Walkinshaw was resisting a deal, but he still thought one was possible with a little strong-arming. Fain had “a lot of good contacts who can make Brady’s life very hard who want a deal.”
House Republican leader J.T. Wilcox texted with Paul Graves, a redistricting commissioner who Wilcox had appointed, throughout a last-minute meeting to try to finalize a deal. (Obtained by ProPublica)Walkinshaw told ProPublica he found the messages puzzling since he and Fain shared no political connections. Wilcox and Graves described it in interviews as a flippant comment, fired off in the heat of the moment.
Graves exchanged messages with state Rep. Andrew Stokesbary, a rising leader in the House GOP.
Commission staffers had been told to avoid last-minute lawmaker requests for mapping changes. But House and Senate leaders could get around this by sending messages through their party liaisons, who were on standby at the Hampton Inn.
House Speaker Jinkins texted her liaison, requesting a mapping tweak desired by two local Democratic officials, who shared a home in Tacoma.
“Not the biggest deal,” Jinkins wrote, asking to get the specific Tacoma street address into another district. “Right now, it’s just on the other side of the line.”
Jinkins said constituents had asked her if they could remain in their previous district.“I told them I would ask staff to see if that was possible but that I could make no promises.”
In the end, she said, her request was denied by “the independent, bipartisan commission.”
House Speaker Laurie Jinkins, a Democrat, texted her liaison, asking for a change that had been requested by two local Democratic officials, who shared a home in Tacoma. (Obtained and redacted by ProPublica)Jamie Nixon, a former commission staffer, said Jinkins’ request violated protocol and was “a vulgar attempt to wield her power to modify a map for her own political benefit.”
Fain, who had recently moved from Bellingham to Normandy Park, didn’t like the district assigned to his new residence. He asked Walkinshaw if they could tweak the congressional lines to move his house.
Walkinshaw rejected the idea.
State government lobbyists were supposed to report any contact with the commission, but a lobbyist for the Service Employees International Union did not disclose texts she sent to Sims on the final night offering assistance finishing up the work. The lobbyist, who was in a relationship with a state Democratic leader, later got a warning letter from the state public records commission. Neither the lobbyist nor Sims responded to ProPublica’s request for comment. The lobbyist’s attorney said in a filing that her texts were not an attempt to influence Sims.
Though commissioners resisted these entreaties, upholding their independence, they had spent precious time fending them off. “There were text messages being exchanged as well as commissioners meeting in the hallway or in the hotel lobby,” Democratic liaison Ali O’Neil wrote on Nov. 21, 2021. “We were forced to compromise on our stated priorities and at times disregard what was shared with the commission during months of gathering public input.”
Lobbying had been going on for months, mostly by persistent citizen groups and Native American tribes. National political operatives were involved in the state’s process too, records revealed. Kurt Fritts, a former national political director for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee who now runs a state consulting firm, attended commission meetings and was briefed by Democrats throughout the process. He did not respond to emails or phone calls.
The National Democratic Redistricting PAC made a small contribution to pay for “proprietary redistricting software,” according to Adam Bartz, director of a fundraising arm of the Senate Democrats.
Graves said he consulted the Virginia-based National Republican Redistricting Trust, which coordinates national GOP redistricting strategy. In a deposition, Graves described meeting with NRRT executive director Adam Kincaid while he was in Washington, DC., conferring with GOP members of his state’s congressional delegation. Kincaid said he described to Graves the assistance the NRRT could offer with data and litigation.
Commissioners finally compromised on the Yakima Valley, but only after Democrats conceded. They approved a plan almost guaranteed to bring a federal lawsuit, with a district that had only a 51.5% Latino voting-age population, which was close to what Republicans had wanted.
Source: Washington State Redistricting Commission (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)As the meeting wore on, Walkinshaw said it was clear the deal “was the best result that could be achieved through bipartisan negotiation.”
Graves emailed his party leadership just before 6 a.m. to alert them a deal had been reached.
“Get Out of the Way”Commissioners finally stumbled out of the Hampton Inn just before sunrise and reconvened the next afternoon to get their mapping recommendations drawn. Even though the commission had blown its deadline, the state Supreme Court reviewed its work and decided in late 2021 to let the mapping recommendations stand so that 2022 elections could proceed without interruption.
Angry that they were once again forced to vote under maps they considered discriminatory, Soto Palmer and other plaintiffs sued in federal court, alleging the commission created a Latino district that was a “facade.”
U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik sided with the plaintiffs in August 2023, finding “inequality in the electoral opportunities enjoyed by white and Latino voters.” He ordered the state to correct the maps.
But Republicans countered, using the Seattle law firm’s tack. A Latino Republican filed a federal lawsuit in March 2022, arguing that the new Latino-dominated legislative district was an illegal racial gerrymander. The plaintiff claimed that Latino voters did not need a 60% opportunity district because the maps drawn by the commission allowed the Yakima Valley to elect its first Latino Republican state senator in 2022. Progress was underway, the plaintiff maintained.
A judicial panel declared the case moot after Lasnik decided the Soto Palmer case, but it is now on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Jinkins and other legislative leaders decided not to reconvene the 2021 commission to draw new maps that can be used in 2024 elections. Instead, lawmakers asked the court to handle it. A special master is expected to decide soon among five proposed maps that could cost several Republicans their seats.
The commission was forced to acknowledge that its November Hampton Inn meeting violated the state’s Open Public Meetings Act and its own transparency rules. It settled a lawsuit brought by the Washington Coalition for Open Government and agreed to pay about $130,000 in legal fees. Individual commissioners were fined $500 each.
With the next redistricting nearly a decade away, Mike Fancher, the coalition’s president, said the Legislature should decide to “appoint a commission and then get out of the way. Don’t be involved in the staffing of it, don’t be involved in the direction of it. Let this commission do its work. We want to make sure this never happens again.”
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Ryann Grochowski Jones contributed research.
CorrectionJan. 22, 2024: This story originally reported incorrectly to the timing of a lawsuit filed by a Latino Republican. It was filed in March 2022, not March 2023. It also referred imprecisely to New York’s recent redistricting process. A state judge threw out the maps that the legislature had made after an independent commission had failed to finish the redistricting; the judge did not toss the independent commission’s work.
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