Aggregator

The St. Louis City board of aldermen will have its first real debate Thursday morning of the proposed legislation that would significantly raise the water bill for city residents. 

Looking back, Martha Bass and Sophie Mendelson were destined to be together. Both were interested in food systems from both a sociological and environmental perspective. Both had committed themselves to pursuing academics and shared many of the same values.

by Megan O’Matz

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.

Update, June 27, 2023: Meagan Wolfe will remain in her administrative post past the end of her term, July 1. Most members of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission made it clear in an open meeting on Tuesday that they have no interest in removing her, praising her expertise and defending her against criticism from conspiracy theorists and what one GOP commissioner called “grifters.” A motion to reappoint her, however, failed to muster a majority of votes after all three Democrats on the commission abstained in a strategic bid to avoid sending her nomination to the GOP-controlled Senate for confirmation and possible defeat. (The three Republican members voted to approve another term for her.) The Democrats were relying on a 2022 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision that held that the simple expiration of a term does not create a vacancy that must be filled. The result of Tuesday’s vote is likely future litigation against the commission. “I will take my shots with the court rather than at the Senate,” Democratic Commissioner Mark Thomsen said.

Meagan Wolfe’s tenure as Wisconsin’s election administrator began without controversy.

Members of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission chose her in 2018, and the state Senate unanimously confirmed her appointment. That was before Wisconsin became a hotbed of conspiracy theories that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump, before election officials across the country saw their lives upended by threats and half-truths.

Now Wolfe is eligible for a second term, but her reappointment is far from assured. Republican politicians who helped sow the seeds of doubt about Wisconsin election results could determine her fate and reset election dynamics in a state pivotal to the 2024 presidential race. Her travails show that although election denialism has been rejected in the courts and at the polls across the country, it has not completely faded away.

One of the six members of the election commission has already signaled he won’t back Wolfe. That member is Bob Spindell, one of 10 Republicans who in December 2020 met secretly in the Wisconsin Capitol to sign electoral count paperwork purporting to show Trump won the state, when that was not the case.

If retained by a majority of the commissioners, Wolfe would have to be confirmed by the state Senate. But the Wisconsin Legislature is dominated by Republicans who buttressed Trump’s false claims about fraud in the 2020 election. The Senate president has in the past called for Wolfe’s resignation after a dispute over how voting was carried out in nursing homes. Some other senators have registered their opposition to reappointing Wolfe, as well.

Republicans and Democrats have fought to a power stalemate in Wisconsin in recent months. Voters reelected a Democratic governor in November of last year and this year elected a new Supreme Court justice who tilts the court away from Republican control.

A December 2022 report by three election integrity groups looking at voter suppression efforts nationwide concluded that in Wisconsin the threat of election subversion had eased. “The governor, attorney general, and secretary of state, all of whom reject election denialism, were re-elected in the 2022 midterm election,” they wrote.

Still, the groups warned, Wisconsin continues to be a state to watch, noting “the legislature now has an election subversion-friendly Republican supermajority in the senate and a majority in the assembly.”

“We are in a better place,” attorney Rachel Homer of Protect Democracy said of the national landscape in a recent press conference following an update to that study. “That said, the threat hasn’t passed. It’s just evolved.”

There are fears that the state Senate could refuse to reappoint Wolfe and instead engineer the appointment of a staunch partisan or an election denier, tilting oversight of the state’s voting operations.

“It could be a huge disruption in our elections in Wisconsin,” said Senate Democratic leader Melissa Agard. “If you have someone who has this pulpit using it to spew disinformation and harmful rhetoric, that is terrible.”

As for Wolfe, she mostly only speaks out about election processes and stays out of the political fray.

Through a spokesperson, Wolfe declined to comment in response to ProPublica’s questions. In a public statement issued last week, she said she found it “deeply disappointing that a small minority of lawmakers continue to misrepresent my work, the work of the agency, and that of our local election officials, especially since we have spent the last few years thoughtfully providing facts to debunk inaccurate rumors.

“Lawmakers,” she continued, “should assess my performance on the facts, not on tired, false claims.” The commission created a page on its web site to address rampant misinformation.

Wolfe has maintained the support of many election officials throughout the state.

She has been “a great patriot” for not quitting despite the attacks and for being willing to be reappointed, said the executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, Claire Woodall-Vogg. “I think she understands the pressure and understands the peril that the state could face if she’s not in that position.”

A Honeymoon, Then Trouble

The state commission was created in 2016 by Republican state officials unhappy with the independent board of retired judges that then oversaw elections. They created a panel of three Democrats and three Republicans, advised by an administrator with no political ties.

The commission provides education, training and support for the state’s roughly 1,900 municipal and county clerks, who in recent years have faced cybersecurity threats, budget woes, shortages of poll workers and other challenges. The commission also handles complaints, ensures the integrity of statewide election results and maintains Wisconsin’s statewide voter registration database. The administrator manages the staff, advises commissioners and carries out their directives.

At first the newly established commission had someone else at the helm: Michael Haas, who had served the prior agency, the Government Accountability Board, which had investigated GOP Gov. Scott Walker for campaign finance violations. (The state Supreme Court halted the probe in 2015, finding no laws had been broken.) As a result, Haas did not win state Senate confirmation and stepped down.

The six commissioners then unanimously promoted Wolfe, the deputy administrator, to the top post in March 2018. She won unanimous confirmation in May 2019 in the Senate, which then-state Senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald said looked to her to “restore stability.”

“I met with Ms. Wolfe last week and was impressed with her wide breadth of knowledge regarding elections issues,” Fitzgerald, now a U.S. representative, said at the time. “Her experience with security and technology issues, as well as her relationships with municipal clerks all over the state, will serve the commission well.”

The bliss did not last.

Wisconsin was one of the first states to put on an election following the start of the pandemic in 2020, amid lockdowns, fear and uncertainty. The primary that April was chaotic, with legal fights over whether to even hold the contest. Local officials closed some polling places. There were long lines in Milwaukee, Green Bay and elsewhere. The governor deployed the state National Guard to assist, and mail-in voting soared.

Voters masked against COVID-19 line up during Wisconsin’s primary election in Milwaukee on April 7, 2020. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)

Later in the year, after it became clear that Trump had lost Wisconsin to Joe Biden in the election the previous November, state Republicans blasted the elections commission for accommodations made during the pandemic, such as the wider use of ballot drop boxes and unmonitored voting in nursing homes. Critics claimed the moves increased the likelihood of fraud and tainted the election.

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, proposed dissolving the commission and transferring its duties to the GOP-controlled Legislature. Talk of that ended with the reelection last year of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. The Legislature would need his approval to disband the commission.

“What’s happened over the last six years, in particular since the Trump years, is there’s been a systematic attempt to undermine the work of the Wisconsin Elections Commission,” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin. “Because it’s apparently not as responsive in a partisan way to the Republicans as they would like.”

Wolfe became a target. Many Republicans accused her of facilitating the awarding of private pandemic-related grants to election clerks that those critics claimed fostered turnout in Democratic areas, though the money was widely distributed.

They also criticized Wolfe for allowing the commission to vote in June 2020 to send absentee ballots to nursing homes during the health emergency rather than have special poll workers visit to assist residents and guard against fraud. Republicans discovered that some mentally impaired people in the facilities who were ineligible to vote cast ballots in Nov. 2020, though the numbers were small and not enough to change the election results. Municipal clerks had received only 23 written complaints of alleged voter fraud of any type in the presidential election, the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau found.

Wolfe was the target of lawsuits and insults. Michael Gableman, a former state Supreme Court justice and Trump supporter tapped by the Assembly Speaker to lead a 2020 election investigation, mocked her attire: “Black dress, white pearls — I’ve seen the act, I’ve seen the show.”

One conservative grassroots group, H.O.T. Government, has been sending out email blasts urging Wolfe’s ouster, referring to her as the “Wolfe of State Street.”

Wolfe does have champions, but they are not as vocal as her critics. “I think she’s done an outstanding job with running the Wisconsin Elections Commission here,” said Cindi Gamb, deputy clerk-treasurer of the Village of Kohler. “She’s been very communicative with us clerks.”

Gamb is the first vice president of the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association, but she said the group’s rules bar it from making endorsements.

Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell finds the assaults on the once-obscure bureaucrat troubling. “What has Meagan done to deserve the abuse she's gotten?” he said. “Nothing.”

Wolfe did receive the support of 50 election officials nationwide who called her “one of the most highly-skilled election administrators in the country” in a 2021 letter to the Wisconsin Assembly speaker. Wolfe is a past president of the National Association of State Election Directors.

And she has had the backing of a bipartisan business group that in February of last year sent a letter of appreciation to her and the commission. “Although the 2020 elections were among the most successful in American history thanks to your efforts, we recognize election administrators nationwide are facing increasing unwarranted threats and harassment. We hereby offer our sincere gratitude and full support,” said the letter from Wisconsin Business Leaders for Democracy.

The 22 signers included the president of the Milwaukee Bucks, the former CEO of Harley-Davidson and two top members of the Florsheim shoemaker family.

An Undecided Fate

Wolfe’s term expires July 1.

To avoid a showdown, some legal experts are exploring whether the commission could take no action and just allow Wolfe to continue past June 30, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. They’ve pointed to the example of Fred Prehn, a dentist appointed to the state Natural Resources Board who refused to leave after his term expired in May 2021, preserving GOP control over the board.

The state Supreme Court ruled last year that Prehn had lawfully retained his position, finding that the expiration of a term does not create a vacancy. And because there was no vacancy, the governor could not make a new appointment unless he removed Prehn “for cause.” Prehn ultimately resigned last Dec. 30.

That scenario now is unlikely. Commission chair Don Millis, a Republican attorney, told ProPublica Wednesday that “there will be a vote” in the near future to consider the appointment of an administrator.

“If someone didn’t think we should have a vote, and we should rely on the Supreme Court decision in the Prehn case, they could move to adjourn,” he said, but added: “I’m not excited about that. To me it would be avoiding our responsibility if we didn’t act.”

Millis declined to say if he would back Wolfe but said he feared that if the commission did not take a vote “that would only add fuel to the fire of the conspiracy theories that we get hit with.”

He warned, “If we decide no vote is required and Meagan Wolfe keeps her position after July 1, I can guarantee you we’ll be sued and the courts will decide.”

Arguing that Wolfe does not have the confidence of Republicans, Spindell said, “I did tell her that I’m not going to vote for her.” He stressed, however, that he thought she was unfairly blamed for long-standing policies set by the commission.

In a letter Wednesday to clerks statewide, Wolfe acknowledged that “my role here is at risk” but said she preferred that the Legislature act quickly to confirm someone, even if it isn’t her. Still, she made it clear she considers herself the best choice to serve the commission. “It is a fact that if I am not selected for this role, Wisconsin would have a less experienced administrator at the helm,” she wrote.

And she also made clear what she thinks is driving the questions about her future, writing that “enough legislators have fallen prey to false information about my work and the work of this agency that my role here is at risk.”

If the commission does vote on Wolfe, Agard said, she expects Wolfe will secure at least one Republican vote, moving her nomination on to the Senate — and what could be a hostile environment.

Senate President Chris Kapenga, a Trump loyalist, told the Associated Press this week that “there’s no way” Wolfe will be re-confirmed by the Senate. “I will do everything I can to keep her from being reappointed,” he said. “I would be extremely surprised if she had any votes in the caucus.”

In the Senate, the matter could first be considered by the Committee on Shared Revenue, Elections and Consumer Protection — chaired by GOP Sen. Dan Knodl. In the weeks after the 2020 election, Knodl signed on to a letter calling on Vice President Mike Pence to delay certifying the results on Jan. 6.

Spindell already is envisioning a future without Wolfe. He said there is talk of conducting a national search for a new administrator, but Millis said there doesn’t appear to be an appetite among the commissioners for this approach. He noted the commission is pressed for time: Come July 1, the state will be only about 16 months away from a presidential election.

State law restricts who can be appointed as election administrator. Appointees cannot have been a lobbyist or have served in a partisan state or local office. Nor can they have made a contribution to a candidate for partisan state or local office in the 12 months prior to their employment.

If the position is vacant for 45 days, the Joint Committee on Legislative Organization, chaired by Kapenga and GOP Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, can appoint an interim commissioner.

As for Wolfe, Spindell said: “She’s experienced. She’s been on all the various boards. I’m sure she would have no problem getting a job anywhere else.”

This story was originally published by Investigate Midwest.  A May 30, 2021, ransomware attack on JBS, one of the world’s largest meat companies, disrupted the company’s operations internationally and ended when the company paid an $11 million ransom to Russian hacker group REvil. While food production companies are potentially lucrative targets for cyberattacks, JBS was poorly […]

The post Cybersecurity at JBS was unusually poor before ransomware attack, records show appeared first on Missouri Independent.

A U.S.-based rare earth supply chain could boost clean energy and electric vehicles — and military weapons.

Even when governments concede to environmentalists, women are often left out of negotiations.

by Jessica Lussenhop and Agnel Philip, photography by Jaida Grey Eagle for ProPublica

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

Update, June 15, 2023: On Thursday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of upholding the Indian Child Welfare Act. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority that the case was about “children who are among the most vulnerable” and that “we reject all of petitioners’ challenges to the statute, some on the merits and others for lack of standing.”

When Cheyenne Hinojosa saw her husband, Jose, and her mother charging through the doors at the gas station where she worked, she assumed something terrible had happened. In Jose’s hands was a stack of papers — the latest legal filing in Hinojosa’s long-running child protective services case regarding her then-3-year-old daughter.

In 2018, not long after Hinojosa’s daughter turned one year old, a South Dakota Department of Social Services caseworker had come to Hinojosa’s home in Huron and taken her away. Two years later, a county judge terminated Hinojosa’s parental rights, an act so permanent that in the legal world it’s considered the death penalty of child welfare cases.

The decision meant that Hinojosa was no longer legally her daughter’s mother.

“I felt my heart just stop,” Hinojosa said of the moment she heard the judge’s ruling.

She asked her attorney to appeal, though he warned Hinojosa not to get her hopes up. In his four-decade career, he’d never had a parental rights termination ruling reversed. For almost a year, Hinojosa barely had contact with her daughter.

All that changed in July of 2021, when her husband reached across the gas station counter and handed her documents with the words “Supreme Court of the State of South Dakota” near the top. Toward the end was the court’s unanimous decision restoring Hinojosa’s parental rights. She started to cry.

“I'm back in the game,” Hinojosa remembers thinking.

In their ruling, the justices seemed particularly disturbed by one important aspect of the case: As an enrolled member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, Hinojosa and her family should have had powerful federal protections under the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act.

Under ICWA, the state Department of Social Services and the local court had a much higher legal bar to meet than in most child welfare cases before they could terminate Hinojosa’s parental rights. And according to the state Supreme Court, the case against her had failed to meet that higher standard, which it noted was created by the law’s authors “to prevent the breakup of the Indian family.”

Against the odds, Hinojosa became one of a small number of parents to have their rights restored by South Dakota’s highest court. It was a moment of validation for a young Native American mother who’d been told throughout the process that she wasn’t fit to be a parent.

Hinojosa’s triumph was short-lived. She had assumed that, with her rights restored, her daughter would be swiftly returned to her custody. She was wrong. And there was yet another fight on the horizon. A month later, Hinojosa learned she was pregnant. Before her second daughter was even a day old, the state was moving to take custody of her as well.

When ICWA became law 45 years ago, the goal was to counteract a century of federal policies that had broken up tribal families. Congress meant to make it harder to terminate the rights of Native American parents, particularly over subjective beliefs about parenting, like that wealthier couples who are not Indigenous would provide a better life for children.

Since its passage, ICWA has played a key role in keeping many Native American families intact, according to tribal leaders, attorneys and child welfare experts. And while federal foster care data — the only national dataset that describes outcomes of the child welfare system —doesn’t track whether a child is covered by the law, a ProPublica analysis found that, in recent years, children identified as Native American were less likely to be taken permanently from their parents than white children once they have entered the system.

Unlike in the U.S. overall, in South Dakota Native American children entering foster care are more likely to face termination of parental rights than white children. Note: Data represents children who were placed in foster care from 2015 through 2019. (Source: ProPublica analysis of National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System removal records.)

The reverse is true in a handful of states, including South Dakota. There, more than 700 Native American children — or about one of every 40 living in the state — experienced the termination of their parents’ rights from 2017 to 2021, the ProPublica analysis found. That was one of the highest rates in the country and nearly 13 times the rate for white children in the state.

“ICWA only works if you follow it,” said Marcia Zug, a professor of family law at the University of South Carolina School of Law.

One issue, child welfare experts said, is that ICWA collides with another federal law. The Adoption and Safe Families Act, passed in 1997, created strict timelines to reduce the amount of time children spend in foster care and free them up for adoption. Once 15 months have passed since a child has been removed from their parent, in most cases child welfare agencies must file for termination of the birth parents’ rights. If they don’t, states can lose federal funding.

In South Dakota, Native American children experience termination of parental rights at 13 times the rate of white children. Note: Terminations occurred between 2017 and 2021. Race and ethnicity categories are not all mutually exclusive. Black and Native American and Alaska Native children may be of Hispanic ethnicity. Hispanic children may be of any race. Non-Hispanic, multiracial children are not included in the data presented. (Source: ProPublica analysis of National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System records and American Community Survey data.)

These two pieces of legislation are sometimes at odds in state courts. While ASFA incentivizes speedy decision-making, ICWA mandates efforts that can be more comprehensive and expensive for state and local child welfare offices. In 2005, South Dakota’s Supreme Court became the first in the country to rule that ASFA does not take precedence over ICWA. A patchwork of legal determinations across the country has bred confusion, however.

“I wish the feds would clear it up and just come out and say, ‘With regard to Native children, either in tribal court or in state court, under ICWA these timelines don’t apply,’” said B.J. Jones, the director of the Tribal Judicial Institute at University of North Dakota School of Law.

Looming over all of this is an existential threat to ICWA. The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in November in a challenge to ICWA brought by three couples who say that the law’s preference for placing adoptable Native American children in Native households is outdated and biased against white families and should be struck down. That argument is opposed by a coalition of nearly 500 tribes, as well as dozens of state attorneys general, child welfare and tribal rights organizations, which have filed briefs in support of preserving ICWA. The court’s decision is expected this month.

Though the current debate centers on adoption, Kimberly Cluff, legal director of the California Tribal Families Coalition, said the termination phase of the child welfare process is what hurts Native American families.

“Creating family for children is a wonderful thing,” she said. “It’s cutting off of other family that’s the problem.”

Though Hinojosa’s mother lived for a time on the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe reservation in central South Dakota, Hinojosa has spent most of her life in small towns around the state that are predominantly white. After her father, who was white, died when she was 18, Hinojosa developed a stronger connection to her Lower Brule heritage. She found an appreciation for the artwork and language, picking up Lakota and Dakota words from her mother and an aunt.

When she was 20, Hinojosa became pregnant. Though the pregnancy was unplanned, she had always wanted to become a mother.

“I was happy. Scared. You know, the mixed emotions of a first-time mom,” she said.

The baby girl was born healthy in the fall of 2017. (ProPublica is not naming either of Hinojosa’s children to protect their privacy.) Ten months later, Hinojosa and her daughter’s then-28-year-old father, who is from the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, got married.

The state Department of Social Services made its first appearance in the family’s life not long after that. In June 2018, someone called the police on Hinojosa and her husband for smoking marijuana at home, and officers cited her husband for possession of drug paraphernalia. Not long after that, Hinojosa went to an anti-abortion counseling center in Huron hoping to get free diapers and formula and blurted out to a worker that she’d smoked marijuana that day. She said the worker reported it to Social Services, which led to her daughter spending a month in foster care before she was returned home.

In early October of that year, documents show, a caseworker arrived unannounced at 9 a.m. in response to another report about the couple. Hinojosa and her husband were asleep, and a roommate let the woman inside. The caseworker wrote in her report that the baby’s diaper was so soiled it was wet to the touch, that she was left alone and unsupervised — one of the more serious allegations against the couple — and that she was hungry.

The caseworker also noted “life threatening” conditions in the household: pieces of candy and wrappers on the floor, moldy baby bottles, a fan with no cover on it, cockroaches in the kitchen and prescription bottles in the bedroom. Caseworkers removed the baby, and a court later deemed her an “abused and neglected child.” She was placed in foster care with Hinojosa’s sister-in-law, who lived about 45 minutes away.

The removal, Hinojosa said, devastated her. But she said she was also immature and slow to appreciate the gravity of the situation. So while she signed up for mental health services, a chemical dependency evaluation and parenting classes, she did not complete them. In their reports, caseworkers noted that she often showed up late to weekly visitations with her daughter or canceled. Though the caseworkers wrote that Hinojosa’s daughter was “excited” to see her and was “attached” to her, they also made critical notes. “Cheyenne sat on the couch for the majority of the visit,” read one. “Cheyenne brought Burger King” for her daughter, another said, “but ate most of the food.”

Over and over, the reports mention out-of-control marijuana use: “Cheyenne’s lifestyle is characterized by using illegal drugs, which is prioritized over planning and caring for” her daughter, said one.

Hinojosa has always maintained that her marijuana use was never habitual. She was also baffled by caseworkers’ contention that “no adult in the home will perform parental duties.”

“I’m the one who's bathing her, changing her, feeding her, all that. Taking her to appointments,” she said. “But they still wanted me to say I neglected her.”

The South Dakota Department of Social Services declined interview requests and did not respond to a detailed list of ProPublica’s questions about Hinojosa’s case.

The paperwork also said little about the turmoil in Hinojosa’s life. Eight months after their daughter was taken, Hinojosa left her husband and was effectively homeless, sleeping on friends’ and relatives’ couches. She did not have a car. She struggled to hold a job.

About 13 months after the baby was removed, a caseworker emailed their latest report to the Beadle County State’s Attorney, which has jurisdiction over child welfare cases in Huron, saying: “Please note we are requesting no further efforts on both parents,” and requesting a termination of parental rights hearing within 60 days. Beadle County Circuit Court Judge Jon Erickson granted the request; in December 2019, Social Services cut off the services it had been providing to Hinojosa.

One of the most important mechanisms of ICWA is the requirement that social service caseworkers make “active efforts” to help Native American parents stay in their children’s lives and hopefully regain custody. That includes providing transportation to visits and to therapy, as well as access to culturally appropriate programs.

The standard is lower in cases of children who do not qualify for ICWA. Under the Adoption and Safe Families Act, child protective service workers only have to provide “reasonable efforts” to keep families together. After a child has been in foster care for 15 months, the state can end those efforts and file for a termination of parental rights. ASFA also says the state can stop those efforts early if it determines that abuse or neglect is chronic or severe.

ASFA’s passage resulted in a large increase in the number of terminations. According to a recent study, the chances a child in the U.S. will experience the severing of their legal relationship with their parents roughly doubled from 2000 to 2016.

In Hinojosa’s case, the active efforts made by caseworkers included not just assigning her to parenting classes and setting up visitations, but also providing transportation. Although Social Services never explicitly mentioned ASFA in its simultaneous request to stop providing Hinojosa with these services, the timing of the proposed termination — roughly 15 months after her daughter was removed — followed the law’s guideline.

Around the time that Social Services cut off services to Hinojosa, her life was finally stabilizing. She moved in with her mother. She reenrolled in parenting classes. She began meeting with a behavioral analyst named Valere Walton, who started Hinojosa on an intensive case management plan to help her develop better parenting skills.

Hinojosa and her court-appointed lawyer were preparing to present all this at a termination hearing scheduled for March 2020. Then COVID hit. Seven months passed before the hearing could be rescheduled. Not realizing that Social Services had cut off active efforts, Hinojosa continued calling and asking for visits with her daughter.

Walton said she saw firsthand that Hinojosa was asking for home inspections and drug tests.

“This young lady was asking social services, ‘Please come into my home, see the changes I’m making,’” said Walton. “They wouldn’t even try.”

In September 2020, the hearing to terminate Hinojosa’s parental rights was convened in the limestone Beadle County Courthouse in the center of Huron. Her then-husband attended, but the couple was headed for a divorce and he was already in the process of voluntarily terminating his parental rights. (He did not respond to requests for comment.)

Downtown Huron, South Dakota

Under ICWA, the judge had to determine that the evidence proved “beyond a reasonable doubt” that returning custody to Hinojosa was “likely to result in serious emotional or physical damage to the child.” When Congress wrote the law, lawmakers chose this standard of proof because they believed that separating parents and children “is a penalty as great, if not greater, than a criminal penalty.”

Hinojosa’s attorney, Doug Kludt, was optimistic that she had made enough progress to provide a compelling argument for retaining her parental rights. She had completed an eight-week substance abuse program the day before the hearing.

“I thought it was real possible,” he said.

ICWA also mandated that Hinojosa’s tribe receive notification from Social Services about the termination and be allowed to intervene. But no one from Hinojosa’s tribe was in court, even though Social Services had contacted the ICWA offices of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe many times.

Under ICWA, the court also had to hear testimony from a “qualified expert witness” to provide an assessment of the case from the perspective of someone familiar with the cultural and social norms of the tribe. Raymond Cournoyer testified that, based on his experience as a member of the Yankton Sioux Tribe, the termination of Hinojosa’s rights was best because “drugs and alcohol use is not the Native American way to live your life.” He acknowledged that his opinion was based entirely on Hinojosa’s Social Services casefile, which did not contain any information about the last nine months of her life, including Hinojosa’s claim — supported by her substance abuse counselor — that she had been sober.

Cournoyer, who is now retired, said in an interview that he does not remember Hinojosa’s case, but if he had known the file was nine months out of date it would have been a “red flag” to him.

Hinojosa’s most recent caseworker took the witness stand to reiterate the conditions of the apartment in 2018 and Hinojosa’s marijuana use at the time. While she acknowledged that Social Services had ended its efforts to help Hinojosa nine months before the hearing and that she’d never seen Hinojosa’s current apartment, she testified that Hinojosa had failed to show progress. She said Hinojosa had no bond with her daughter.

Walton, the behavioral analyst, testified there was marked improvement in Hinojosa’s life over the previous year. She added that, in her opinion, Social Services hadn’t just been absent in Hinojosa’s case, it had actively undermined Hinojosa.

“There was a lot of resistance and a lot of desire to continue to terminate Cheyenne’s parental rights,” she told the court. “That is a very loving little girl. And she loves her mom. So to say that there is no bond is a very, very terrible falsehood.”

Hinojosa testified last. She admitted that she should have complied with Social Services requirements sooner, but said that issues with her husband, with money and with transportation impeded her progress. She said she felt confident she could be a better caregiver using the parenting and life skills she’d acquired.

“I love her with all my heart. She is my life,” Hinojosa said of her daughter. “I think of her when I wake up and when I go to bed.”

On cross-examination, Beadle County State’s Attorney Michael Moore pressed her about why she was unemployed, how she expected to afford food and diapers and why she fell short on some of her goals with Walton. His closing argument was mostly about how Hinojosa had run out of time.

“How long are we supposed to wait then?” Moore said. And how long, he asked, was Hinojosa’s daughter supposed to wait? “They had done stuff — what they could do for 15 months. And they couldn’t get her to do anything.”

“I don’t think we should terminate rights just because somebody is poor and can’t maintain a job,” Kludt argued in response. “A young child deserves to be with her mother.” As to how long Hinojosa’s daughter could wait, he said, “If it’s her natural mother, she can wait a little while. I don’t think we should be on some sort of rigid timetable here.”

Minutes later, Judge Erickson terminated Hinojosa’s rights.

Cheyenne met her second husband, Jose Hinojosa, on a smoke break at the sprawling turkey processing plant where they both worked at the time. She was candid with him about the complications in her life; one of their first conversations, they both said, was about her child welfare case.

“When I’m nervous, I babble. And everything just comes out,” she said.

Cheyenne and her second husband, Jose Hinojosa, on their wedding day (courtesy of Cheyenne Hinojosa)

The day before the couple’s wedding, the state Supreme Court reversed the outcome of the termination hearing. In their decision, the justices called out the “glaring defects involving ICWA,” principally the failure to continue efforts to reunify Hinojosa and her daughter. They questioned how Erickson could rule beyond a reasonable doubt that Hinojosa’s daughter was in imminent physical or emotional danger when no evidence had been introduced into the record for the previous nine months. They gave Hinojosa credit for her “ongoing work with counselors on her own accord.”

However, the supreme court’s order did not simply restore custody to Cheyenne. Instead, it ordered that the state “reassess” her, this time following the mandates of ICWA. Social Services essentially started the process all over again, allowing the Hinojosas short, supervised visits with Cheyenne’s daughter. Although the newlyweds were eager to start their own family, her lawyer advised her to wait until the case was closed before having another child.

But it was too late. A month after her wedding, Hinojosa discovered she was pregnant.

“What if they come for this one?” she worried.

On supervised visits with Cheyenne’s daughter, she and Jose told the caseworker they were expecting another little girl and asked if there was any cause for concern.

“Every time we could ask, we asked them, ‘Is she gonna be taken?’” said Jose. “The response was the same: ‘There’s no reason for us to take her.’”

The baby was born in April 2022. Hinojosa and her husband posted photos of the dark-haired newborn on Facebook and sent Snaps and texts to family and friends. The next morning, as Cheyenne was having breakfast with Jose in her hospital room, she looked down at her phone and saw a missed call from her caseworker. When they connected for a brief phone call, her worst fears were realized: Social Services was going to take her younger daughter as well.

“I literally felt the soul leave my body,” she said.

For the next two days before her discharge, Cheyenne and Jose slept as little as possible, passing the baby back and forth, trying to savor their dwindling moments together. When Cheyenne set her down in her bassinet for the last time and turned to leave, the baby let out a little cry. Her parents fell apart.

They left the hospital empty-handed and tearful. For the next several days, they stayed with Cheyenne’s mother; the empty crib in their own house was too much to bear.

In one of the earliest court filings in this new case, a Social Services caseworker alleged that the Hinojosas were neglectful. A sworn affidavit from Social Services said “Cheyenne has made little progress” in her older daughter’s case. The court filing made no mention of the fact that Hinojosa’s rights had been restored or the mistakes that the lower court and Social Services had made. It criticized the Hinojosas’ behavior at visitations with Cheyenne’s older daughter, saying they complained too much that she was “exhausting.”

“Jose and Cheyenne do not have the resources to meet” their daughters’ needs, the affidavit read. “Jose and Cheyenne are routinely using their resources for other things such as eating fast food and shopping.”

About a week after the newborn was taken, Cheyenne and her mother huddled around a phone at Kludt’s office. Across the street in a storefront legal office, Jose sat with his lawyer. The prosecutor, the caseworker and a new judge all dialed in.

After the caseworker explained their reasoning for taking custody, the judge ticked off the facts of the case. It appeared the younger daughter’s removal was based entirely on her older sister’s case. The mother had been divorced and remarried. Jose had never had a Social Services case.

After a brief recess, the judge returned custody to Cheyenne and Jose. Hours later, they met their younger daughter’s temporary foster mother at the Social Services office.

“I grabbed that car seat, and I left that office,” said Jose. “I didn't look back.”

Jose Hinojosa with his daughter at their home in Huron

The Department of Social Services did not answer ProPublica’s questions about the legal justification it had for removing the younger child at the hospital. Moore, the prosecutor, said he told Social Services that he thought Cheyenne Hinojosa had shown enough progress to delay termination regarding her older daughter back in 2020.

“Next time, I think that they will listen to me, because of the Supreme Court case,” he said. “It's one of those cases of ‘I told you so.’”

First image: Jose Hinojosa and Joan Malikowski, his mother-in-law, share a laugh after cleaning Jose and Cheyenne’s daughter following cake at her first birthday party celebration in Huron. Second image: Jose and Cheyenne’s daughter’s birthday dress.

Though the prosecutor stood behind the first case he made against Hinojosa, he conceded that the outcome was the result of trying to enforce two conflicting federal laws — plus the typical human disarray that affects many child welfare cases. It was not, he insisted, an attempt to sidestep ICWA.

“To paint a picture that we’re ignoring this or not following it, I don’t think is fair,” Moore said. “I think that there’s a lot of things that could be done outside of the court system to make this process better.”

For example, he said, in his 30-year career, he has never had a tribe take jurisdiction of a child welfare case and move it to tribal court, which ICWA permits them to do.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily the tribes’ fault. I just don’t think they have the resources,” he said.

Clyde Estes, the chairman of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, declined to speak specifically about Hinojosa’s case. But he said his ICWA division is just one person tasked with processing child welfare case requests for the tribe’s roughly 4,500 members, the vast majority of whom live off the reservation. The tribe does not have an ICWA attorney, and as one of the smallest tribes in South Dakota, it has little money and relies mostly on financial support from the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs to fund its ICWA work.

“It really puts us in a tough bind,” he said.

Estes said that things will only get worse if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes ICWA down. While states like North Dakota and Colorado have recently enshrined ICWA tenets into state law, similar bills in South Dakota died during the last session. The state legislature also would not approve the creation of a task force to study the disproportionate impact of the child welfare system on Native American children, a lack of action Estes called “heartbreaking.”

In response, several of the state’s tribes announced their intention to start their own study.

“This is a very serious issue for the future of our children,” said Estes. “They should have the option to be in a Native home on their own lands. Because that’s who they are. And that’s their identity.”

Although ICWA protections ultimately preserved Hinojosa’s family, the law couldn’t put everything back together. Last Thanksgiving, Hinojosa’s family was as close to being whole as it had been in four years. The case with Social Services over her older daughter was still going on, but she and her husband were allowed unsupervised overnight visits. Cheyenne’s older daughter had joined them for the holiday. The Hinojosas’ younger daughter had been back in their care for about seven months and had grown into a chubby, sweet-tempered girl.

Hinojosa’s mother set up tables in the living room. They invited a couple of friends. The spread included ham, mashed potatoes and gravy, chicken and stuffing.

After dinner, Hinojosa realized her older daughter had stopped playing with the other kids and was alone in her room. Hinojosa found the 5-year-old in tears. She said she missed her foster mother and siblings.

“I want to go home. I want to go home,” Hinojosa remembers her saying.

After she calmed her down and put her to bed, Hinojosa went into the basement, where the sound of her own crying wouldn’t be heard. A feeling that had been building for weeks crashed to the surface. She wondered if the long, disruptive process of regaining custody had somehow harmed her daughter.

In the years since she’d been living with an aunt in another town, Hinojosa’s daughter had been diagnosed with emotional disorders and was experiencing developmental delays. Her foster mother had found a school that was helping her achieve her milestones. Many of her doctors were there, too. Social Services had made it clear in their reports that they did not believe Hinojosa understood her daughter’s conditions or had the resources to take care of her. Hinojosa felt a sense of inevitability, certain they were heading towards another termination hearing.

And though their relationship had at times been strained over her efforts to regain custody, Hinojosa always thought her older daughter’s foster mother was a wonderful caregiver. The woman had long made it clear she would adopt the girl. The day after Thanksgiving, Hinojosa said she called the foster mother to tell her, “You’ve done an amazing job with her.” (Hinojosa’s older daughter’s foster mother did not respond to several requests for comment.)

In early December, Hinojosa went back in front of Judge Erickson and voluntarily terminated her parental rights for her older daughter. She knew some people would say that she’d just given up.

“I have to do what’s best” for her, she told herself, “even if it’s not with me.”

Because of her relationship with the foster mother, Hinojosa gets to see her oldest daughter regularly, though she has no legal right or guarantee that those visits will continue. She is relieved the case is over, but also haunted by her final decision. She replays the events of the last four years in her mind, she said, hoping that someday she can explain all of it to her daughter.

How We Measured Terminations of Parental Rights Using Foster Care Data

We analyzed data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System to compare termination of parental rights rates across states by race.

The AFCARS data, obtained from the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, required steps to clean and deduplicate before we could make comparisons across counties and states. This database had unique identifiers for children called AFCARS IDs, which we used to remove duplicates. For cases in which the most recent report had multiple entries for the same unique identifier, we kept the latest termination of parental rights date. We then filtered the dataset to the entries in which rights for both parents were severed between 2017 and 2021, the last full year covered in the data. Then we grouped this dataset by state and counted the number of terminations by race. To find the rate of terminations per child in each state, we divided our count by the under-18 population from the Census Bureau’s 2017-2021 American Community Survey.

To find how likely children who entered the child welfare system were to be permanently separated from their parents, we identified children placed into foster care from 2015 to 2019, based on having a removal date during that time period. We chose these earlier years to allow time for the foster care cases to resolve. We then flagged which of those children, based on their AFCARS IDs, had their parents’ rights severed between the removal and the end of September 2022, the last day covered in the data.

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.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

When Santana played Woodstock in 1969, they were a relatively unknown band that shot to superstardom after their performance. But according to Carlos Santana, it’s surprising the set went off as well as…

Source

Fights over domestic spying typically follow a familiar pattern. That might end this year.

After ‘Milligan,’ some redistricting cases may find their way back to state lawmakers who fear Black voters—and the multiracial coalitions they can anchor.

by Lisa Song, with additional reporting by Jaime Yaya Barry for ProPublica, photography by Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica

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

We’re investigating the cause of viruses spilling over from animals to humans — and what can be done to stop it. Read more in the series.

Several times a day, Hassanatou Bah scans for threats along the river’s edge near her village in northwest Guinea. The once-mundane chore of fetching water has become a territorial tug of war with an increasingly frightening foe: chimpanzees. Some days, she’s seen them hurl rocks from trees. Other times, they throw clusters of leaves containing nests of biting weaver ants.

Chimps had long encroached on Kagnèka, her farming community of about 350, but there was a time when residents could beat on gongs to scare them away. That changed about six years ago when a mining expansion drained streams and razed trees, driving the displaced primates into a desperate struggle with the village over food and water. Kagnèka’s crops became an open buffet. And the chimps began guarding the river so aggressively that Bah no longer felt safe bringing her two small children, or washing her clothes on the bank, or even going alone.

One afternoon in February, an enormous nest loomed above — a mound of bent branches where a chimpanzee would have recently slept. Bah used a gourd to scoop water into a bucket to balance on her head, then rushed home with neighbors, past trees stripped bare of bananas.

What Bah and her neighbors didn’t know is that they — and the chimps who now terrorize them — are the accepted collateral damage in a deal brokered by the globally respected World Bank Group, whose priorities include reducing poverty, protecting the environment and preventing the spread of deadly diseases.

First image: Hassanatou Bah, left, and Aissatou Bah fetch water near Kagnèka, Guinea. Second image: A chimpanzee nest in the forest near Missira, Guinea.

The idea seems noble: In parts of the world rich in natural resources, but struggling economically, the bank sets up arrangements known as biodiversity offsets. Mining or gas companies, for example, can build environmentally ruinous projects in areas even if they are home to endangered species as long as the companies protect the same species elsewhere or take other steps to “compensate” for the ecological damage.

When the World Bank Group funds their operations, it allows the companies to publicly portray themselves as ecologically responsible. In some cases, the name-brand companies that eventually use their products can do so as well.

The World Bank Group has backed such projects for decades; its arm that works with private companies, the International Finance Corporation, has funded at least 19 with biodiversity offsets.

IFC standards are influential and considered the best in the world.

But in practice, ProPublica found, projects brokered by the World Bank Group can fall short of their idealistic goals. The one in Guinea has left a trail of hunger, displaced and broken families, decimated ecosystems and conditions ripe for the spread of deadly contagions.

And the deals themselves sometimes fall apart, with the land used as an offset falling prey to another company or disaster — with few consequences for the company or its lenders.

The deal in Guinea began like many others: Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée sought funding to expand its mining operation. The company estimated its project would lead to the deaths of up to 83 critically endangered western chimpanzees; if they weren’t killed in the demolition, the displacement would decimate the population over time, as females stopped reproducing due to stress and males injured or killed one another fighting over shrinking territory.

Chimpanzees in Bossou, Guinea. (Photo courtesy of Maegan Fitzgerald)

A nearby company that also needed money predicted its mine would result in the loss of twice as many chimps. The IFC helped the companies establish Moyen-Bafing National Park some 200 miles away, where thousands of other chimps already lived. Bolstering and protecting this population, the idea went, would make up for the loss of the others.

But the companies’ consultants underestimated the chimp death toll, primatologist Genevieve Campbell and her colleagues later found in an independent review of the offset. The consultants had assumed some of the chimpanzees near the mines would survive, but the reviewers concluded the development would contribute to the eventual deaths of all the chimpanzees — about 180 to 400.

The offset also faced an existential threat: A regional development authority, not working with the IFC or the mining companies, proposed building a dam that would submerge a swath of it and kill up to 1,500 chimps, in addition to displacing 8,700 people.

Offsets are “mainly an instrument to sanction perpetual destruction,” said Jutta Kill, a researcher and environmental advocate who’s studied conservation programs in the Global South.

[Offsets are] mainly an instrument to sanction perpetual destruction.”

—Jutta Kill, researcher and advocate

While biodiversity offsets have been used by governments, banks and industries at least 13,000 times across 37 countries, these arrangements have been subjected to far less scrutiny than carbon offsets, which my investigations have found to be profoundly flawed.

I reviewed the literature on the tiny sliver of biodiversity offsets that have been studied and found that, at best, their records are spotty or unproven. At worst, they function as greenwashing for destructive industries.

Those associated with the World Bank Group are among the most controversial, because unlike most others, some enable companies to write off the lives of critically endangered species.

Such trade-offs are increasingly likely as nations race to extract metals from wildlife habitats to meet the global demand for electric cars.

To investigate what gets traded away in a World Bank Group offset, I traveled to five Guinean villages where more than a thousand people live. Mining has long been a nuisance in the Boké region, which is rich in bauxite, the mineral ore that makes aluminum. But residents said the impacts have become noticeably worse since the IFC loaned $200 million to Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée for its expansion, exacerbating the damage from decades of mining.

Residents described increasing chimpanzee raids, dwindling resources, wells that had run dry and explosions that cracked the foundations of their homes. Their hopes for better-paying jobs were dashed when the mine provided few opportunities. One village was relocated from a shaded grove to a scorching, windswept hilltop, barren as the surface of Mars. Residents said they had little choice in the matter.

The IFC says that its primary consideration when deciding to fund a project is whether it will help alleviate poverty and bolster economies in countries with urgent financial needs, and that it takes great pains to make sure clients use offsets only after taking appropriate steps to minimize impacts on nature. By forcing companies to follow strict standards, the IFC said in a statement, it is “helping embed conservation in economic development.” A spokesperson said that the IFC’s relatively small number of offsets reflects how well it has reduced the need for them.

But some say any stamp of approval by such a revered institution is harmful.

“The World Bank’s involvement helped burnish the profile of a company whose sustainability credentials were otherwise highly suspect,” said Natalie Bugalski, legal and policy director for Inclusive Development International, which advocates for marginalized communities affected by development projects; she added that such an endorsement helps destructive projects attract further funding.

First image: Children in Hamdallaye play soccer. Second image: Mamadou Lamine Barry is the administrative chief of Fassaly Foutabhé, Guinea. The village was relocated a few hundred feet across a stream because of mining activity by Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée.

Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée is 49% owned by the Guinean government and 51% by a consortium of global mining companies including Rio Tinto and Alcoa, with a registration address in Delaware. A spokesperson said it has been engaged in “constructive” dialogue with the villages in collaboration with the IFC, adding that the mediation has been “an opportunity to continue to improve its practices.”

Before the mining deal, Kagnèka had never worried this much about water, said assistant village chief Ousmane Bah. As legend goes, the village’s founder once sacrificed a cow in a religious ceremony to ensure enough water for generations. Now, its children are dehydrated on sweltering, hourlong walks from school. And many of their fathers no longer live with them, forced to migrate more than 30 miles to raise crops and cattle for the families back home.

The mines have “destroyed all of the land” and left residents with little recourse, Bah said. It’s as if “we don’t own anything,” he added. “We don’t even own ourselves.”

Khadijatou Bah cooks a meal in M’Bouroré, Guinea.

A world away from rural Guinea, delegates gathered in Montreal last December for a United Nations conference on biodiversity, where nearly 200 countries hoped to sign an agreement about measures they would take to protect nature. Participants ate salad using biodegradable cutlery and drank seltzer from cans that could have been smelted from Guinean bauxite.

I’d arrived hoping for a crash course on biodiversity offsets, which seemed even more complicated than carbon offsets. Our most basic needs depend on healthy ecosystems: bees to pollinate crops, forests to filter drinking water. It took thousands, if not millions, of years for these complex systems to evolve. And how would you even begin to make up for dead elephants?

I heard no mention of anything dead in Montreal. Instead, conference sessions referencing the concept didn’t even use the word “offset” — a term that has become controversial in recent years — and instead glossed over the fine points with the kind of vague enviro-jargon that permeates high-level gatherings: talk of “raising the bar” via “guidelines” and “building a risk management and disclosure framework.”

It took some interviewing in the months that followed to piece together the rest.

The idea of compensating for ecosystem harm has existed since at least the 1960s, but biodiversity offsets became mainstream in the 1980s when the United States began regulating wetland destruction via the Clean Water Act. If you wanted to rip up 20 acres of wetlands for a shopping mall, the rules said, you now had to preserve or restore at least 20 acres of wetlands elsewhere. Other nations created similar programs, and the concept took off.

The vast majority of offsets used today are created to comply with regulations set by governments; others are voluntarily adopted by corporations or brokered through banks as a condition of funding. The World Bank Group has worked with companies ranging from Chevron and ExxonMobil to wind and solar farms to set up offsets. Many projects often have funding from other banks at the same time, including the two in Guinea.

Trucks pass through a village near bauxite mines in the Boké region of Guinea.

The best biodiversity offsets follow these requirements, experts say: They must be used as a last resort after considering alternatives to ecosystem destruction. They must protect the same type of species or habitat that is being harmed. They should sustain the promised biodiversity for a long time (forever, or at least decades). They should claim credit only for the benefit they create, not what would have happened anyway, such as gains from preexisting conservation efforts. Finally, they should create “no net loss” in biodiversity. In other words, if a natural gas power plant destroys 30 acres of swamp forest where endangered frogs live, the offset could make up for it by restoring at least 30 acres of the same kind of habitat. (Separate rules exist to protect humans affected by these projects, though they’re not consistently enforced.)

The limited number of studies show decidedly mixed outcomes. In 2019, a survey of 32 papers on whether the offset sites recreated the biodiversity that was lost found that one-third of them, all involving wetlands, had some level of success, while none of the forest-based offsets met that goal. Even one of the most notable successes — a high-profile project in Madagascar on track to offset tree loss — has not proven it will make up for other biodiversity harms, scientists concluded last year. “We know embarrassingly little about the effectiveness of offsets,” even though they’ve become an important policy tool, said Julia Jones, a professor of conservation science at Bangor University in Wales who co-authored the Madagascar study.

“The World Bank’s involvement helped burnish the profile of a company whose sustainability credentials were otherwise highly suspect.”

—Natalie Bugalski, legal and policy director for Inclusive Development International

The IFC said that it requires offsets to achieve no net loss and that many of the papers showing mixed results focus on projects “designed under older policy systems that pre-date current IFC and industry good practice.” For offsets that affect the habitats of endangered species or great apes like chimpanzees, the IFC said it almost always requires a “net gain” in biodiversity and the participation of a special team of experts when great apes are involved. It tightened its rules in 2019 to limit projects that affect great apes’ habitats; it has, however, since funded a hydroelectric dam in Gabon that threatens gorillas and endangered central chimpanzees. The project developer said the impact on those animals would be “negligible,” but the outside experts who reviewed the project (including Campbell) concluded there’s not enough data to tell how many great apes will be affected.

Many critics say offsets remain a “get out of jail free card” for ecosystem damage. Developers can break ground long before anyone can tell whether the corresponding offset will succeed. Companies don’t often invest enough to secure long-term results; the mining companies in Guinea, for example, will fund the national park for 20 years, but chimps can live twice as long. And there are few resources to follow up and ensure the offset project actually works.

One recent failure is all too familiar: An IFC-funded dam in Uganda struggled for years to support its offset, which included protecting a large stretch of forest and several islands along the Victoria Nile River. It deteriorated further in 2019 when a second dam flooded part of the offset, requiring a new offset to offset the offset.

A World Bank panel later concluded that “mitigating the partial loss of one offset by creating another erodes the underlying principles of offsetting.” Yet this is the same remedy the World Bank suggested for the developer that plans to inundate part of the park that was supposed to offset the mines’ destruction of the chimp habitat. A spokesperson for the IFC said the institution has no power to overrule what the Guinean government decides to support and approve.

A sign for the Guinea Alumina Corporation in the Boké region.

The companies that funded the park insist their offset would still count if the dam floods part of it. Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée said there would be enough chimpanzees left there to “largely cover” the loss of chimps near the mines. Guinea Alumina Corporation, the second company that worked with the IFC to establish the park, said the dam could be “an opportunity” for biodiversity, as it “would increase the availability of water in and around the park” and bring in additional conservation funding from the dam operator.

The company said it has taken steps to help chimps near its mine, planting trees and maintaining the aquifers near the forests where the animals prefer to live. As to the finding that the offset undercounted the mines’ toll on those chimps, the company said that the estimate came from a yearslong survey, that all such efforts contain “a degree of uncertainty” and that “the goal is to reduce this uncertainty over time through repetition and peer review.”

But Campbell, the primatologist who took part in the estimate for the offset project, said the task involved as much art as science. “Offsets are a bit crap” when you’re dealing with chimpanzees and other great apes, she said. None of the handful of ongoing great ape offsets around the world have proven their success, she added.

And the math fails to account for the ethical questions of losing entire communities of complex and intelligent animals, said Campbell, who has consulted for both mining companies in the past. As the closest relative to humans, chimpanzees share more than 98% of our DNA. Chimpanzees take care of their young for years, and mothers have been observed carrying their infants for days after their deaths. Each community has its own culture. Some groups fish for algae; others crack nuts using self-made tools. Once the chimps in a community die off, those traits are lost forever.

First image: Local resident Youssouf Mané, left, speaks with the executive director of Guinée Ecologie, Mamadou Diawara, and primatologist Genevieve Campbell in the forest near Missira. Diawara and Campbell were in the region studying mining’s impacts on chimpanzees. Second image: Diawara looks through a textbook on primates of West Africa during a trek through the forest near Missira.

Offsets “should never be an excuse to legitimize” harm to critically endangered species, which are “about as vulnerable as you can get,” said Sophus zu Ermgassen, a University of Oxford researcher who advises the British government on biodiversity offsetting. Doing so clearly violates best practices, but such offsets may still make sense if you can make a really good case that the development alleviates extreme poverty, he said.

“It is better to have something than to have nothing” was a sentiment I heard again and again. Several experts — including scientists who’d criticized offsets — said they are a pragmatic tool given that it’s impossible to avoid all impact on nature from development projects, many of which would happen anyway. They said the rules for best practices are constantly improving and written by people with good intentions.

Manga Kounsa, a lawyer and activist, stands next to the house that had been his home before Fassaly Foutabhé was displaced by a mining company.

For the villages near areas mined by Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée, biodiversity has always meant much more than something to be balanced on spreadsheets. Generations of farmers relied on the land and surrounding forest, hunting, fishing and collecting water from the streams. Families planted cassava and rice and raised cattle. Halimatou Barry recalled how it didn’t take much to keep her children fed during mango season, when they stuffed themselves with fruit. Bah Mamadou Lamarana said residents tracked the appearance of one type of bird that signaled the start of planting season and another whose song indicated it was time to harvest.

When people got sick, they turned to the forest as their main pharmacy, collecting bantora for scabies; garba for pain relief after childbirth; and kinkeliba for an herbal tea that treats insomnia. The farmers in his village cleared trees to plant crops, but they took care not to overexploit the land, said Manga Kounsa. When one of his neighbors began selling charcoal to survive, he said, the community gave him farmland so he could stop logging. Once you remove the forests and animals, the communities become villages in name only, Kounsa said. “It doesn’t have the characteristics of a village anymore.”

All of the villages I visited were within a few miles of one another, accessible via dirt roads and occasionally only on foot.

Three of them — Kagnèka, Bandoji and M’Bouroré — are being plundered by displaced chimpanzees.

(Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Biodiversity surveys confirmed the presence of chimps near these villages before the mining expansion. They’d always lived close to humans, foraging for fruit and insects among a mosaic of woodlands, savannas, farms and the riverine forests where they tend to nest. Crops can act as a backup food option when there’s little wild fruit available, experts said. But as their habitat is chopped up by the mines, or noisy machinery drives them away, farms and orchards become increasingly attractive and essential to their survival. The fear and stress of being kicked out of their own territory can make chimpanzees more aggressive.

The chimps that visit Bandoji are smart, residents said. They might show up in the morning at one end of the village to raid their crops, and if they see people there, the chimps will go to the other end in the evening. Farmers said they’ve had to cut down trees to make more space for crops, in part because they now have to share their harvest with the chimpanzees.

Mamadou Hocha Diallo, a hunter in M’Bouroré, wishes everything would go back to the way it was when the chimps had a large enough forest that they mostly stayed there. Now, they show up in the village every two or three days, just long enough for the next batch of cashews to ripen. “We all have to fight for the available food,” he said.

First image: Mamadou Hocha Diallo during a workday in a cashew orchard. Second image: Diallo walks through cashew trees near his village with his daughter, Mariama. Third image: Cashews are harvested in Kagnèka

This new collision between people and chimps can spark outbreaks of deadly viruses as they jump from wildlife to humans in an event known as spillover. It happened in 2013 in the Guinean village of Meliandou, where scientists believe the world’s worst outbreak of Ebola began after a toddler played near a tree full of bats.

The majority of emerging infectious diseases start with these fateful moments.

“Anytime you’re creating unnatural interactions between species and resources are becoming limited, you’re potentially concentrating viral load in the environment,” said Sarah Olson, an epidemiologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Chimpanzees can be infected with coronaviruses and filoviruses including Ebola. The same diseases circulate in other local wildlife, including bats and smaller monkeys. If chimpanzees are wandering more frequently into villages, then other animals may be doing that too, even if it’s less noticeable, said Laura Bloomfield, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vermont who studies infectious diseases and environmental change.

The biggest spillover risk comes from direct contact, of humans touching the blood, saliva or feces of an infected animal. Because many of the residents consider it taboo to hunt or kill chimpanzees, they are somewhat protected. The spokesperson for Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée said the company monitors chimpanzees with a network of cameras and drones and officials haven’t seen or heard “any case of direct conflict” between chimpanzees and humans.

But they’re still vulnerable to risks from indirect contact, Olson said. If someone eats fruit that was recently contaminated by the saliva of a sick chimpanzee, for instance, that disease could jump into the human population. On a recent morning, in a ransacked orchard, Diallo’s young daughter Mariama played on the ground among dropped cashew fruits.

First image: Fatoumata Bah processes oil from the kernels of oil palms in M’Bouroré. Bah sells the oil to supplement her income and says the dust from mining has affected crop yields in her village. Second image: Cashews dry on the ground in M’Bouroré.

Spillover risk is a numbers game, Bloomfield said. The more interactions there are, the greater the chance that an animal will transmit a particular disease to a human, and the greater the risk that person will get sick and pass it on to their neighbors. The best way to reduce risk “is not having overlapping habitats,” she said.

The World Bank Group recently warned of this very problem, yet the IFC’s standards were last updated in 2012 and don’t account for the wealth of virus research conducted in the wake of the West African Ebola epidemic.

The IFC spokesperson said both mining companies that created the offset have policies that prevent staff from hunting chimpanzees and that the institution “is increasingly encouraging our clients to include pathogen transfer risks in protocols for encounters with great apes on project sites.”

But the IFC standards include no protections against spillover risk.

Ousmane Bah, assistant village chief of Kagnèka.

In every village I visited, residents gathered in a circle, next to houses with slanted thatched roofs, and talked of promises broken.

The World Bank Group was familiar with an important context when it decided to back the mine expansion in Guinea, which has one of the highest poverty rates in the world: Though mines had long powered the economy, local residents — those impacted the most by the industry — stood to benefit the least. The IFC was supposed to guard against any further harm or exploitation. In 2016, an IFC executive announced the expansion would create jobs. And IFC standards required communities to be compensated for lost agricultural land with property “of equal or greater value” or cash payments “at full replacement cost.”

Instead, out of five villages, I heard of only one person who’d gotten a job in the mines. And each community spoke of lands seized or crops lost with zero or inadequate payment, forcing residents to find other ways to support themselves, some selling their livestock to survive.

I spent an afternoon in Fassaly Foutabhé, a village of 75 that was relocated a few hundred feet across a stream to make way for future mining activity. Kounsa, a young, soft-spoken attorney who grew up there, said he returned after graduating from law school to advocate for his community amid the expansion. He said his neighbors were not reimbursed for the medicinal plants they lost or for the reduced yields of their crops.

In the small portion of farmland that remains in the village’s control, the cashews are stunted by endless dust that blows in from the nearby mine. The red powder coats the trees, making it look like the leaves have rusted; it was so thick that Kounsa wore a mask.

Unlike the villages frequented by chimps, there is nothing left to scavenge here. Leaders told me the community will be forced to disperse unless they can obtain funds to move to a place with ample farmland and clean water. “Our village is very dear to us,” they wrote last year in a letter to Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée and the government. “But our lives are worth even more.”

First image: Residents in Fassaly Foutabhé reinforce the walls of a home prior to the community being relocated. Photo courtesy of Manga Kounsa. Second image: Fassaly Foutabhé is one of several villages displaced by Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée.

The stream began to run dry in 2017, Kounsa said. The fish have disappeared. The mines use water to control dust on roads, and the influx of people moving to the nearby city of Sangarédi in search of mining-related jobs places additional strain on water sources. Bob Adam, an Australian mining consultant who’s worked in Guinea, said bauxite deposits act as a kind of sponge that stores water underground, and their removal can drain local streams. Before they broke ground, the environmental disclosures for both mines acknowledged that there would be potential harm to local streams, as well as air pollution and noise.

Vibrations from dynamite used to extract bauxite have cracked the walls of people’s homes. The explosions keep them up at night; I heard one of these blasts during a tour of Kagnèka, a loud, echoing boom like a cannon.

It’s as if we’ve been “colonized,” Diallo said.

Many of these grievances are documented in a letter that 13 villages filed with the IFC in 2019. Similar details emerged from a 2018 report from Human Rights Watch.

Several organizations helped residents write the letter, including Centre du Commerce International pour le Développement, a Guinean group that advocates for community and women’s rights. Bamba Ibrahima Kalil, the group’s director of programs, said the effort has led to limited gains. The company has agreed to stop blasting within 1 kilometer of villages and installed dozens of water taps in communities. “It’s not enough,” Kalil said, adding that his organization is fighting for the restoration of clean water in local rivers and streams.

The spokesperson for the mining company said it has “always ensured that all environmental and social impacts” from its projects “are fully compensated in accordance with applicable standards including those of IFC.”

“Our village is very dear to us. But our lives are worth even more.”

—Letter from Fassaly Foutabhé residents to Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée and the government

Adam, the mining consultant, said the industry is improving. Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée is transitioning to surface miners, machines that produce less dust and noise than the traditional drill-and-blast method, he said; the company said it runs a program to repair and build water wells in 50 villages throughout its mining area.

Kalil said the IFC needs to take responsibility for the company’s overall track record, not just the post-2016 expansion. When the IFC agreed to fund the mine, he said, it essentially endorsed the company’s legacy. That includes a long-running dispute with the village of Hamdallaye, whose 600 residents were relocated in 2020.

IFC standards require companies to offer residents different options for resettlement.

Hamdallaye residents told me that didn’t happen. Their complaint letter describes how they’ve been fighting the company’s intentions to relocate them since 2007, and that even though some residents signed agreements in 2018, they didn’t understand what the documents meant.

The company disputed the accusation that they forced the move. “The resettlement of Hamdallaye village was done following a participatory and inclusive process” that meets IFC standards, a spokesperson said, adding that decisions were made by a committee that included men, women and young residents from the village and that families were compensated for crops and agricultural land.

The company moved the community to a barren hilltop. I visited to find pink brick houses with metal roofs baking in temperatures that hover over 100 degrees. “They brought us here and left us under the sun to dry like clothes,” Halimatou Barry said.

Mamadou Oury Bah takes down laundry. A field scorched by wildfire surrounds the village where the people of Hamdallaye have been relocated by Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée.

Their former homes had thatched roofs that dispersed the heat and were sheltered by fruit trees, residents said. Bah Mamadou Lamarana, an activist and community leader, reminisced about a time when families could step outside to hunt and fish. The only wildlife in the new village, he said, are mosquitoes.

The only vegetation here is brittle tufts of grass and a few trees that offer about as much shade as a potted plant. Mamadou Maoudoh Bah said the company had promised to plant thousands of trees, but it did little to cool the air. He pointed to one of the saplings — a spindly thing about 5 feet tall, small enough to count every leaf.

Even Adam, the mining consultant, was shocked by where Hamdallaye’s residents ended up. “I don’t think it’s a suitable site for a relocation,” he said.

As I talked to Bah in the shade of a house, flames erupted a block away. The fire tore through a field, black smoke rising several stories high. I later heard it had been started by a dropped cigarette. Residents said these wildfires occur nearly twice a month during the dry season.

First image: A tree in Hamdallaye. Second image: A fire breaks out near houses in Hamdallaye.

The company has rehabilitated more than 1,000 hectares, or roughly 2,500 acres, of mining land since 2017, its spokesperson said, establishing a tree nursery with 500,000 seedlings and hiring more than 100 residents each year to plant and monitor the trees.

“We acknowledge that communities care about land use and feel that their new land should have been fully rehabilitated before their move,” the spokesperson said. “Hamdallaye still has access to certain historical prime agricultural land, where their usual crops and fruit trees are.”

Just 2 miles away, the old village sat empty, a few crumbling walls poking through the ground like ancient ruins. The air felt 20 degrees cooler. Bah stood before the remains of his mother’s house, next to the tree he’d planted as a teenager, its branches dripping with green mangoes. When the fruit ripened each spring, he said, his family would boil the pulp and mix it with palm oil to make a sauce for fish stew.

Bah said he rarely returns here. The reminder is too painful.

Mamadou Maoudoh Bah stands in the abandoned village of Hamdallaye, where he had previously lived before his village was relocated.

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

Special thanks to our driver, Alpha Amadou Bah.

Design and development by Anna Donlan. Photo editing by Peter DiCampo.

Correction

June 15, 2023: This story originally misstated the type of chimpanzee threatened by a hydroelectric dam in Gabon. It is the central chimpanzee, not the western chimpanzee.

The media’s focus on waste misses key context, and ignores the stunning success of the lockdown-era welfare state.

The U.S. Department of Labor announced today (June 14) that its Wage and Hour Division will offer online seminars for contracting agencies, contractors, unions, workers and other stakeholders on the requirements for paying prevailing wages on federally funded construction and service contracts. Part of the division’s effort to increase awareness and improve compliance, the seminars […]

The weather — initially grey and wet — was no match for the Blue wave that swept down Market Street one year ago.

From St. Louis Business Journal:  Chesterfield-based agriculture giant Bunge Ltd. (NYSE: BG) has a chance to be part of a small class of companies — those with $100 billion in annual revenue — after announcing plans Tuesday to merge with Netherlands-based agriculture firm Viterra. It marks a major move for the Chesterfield-based firm considering that […]

KAI Enterprises CEO Michael B. Kennedy has been named an Ernst & Young LLP (EY US) Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2023 Heartland Award finalist. Now in its 37th year, Entrepreneur Of The Year is one of the preeminent competitive business awards for transformative entrepreneurs and leaders of high-growth companies who are building a more equitable, […]

Angel Freely of Fairview Heights, IL joined the Real Rock Army today

Source

Brush up on the history of the Mighty Mississippi while cruising the river.   The Riverboats at the Gateway Arch have partnered with the Missouri History Museum to introduce a

The post MO History Riverfront Takeover Cruise appeared first on Explore St. Louis.

The Riverboats at the Gateway Arch award guests one of the best views of St. Louis’ working riverfront, the Gateway Arch and the city skyline.   Narrated by the captain

The post St. Louis Riverfront Cruise appeared first on Explore St. Louis.

McClure Engineering, a St. Louis-based mechanical and electrical consulting engineering firm, was recently honored with three Technology Awards from the St. Louis Chapter of ASHRAE for its role on three separate projects. The 2023 awards mark the first time McClure Engineering has received three awards in a single year. McClure Engineering won awards in three […]