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by Jessica Miller, The Salt Lake Tribune

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

This story discusses sexual assault.

Andrew was feeling crushed by the cultural expectation to get married.

Twenty-two years old, he had just returned from a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was attending a singles’ ward in Provo, Utah — a local congregation of unmarried college students.

But Andrew is gay. And marriage between a man and a woman is a central tenet of the Latter-day Saint faith, which teaches that the highest level of heaven is reserved only for married, heterosexual couples. Same-sex marriage is not an option in the church.

So in the fall of 2015, he did as many Latter-day Saints do when they are having a crisis: He went to his bishop.

The lay leader suggested trying therapy, Andrew remembered. In fact, the bishop said he had just gotten a referral that same day for a local therapist named Scott Owen who worked well with gay men who were members of their faith. Owen co-owned a Provo therapy business called Canyon Counseling and, at that time, was also a regional leader in a Provo-area stake, a cluster of congregations that is similar to a Catholic diocese.

The coincidental timing — that his bishop learned of Owen on the same day Andrew disclosed his internal struggles — felt miraculous.

“It was like, God has a plan,” Andrew said. “This is going to work out. Everything seems dark and depressing. But this therapist is going to fix everything.”

But that’s not what happened. For five months beginning in October 2015, Andrew said, the clinical mental health counselor groped him, encouraged him to undress and kissed him during sessions. Andrew said Owen told him that the touching was a therapeutic way to learn how to accept love and intimacy.

Andrew, now 30, is being identified by a pseudonym to protect his privacy.

Sexual touching in a therapy session is considered unethical by all major mental health professional organizations, and it is defined in Utah rules as “unprofessional conduct” that could lead to a mental health worker losing their license or other discipline. It’s also illegal in Utah.

By March 2016, Andrew had reported Owen to both his bishop and to state licensing officials. A new investigation from The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica shows how Utah licensers allowed Owen to continue practicing and church leaders repeatedly heard concerns but took several years to take official action. For nearly two years after Andrew’s report, Owen provided therapy to clients, some of whom were men referred for “same-sex attraction” counseling. During that time, at least three more patients allege they were sexually abused by Owen, including two who reported him to the state licensing body in 2018. Those reports ultimately led Owen to agree to surrender his license.

Owen’s case is indicative of a flawed and misleading system: Officials within Utah’s Division of Professional Licensing encourage the public to look to the agency’s disciplinary records to vet a professional, yet those records rarely offer a full picture of misconduct. Despite Owen’s pattern of alleged inappropriate behavior, his publicly available disciplinary records reference touching but never disclose that the accusations against him were sexual in nature. This is one of a number of shortcomings identified by The Tribune and ProPublica while reporting on how Utah officials fail to supervise medical professionals and to adequately address patient reports of sexual assault.

Scott Owen (Obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune)

Owen, a large-framed bald man with dark blue eyes who speaks with a drawl, built a reputation over his 20-year career as a therapist with Christian values who could help Latter-day Saint men with same-gender attraction. He gave public lectures so often about pornography and masturbation, Owen told a crowd of LGBTQ+ church members in 2016, that he had earned the nickname “The Porn King.”

Although Owen, now 64, responded to an initial email from a reporter, he did not answer detailed questions sent to him via certified mail.

Officials with DOPL say that, given the evidence they had from Andrew’s complaint, they believe they responded appropriately. But, communications between Andrew and an investigator suggest that the agency’s actions rested largely on Owen’s denial that anything improper had happened and a failed polygraph test officials asked Andrew to take — a tool that experts say is known to be specifically unreliable with victims of sexual abuse, and that some states ban for that reason.

Church spokesperson Sam Penrod said the faith made an annotation on Owen’s personal church record in spring of 2019 — three years after Andrew’s initial report to his bishop. An annotation is a confidential marking intended to alert a bishop to someone whose conduct has threatened the well-being of other people or the church. It can affect what roles members are asked to fill within their congregation.

Penrod said in an email: “The Church takes all matters of sexual misconduct very seriously. This case was no exception.”

Both the church and the licensing division declined to comment on whether they reported the therapist to the police. Provo police officials said they had no record of ever receiving any report of sexual abuse against Owen.

Owen co-founded Canyon Counseling in Provo, Utah, in 1998. (Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune) Touching in Therapy

Owen pushed physical boundaries from the very start, Andrew said. After their first session, Owen ended their meeting with a quick hug. At his second appointment, Andrew said, Owen held him in a longer embrace.

“I’m doing this because I know you’re uncomfortable with love,” Andrew remembered Owen telling him as they hugged. “I want you to get used to it.” Such touching, he recalled Owen saying, would be “a key step in my therapy.”

Andrew did feel uncomfortable. But he remembered Owen seemed genuine and truthful in their therapy sessions — even “Christ-like” in his caring.

Growing up in the Latter-day Saint faith, Andrew was taught to trust men in positions of authority. There was also the expectation to talk with his bishop about deeply personal sexual details during one-on-one interviews. These annual closed-door discussions generally start when members become teenagers and typically explore whether they are following the faith’s rules; they have been criticized by some parents and therapists as being “inappropriate” and “intrusive.”

These interviews, Andrew said, left him with a skewed view of what was appropriate in a mentoring relationship.

“I felt like a lot of the times I didn’t understand what normal boundaries to have around sexuality,” he said, in part because of how he was instructed to relate to religious leaders. “You have to air it all to these particular people in your life — and then you hide it desperately from everyone else.”

In the late 1960s, church leaders took a hard stance against even identifying as gay, including “homosexuality” in a list of behaviors that could result in excommunication. Bishops and church leaders in subsequent years were taught that being gay was a reversible condition, and church leaders would send gay men to conversion therapy or advise they could be fixed by marrying a woman.

By the time Andrew began seeing Owen in 2015, the church had publicly acknowledged that its members do not have a choice in being attracted to the same sex; today, church policy says a gay member can remain in good standing if they remain celibate and never marry someone of their same gender.

“At the time, I knew it might not be possible for me to get married, and that would still be OK in the church framework,” Andrew recalled. But, he added, “so much of the LDS dream is based on marriage that that was crushing and really depressing to me.”

So Andrew kept going to therapy, even as he said Owen began touching him more, at times rubbing his back or his bottom during hugs. Owen encouraged him to undress during some therapy sessions, Andrew said, which evolved into what he describes as “makeout sessions.” Looking back now, it’s clear to Andrew that this was inappropriate — but in the moment, he felt desperate and confused.

Andrew reasoned with himself that he was not physically attracted to Owen when they touched, which would be similar if he married a woman. Maybe it was a way for him to learn how to express romantic feelings he didn’t have or to fake it until those feelings came.

“I couldn’t accept that I was being taken advantage of,” Andrew said. “That’s a hard thing to be like, ‘Oh, I’ve been sexually abused this whole time.’”

“This was supposed to be my miracle,” he added.

Decorations in Andrew’s room (Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune) A Reprimand

Andrew decided to stop therapy in February 2016, as he wrestled with whether what had happened had been abusive. He confided in a friend during late-night study sessions on Brigham Young University’s campus a few days later. In an interview corroborating Andrew’s account, she recalled urging him to tell someone.

Within a week of stopping therapy, Andrew again found himself confiding in his bishop.

Andrew recalled feeling like his church leader, who works as a livestock and pasture insurance agent, seemed confused about how to help a gay member of the church — and whether this type of touching in therapy was supposed to be helpful. He referred Andrew to another therapist who, Andrew said, told him Owen’s alleged conduct was a “gross violation” of patient boundaries.

Andrew went back to his bishop with this information, but the lay leader never reported that information to church authorities. The church’s general handbook for members makes it clear that if a bishop or stake president “learns of abuse of a spouse or another adult,” they are supposed to call a confidential hotline for guidance from lawyers and clinical professionals.

The bishop, whom The Tribune and ProPublica are not identifying to protect Andrew’s identity, said that he struggled to process what Andrew told him, and that he felt it was sufficient that he had encouraged Andrew to report Owen to state licensing officials at DOPL. The division is responsible for licensing Utah professionals, from medical doctors to armed security guards to massage therapists. It is also charged with investigating misconduct and can revoke a license or put someone on administrative probation.

By then, Andrew had stopped seeing Owen. Andrew’s bishop questions now whether he should have said something to a higher church leader, but he said he felt the faith’s guidance for when bishops should report alleged abuse to church authorities pertained more to “something happening that needs to be stopped, like when there’s abuse in the home.” The bishop added that he didn’t feel he knew how he should help members who were struggling with their sexual identity and their faith.

“A bishop is supposed to be a spiritual guide. Not a psychologist, not a family therapist. So I felt equipped to listen and love them, absolutely,” he said. “But as far as to help them process what it means and how to be a part of this religion and be gay — I never figured that out.”

Andrew followed his bishop’s guidance and went to licensers in early March 2016. In a statement Andrew wrote for investigators — which he shared with The Tribune and ProPublica — Andrew described the escalating touching and accused Owen of touching parts of his genital area at their last appointment.

“I left feeling disgusted in what had happened,” Andrew wrote about their last appointment, “and vowed to never return.”

To conduct their investigation, licensing officials offered the therapist a polygraph test. He refused, according to DOPL. They also asked Andrew if he would wear a recording device, he said, and go to Owen’s office to ask him about the touching. Andrew said he didn’t feel like he could go through with that.

That’s when the investigator asked Andrew if he would take a lie detector test.

Andrew said the investigator reasoned to him that if he could pass one, it could bolster what essentially was a case of one person’s word against the other.

The polygraph did not go well, Andrew said — the results suggested he was being deceptive.

“I had so much trauma,” Andrew said. “And so, certainly, when they asked me questions about the particular things that happened in therapy, it’s going to elicit a very strong emotional response.”

Researchers say this is a common response for trauma victims, and many recommend that sexual abuse victims not undergo polygraph exams. Half of states have laws explicitly prohibiting law enforcement from conducting a polygraph test with someone reporting a sexual assault, with some barring any government employee from requiring an alleged sexual assault victim to take one. There is no law in Utah that puts limits on the use of polygraph tests on victims.

Melanie Hall, the spokesperson for DOPL, acknowledged that an investigator did “offer the option” of a polygraph test to both Owen and Andrew. She said that it is “extremely rare” for a polygraph to be used as part of an investigation, but that the agency doesn’t track how often.

Andrew’s failed polygraph sent his own mental health spiraling. He wrote in an email in October 2016 that he no longer wanted to participate in the investigation unless someone else came forward.

A month later, Owen was given a public reprimand from licensers for the one inappropriate action he admitted to: that he gave Andrew hugs. Owen admitted in licensing documents that he “inappropriately touched a client in a non-sexual manner.”

Hall said the “overwhelming majority” of DOPL’s disciplinary actions are negotiated settlements — where a licensed professional admits to lesser conduct than what is alleged by those who say they’ve been harmed.

Owen later told the Clinical Mental Health Counselor Licensing Board, in a hearing in Salt Lake City at which he received an official reprimand, that his client had been struggling with a family issue, and that it was “not uncommon” for him to hug his patients.

But he denied Andrew’s allegations to the board, calling it “quite a story he concocted.”

“I readily agreed and admitted to giving him hugs at the end of the session and that sort of stuff,” Owen said during the meeting, adding that someone at DOPL told him that he should “know better” than to hug someone who was seeking therapy for same-sex attraction.

Owen said that he had changed his practices.

“I don’t do that anymore,” he said. “I have just been a little bit stunned and burned by this. I’ll shake hands, and I don’t even like to shake hands until my office door’s open and completely out in the reception area with my receptionist there.”

Owen left the meeting that day with a reprimand but no other limitations on his license — and no need to tell his other patients.

“I Felt Betrayed”

At precisely the time DOPL was investigating Owen, and then publicly reprimanded him, another man living in Provo and attending the same religious university as Andrew was questioning whether the way the therapist touched him during sessions had crossed the line.

Jonathan Scott had been seeing Owen for three years — and he would continue to see him for nine months more after the reprimand. His allegations bear a striking resemblance to Andrew’s, but he was not aware of the licensing reprimand — and it would be years before he realized that his experience was not unique.

Jonathan Scott began therapy sessions with Scott Owen in 2013 as an effort to heal from childhood sexual abuse. Scott said that the therapist touched him inappropriately but that he did not initially recognize Owen’s alleged actions as abuse. (Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune)

Jonathan Scott, a reserved 32-year-old with curly ash brown hair, first started seeing Owen in 2013 as a lanky BYU student struggling to deal with childhood trauma from being sexually abused by his Boy Scout leader in Illinois. His parents found Owen online and met with him first; Jonathan Scott’s father recalls Owen saying that he could help their son have safe relationships with adult men.

Jonathan Scott said his new therapist reminded him of the man who sexually abused him when he was a kid. They had similar nervous tics, and the way each man had looked at him felt the same. They were both middle aged and had the large frame and roundness of a teddy bear.

“That was kind of the point,” Jonathan Scott remembers. Unlike his abuser, Owen was supposed to be “a safe, good man who is supposed to help me reestablish trust with men.”

But Jonathan Scott said Owen frequently touched him under his clothing while hugging him during sessions.

Like Andrew, he said this touching gradually escalated. Eventually, he said, his sessions felt like nothing more than 40 minutes of cuddling. Also like Andrew, he told himself that to heal he needed to learn to accept touch. And because he was raised in the church, he added, he wasn’t going to question a religious leader.

“You justify things. You let things slide. But did it feel comfortable? No, it didn’t feel comfortable. It didn’t feel safe,” he said. “But I was told I needed to work through that.”

Jonathan Scott ended therapy in 2017 when he moved. He never contacted DOPL, or the police, himself. It was only two years later that his partner — upset with the thought that Owen had never faced consequences — was searching online and found the reprimand. She corroborated details of his account in an interview with The Tribune.

It felt like a betrayal, Jonathan Scott said, to learn that Owen had denied touching Andrew around the same time he says the therapist had been groping him.

“When I found out that there were others, I felt not alone,” he said. “I felt justified in my anger of what I thought had happened to me. I felt even less trust in authority.”

Hall said that DOPL may, in some cases, require a disciplined licensee to inform their patients of unprofessional conduct, though that didn’t happen in Owen’s case. Utah has no law requiring this type of disclosure, and there are only three states that do require medical professionals disciplined for sexual misconduct to disclose that to their patients.

“DOPL and/or the licensing board may decide to implement this requirement,” Hall said, “if there is strong concern about an individual treating others without first informing them and receiving consent from the patient.”

But a search of more than 3,200 filings obtained from DOPL’s website, some from as early as 2010, shows the state has rarely required disclosure of unprofessional conduct to individual patients.

A Surrendered License

Owen continued to practice for nearly two years after the reprimand. It would take two more people coming forward before the licensing process was able to take meaningful action.

One of those was Sam, a 43-year-old man who now lives in Arizona. As a Latter-day Saint who was attracted to other men, Sam struggled to feel accepted, his brother Jason recalled. One fall day in 2017, Sam called Jason sobbing to tell him about a therapist he had been going to: how Owen had made him feel loved; how the therapist told him that he could help him learn to accept intimacy; how the sessions had become sexual.

Sam later detailed his experiences in a written timeline, an account that a friend later also shared in a letter to the church: It started in January 2017 with a hug and by August had escalated to mutual masturbation.

He declined an interview request relayed through his brother. Sam and his brother are identified by pseudonyms for this article, and information about Sam’s experience was gleaned from interviews and records provided by his brother and Troy Flake, a friend Sam confided in at the time.

In February 2018, DOPL received another report alleging Owen engaged in sexual misconduct. Details of the complaint were redacted in response to a public records request. And in April, Sam himself spoke to a DOPL investigator.

“Just got off the phone with the investigator,” Sam wrote in a text message to his brother. “It was pretty rough to explain to him all of what happened, but I’m glad I got through it and started this process.”

He wrote that the investigator had “accumulated accounts from several of Scott’s clients.”

Within weeks of Sam speaking to the investigator, Owen surrendered his license as part of an agreement with Utah’s licensing division. According to the DOPL order, investigators believed that Owen inappropriately touched “a number” of clients in a five-year period beginning in 2013. There was no reference to the sexual nature of those contacts. And when Owen surrendered his license, he was able to give it up while neither agreeing with nor denying licensers’ findings.

Reports to Church Leaders

Utah’s licensing division wasn’t the only entity that had knowledge of Owen’s activities for years before he was censured. There was also the church.

Andrew had gone to his bishop back in 2016, but church officials say their legal department did not learn of any alleged inappropriate conduct involving Owen until two years later, after DOPL had already begun to investigate.

As with Andrew, Sam first relayed his concerns to a trusted church leader. In the timeline Sam created, which he had shared with Flake, he wrote that Owen at times had told him that he “didn’t need to run off and talk to my bishop about” their counseling sessions.

If he wanted help processing what was happening, Sam wrote in that document, Owen suggested he talk with Alan Hansen, a psychologist who was also Owen’s business partner at Canyon Counseling. Hansen’s role as Sam’s stake president at that time meant he was also in charge of overseeing thousands of church members who make up local congregations in their area.

A patient of Owen’s twice raised concerns with Alan Hansen, co-owner of Canyon Counseling, about inappropriate touching during therapy. (Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune)

In August 2017, Sam went to Hansen’s church office on BYU’s campus, where he disclosed that Owen had been “physical” with him during sessions.

He wrote in his timeline that Hansen encouraged him to keep attending therapy and gave him a priesthood blessing — a prayer of healing and encouragement given by adult men in their church. The blessing made Sam feel better, he wrote, and he continued seeing Owen for therapy for two months. But then, he added, he became too uncomfortable with the sexual touching he said happened inside the Canyon Counseling office.

In December, according to the timeline, he told Hansen again about Owen’s touching. This time, though, he was more explicit — telling the church leader that Owen had kissed him and had engaged in heavy petting and other types of sexual touching.

“Alan acknowledged that some of Scott’s actions clearly crossed some boundaries and that was likely due to Scott’s own weaknesses,” Sam wrote. “He also stated that Scott had done something like this before — and that there were others. I don’t remember his exact language, but that was the effect of what he said.”

Hansen did not respond to a list of questions sent to him, and he referred a reporter to the church’s legal department. A church spokesperson did not address questions about Hansen.

Sam continued to tell other church leaders about Owen’s behavior — and Hansen’s dismissal of it. He also went to his previous bishop in Provo. Sam wrote in text messages to his brother that this church leader confronted Hansen about “essentially doing nothing about my situation with my previous therapist.”

“He thinks it’s possible that it’s a releasable offense for the stake president,” Sam wrote to his brother about the chance that church authorities would strip Hansen of his official role in their faith. But that didn’t happen.

Penrod, the church spokesperson, did not respond to a question asking whether Hansen ever received disciplinary action for not reporting his business partner to church authorities.

He added that “local leaders who are themselves professional therapists should not refer members to affiliated therapists or practices in which they have a financial interest.”

But concerns over Owen’s behavior didn’t end when he surrendered his license. Flake, Sam’s friend, was worried that Owen could still be teaching in a church setting and was frustrated that he believed Hansen had known what was going on and took no action. More than a year later, in December 2019, he sent an email to church lawyers urging them to investigate.

A church attorney responded to his email later that same day, according to correspondence shared with The Tribune and ProPublica, telling Flake the firm would provide the information “to Owen’s current leaders and let you know if we need additional information.” The attorney made no mention of Hansen. Flake says he never heard from the church lawyers again.

The Tribune asked church officials in an email whether Hansen had ever been disciplined in connection to his business partner’s actions, but the church did not respond to that question. Hansen’s psychologist license is in good standing with the state, and no disciplinary action has been taken against him.

“There’s Been Zero Justice”

Years after they say they were sexually assaulted, several of Owen’s former patients are connected now through one more person who says the ex-therapist sexually abused him nearly 40 years ago: Owen’s own cousin, a Boise, Idaho, man named James Cooper.

Cooper wrote to his family in June 2020, telling them that Owen molested him in a shared bed during a trip to Colorado in the 1980s. The email describes how Cooper had learned that past winter that Owen had surrendered his license.

He also sent a separate email to Owen, who denied the allegation and replied: “I don’t see this the same, but I am so sorry for your pain and hurt.”

Cooper wrote in the email to his family that up until then “my strategy has been to forget and avoid Scott [Owen] as much as possible, and admittedly that means I was content to keep my head in the sand in this regard.”

But after he read about Owen surrendering his license, Cooper wrote, it forced him to think about those who allege his cousin later hurt them. The 48-year-old man scoured the internet, searching for any potential victims and posting anonymously on Google reviews asking others to reach out to him.

Owen’s cousin, James Cooper, alleged Owen molested him in the 1980s. More recently, Cooper sought out and connected former patients of Owen’s who allege they were abused in therapy. (Sarah A. Miller for ProPublica)

That’s how he connected with Andrew, Jonathan Scott and Sam’s friend Flake; together, the men grappled with what to do next. All of them described long-term effects of Owen’s alleged conduct and also a sense that there had been no meaningful consequences for him.

Both Andrew and Jonathan Scott have left the church, in part because of the alleged abuse. Sam has been devastated after realizing he had been taken advantage of, according to Flake, which has destroyed his ability to trust his own perception. And Jonathan Scott has thought about reporting Owen to the police, but he continues to struggle to trust authority figures.

“There’s been zero justice, as far as I can see,” Jonathan Scott said.

Owen today is listed as the registered agent for Canyon Counseling in public business records. It’s not clear what his role in the business is, but in 2019, Flake called the police to report seeing Owen’s truck in the Canyon Counseling parking lot, though he did not have a license to practice therapy.

An officer contacted Owen, who said he owns the business — but is not a therapist any more.

The Mental Health Profession Violations

Scott Owen is one of at least 197 mental health professionals who have been disciplined by Utah licensers since 2012, according to a data analysis by The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica of available disciplinary documents on the state Division of Professional Licensing’s website as of April 20, 2023. This database is not exhaustive, as older filings may no longer appear on the website.

Of those, 73 — or 37% — had been disciplined for sexual misconduct. Searches of DOPL’s disciplinary records suggest that mental health professionals are more often disciplined for sexual-related misconduct than doctors or nurses. The Tribune and ProPublica also identified 28 other misconduct cases where a therapist had an inappropriate “dual relationship” with a client — such as a client sleeping over at a therapist’s home or cleaning horse stalls together — that did not appear on paper to be explicitly sexual in nature.

Owen is one of five Utah mental health professionals identified by The Tribune and ProPublica who have been disciplined more than once for sexual conduct. Several of them continue to work in the therapy business in some capacity. Two others among the five were put on probation and allowed to continue working as therapists, according to disciplinary filings, while a third opened a life coaching business marketing himself as a “one of the few Ph.D.-level coaches” in southern Utah.

Utah licensers consider any sexual contact with a current patient to be misconduct, and sexual relationships with a former patient are not allowed within two years after they stop seeing a therapist.

When asked if the licensing division knew whether therapists were at higher risk for sexual misconduct, spokesperson Melanie Hall said DOPL is aware that certain license types “have a tendency towards certain types of violations.” She didn’t specifically address mental health professionals, but she gave certified public accountants as an example of professionals who have increased access to bank accounts and are more likely to commit financial fraud than other professionals who do not have that access.

The agency, she said, “takes these factors into account when investigating complaints, and takes appropriate disciplinary action when necessary.”

The news organizations also asked Hall about whether DOPL reports cases to law enforcement. Under Utah law, it is illegal for a health professional to engage in sexual contact with their patient under the guise of providing treatment.

The licensing division, Hall said, is not legally required to forward information to law enforcement — just as the police are also not mandated to share information about a licensed professional they are investigating. The only exception to this, she said, is a requirement that drug thefts be reported to police.

Hall said that licensers do collaborate and report crimes to police agencies “often,” though she did not explain under what circumstances they would do so. She said that licensers may encourage a patient to reach out to the police or decide that the case does not require a criminal investigation. She would not say whether anyone at DOPL ever reported Owen to the police.

Help ProPublica and The Salt Lake Tribune Investigate Sexual Assault in Utah

Editor’s Note: Three sources for this story — Andrew, Sam and Jason — are identified only by pseudonyms because they requested anonymity. Two are alleged victims of sexual assault, and the third is the brother of one of those men. We have granted this request because of the risk to their standing in their communities if they were publicly identified. The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica typically use sources’ full names in stories. But sometimes that isn’t possible, and we consider other approaches. That often takes the form of initials or middle names. In this case, we felt that we couldn’t fully protect our sources by those means. Their full names are known to a reporter and editors, and their accounts have been corroborated by documents and interviews with others.

This story was supported in part by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Jeff Kao and Haru Coryne, ProPublica, and Will Craft, special to The Salt Lake Tribune, contributed data reporting. Mollie Simon, ProPublica, contributed research.

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Central Wisconsin’s Clark County is home to more dairy farms than any other county in the state, which bills itself as America’s Dairyland. Its identity is so tied to the dairy industry that a 16-foot-tall, black-and-white talking Holstein stands outside downtown Neillsville, the county seat.

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The workers, many from remote, impoverished communities in Latin America, are grateful for the jobs. And yet they feel trapped.

They are people like a 33-year-old Nicaraguan who came to Wisconsin two years ago after hearing from friends that it was easy to find work on “los ranchos,” as dairy farms here are known by Spanish-speaking workers. He lives with three other Central American men in a small, white house owned by their boss that sits a few miles down a county road from the farm.

One afternoon in March, as the worker drove a roommate’s Jeep to the grocery store, a Neillsville police officer ran a random check of the license plates. The officer learned that the Jeep’s registered owner didn’t have a driver’s license and pulled him over.

The worker told the officer he didn’t have a license, records show, and the officer issued him a $200.50 citation.

“A day’s worth of work, lost. It hurts,” said the man, who routinely works 14-hour days.

Over the past year, ProPublica has interviewed more than 100 undocumented current and former dairy workers — in farm breakrooms, in the trailers and apartments where they live, in the shops where they wire money home, and at courthouse cashier’s windows where they pay their tickets. They said they are isolated and stuck on the farms where they work and often live. They struggle to get to grocery stores, to their children’s schools and to immigration court hearings. They delay medical care.

So they either rely on others who, for a price, drive them where they need to go, or they break the law and take their chances.

“You can’t call Uber because there isn’t any. You can’t take the bus because there aren’t any,” said John Rosenow, a dairy farmer in western Wisconsin who has become one of the most prominent advocates for immigrant workers in the state. “The closest barber shop is 15 miles away. The closest grocery store is 25 miles away.”

Making matters worse, the punishments for repeat offenses can escalate in severity, exposing workers to stiffer financial penalties, criminal cases and jail time. In counties that have formal agreements with federal immigration authorities, the threat of deportation hangs over every police stop.

What’s happening in Clark County and across Wisconsin is the result of Congress’ failure to figure out what to do about the millions of undocumented immigrants who live here and work in industries that, like dairy, unabashedly depend on them. That leaves state lawmakers to craft legislation to try to address the consequences — or to ignore what’s happening, punishing immigrants in the process.

Wisconsin is home to about 70,000 undocumented immigrants, mostly from Latin America, according to estimates from the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute. These are the people who hang drywall, clean hotel rooms, wash dishes in restaurant kitchens and package the nation’s cheese.

Determining how many of Wisconsin’s dairy workers are undocumented is almost impossible. Workers use fake papers to get jobs, farmers accept those papers without question, and the state and federal governments make little effort to get an accurate count. But a conservative estimate from a recent University of Wisconsin at Madison study puts the number of undocumented Hispanic workers on medium-to-large farms at roughly 6,200. That figure excludes the many immigrant workers on smaller farms, those with fewer than 500 cows.

Advocates for immigrants have worked for years to persuade lawmakers to give undocumented immigrants driving privileges, as 19 states — most of them blue — have done. But those efforts have been unsuccessful in Wisconsin, where legislative districts have been drawn to favor Republicans. Few GOP lawmakers have been willing to support any such efforts; political observers say the lawmakers don’t want to look soft on immigration.

So local communities are left to look for their own solutions.

In one county, officials have been quietly conducting a pilot driver’s education program aimed largely at undocumented immigrants who were caught driving without a license. They are reluctant to speak publicly about it out of fear that any attention will lead to conservative backlash.

Elected district attorneys in several counties have stopped bringing criminal charges against people caught driving without a license; both Democrat and Republican prosecutors say they want to dedicate their limited resources to crimes with victims.

And in four counties in southwestern Wisconsin, community advocates worked with local law enforcement agencies and dairy farmers a few years ago to create identification cards that workers could show officers during traffic stops to prove that they worked in the area and, potentially, keep those encounters from escalating.

“It did not prevent them from getting a ticket, but it prevented them from being handcuffed and hauled off to jail,” said Shirley Barnes, the recently retired co-director of the MultiCultural Outreach Program in Dodgeville. “The fact is, all the police officers in all of these counties know exactly where these people work. They know it is local farmers who are employing these people.”

A dairy farm in south-central Wisconsin (Caleb Santiago Alvarado for ProPublica)

One morning in May, a former dairy worker from Honduras slid into a courtroom bench in the Clark County Circuit Court in downtown Neillsville and waited for his name to be called. His 16-year-old son sat next to him, missing school to serve as his father’s interpreter. ProPublica is identifying the man only by his first name, José. Like other workers in this story, he asked not to be fully identified because he is undocumented and fears being deported.

A month earlier, a state trooper had pulled José over for driving 15 mph over the speed limit on U.S. Highway 10. In addition to issuing a speeding ticket, the trooper had cited him for driving without a valid license.

“We just enforce the law,” Sgt. Brandon Gray, a spokesperson for the Eau Claire post of the Wisconsin State Patrol, said in an interview. “If they don’t have a valid license, then obviously they receive a citation.”

José said he regrets speeding. But he said it’s impossible for him to comply with the license requirement.

“It makes me so damn sad I could cry,” said José, who said he came to the U.S. two years ago to better provide for his son. “I have to drive. Nobody else is going to come to support my son. Nobody else is going to pay my rent.”

José left court with his son after paying $200.50 for driving without a license and another $175.30 for speeding. José drove home, still licenseless.

Of the 35,000 people who live in Clark County, just 6% are Hispanic, according to census estimates.

Yet last year, 187 of the 245 cases that were brought in this court for operating a vehicle without a valid license — or more than 75% — involved Hispanic drivers, according to data compiled for ProPublica by Court Data Technologies, a Madison company.

A similar trend is playing out in circuit and municipal courts across the state, ProPublica found. (Citations for this charge can go to either type of court if it’s a first-time offense; circuit courts also handle repeat offenses, which can become criminal cases.)

Roughly half of the 16,000 circuit court convictions for driving without a valid license involved Hispanic drivers, according to the information provided by Court Data Technologies from cases filed in 2022.

The actual percentage is likely higher, since Latin American immigrants are often marked as “Caucasian” in court records; José, for example, is listed this way.

Hispanic residents make up less than 8% of the population.

“Those numbers are alarming,” said Primitivo Torres Martinez, deputy director for statewide civic engagement for Voces de la Frontera, the state’s largest immigrant rights advocacy group, who learned of the statistics from ProPublica. “The thing is, farmers need [immigrant workers] to drive, so it’s a Catch-22 for a lot of folks.”

Police and the courts don’t track the immigration status of drivers. But across the state, people involved in nearly every step of the traffic enforcement process — police, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, interpreters and other circuit and municipal court officials — agreed that most Hispanic drivers who get ticketed for not having a license are undocumented immigrants.

Records from these cases routinely describe drivers who show Mexican or Nicaraguan identification cards to police, don’t speak English and need an interpreter, or tell officers they can’t get a license because of their immigration status. You can see them in courthouse lobbies, glancing hopefully around for an interpreter when the clerk offers to use Google Translate on her phone, or sitting anxiously on courtroom benches, wondering whether they will end up being deported.

Thousands more tickets for driving without a valid license were processed last year in the state’s roughly 230 municipal courts. These courts operate independently from each other and, as a result, there is no one single place to get case information that would allow a statewide analysis of those courts.

But ProPublica obtained data from about a dozen municipal courts and found that, over and over, Hispanic drivers received a substantial share of these citations.

In Milwaukee, the state’s largest city, they accounted for nearly 40% of the tickets. In Waukesha, a Milwaukee suburb, 49%. In Manitowoc, along Lake Michigan, 58%. In each of these places, Hispanics account for 20% or less of the population.

The numbers appear to be starker in municipal courts farther from metropolitan areas. At the Marshfield Area Municipal Court in central Wisconsin, for example, 69% of these tickets issued by the Marshfield Police Department went to Hispanic drivers, records show. Less than 3% of Marshfield residents are Hispanic.

It’s a similar story in Sparta, a small town surrounded by dairy farms in western Wisconsin. Sparta’s municipal court does not track defendants’ race or ethnicity, but ProPublica found that 91 of the 131 tickets issued last year for driving without a valid license — or about 70% — involved defendants with common Hispanic surnames like Cruz, Cortez and Gonzalez. (The U.S. Census Bureau says that more than 85% of people with those last names are Hispanic.) Fewer than 6% of residents in Sparta are Hispanic.

Immigrant dairy workers from around Sparta, Wisconsin, regularly visit Supermercado Guerrero to buy groceries and painkillers, cash their checks and wire money to relatives in Mexico and Central America. (Caleb Santiago Alvarado for ProPublica)

Mention the subject of tickets in a tiny Mexican grocery store there and the tired dairy workers in line will nod their heads with familiarity and indignation.

“I’ve been pulled over probably 15 times,” said one man, a longtime dairy worker from Mexico. Sometimes, he said, it’s the same police officer who pulls him over. “They recognize me immediately and call me by name, saying, ‘I told you not to drive,’” the worker added. “But I have to drive to get to work.”

Most Hispanic immigrant drivers don’t bother to contest the tickets, they simply pay in cash, said Andrea Ziegler, Sparta’s municipal court clerk. Altogether, Hispanic drivers in Sparta paid more than $8,400 in tickets issued last year for not having a license, records show.

“I don’t think it’s right. If you’re going to ticket them, then you need to provide a path for them to get a license so they can work, so they can continue to contribute to our society,” Ziegler said.

“Our farms would not be able to survive without them.”

When we asked farmers about their employees’ immigration status, they told us they merely accept the paperwork that applicants hand them.

“I don’t think it’s right. If you’re going to ticket them, then you need to provide a path for them to get a license so they can work, so they can continue to contribute to our society.”

—Andrea Ziegler, Sparta, Wisconsin’s municipal court clerk

But over the years, the dairy industry has tacitly acknowledged its reliance on an undocumented workforce. At the federal level, it has tried unsuccessfully to gain access to an immigrant guest worker program. Closer to home, dairy farmers have become powerful allies of Voces de la Frontera in its campaign to allow undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses.

Almost a dozen dairy farmers across Wisconsin told ProPublica they wish their workers could get licenses.

In one sense, their motivation is economic. Many farmers say they would like to ensure their employees can get to and from work without police stopping and ticketing them. Several described the calls they’ve received in the middle of the night from workers who needed a ride after they got locked up. “If they throw them in jail, they’re no good to us,” said one farmer in western Wisconsin.

Farmers said they are also motivated by empathy.

“It’s basically a human need issue,” said Randy Roecker, a third-generation dairy farmer who runs a 275-cow operation in Sauk County, in central Wisconsin. “They need to be able to drive to go get groceries, the bank, the doctor, but yet they feel they can’t because they’re afraid they’re gonna get picked up all the time.”

Randy Roecker watches as his dairy cows are taken to the milking parlor. (Caleb Santiago Alvarado for ProPublica)

Like many other farmers, Roecker and his family decided to build employee housing when they expanded their operation and hired their first immigrant workers in 2006.

That was the year Wisconsin lawmakers banned access to driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants. Some dairy workers who were in the state at the time still keep their expired licenses in their wallets in the hope that the old documents may help them avoid tickets in traffic stops.

The change in the law was a response to the federal REAL ID Act — a post-9/11 law sponsored by then-U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican — which standardized the type of identification that could be used to board planes and enter federal buildings. To comply, Wisconsin and other states began to require proof of U.S. citizenship or other legal status to obtain licenses.

From the beginning it was clear the law would hurt undocumented immigrants living in states that let them drive. For some lawmakers, like Sensenbrenner, this was a good thing; he told reporters at the time that Wisconsin had become a “mecca for illegal aliens” seeking driver’s licenses.

Latino lawmakers and advocates said banning these immigrants from driving would cause more problems than it would solve. Bernard Trujillo, then a law professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told The Capital Times that if Wisconsin denied immigrants driver’s licenses, “they will just drive without it.”

“This is the ‘If I close my eyes, I’ll make them go away’ approach to treating the undocumented, which is ineffective as a policy matter,” he added.

(Caleb Santiago Alvarado for ProPublica)

On a frigid evening in February 2021, John Rosenow stood outside his dairy farm in Cochrane, in western Wisconsin, and watched as a longtime employee got pulled over on his way into work.

A Buffalo County sheriff’s deputy had been parked in front of the farm observing traffic on a stretch of county road where the speed limit is 35 mph. The deputy noted later that he saw a car moving at a “slow rate of speed,” then ran the license plate. The records check showed that the car’s owner didn’t have a license, so the deputy pulled it over.

Despite a language barrier, the worker was able to tell the deputy he didn’t have a driver’s license but showed his Mexican identification card. The deputy told him that he’d be getting a ticket in the mail and warned him not to drive without a license.

Because it was the worker’s second citation in three years, he was charged with a misdemeanor in Buffalo County Circuit Court.

To Rosenow, the traffic stop looked like racial profiling. He wrote a letter to the judge in the case.

“Certainly, the court can understand how important Juan and other Mexicans are to the agricultural and food processing industries in our area,” Rosenow wrote. “Harassment by the Sheriff’s department does not help make our community any safer.”

That argument didn’t sway the judge. The worker, who has since returned to Mexico to be with his family, pleaded guilty and paid $443 for the ticket and mandatory court costs — including a DNA test, a requirement in criminal cases. The total amount was equivalent to about five days’ take-home pay.

In a statement, Buffalo County Sheriff Mike Osmond declined to comment on the traffic stop but said he understood the concerns about potential racial profiling. But he said that his deputies “enforce traffic laws impartially, without discrimination based on race or ethnicity” and that his office is “committed to upholding the constitutional rights of all individuals, regardless of their immigration status.”

Across Wisconsin, dozens of undocumented immigrants who have been stopped and ticketed solely for not having a license told ProPublica they believed they were the victims of racial profiling.

Among them: the 33-year-old Nicaraguan man who was pulled over after a random plate check as he drove to the grocery store in Neillsville this spring. “How did he know I didn’t have a license?” he wondered. “I hadn’t committed any infraction but got pulled over.”

In an interview, Neillsville Police Chief Jim Mankowski said he would support letting undocumented immigrants get licenses as a way to make the roads safer and to help officers more quickly and accurately identify people they encounter.

“How did he know I didn’t have a license? I hadn’t committed any infraction but got pulled over.”

—A Nicaraguan man who was pulled over after a random plate check

But he said random plate checks can help officers discover violations that are tied to the registered owner of a vehicle, from suspended or revoked licenses to outstanding arrest warrants. He said officers should have a reasonable suspicion that the person driving a vehicle is its owner; for example, if a plate check determines the owner is a man who doesn’t have a license, it wouldn’t make sense to pull the vehicle over if a woman is driving.

He added, “If it’s a tool that can help my cops do their job better, that’s something that we have to embrace.”

Records from law enforcement and court cases across the state show that, in many communities, sheriff’s deputies and police officers routinely run the license plates of passing vehicles — regardless of the racial or ethnic background of the driver — and pull people over if they discover a violation. But the issue of not having a license hits Hispanic drivers the most.

One of the underlying factors is the contradiction in state policy that allows undocumented immigrants to register their cars but not drive them.

“They put a bullseye on them,” said Tony Gonzalez, an immigration rights advocate in north-central Wisconsin. “The state collects the money on registration and there is no benefit for that registrant. It’s like taxation without representation.”

A spokesperson for the state transportation department said the agency “implements the laws as written.” The spokesperson could not say how many vehicles are registered to people who do not have driver’s licenses.

Getting pulled over after a random license plate check by police is so common that many undocumented immigrants have turned to a black market for protection: Several people who spoke with ProPublica described paying someone with a license to register a vehicle under their name to help avoid getting pulled over. One man, a home construction contractor in a Milwaukee suburb, said that once he started registering his car under his company’s name instead of his own, he stopped getting pulled over and ticketed for not having a license.

Similarly, a dairy worker in Jefferson County, in southern Wisconsin, said he felt “like an ATM” for police after paying thousands of dollars over the past few years in fines and court costs resulting from not having a license. Then, he said, he heard of someone in another community who, for a price, would register his car under their name.

It has been worth the money, the worker said. He hasn’t been pulled over since.

Help ProPublica Journalists Investigate the Dairy Industry

Alex Mierjeski and Jeff Frankl contributed research.

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