Aggregator

Police are searching for two men who burglarized a church in north St. Louis on July 7, with one suspect wearing a yellow hazmat suit and the other wearing blue jeans and a dark shirt.

From St. Louis Business Journal: One of the region’s largest car dealers has begun work on its latest project, a new $15.5 million service center. The new service center, being built by Clement Auto Group, marks the second half of a two-phase, total $30 million project on St. Charles’ “car row” bordering Interstate 70. The latest […]

The post Impact Strategies Starts $15.5M Auto Service Center in St. Charles appeared first on Construction Forum.

From St. Louis American: For over a decade the children of East St. Louis have endured the blistering heat and humidity of summer with no public pool, splash pad or aquatic recreational facility. However, this summer was to be very different, with the construction of a $8.9 million pool project in Lincoln Park, in the […]

The post PERSPECTIVE: Political Ineptitude Idles East St. Louis Pool Project appeared first on Construction Forum.

ST. CLAIR COUNTY, Ill. - Police are investigating after a person was found dead in a driveway in Washington Park. The person was found dead around 5 a.m. on the 5600 block of Warren Avenue. This is a developing story; FOX 2 will provide additional information once it comes into the newsroom.

The Connections to Success program is helping St. Louisans of various ages to find economic independence. That includes finding out what paperwork is needed to obtain an ID card, learning about relationship love languages or how to set and reach realistic goals.

The possibility of a “whites-only” organization from Arkansas expanding into Missouri has inspired bipartisan outrage from state lawmakers and local officials who decry the group as racist and antisemitic.  The private membership association, called Return to the Land, owns 160 acres in northeast Arkansas, according to its website. Jews and non-whites are explicitly banned from membership.  The […]

Missouri's Katy Trail is a cross-state pedestrian and bicycle pathway that crosses hundreds of roads

The two parties will continue negotiations Thursday, according to a Boeing spokesperson.

Onyx Partners, a commercial real estate and private equity firm, is set to buy 119 JCPenney properties held by Copper Property CTL Pass Through Trust.

ST. LOUIS - Scattered showers and storms continue early Thursday as a cold front continues to move south through the region. Lots of clouds hang around throughout Thursday, as does the chance at a few spot showers. It will be cooler but still muggy, with top temperatures in the upper 70s. Less humid air will [...]

by Nicole Foy and McKenzie Funk

This story contains videos and descriptions of violent arrests.

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

A month into the new Trump administration, on the predawn streets of suburban Maryland, a high-ranking ICE official stood alongside a Mazda sedan that his officers had just stopped.

The official told a local TV reporter at the scene what was about to happen. “He can either give us a license,” he said, “or we’ll smash the fucking window out and drag him out.” Then, as the driver refused to exit the car, officers broke the glass.

It was one of nearly 50 documented instances of immigration agents breaking vehicle windows that ProPublica has identified from social media, local news accounts, lawsuits and interviews since President Donald Trump took office six months ago. Using the same methods, we found just eight in the previous decade. Neither number is comprehensive. The government releases no relevant statistics.

Use-of-force experts and former Immigration and Customs Enforcement insiders say the tactic was rarely used during previous administrations. They say there is no known policy change greenlighting agents’ smashing of windows. Rather, it’s a part of a broader shattering of norms.

There are arrest quotas, and they are increasingly aggressive. “There’s been an emphasis placed on speed and numbers that did not exist before,” says Deborah Fleischaker, who served as ICE chief of staff under President Joe Biden.

Officers who break glass aren’t being disciplined — they’re being promoted. The official from Maryland, Matthew Elliston, now occupies a senior position at headquarters and oversees field operations on the East Coast. On the other side of the country, a Border Patrol chief who also embraced the tactic, Gregory Bovino, was put in charge of sweeps in Los Angeles. (Neither answered ProPublica’s questions.)

ICE says its officers use a “minimum amount of force” when making arrests. You can judge for yourself.

Agents break car windows even when sobbing children or pregnant women are inside.

Spokane, Wash. • March 10, 2025 (Courtesy of Kayla Somarriba)

Watch video ➜

“She is pregnant!” a man yelled as his wife, a U.S. citizen, filmed from inside their Chevy. “Is pregnant! Is pregnant!”

Officers smashed through three windows to arrest Jeison Ruiz Rodriguez and his younger brother César in early March. The video was not the first under Trump — at least nine broken-windows arrests preceded it this year, some documented by Facebook posts or local reporters or Spanish-language TV.

Chelsea, Mass. • May 11, 2025 (Kenneth Santizo)

Watch video ➜

On Mother’s Day in the Boston suburbs, ICE and FBI officers stopped a family on their way to church, threatening Daniel Flores-Martinez with what the family and a bystander believe was a gun. His three children and U.S. citizen wife sobbed in the car. Agents broke the window, forced Martinez to his knees, then slammed him roughly to the ground.

One of the children is a toddler. Another is a 12-year old with severe disabilities.

The incident was captured by then-high school student Kenneth Santizo, who was nearby waiting for his bus. “All I could hear was kids crying,” Santizo said.

People reported bloodied faces, bleeding arms and other injuries after agents smashed through the glass.

La Puente, Calif. • June 26, 2025 (Zeus S.)

Watch video ➜

Last month, a bystander filmed several masked agents using a baton to break a rear window of a white pickup truck, taking the driver to the ground and pressing his head forcefully into the asphalt. The man, last seen in the video bleeding from the head, has not been identified.

Watertown, Mass. • May 5, 2025 (Obtained by ProPublica via WBUR)

Watch video ➜

On a residential street in May, agents smashed through two windows of a Ford Focus to arrest the two men inside. A neighbor filmed from inside their home as one man, later identified by WBUR as Guatemalan immigrant Kiender Lopez-Lopez, struggled with masked agents. (He had previously been charged with domestic violence but was not convicted.) Several of them tackled him on the sidewalk while he screamed for help. The government released no information about the arrest, despite repeated requests from WBUR and ProPublica.

At least 10 people have said they were injured this year during broken-windows arrests. César Ruiz Rodriguez had an open wound at the back of his head when he arrived at detention from Spokane, Washington, his lawyer said, and X-rays showed glass in the knees of his brother Jeison. ICE claimed that the Nicaraguan-born brothers were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Both men have denied any gang affiliation. We found that the brothers had been accused of threatening a family member, but prosecutors dropped the charges.

In Kentucky, agents stopped Martin Rivera and his girlfriend, Jennifer Gribben, a U.S. citizen, while the agents searched for a fugitive. “You said you’re looking for Garcia,” Rivera said in a scene the couple broadcast on Facebook Live and have since deleted. One of the agents replied, “And I found you instead.”

Then they smashed through the car’s window. Gribben later wrote on Facebook that she was beaten “brutally in my head” and that officers broke Rivera’s arm. She pleaded not guilty to charges of resisting arrest and third-degree assault stemming from the incident.

Near Detroit, masked ICE officers dragged 49-year-old Veronica Ramirez Verduzco, an aide at an assisted-living center, out of her car through a window they broke. Ramirez Verduzco still had bloody, jagged scratches up and down her forearms five days later, her lawyer said.

ICE told ProPublica that agents are allowed to use force when civilians don’t follow their commands. But Ramirez Verduzco and others said they were given little time to respond before officers broke their windows.

“They didn’t give me a chance to understand what was going on,” she said in an interview shortly before she was ordered deported to Mexico.

Officials claim they target the “worst of the worst.” But they’re breaking windows to arrest people who don’t have criminal records. In one case, ICE said a 51-year-old mom was connected to the MS-13 gang.

Westminster, Md. • March 31, 2025 (Karen Cruz Berrios)

Watch video ➜

This spring, ICE arrested Elsy Noemi Berrios after breaking her car window, scattering glass over her patterned dress. Her teenage daughter screamed and cried as she filmed with her cellphone. An officer helped Berrios shake off the glass and step out of the car. “Gracias,” she said. Then he put her in handcuffs.

After the video went viral and outrage spread, the agency put out a statement asserting that Berrios, a Salvadoran national, was a “known affiliate of the violent transnational street gang, MS-13.” Our review of judicial records — both federal and local — found no criminal history for Berrios and no other evidence to support this claim.

This July, in another widely circulated case, officers stopped an Iranian chiropractor and green-card applicant near Portland, Oregon. He was on his way to his toddler’s preschool. “There is a baby in the car,” the man said. They allowed him to continue to the school, then broke a window once the toddler was out. We found no criminal history for him.

Your car is a constitutional gray zone. It doesn’t have the same Fourth Amendment protections as homes. You can refuse to open the door of your home if officers don’t have a judicial warrant; you can’t refuse to step out of your car.

The Constitution still limits when officers can use force and how much they can use. But there are no firm rules. Should they shatter windows just minutes or seconds after making a vehicle stop? Should they drag someone through broken glass when they could wait to make the arrest another day?

“Use of force has to be objectively reasonable,” says Bruce-Alan Barnard, a retired Fourth Amendment instructor at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia, where ICE officers train. The problem with “objectively reasonable,” Barnard says, is that “it’s an oxymoron. What’s reasonable to you might not be reasonable to me.”

Immigration officers are given little guidance on whether or how they should breach car windows, former federal law enforcement officials told ProPublica. The tactic was never prohibited. It was just rare.

It isn’t mentioned in the government’s use-of-force guidelines for immigration agents. And past instructors and students at the Georgia training center say it was never part of the curriculum.

Often, civilians whose windows are smashed aren’t agents’ intended targets. Some are American citizens.

New Bedford, Mass. • April 14, 2025 (Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra)

Watch video ➜

In Massachusetts this spring, a tall ICE officer in a trucker’s cap swung a sledgehammer to arrest Juan Francisco Méndez, the Guatemalan asylum-seeker inside. Officers had stopped the car looking for an “Antonio,” his wife told the New Bedford Light. Méndez has no known criminal record.

He and his wife told officers they were waiting to exit the car until their lawyer could arrive. Before the sledgehammer swung, one of the officers threatened them in broken Spanish: “We can do it two ways. Hard or easy?”

An ICE spokesperson told ProPublica that the agency “concurs with the actions deemed appropriate by the officers on the scene.”

Rochester, N.Y. • June 17, 2025 (Kayden Goode)

Watch video ➜

In June, a 15-year-old girl and her mother watched as ICE agents stopped a work truck and roughly arrested several men.

“For the last time, are you opening this, or no?” an officer warned before he broke the glass. “I’m fucking blasting it right now.”

While the teenager yelled and asked the officers if they had a warrant, the driver turned toward her camera and said he was a U.S. citizen.

Early this year, border czar Tom Homan made one of his now-familiar threats to a sanctuary jurisdiction, promising to bring “hell” to the Boston area. To do that, his immigration officers needed help.

An ICE press release soon touted its collaboration with a half-dozen other federal agencies, including the Coast Guard and State Department, on a monthlong crackdown in the region, dubbed Operation Patriot. (The Coast Guard confirmed that it helped transport people arrested on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The State Department also confirmed its role. Neither commented further.)

In May, bystanders filmed in nearby Waltham, Massachusetts, as masked agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and Homeland Security Investigations, along with agents from unidentified agencies, questioned two men parked in a work van. “Show me you’re here legally and I’ll leave you alone,” said one officer, identified on his vest only as “federal agent.”

In the months since, federal officers from other agencies have continued to participate in immigration operations around the country.

We don’t know who these masked officers are or, often, even which agency they’re from, or who can be held accountable.

Elgin, Ill. • Jan. 28, 2025 (Univision Chicago) Westminster, Md. • March 31, 2025 (Karen Cruz Berrios) Watertown, Mass. • May 5, 2025 (Obtained by ProPublica via WBUR) Waltham, Mass. • May 13, 2025 (Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra) Marlborough, Mass. • May 20, 2025 (@lr0293) Los Angeles, Calif. • June 19, 2025 (Job Garcia) La Puente, Calif. • June 25, 2025 (Zeus S.) Baltimore, Md. • July 10, 2025 (@vannvegapr)

What happens if officers cross the line? Usually very little.

Paths to suing federal officers are even more limited than for police officers, making it particularly hard for immigrants to hold officers accountable for any misconduct.

“The deck is stacked against them,” says Fleischaker, the former top ICE official.

Even if a judge decides to award damages, that usually won’t change what happens — or already happened — in the separate system of immigration court. Evidence of a violent arrest rarely stops a deportation, and if people have already been deported, it won’t bring them back.

In the instance of the family detained on Mother’s Day, they filed a complaint over “unlawful and excessive” actions — but the father has already been deported to Mexico. (The government has not responded to the complaint or to ProPublica’s questions about it.) A precursor to a full civil lawsuit, the complaint says their 3-year-old now tells people, “Police broke the window and threw daddy on the floor.”

Settlements in similar cases have been small. A California woman detained by Border Patrol in 2016 after agents broke her car window while her children screamed settled two years later for $25,000.

When we asked the White House detailed questions about the tactic and specific incidents, it stood by officers’ conduct. “ProPublica is a left-wing rag that is shamelessly doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens,” deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “ICE Officers are heroically getting these violent illegal aliens off of American streets with the utmost professionalism.”

Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin also defended the tactic in response to questions about Border Patrol. Officers “may break vehicle windows” if occupants don’t follow their commands, she said. In June, an ICE spokesperson told ProPublica, “Our officers follow their training to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve situations in a manner that ensures the success of the operation and prioritizes safety.”

Other agencies whose officers were involved in incidents we documented — FBI; DEA; and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — did not respond or declined to comment on specific cases.

Officers are arresting bystanders, too. But they’re still filming.

Los Angeles, Calif. • June 19, 2025 (Job Garcia)

Watch video ➜

Bystanders who film these videos do so at no small risk to themselves.

Job Garcia, a 37-year-old Ph.D. student and U.S. citizen, was filming an immigration raid in June near a Home Depot in Los Angeles when Border Patrol agents broke the window of a truck to detain the man inside. Then, agents turned on Garcia.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed a complaint against the federal government on Garcia’s behalf in July, alleging agents detained him in retaliation for recording and because he was Latino.

In response to our questions, DHS’ McLaughlin claimed Garcia “assaulted and verbally harassed” Border Patrol. (No assault is shown in the video.) McLaughlin added, “He was subdued and arrested for assault on a federal agent.”

Kayden Goode, the 15-year-old girl who filmed the arrest of the U.S. citizen in Rochester, New York, said she felt compelled to record despite the risk.

"I don’t think it was right,” Goode said. “Just because something is legal doesn’t mean that it’s right.”

Sometimes just the threat of window smashing is enough. One Afghan asylum-seeker who stepped out of a car after ICE threatened his window said in an affidavit, “It reminded me of the Taliban.”

But this all may be only the beginning. Shortly before Trump’s flagship domestic policy bill passed in early July, border czar Tom Homan told a conservative Christian conference that immigration agencies were just getting started. The law will triple the size of ICE and add thousands more immigration agents.

“You think we’re arresting people now?” Homan said. “You wait.”

How We Did This

Earlier this year, reporter Nicole Foy heard about Border Patrol officers near Bakersfield, California, smashing a car window. Reporter McKenzie Funk also noticed immigration agents using the tactic in Washington state. The federal government does not publicly track how often agents break car windows, nor did government officials agree to requests to speak about it.

In the months that followed, Foy and Funk documented dozens of cases by searching social media, local news and legal filings. They spoke to current and former law enforcement officials, experts in constitutional law and advocates across the country and contacted the agencies of officers involved in the incidents.

Along with research reporter Mariam Elba, they also looked into the backgrounds of the identified individuals whose immigration arrests are shown in this story. They searched for records in the criminal courts of the counties in which the arrest took place, as well as in the counties public records show the person previously lived in. We found one criminal conviction among those people: Veronica Ramirez Verduzco was convicted of reentering the country illegally.

The findings on criminal records are not comprehensive because there is no universal database of charges or convictions, and there was not enough identifying information for some people. When the government made claims about an individual, Foy and Funk asked them for supporting evidence. They did not provide any.

How to Help Us

Do you have information or videos to share about the administration’s immigration crackdown? Contact Nicole Foy via email at nicole.foy@propublica.org or on Signal at nicolefoy.27 and McKenzie Funk via email at mckenzie.funk@propublica.org or on Signal at 212-379-5757.

Design and development by Anna Donlan, visual editing by Shoshana Gordon, research by Mariam Elba and reporting by Rob Davis. Additional production by Lucas Waldron.

It was 40 years ago that John Mellencamp, then known as John Cougar Mellencamp, released his critically acclaimed eighth studio album, Scarecrow, which was filled with songs about the fading American…

Source

American history offers three general strategies of repair and renewal.

It’s the return of rotten boroughs, railroad barons, and constant graft.

As new immigration fees take effect, aspiring Americans who meet all the legal requirements could be priced out.

by Corey G. Johnson

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

If you have information about cases or investigations paused or dropped by either the Department of Justice or the Securities and Exchange Commission, contact Corey G. Johnson at corey.johnson@propublica.org or 917-512-0287.

The Trump administration has halted litigation aimed at stopping civil rights abuses of prisoners in Louisiana and mentally ill people living in South Carolina group homes.

The Biden administration filed lawsuits against the two states in December after Department of Justice investigations concluded that they had failed to fix violations despite years of warnings.

Louisiana’s prison system has kept thousands of incarcerated people behind bars for weeks, months or sometimes more than a year after they were supposed to be released, records show. And the DOJ accused South Carolina of institutionalizing thousands of people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses — sometimes for decades — rather than provide services that would allow them to live in less restricted settings, as is their right under federal law.

Federal judges temporarily suspended the lawsuits in February at the request of the states and with the support of the DOJ.

Civil rights lawyers who have monitored the cases said the move is another sign of the Trump administration’s retreat from the department’s mission of protecting the rights of vulnerable groups. Since January, President Donald Trump’s DOJ has dropped racial discrimination lawsuits, abandoned investigations of police misconduct and canceled oversight of troubled law enforcement agencies.

“This administration has been very aggressive in rolling back any kind of civil rights reforms or advancements,” said Anya Bidwell, senior attorney at the public-interest law firm Institute for Justice. “It’s unquestionably disappointing.”

The cases against Louisiana and South Carolina were brought by a unit of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division tasked with enforcing laws that guarantee religious freedom, access to reproductive health services, constitutional policing, and the rights of people in state and local institutions, including jails, prisons and health care facilities for people with disabilities.

The unit, the Special Litigation Section, has seen a dramatic reduction in lawyers since Trump took office in January. Court records show at least seven attorneys working on the lawsuits against Louisiana and South Carolina are no longer with the DOJ.

The section had more than 90 employees at the start of the year, including about 60 front-line attorneys. By June, it had about 25, including around 15 front-line lawyers, according to a source familiar with its operation. Sources said some were reassigned to other areas of the department while others quit in protest against the direction of the office under Trump, found new jobs or took early retirement.

Similar departures have been seen throughout the DOJ.

The exodus will hamper its ability to carry out essential functions, such as battling sexual harassment in housing, discrimination against disabled people, and the improper use of restraints and seclusions against students in schools, said Omar Noureldin, a former senior attorney in the Civil Rights Division and President Joe Biden appointee who left in January.

“Regardless of your political leanings, I think most people would agree these are the kind of bad situations that should be addressed by the nation’s top civil rights enforcer,” Noureldin said.

A department spokesperson declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica about the Louisiana and South Carolina cases. Sources familiar with the lawsuits said Trump appointees have told DOJ lawyers handling the cases that they want to resolve matters out of court.

The federal government has used settlement talks in the past to hammer out consent decrees, agreements that set a list of requirements to fix civil rights violations and are overseen by an outside monitor and federal judge to ensure compliance. But Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump’s appointee to run the DOJ’s civil rights division, has made no secret of her distaste for such measures.

In May, Dhillon announced she was moving to dismiss efforts to impose consent decrees on the Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis police departments. She complained that consent decrees turn local control of policing over to “unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.”

Dhillon attends an April meeting of the Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias Task Force at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. (Ken Cedeno/Reuters/Redux)

A DOJ investigation in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer accused the department of excessive force, unjustified shootings, and discrimination against Black and Native American people. The agency issued similar findings against the Louisville Metro Police Department after the high-profile killing of Breonna Taylor, who was shot in 2020 when officers forced their way into her home to execute a search warrant.

Noureldin, now a senior vice president at the government watchdog group Common Cause, said consent decrees provide an important level of oversight by an independent judge. By contrast, out-of-court settlements can be subject to the political whims of a new administration, which can decide to drop a case or end an agreement despite evidence of continuing constitutional violations.

“When you have a consent decree or a court-enforced settlement, the Justice Department can’t unilaterally just withdraw from the agreement,” Noureldin said. “A federal judge would have to agree that the public interest is served by terminating that settlement.”

“I Lost Everything”

In the case of Louisiana, the Justice Department issued a scathing report in January 2023 about the state confining prisoners beyond their sentences. The problems dated back more than a decade and remained widespread, the report said. Between January and April 2022 alone, more than a quarter of everyone released from prison custody was held past their release dates. Of those, 24% spent an additional 90 days or more behind bars, the DOJ found.

Among those held longer than they should have been was Robert Parker, a disc jockey known as “DJ Rob” in New Orleans, where he played R&B and hip-hop music at weddings and private parties. Parker, 55, was arrested in late 2016 after violating a restraining order brought by a former girlfriend.

He was supposed to be released in October 2017, but a prison staffer mistakenly classified him as a sex offender. That meant he was required to provide prison authorities with two addresses where he could stay that complied with sex offender registry rules.

Prison documents show Parker repeatedly told authorities that he wasn’t a sex offender and pleaded to speak to the warden to clear up the mistake. But nobody acted until a deputy public defender contacted state officials months later to complain. By the time he walked out, Parker had spent 337 extra days behind bars. During that period, he said, his car was repossessed, his mother died and his reputation was ruined.

“I lost everything,” he told ProPublica in an interview from a nursing home, where he was recovering from a stroke. “I’m ready to get away from Louisiana.”

Louisiana’s detention system is complex. Unlike other jurisdictions, where the convicted are housed in state facilities, inmates in Louisiana can be held in local jails overseen by sheriffs. A major contributor to the so-called over-detentions was poor communication among Louisiana’s court clerks, sheriff’s offices and the state department of corrections, according to interviews with attorneys, depositions of state officials, and reports from state and federal reviews of the prison system.

Until recently, the agencies shared prisoner sentencing information by shuttling stacks of paperwork by van or truck from the court to the sheriff’s office for the parish holding the prisoner, then to corrections officials. The document transfers, which often crisscrossed the state, typically happened only once a week. When the records finally arrived, it could take staff a month or longer to enter the data into computers, creating more delays. In addition, staff made data errors when calculating release dates.

Two years ago, The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Parker could pursue a lawsuit against the former head of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, James LeBlanc. That lawsuit is ongoing, said Parker’s attorney, Jonathan Rhodes. LeBlanc, who resigned last year, could not be reached for comment, and his attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.

In a statement, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill acknowledged that the state’s process to determine release dates was unreliable but said the issue had been overblown by the Justice Department’s investigation, which she called “factually incorrect.”

“There were simply parts of it that are outside state control, such as clerks & courts,” Murrill stated.

Murrill said correction officials have been working with local officials to ensure prisoner releases are computed in a “timely and correct fashion.” Louisiana officials point to a new website that allows electronic sharing of information among the various agencies.

“The system has been overhauled. That has dramatically diminished, if not completely eliminated this problem,” Murrill stated. She did not address questions from ProPublica asking if prisoners were being held longer than their release dates this year.

Local attorneys who are handling lawsuits against the state expressed skepticism about Murrill’s claims.

William Most, an attorney who filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of incarcerated people who had been detained past their release dates, noted that as late as May 2024, 141 people who were released that month had been kept longer than they should have been, 120 of them for more than 30 days.

“I have seen no evidence suggesting the problem in Louisiana is fixed,” Most said. “And it seems unwise to dismiss any cases while that’s the situation.”

After Breonna Taylor’s high-profile killing in 2020, the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden found that the Louisville Metro Police Department used excessive force and discriminated against Black residents. (Xavier Burrel/The New York Times/Redux) Trapped in Group Homes

South Carolina’s mentally ill population is grappling with similar challenges.

After years of lawsuits and complaints, a DOJ investigation determined that officials illegally denied community-based services — required by the Americans with Disabilities Act and a 1999 Supreme Court decision — to over 1,000 people diagnosed as seriously mentally ill. Instead, the state placed them in group homes that failed to provide adequate care and were overly restrictive, the department alleged.

The DOJ report didn’t address why the state relied so heavily on group homes. It noted that South Carolina’s own goals and plans called for increasing community-based services to help more people live independently. But the investigation concluded that the availability of community-based services varied widely across the state, leaving people in some areas with no access. And the DOJ said the state’s rules for deciding when someone could leave were too stringent.

South Carolina funds and oversees more than 400 facilities that serve people with serious mental illness, according to a state affidavit.

Kimberly Tissot, president of the disability rights group Able South Carolina, said it was common for disabled adults who were living successfully on their own to be involuntarily committed to an adult group home simply because they visited a hospital to pick up medicine.

Tissot, who has inspected hundreds of the adult facilities, said they often are roach-infested, soaked in urine, lacking in adequate medicine and staffed by untrained employees. Her description mirrors the findings of several state and independent investigations. In some group homes, patients weren’t allowed to leave or freely move around. Subsequently, their mental health would deteriorate, Tissot said.

“We have had people die in these facilities because of the conditions,” said Tissot, who worked closely with the DOJ investigators. Scores of sexual abuse incidents, assaults and deaths in such group homes have been reported to the state, according to a 2022 federal report that faulted South Carolina’s oversight.

South Carolina has been on notice about the difficulties since 2016 but didn’t make sufficient progress, the DOJ alleged in its lawsuit filed in December.

After two years of failed attempts, state lawmakers passed a law in April that consolidated services for disabled people into a new agency responsible for expanding access to home and community-based treatments and for ensuring compliance with federal laws.

South Carolina’s attorney general, Alan Wilson, has argued in the DOJ’s lawsuit that the state has been providing necessary services and has not been violating people’s constitutional rights. In January, his office asked the court for a delay in the case to give the Trump administration enough time to determine how to proceed.

His office and a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities declined to comment, citing the ongoing DOJ lawsuit.

Tissot credits the federal attention with creating a sense of urgency among state lawmakers to make improvements. While she said she is pleased with the latest progress, she warned that if the DOJ dropped the case, it would undermine the enforcement of disabled people’s civil rights and allow state abuses to continue.

“It would signal that systemic discrimination will go unchecked and embolden institutional providers to resist change,” Tissot said. “Most importantly, it abandons the people directly impacted.”

Farms, ranches, and food organizations brace for cuts, but the federal agency won’t say who’s next.

In the new horror-tinged Western, a fictional Pueblo tribe and a fractured town reveal how pandemic politics and AI infrastructure deepen old patterns of violence.