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“Everyone Will Die in Prison”: How Louisiana’s Plan to Lock People Up Longer Imperils Its Sickest Inmates

1 day ago

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

Janice Parker walked into the medical ward at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola several years back, looking for her son, Kentrell Parker.

He should have been easy to find. The 45-year-old New Orleans native had been bedridden since an injury in a prison football game left him paralyzed from the neck down more than a decade earlier. His bed was usually positioned near a window by the nurses’ station.

When she didn’t see him there, Janice Parker feared the worst. Her son is completely dependent on staff to keep him alive: to feed him, clean him after bowel movements, change his catheter and prevent him from choking. Because he struggles to clear his throat, even a little mucus can be life-threatening.

A nurse pointed toward a door that was ajar. Janice Parker’s son was alive, but she was disturbed by what she saw: He was alone in a dark, grimy room slightly larger than a bathroom, with no medical staff or orderlies nearby. He was there, he told his mother in a raspy voice, because a nurse had written him up for complaining about his care. This was his punishment — the medical ward’s version of solitary confinement. He told her he had been in the room for days, Janice Parker said during a recent interview. “There was no one at his bedside. And he can’t holler for help if needed,” she said.

For years, Janice Parker said, she has complained to nurses and prison officials — in person, over the phone and through an attorney — about the neglect that she has witnessed on her frequent visits and that her son has described. He has told her that he’s gone days without food. He has developed urinary tract infections because his catheter hasn’t been changed. At one point, Janice Parker said, he developed bedsores on his back because nurses hadn’t shifted his body every few hours.

Her complaints have gone nowhere, she said. “I don’t know what to do anymore,” she said.

Parker has spoken to nurses and prison officials about the neglect that she has witnessed and that her son has described, but her complaints have gone nowhere. (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)

Kentrell Parker is among the most frail inmates in Louisiana’s prison system, requiring constant care from a medical system that has largely failed to meet the needs of people like him. The deficiencies of Angola’s medical system are well documented: Department of Justice reports in the 1990s, a court-monitored lawsuit settlement in 1998 and a federal judge’s opinions in another lawsuit filed in 2015.

Case Study: “Patient 22” Choked on Sausage After Brain Injury

– U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick

In a November 2023 opinion, U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick wrote that Angola’s medical care had not significantly improved since she ruled in 2021 that it amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

Among the cases she cited to illustrate her conclusion was “Patient 22.” What happened to this inmate, she wrote, was “the most egregious example” of the prison’s substandard care and its practice of relying on inmate orderlies rather than trained professionals to provide medical care.

The 60-year-old patient, who had previously suffered a traumatic brain injury, was transferred to Angola’s emergency medical unit and then to an outside hospital after he was kicked in the face by another inmate, according to a medical expert for the plaintiffs.

The inmate returned to the prison, where he was sent to the medical ward for two and a half months, suffering repeated falls while there. Medical staff placed him in a “locked room with nothing but a mattress on the floor,” the judge wrote. A doctor who testified on behalf of the prison said putting a mattress on the floor was appropriate because of the inmate’s risk of falling.

Although a speech therapist had recommended a diet of soft food because the inmate had trouble swallowing, the prison failed to provide one, the judge wrote. In January 2021, the patient choked on a piece of sausage and died. An inmate orderly administered CPR until emergency medical services arrived.

In court filings and testimony, the state pointed to an apparent conflict in medical records regarding the patient’s recommended diet. A doctor who testified on behalf of the prison said the death was accidental, and he didn’t believe that it showed a violation of the standard of care.

In 1994, the Justice Department reported that Angola inmates were punished for seeking medical care, with seriously ill patients placed in “isolation rooms.” Prison staff failed to “recognize, diagnose, treat, or monitor” inmates’ medical needs, including “serious chronic illnesses and dangerous infections and contagious diseases.” Two decades later, a federal judge wrote that Angola’s medical care has caused “unspeakable” harm and amounts to “abhorrent cruel and unusual punishment.”

For years, Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s new governor, defended the quality of Angola’s medical care. When he was attorney general, a post he held from 2016 until January, he argued that inmates are entitled only to “adequate” medical care, which is what they got. During the pandemic, Landry opposed releasing elderly and medically vulnerable prisoners, warning that it could result in a “crime wave” more dangerous than the “potential public-health issue” in the state’s prisons.

And now that Landry has moved to the governor’s mansion, the number of inmates who rely on the medical care in Louisiana’s prisons is likely to grow. Soon after Landry was sworn in, he called for a special legislative session on crime. Over nine days in February, lawmakers worked at a dizzying pace to overhaul the state’s criminal justice system. They passed a law that requires prisoners to serve at least 85% of their sentences before they can reduce their incarceration through good behavior. Another law ends parole for everyone but those who were sentenced to life for crimes they committed as juveniles.

The “truth in sentencing” law will nearly double the number of people behind bars in Louisiana in six years, from about 28,000 to about 55,800, according to an estimate by James Austin of the JFA Institute. The Denver-based criminal justice nonprofit studies public policy regarding prison and jail populations, including the jail in New Orleans.

Austin projects that the law will add an average of five years to each new prisoner’s incarceration, resulting in a growing number of older inmates who will further burden prisons’ medical systems. The share of inmates 50 and older already has risen substantially in the past decade, from about 18% in 2012 to about 25% in 2023, according to figures from the Department of Public Safety and Corrections.

Although these laws aren’t retroactive and won’t affect Parker’s chance of release, they could be devastating for future inmates in his condition. Louisiana has three programs that allow for its sickest inmates to be released; two of them will be eliminated and inmates will be eligible for the third only after serving the vast majority of their sentences, according to state Rep. Debbie Villio, R-Kenner, who spearheaded the legislation.

Absent additional resources, Austin said, a medical system that for decades has struggled to care for its most vulnerable will “only worsen.” He called what is happening in Louisiana “one of the most dramatic plans to increase prison population I’ve ever seen.”

Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s new governor and formerly the state attorney general, has defended the quality of Angola’s medical care. (Matthew Hinton/AP)

Villio said in an email that she disagreed with Austin’s projections. (The Landry administration didn’t respond to questions from Verite News and ProPublica.) The nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Office, however, estimated that the state’s expenses are likely to rise because inmates will be held longer.

All told, the bills Landry signed seem designed to ensure that “everyone will die in prison,” said Bruce Reilly, deputy director of Voice of the Experienced, a New Orleans nonprofit that advocates for the rights of the incarcerated.

“More and more sentences of 30 to 60 years, which are not uncommon, will be death sentences,” he said. “And we do not all age gracefully or go quietly in our sleep.”

“They Don’t Even Try to Pretend to Show Compassion”

After a jury found Parker guilty in the 1999 murder of his girlfriend, Kawana Bernard, he was sentenced to life without parole and sent to Angola. The sprawling maximum security prison, which holds about 3,800 inmates on the site of a former slave plantation, was once known as “the bloodiest prison in America” because of rampant violence. That reputation remains.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola (Kathleen Flynn)

Still, it wasn’t until her paralyzed son was sent to the prison’s medical unit that Janice Parker truly feared for his life.

In the years that he has been held there, at least 17 prisoners have died after receiving substandard health care, according to U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick, who ruled in 2021 that Angola’s medical care was unconstitutional and in November 2023 that the state had failed to significantly improve it.

“If he stays there,” Janice Parker said, “he’s gonna die.”

Though Parker’s movements are now limited to facial expressions and slight shifts of his head, he was once known as “Coyote” for his relentless style of play as a cornerback for the East Yard Raiders in the prison’s full-pads football league. After the team won the prison championship in 2009, he was chosen for Angola’s all-star team.

They traveled to Elayn Hunt Correctional Center to compete against its best players. After Angola dominated most of the game, its coaches pulled their starters to prevent injury, Derrick Magee, a former teammate, said in an interview. Parker insisted on playing.

Kentrell Parker, second from left, poses in 2010 with teammates from the East Yard Raiders in a photograph held by his mother. The players are holding championship belts from Angola’s Crunch Bowl in 2009, according to former teammate Derrick Magee. Parker was paralyzed in a game soon after. (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)

Magee said the memory of what happened during that game continues to haunt him nearly 14 years later. The opposing team ran a short run play. As their fullback drove a few yards forward, Parker drilled him, driving his neck into the player’s torso. Nearly a dozen others piled on.

The whistle blew. One by one, the players stood up. Parker, however, lay on the grass. “What’s going on, Coyote?” Magee asked.

“Man, I can’t move,” Parker replied.

He had suffered a traumatic spinal cord injury in his neck. Dr. Raman Singh, the medical director for the Department of Corrections at the time, summarized Parker’s condition in a letter a month after his injury: “He requires total assistance with all activities of daily living.”

After about 19 months of treatment outside the prison, Parker was taken back to Angola and admitted to its hospital, which includes a 34-bed ward for prisoners who need long-term or hospice care, according to the Department of Corrections.

Janice Parker has observed the conditions in the medical ward on her frequent visits, nearly every month for more than a decade. The smell of urine and feces permeates the infirmary. Tables and medical equipment are covered in dust and grime, she said. Patients, suffering from open wounds and sores, scream in pain throughout the day.

On one visit, she said, clumps of her son’s hair had fallen out and the bare patches of his scalp were covered in scabs. He told her he hadn’t been bathed in weeks. Another time, she found him lying in his own feces, suffering from an infection after bacteria had “entered his blood from his stool,” according to the 2015 lawsuit filed by her son and other inmates, in which Angola’s medical care was ruled unconstitutional.

Kentrell Parker’s sister, Keoka, said that during the many visits she has made to Angola, not once has she seen a nurse check on her brother or any other inmate. Instead, it’s the inmate orderlies — untrained men who in many cases have been convicted of violent crimes — who care for the patients.

“The certified people — the people with degrees, the nurses — they don’t turn my brother over, they don’t feed him, they don’t wash his face, they don’t give him therapy or exercise him,” Keoka Parker said. “They don’t even try to pretend to show compassion.”

The Department of Corrections didn’t respond to questions from Verite News and ProPublica about the complaints by Parker’s family; in documents filed in response to his lawsuit, it denied all allegations related to him.

Like her mother, Keoka Parker said she lives in terror of a phone call from the prison informing her that her brother has died because of medical complications or neglect.

Keoka Parker (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)

For Lois Ratcliff, whose son spent several years in Angola’s hospital after an infection paralyzed him from the waist down, that fear was realized.

Ratcliff said she visited her son, Farrell Sampier, at least every other weekend in the prison hospital between 2013 and 2019. She often sat and talked with Parker. Seeing them suffer needlessly left her so depressed, she said, that she contemplated suicide. Ratcliff often wondered whether the cruelty was the point.

“I’ll never be able to get that out my head, the things I seen, and how they treat the people,” she said.

During a 2018 visit, Ratcliff said, she found Parker lying in his bed, his face surrounded by flies. The nurses did nothing and refused to let her help him, she said. Unable to swat the flies as they buzzed about, Parker did the only thing he could to bring himself some relief: He ate them.

Case Study: “Patient 38” Locked in an Isolation Room With a Serious Infection

– U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick

Dick, the federal judge, cited a medical expert’s conclusion that “Patient 38” had died because of delayed medical care as one example of Angola’s substandard care.

This inmate, who had an artificial heart valve and suffered from diabetes, hypertension and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, developed symptoms of a potentially life-threatening infection, Dick wrote. In response, Angola’s medical staff treated him for the flu, giving him Tylenol and an antiviral drug, and locked him in a room, a medical expert for the plaintiffs testified.

The inmate’s condition worsened over the next three days, when his lab results showed signs of sepsis, a bacterial infection and kidney failure, Dick wrote. On the third morning, his vital signs indicated he had gone into shock, but there’s no record that a doctor provided care, according to medical experts for the plaintiffs. Based on his vital signs, the plaintiffs’ experts wrote, the patient “should have been sent to a hospital. Instead, he received no care.”

About an hour later, the patient was found on the floor of his isolation room, the judge wrote. Staff tried to revive him, but he was pronounced dead at a local hospital after cardiorespiratory arrest stemming from pneumonia, the judge wrote.

A medical expert hired by the state said the patient’s care met constitutional standards and that it was appropriate to treat him for flu rather than pneumonia. “The Court is dumbfounded to understand how treating these symptoms as flu can be justified without so much as a physical examination,” Dick wrote.

In 2015, Parker and Sampier were among a dozen named plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against the Department of Corrections; the agency’s secretary, James LeBlanc; Angola’s warden; and the assistant warden in charge of medical care. The suit alleged that the prison’s medical care caused inmates to suffer serious harm, including the “exacerbation of existing conditions, permanent disability, disfigurement, and even death.”

Dick ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in 2021. In a November 2023 opinion supporting that ruling, she concluded that the prison knew inmates were sick but failed to provide them with adequate treatment, worsening their conditions and in several cases leading to their deaths. That 100-page opinion confirms many of the allegations made by Parker’s family: untrained inmates doing the work of nurses, patients locked in isolation rooms, unsanitary conditions and a medical staff that routinely ignored patients’ needs.

The judge’s ruling came too late for Ratcliff. In 2019, her 51-year-old son died at an outside hospital while in Angola’s custody. His autopsy indicated that he had suffered a stroke.

The state has appealed Dick’s ruling; it went before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this month. Newly elected Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who was Landry’s top lawyer when he held that office, argued that prison administrators have made significant improvements, including the addition of air conditioning to several dorms, telemedicine and specialty clinics.

“I believe that the judges should give us credit for what we have done to improve conditions,” Murrill said in court.

She also pushed back against the very premise of the lawsuit, denying that medical care at the prison was ever lacking or unconstitutional. The state has argued that Dick’s ruling was based largely on a review by plaintiffs’ medical experts of the most difficult cases and that the judge didn’t consider whether problems stemmed from medical error or differences in medical judgment.

“We never conceded there was a violation in the first place,” Murrill told judges.

The Cost of Being Tough on Crime

The legal fight over Angola’s health care system was part of a broader battle to improve conditions within Louisiana’s prisons and unseat the state as the per-capita incarceration capital of the country, if not the world. In 2017, two years after inmates filed suit, a bipartisan coalition of inmate advocates, law enforcement officials and politicians pushed through a package of bills to revamp the state’s criminal justice system and help inmates like Parker.

That effort was hailed nationally and placed Louisiana at the forefront of a movement to combat mass incarceration. But it would be relatively short-lived. Landry would soon promise to roll back most of these changes as he campaigned for governor on a platform of fighting a post-pandemic spike in crime.

Case Study: “Patient 29” Had 108-Degree Temperature, but Prison Staff Didn’t Try to Cool Him

– U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick

This 28-year-old inmate had requested help repeatedly but was never assessed by a medical provider, the judge wrote. In March 2020, the inmate called for help again, complaining of stomach and back pain. He was evaluated by an EMT, but there was no indication that he received any treatment.

That afternoon, the man was found on the floor, foaming at the mouth with a temperature of 108.2 degrees — “obviously a heat stroke,” according to a medical expert who testified for the plaintiffs. Medical staff did not try to cool the inmate with ice, Dick wrote. Instead, they inserted a catheter in an apparent effort to test his urine for illicit drugs.

An expert for the defense testified that there was no reason to administer ice. “You can only do so much when someone isn’t breathing and doesn’t have a heartbeat,” he said. “This was essentially a dead man.”

That, Dick wrote, was the least of the failures. The larger problem, she wrote, is that the inmate’s calls for help were dismissed. The way this patient was treated, she wrote, showed “an attitude of general indifference.”

In a January filing in federal appeals court, lawyers for the state wrote that prison medical staff use ice in heat stroke cases “when appropriate.” Even if the state were to concede that the patient should have been cooled with ice, lawyers argued, “This case would be at most a case of medical negligence.”

In 2017, Department of Corrections officials went to the state Capitol to warn lawmakers that medical costs were taking up an exorbitant portion of their budget. LeBlanc, the corrections secretary, cited one chronically ill inmate who cost the agency more than $1 million a year. He told lawmakers that one of the best ways to tackle the problem was to reduce the prison population, in part by releasing terminally ill or bed-bound inmates.

“I have inmates in Angola that are in fetal positions, who are paralyzed from the neck down, are in hospice,” LeBlanc said in a 2017 interview. “Their life is over, it’s done, they’re finished. Why do we need to keep them in prison? There’s no reason for that. They can spend their last few days with their family.”

Lawmakers responded by dialing back some of the state’s more draconian penalties. They softened a “three strikes” sentencing law that put people in prison for life even for nonviolent offenses and created a medical furlough program that allowed bed-bound inmates and those unable to perform basic self-care to be released to a health care facility. All told, legislation enacted in 2017 resulted in a 26% decrease in the state’s prison population by the end of 2021 and nearly $153 million in savings by June 2022.

While those changes saved money and freed up space in prisons, the programs to release infirm patients were flawed, said Dr. Anjali Niyogi, founder of the Formerly Incarcerated Transitions Clinic and co-author of a legislative task force report about those programs. The process was complicated, it was unclear how decisions were made and prison officials often overruled the opinion of medical professionals, she said.

Case in point: Although Parker was initially sent to a medical facility after he was injured, the Department of Corrections brought him back to Angola. (Janice Parker has a copy of a letter from LeBlanc to Angola’s warden saying it was because Parker’s condition had changed, but her attorney was told years later that it had been because of an unspecified behavioral issue.) Since then, Parker has been repeatedly denied any kind of medical release, even though Angola’s medical director, unit warden and a mental health team have recommended it.

In 2019, prison officials recommended that Kentrell Parker be approved for a medical furlough, which would allow him to serve the remainder of his sentence in a health care facility. Department of Public Safety and Corrections Secretary James LeBlanc declined to move Parker’s case forward to the state Committee on Parole, which has the final say. Parker’s family said LeBlanc has never explained his decision. (Obtained by Verite News and ProPublica. Highlighting by ProPublica.)

The Department of Corrections declined to comment on Parker’s attempts to be released, saying any information would be contained in department documents provided by his family to Verite News and ProPublica.

In 2022, state Sen. Royce Duplessis, D-New Orleans, tried to address shortcomings in the medical release programs. But by then, the political dynamics had shifted. Gov. John Bel Edwards, a moderate Democrat, was on his way out; Landry was taking high-profile stands against crime as he laid the groundwork for his gubernatorial campaign.

Villio, a Landry ally, led the charge against Duplessis’ bill. When advocates contended that even prisoners convicted of violent crimes should be allowed to die with dignity, she responded: “Did the victims of murder have an opportunity to die with dignity? Were the victims of rape dignified in that act?”

She took a similar message into last month’s legislative session as the new chair of the powerful House Committee on the Administration of Criminal Justice. Her bill requiring inmates to serve at least 85% of their sentences represents a dramatic change; today, inmates serve an average of 40%, largely because of credit earned for good behavior, said Austin, the consultant who projected how Villio’s bill would affect the state’s prison population.

But Villio told fellow lawmakers that her bills raising the minimum time served and ending parole wouldn’t increase the prison population or spending. She reasoned that because the bills would create certainty in sentencing, they would spur judges to issue shorter sentences. “There is no intent to ramp up the prison population,” she said in a February legislative committee hearing.

The Legislative Fiscal Office, however, concluded otherwise. The bill ending parole could add between $5.7 million and $14.2 million to the Department of Corrections’ costs, legislative staffers wrote. The truth in sentencing bill would “likely result in a significant increase” in spending, they wrote — at least $5 million in the first full fiscal year, based on Department of Corrections figures. The department estimated those costs would increase every month.

Landry’s current budget proposal would increase funding for the Corrections Department by about $53 million, or 7.4%, but it does not project a significant expansion in the incarcerated population, nor would it increase health care funding.

Tennessee attorney David Louis Raybin, who helped draft a truth in sentencing law there in 1979, said he knows what Louisiana is in for. Tennessee’s law was repealed six years later, after a string of riots in the state’s overcrowded prisons. But in 2022, Tennessee lawmakers adopted yet another truth in sentencing law over Raybin’s objections.

“It takes about three years for this to have its effect. But once it does, it hits with a vengeance,” said Raybin, a self-described conservative Democrat who previously worked as a prosecutor and helped draft the state’s death penalty statute. “You guys are going to get whacked down there. Your population is going to go through the ceiling.”

Three days after the legislative session ended, Janice Parker visited her son. He was in severe pain from a distended stomach and a blockage in his catheter. She said the prison’s medical staff didn’t answer her questions about what was wrong and refused to send him to a hospital.

As she sat by her son’s bedside and held his limp hand, she didn’t have the heart to tell him that their fears of what would happen if Landry became governor had come true: Louisiana was returning to its punitive roots.

Though her son still is technically eligible for some sort of medical release, she worried that after 14 years of suffering and disappointment, news of the changes would sever his last thread of hope.

Janice Parker holds a photo of herself with her son that was taken as she visited him at Angola. (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica)

Case study document illustrations by ProPublica.

by Richard A. Webster, Verite News

Inside the Historic Suit That the Gun Industry and Republicans Are on the Verge of Killing

2 days ago

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.

Twenty-five years ago, Scott King, then mayor of Gary, Indiana, spoke solemnly as he described a new strategy the city was taking to deal with the flow of illegally purchased guns fueling violent crime there.

Undercover Gary police officers had fanned out across the area for Operation Hollowpoint, successfully purchasing guns and ammunition at federally licensed firearm retailers despite representing themselves as suspicious buyers. King presented surveillance footage in an 18-minute video produced by the city.

Inside one pawn shop, a bespectacled clerk and two undercover police officers are shown discussing a 9 mm pistol. After the male officer admitted he did not have the permit required to buy the gun, the female officer accompanying him told the clerk she did. The clerk then suggested she buy the gun on her partner’s behalf in violation of federal gun restrictions.

“Might as well put it in your name then so I don’t have to make a call,” the clerk responded. “The feds are constantly screwing with people.”

The footage, which documented four suspicious purchases at different retailers selling guns, showed “how easy juveniles, felons and other prohibited purchasers can acquire guns from legitimate gun dealers through the use of a straw purchaser,” King said in the video.

The stings formed the basis of the city’s historic lawsuit seeking to hold local gun retailers and major gun manufacturers, such as Smith & Wesson, Glock and others, responsible for illegal sales like those uncovered in the investigation. As part of the suit, the city sought monetary damages and changes in industry practices.

Relentless legislative and legal efforts across the country have eliminated a flurry of lawsuits initiated by cities against the industry two decades ago. A bill approved by the Indiana legislature and signed into law this month by Gov. Eric Holcomb may be the final blow to Gary’s suit, the last one standing from that original group of cases.

But the problem of illicit gun sales outlined by King and detailed in that grainy footage remains and continues to contribute to violence in northwest Indiana, nearby Chicago and beyond.

Scott King, former mayor of Gary, presented the Operation Hollowpoint video 25 years ago. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

Over the years, Gary’s lawyers have sought to keep the suit going by arguing that negligence plagues the firearms industry, not just in the city but across the region, creating an ongoing public nuisance. To emphasize that point in court filings, they’ve included long lists of federal indictments of gun traffickers and their ties to illegal purchases at northwest Indiana retailers.

Combing through the suit’s voluminous records, ProPublica found and then analyzed over 100 separate criminal cases involving straw sales — transactions where suspects participated in schemes to buy guns from federally licensed retailers and resell them to people barred by law from purchasing guns themselves.

The federal gun cases represent a small but illustrative sampling of the nation’s illegal gun trade, whose contours are well known to law enforcement but shrouded in mystery to the public because of industry-backed laws that keep a tight lid on data involving illicit gun sales.

Some of the cases examined by ProPublica involve just one transaction for a single firearm. Others are part of elaborate and organized schemes, where prolific traffickers use others with clean records to purchase multiple guns from one retailer, then head to the next gun shop and repeat the process over and over again. Most can be tied back to at least one northwest Indiana gun retailer.

One of the cases involves three guns purchased in 2020 that ended up in the hands of a wanted fugitive. He later turned one of those pistols on two police officers in Wisconsin, seriously injuring both. “I knew that at some point I may die that night,” one officer later testified.

But just as those examples showcase the scope of the straw sale problem in the United States, the vigorous effort by the firearms industry to quash the suit shows its commitment to the push back against stepped-up regulation and legal threats.

The defendants have countered Gary’s claims at every turn, arguing that manufacturers have no part in the illegal gun trade and denying responsibility for criminal acts committed by buyers. In a 2000 joint response to the city’s allegations, attorneys for the defendants wrote that after manufacturers sell firearms to licensed retailers, they have no control over “the subsequent negligent or unlawful transfer, possession, ‘availability’ or use of firearms.”

In 2021, after years of legal wrangling, the Gary suit reached a crucial stage. The Lake County, Indiana, judge overseeing it ordered the sides to finalize agreements for turning over thousands of pages of internal records as part of a legal process known as discovery.

Gary’s attorneys have for years sought those documents as they try to prove that manufacturers are aware of the straw sales occurring at the Indiana retailers they supply. But the discovery process might never be completed, now that the Indiana legislature has passed a bill making the Gary lawsuit and any like it illegal. The intent of legislators was clear: The law was made retroactive to Aug. 27, 1999 — three days before Gary filed its lawsuit.

Speaking of recent legislation that may be the final blow to Gary’s lawsuit over illegal gun sales, Mayor Eddie Melton said, “We just want that fair day in court.” (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

The legislative maneuver, and explanations for it, have frustrated the current mayor of Gary, Eddie Melton. Some proponents of the bill suggested that for as long as the lawsuit was allowed to continue, the firearms industry would pass over Indiana to do business in other states.

“I’ve looked at that as a slap in the face in terms of the law, the lives that have been lost and the reason that the city has been fighting this fight for so long,” he said in an interview. “We just want that fair day in court.”

In an excerpt from the Operation Hollowpoint video, surveillance footage shows a gun store clerk allegedly completing a straw purchase to an undercover Gary police officer.

Watch video ➜

In February, Melton arrived at the state Capitol with the political fight over the gun industry bill in full swing. The legislation targeted the Gary lawsuit directly by restricting the power to bring such action to the Indiana attorney general. The House had passed its version just days before, and the Senate began its deliberations.

Melton, himself a former state senator, strode to a podium inside a meeting room at the Statehouse and made his pitch. “I’m asking you to think about what kind of precedent this will set,” he said. “Local governments have the right to fight back against bad actors. What message will this send across our state and nation if Indiana were to pass a bill that allows the state to inject itself in an active lawsuit and effectively eliminate this right?”

Aaron Freeman, a Republican and one of the bill’s chief backers, was unmoved. The power of such legal action should, as the bill dictates, rest in the hands of the state’s attorney general, he said.

“This one is out of bounds,” he said of Gary’s lawsuit. “It’s a 25-year-old situation. There’s other municipalities that could do this, and I think only the state of Indiana should.”

The Senate eventually passed the bill by a vote of 33 to 15, along party lines.

More than two decades ago, when its suit was filed, Gary joined a wave of American cities that included Detroit and Chicago seeking solutions to gun violence problems through legal action. Under pressure, the firearms industry then turned to its political allies for relief.

In 2003, Congress passed a law known as the Tiahrt Amendment, which prevents the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from publicly releasing information identifying the retailers who originally sold guns confiscated by police during criminal investigations.

Two years later, Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which radically altered the nation’s relationship with guns. It gave manufacturers and retailers broad protections against civil litigation. Following passage of the act, lawsuits against the industry began to crumble.

In 2015, the Indiana legislature passed its own law granting additional protections to firearm manufacturers, dealers and retailers. After then-Gov. Mike Pence signed the bill into law, defendants in the Gary suit all moved to have the case thrown out.

But an appeals court ruled that the city’s suit could proceed via a narrow exception in the law. The straw sales documented by the city provided sufficient basis for a nuisance lawsuit, the court ruled.

The reprieve freed Gary to continue pursuing financial damages for the unlawful sales and to make a case that manufacturers had turned a blind eye to the deadly problem. Since then, Gary’s attorneys have sought tightly guarded industry documents, including any internal studies or reports monitoring how guns are used or if they’re involved in shootings and plans for how products are marketed.

In September 2021, the case reached a milestone that similar lawsuits had not, as the presiding judge set a final date to complete the discovery phase. With the passage of the bill, signed into law on March 15 by Holcomb, attorneys for the city expect that process to come to a standstill.

King in 1999 describes straw purchases uncovered by police stings at local gun retailers in the Operation Hollowpoint video.

Watch video ➜

King, the former mayor, no longer remembers even making the video on Operation Hollowpoint, but he still recalls the immediate pushback from the industry and Indiana politicians. To him, the latest effort to kill the suit is a testament to the influence of the firearms industry, which he said has for years pushed Indiana’s lawmakers toward “meddling in the operation of local government.”

“I don’t think there’s too many legislators whose first thought after jumping out of bed in the morning is: ‘What can I do to make it easier for more people to get guns?’” he said. “I think their motivation in many circumstances is from who’s lobbying, and unfortunately those lobbyists have proven more effective than lobbies on behalf of local government, people in cities and towns throughout the state, that are the first line that have to deal with the reality of this violence.”

Financial disclosure records reveal that the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which conducts political lobbying on behalf of the firearms industry, began ramping up its work at the state legislature last year.

The group spent around $143,000 on lobbying efforts in 2023, a huge uptick from previous years. The bill aimed at killing Gary’s lawsuit was authored by Rep. Chris Jeter, a Republican who was an attorney at the law firm that handled lobbying for the NSSF until 2015.

Jeter said no one at the law firm approached him about the measure.

The bill had another backer in Attorney General Todd Rokita, who once it went into effect became the only official in the state with the power to sue the gun industry.

As the bill began to wind its way through the Indiana Statehouse in January, Rokita, a champion of gun ownership rights, was in Las Vegas for an NSSF trade show. Speaking in an on-camera interview with one of the group’s top officials, Rokita made clear he has little intention of ever filing a suit like the one out of Gary.

“That’s not gonna happen on my watch,” he said.

Surveillance footage shows a display case inside a Gary-area gun shop.

Watch video ➜

The gun cases cited in the Gary suit and examined by ProPublica provide a chilling tour of illegal activity and crime in the region and beyond.

Take for instance, the case of Nathanael Benton, who was on the run in 2020 when he fired on police officers in Wisconsin. He had already shot a man in Fargo, North Dakota, in an argument over money, as he’d later admit during his trial, and had gotten rid of the gun he used in that shooting. Arriving in Indiana with police on his tail, Benton decided to obtain another one.

As a convicted felon, Benton couldn’t buy a gun for himself from a licensed dealer. So, after fleeing to Indiana to lay low, he got a friend’s estranged girlfriend to make the purchases.

Surveillance video taken from a now-shuttered gun retailer in Warsaw, Indiana, shows Benton’s friend appearing to steer the woman toward particular firearms to purchase. Later, the pair approached a car with two handguns — a Taurus .380 and Smith & Wesson .40 — and then handed the firearms through the car’s rear window to Benton. On the required federal form asking if she was purchasing the guns for herself, the woman checked “yes,” court records state.

That same day, Benton and his accomplices traveled to ADT Firearms, a tiny gun shop in Syracuse, Indiana, run out of the basement of the owner’s home. Anthony Tilson, the owner, told ProPublica that he remembered showing a man and a woman several guns before they finally settled on a Smith & Wesson 9 mm pistol.

Watching the two as they browsed, Tilson said, he felt uneasy. But the woman was familiar, a previous customer, Tilson said. And so he went through with the sale.

A Smith & Wesson 9 mm pistol illegally purchased at ADT Firearms in Syracuse, Indiana, was later recovered near a Holiday Inn Express in Delafield, Wisconsin, where two police officers were shot. ADT’s owner told ProPublica: “We cannot control what somebody else does.” (Graphic by Lucas Waldron/ProPublica. Photography by Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica.)

Two days later, outside a hotel in Delafield, Wisconsin, two police officers detained Benton as part of an investigation into a hit-and-run accident. As one of the officers frisked him, Benton pulled the Smith & Wesson .40 from his waistband and began firing, according to court testimony and other records.

Bullets hit one officer in the pelvis. The other officer was struck three times — two bullets hitting his back, while another struck him in the pelvis and pierced his abdomen, causing severe internal damage that forced him to undergo four separate surgeries. At Benton’s trial, the officer testified that the bulletproof vest stopped two of the bullets that struck him, saving him from additional injuries. Both men have left law enforcement.

Benton fled the hotel but was captured at 11 on the morning following the shooting, eight hours from when officers first confronted him, following a massive police search. He was later tried and convicted on multiple charges, including attempted murder and reckless use of a dangerous weapon.

Tilson found out about the Wisconsin shooting from a newspaper article. The 9 mm Smith & Wesson pistol Benton’s friends had purchased at ADT had been recovered at the scene.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Tilson said.

Police eventually arrested the Indiana woman Benton paid to buy guns for him. She was found guilty of one count of providing false information during the purchase of a firearm, and after a year in federal prison she was released for time served.

Tilson said that if given a second chance he would have trusted his instincts and rejected the sale. But to Tilson, retailers like himself should not be held liable for straw sales.

“We cannot control what somebody else does,” he said.

Two officers who were shot in Delafield, Wisconsin, first image, with a gun purchased in Syracuse, Indiana, second image, have left law enforcement. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has identified straw purchases as among the most common ways in which guns fall into the wrong hands across the country.

ProPublica’s analysis of straw-purchase cases cited in the Gary suit found that guns obtained unlawfully have been linked to crimes and mayhem throughout the Midwest.

Andrew Thompson, for example, had a clean record, and that made the Fort Wayne, Indiana, resident an ideal middle man for straw purchases. Thompson bought at least 20 guns between 2017 and 2020, several of which were later recovered amid crimes in Chicago, Peoria, Illinois, and as far away as Pennsylvania and Missouri, according to court records. One gun purchased by Thompson was recovered by Kansas City police officers from a suspect who held them at bay in an armed standoff.

Court records show that in at least one case, Thompson, who a federal judge would later sentence to just over five years in prison, offered to include incendiary ammunition as part of a sale to an informant.

Upon impact, the bullet would explode into a ball of “burning magnesium that burns so hot it goes right through bone like butter and it’s burning at up to 3,000 degrees so it can LITERALLY SMOKE SOMEONE,” he wrote to one customer.

The Operation Hollowpoint video shows a collection of guns recovered by Gary police.

Watch video ➜

Nearly all of the manufacturers and retailers sued by Gary already have moved to dismiss the case, given the new legislation, leaving the suit’s proponents struggling to determine a way forward.

Even if the case stays alive through a potentially lengthy appeal, the discovery process will once again be on hold. Attorney Philip Bangle of the nonprofit Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which represents the city in the suit, is just as frustrated as Melton by the legislature’s action.

“This is not about the merits of Gary’s case, which have been found valid by the courts no less than three times on appeal,” he said.

In passing the bill, he said, the legislature invited “any person or corporation with ample resources or special interest” to seek legislative intervention to fend off a legal threat.

Bangle said the Brady Center plans to appeal if Gary’s lawsuit is dismissed. But Melton would have to sign off and is not yet ready to commit. Melton said that he needs to weigh what’s in the best interests of the city, along with counsel of the city’s attorneys, and that he would wait to decide until the courts rule.

Meanwhile, across the border, Chicago continues to pursue remedies to gun violence through the courts. Last week, the city filed a lawsuit against gun-maker Glock over the company’s alleged refusal to alter the design of pistols the city claims are being cheaply and easily converted into “machine guns.”

Company officials have not responded to requests for comment.

A Smith & Wesson 9 mm handgun illegally purchased at Westforth Sports in Gary, Indiana, was later recovered by police during a traffic stop in Chicago. (Graphic by Lucas Waldron, ProPublica. Photography by Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica.)

The move follows efforts by the city to revive its lawsuit against Indiana gun retailer Westforth Sports. Owned and operated by the Westforth family for decades, the now-shuttered Gary retailer was the source of hundreds of guns recovered amid investigations by Chicago police. Between 2011 and 2021, federal authorities indicted 53 people on charges related to illegal sales made at the shop, according to a filing in the original suit, which was dismissed by a judge in May 2023. The city appealed the decision later that year.

Timothy Rudd, attorney for Earl Westforth, the now-retired owner of Westforth Sports, said the court “properly dismissed the City of Chicago’s claims against Westforth last spring, and we are confident that the appellate court will uphold that decision.”

He declined to comment on the Gary lawsuit. Westforth was among the stores originally sued by the city and reached an undisclosed settlement. Nonetheless, Gary’s attorneys have continued to seek records from Westforth about its sales history.

The now-closed Westforth Sports gun shop, first image, was the source of hundreds of guns recovered amid investigations by police in Chicago, second image. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

Amid these prolonged court battles, police and prosecutors remain as busy as ever dealing with the aftermath of straw sales occurring in the region. On Feb. 22, as the Indiana Senate had begun its deliberation on the bill barring Gary’s suit, a federal judge sentenced a 25-year-old former school custodian to 18 months in federal prison for charges related to straw purchases. Federal prosecutors accused him of buying at least 19 handguns illegally from Indiana gun retailers over the course of a year.

Most of those guns have been recovered. Five remain missing.

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Tony Cook of IndyStar contributed reporting.

by Vernal Coleman

Michigan Lawmakers Working to Fix a Program That Failed to Compensate the Wrongfully Convicted

3 days ago

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A bill moving through the Michigan House of Representatives would fix flaws in a 7-year-old compensation fund that the state set up to help wrongfully convicted people rebuild their lives.

Sponsored by Rep. Joey Andrews, a Democrat, along with 14 other Democrats, the bill would be the first substantive reform of the Wrongful Imprisonment Compensation Act’s eligibility requirements. If it becomes law, many people who would otherwise be denied compensation would become eligible for relief.

“This is going to be huge for a lot of people,” said Kenneth Nixon, co-founder and president of the nonprofit Organization of Exonerees. He spent nearly 16 years in prison before his conviction was vacated.

WICA, passed in 2016, was intended as a lifeline for people who experienced extreme injustice by offering $50,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment. But, as a ProPublica investigation detailed in January, the bipartisan law’s narrow requirements have resulted in delays in compensation, partial settlements or even complete denials. Only people whose cases are overturned based on “clear and convincing” new evidence that they weren’t a perpetrator or an accomplice have been eligible for WICA compensation, a higher standard of proof than for other civil claims. This has meant that some former prisoners — for instance, those whose convictions were overturned for insufficient evidence — can be left out.

In Charles Perry’s case, which ProPublica highlighted, judges acknowledged that there was new evidence of innocence, but because his conviction was officially overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective counsel, he got nothing.

Michigan has had 173 wrongful convictions in state courts since 1989, the fifth-most in the country, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. After an average of nearly 11 years in prison, many of these individuals are released with no home, no job prospects, no transportation and no resources to navigate trauma.

For years, advocates, a state commission and even some state Supreme Court justices have urged the Legislature to revisit the law. “I don’t like administering legal rules that I can’t explain to the people they impact,” wrote one justice in a concurring statement in Perry’s case. “Please fix it, legislators.”

On several key matters, the new bill proposes doing so. Significantly, it would change the standard of proof for former inmates to a “preponderance” of evidence showing they were not the perpetrator or an accomplice, instead of “clear and convincing” evidence, which is considered more daunting. In testimony to the House Criminal Justice Committee in March, where he serves as majority vice chair, Andrews said the higher standard is usually reserved for when the government takes away a person’s rights.

It’s “a very unusual burden of proof to be using in a civil matter,” he said, and it works against “the purpose of compensating the innocent,” especially in old cases when evidence has deteriorated and witnesses are no longer available.

The bill would also allow certain exceptions to the new evidence requirement. An individual would also qualify for relief if there was insufficient evidence to support their conviction, or if new evidence was available but the court reversed or vacated their conviction for other reasons.

Wolf Mueller, an attorney who said he represented at least 20 WICA claims, said the changes would make a big difference to a law he described as poorly written.

“If you shouldn’t have been tried in the first place, because there was insufficient existing evidence to convict you, then you should be compensated,” Mueller said. “You are just as much wrongfully convicted as somebody else who was lucky enough to find new evidence.”

At the committee hearing, Robyn Frankel, an assistant attorney general who directs the office’s Conviction Integrity Unit and heads the section responding to WICA claims, testified for the bill. The proposed changes, she said, would “remedy a number of difficulties that we were experiencing in the application of the law.”

For example, Frankel said, “removing the requirement that new evidence be the reason for the dismissal was prompted by our realization that more often than not, specific explanations are not provided at the time a case is dismissed.”

The bill would also make a number of other reforms. Among them: Pretrial detention would count as time spent wrongfully imprisoned, and people pardoned by the governor would be eligible to file a claim.

An analysis by the House Fiscal Agency said the bill would result in “an indeterminate, but likely marginal annual increase in claims and awards” for compensation. Average yearly compensation under WICA over the last four fiscal years has totaled about $9.8 million, it said.

Two weeks ago, the House Criminal Justice Committee voted to favorably report a substitute version of the bill, tweaking it to account for the pardon process. Eight members supported the recommendation, three opposed and two abstained.

Rep. Graham Filler, the committee’s minority vice chair, abstained after asking at the hearing about why there’d be a different standard of proof for a WICA claim than for a conviction.

To that, Marla Mitchell-Cichon, counsel to the Innocence Project at Thomas M. Cooley Law School, said the difference is that a WICA claim is not a criminal matter. A full House vote is anticipated in April or May, a legislative aide to Andrews said in an email.

As the bill moves forward, Andrews said in an interview with ProPublica that he hopes more colleagues sign on, including Republicans. Next step after the House would be the state Senate, which also is led by Democrats.

If the bill becomes law, wrongfully convicted people whose cases were overturned based on insufficient evidence would have an 18-month window to show they are eligible for compensation under the new reforms. However, people who were ineligible for reasons other than insufficient evidence would still not qualify, and people whose claims were already denied, or ended in settlements, would not be eligible to file again.

Kenneth Nixon, who received partial compensation after his conviction was overturned, stands outside of a property he purchased with the goal of opening an adult foster care home there. The WICA settlement has helped, he said. “It’s a project to help people. I want to be helpful wherever I can to society,” said Nixon. “The cash has helped with getting stuff done.” (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

Nixon, on behalf of the Organization of Exonerees, is pushing for the bill to go still further. In a March 11 letter to the committee, he argued that past claimants should be allowed to benefit from the reforms. “Fairness requires that the positive changes to WICA benefit all exonerees, not just those with claims in the future,” he wrote. In 2022, Nixon received a settlement for less than he anticipated from WICA.

In the letter, Nixon also expressed concern that innocent people whose cases were overturned for reasons other than insufficient or new evidence — such as improper jury instruction or ineffective counsel — could still be excluded. And, he said, the compensation amount should be adjusted yearly for inflation, as the $50,000 allotted when WICA passed in 2016 is worth less in 2024. (Had the original amount kept up with inflation, it would now be about $64,700 per year.)

It’s important to get WICA right, Mueller said. The compensation “is not just life-changing from a monetary standpoint; it’s a dignity standpoint,” he said. “Somebody recognized that they had been wronged and wanted to make it right.”

by Anna Clark

What ProPublica Is Doing About Diversity in 2024

3 days 23 hours ago

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ProPublica is committed to increasing the diversity of our workplace as well as the journalism community more broadly, and each year we publish a report on those efforts. This is the report for 2024; here are all our past reports.

Our Commitment

We believe that it is imperative to staff our newsroom and business operations with people from a broad range of backgrounds, ages and perspectives. We are committed to recruiting and retaining people from communities that have long been underrepresented, in journalism broadly and in investigative journalism especially. That includes African Americans, Latinos, other people of color, women, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities.

ProPublica has continued to expand, growing from 172 full-time employees at the start of 2023 to 186 in 2024, due in part to the creation of our Northwest team and additions to our development, audience and visual teams.

Our diversity efforts last year were wide-ranging, with the launch of an investigative editor training program that is open to journalists across the U.S., a large presence at journalism affinity conferences and a webinar for former conference stipend recipients and other early career journalists who have participated in previous ProPublica programs.

We also continued to formalize some of our formerly staff-run, volunteer diversity efforts, built partnerships with outside journalism organizations and looked for ways to improve the internal culture and processes for all ProPublicans.

Our Diversity Committee comprises more than 50 ProPublicans who volunteer their time to work on initiatives that are pitched and run by the staff. The current co-chairs are Vianna Davila, Melissa Sanchez and Liz Sharp.

Breakdown of Our Staff

As with last year, we tracked candidates through the application and interview process. Out of 21 positions filled in 2023, 50% of the candidates we interviewed identified as women and 36% identified as being part of a racial/ethnic group other than solely non-Hispanic white. About 67% of the people we hired identified as women.

However, 29% of those people we hired in 2023 identified as being part of a racial/ethnic group other than solely non-Hispanic white — a lower percentage than ProPublica had hired in previous years.

"Recruiting and retaining a diverse staff is one of ProPublica's core principles,” said ProPublica editor-in-chief Stephen Engelberg, responding to the hiring numbers. “We are proud of the progress we've made, but we agree that there's more to be done.”

This year, Engelberg said, ProPublica added a full-time talent acquisition manager “to make sure our job searches reach the broadest possible group of applicants."

At the start of 2024, the percentage of all ProPublica staff members who identified as solely non-Hispanic white was 62% — slightly higher than in previous years. This percentage was the same for editorial positions.

For the sixth year in a row, more women than men work at ProPublica. About 2% of our staff identify as nonbinary or transgender. In editorial positions, women represented 51% of the staff.

Since 2022, we have collected demographic information about our board of directors. Half of the 14 people on the board identified as women, the same as last year. About 64% of the directors identified as non-Hispanic white, compared to 71% last year.

As we’ve said since 2015, part of our commitment to diversity means being transparent about our own numbers. Here’s how our staff breaks down.

(Please note that the data is based on employees’ self-reported information. Recognizing that some people may identify as more than one race but not identify as a person of color, in 2022 we began stating numbers in terms of people who “solely identify as non-Hispanic white.” We hope this will provide more specificity and accuracy. The employee information is as of Jan. 1 of each year. Managers are defined as staff members who supervise other people, and that group does not include all editors. Percentages may not add up to 100 because of rounding. Fellows, time-limited employees and part-time employees are not included in this analysis.)

Race and Ethnicity: All of ProPublica Note: Fellows, time-limited employees and part-time employees are not included in this analysis. Race and Ethnicity: Editorial Note: Fellows, time-limited employees and part-time employees are not included in this analysis. Race and Ethnicity: Managers Note: Fellows, time-limited employees and part-time employees are not included in this analysis. Gender: All of ProPublica Note: Fellows, time-limited employees and part-time employees are not included in this analysis. Gender: Editorial Note: Fellows, time-limited employees and part-time employees are not included in this analysis. Gender: Managers Note: Fellows, time-limited employees and part-time employees are not included in this analysis. New Initiatives

Investigative editor training: ProPublica started an Investigative Editor Training Program in 2023 for journalists who want to learn how to manage, edit and elevate investigative projects that expose harm and create impact. The curriculum for the yearlong program was designed by ProPublica chief of correspondents Ginger Thompson and deputy managing editor Alexandra Zayas to increase diversity in the next generation of investigative editors. We did a test-run for the program for nine ProPublica staffers. Then we refined the training and invited journalists from other organizations to apply. More than 150 reporters and editors from news organizations across the country applied. We selected 11 people to attend a weeklong training at our New York office, where they heard from ProPublica editors on different aspects of the craft, from story selection and memos to managing the reporting and digging into the first draft. After that, participants were paired with ProPublica senior staff as mentors and received additional virtual training for the remainder of the year. We are offering this training again this year for external participants.

Alumni virtual meetup: After a hiatus in 2022, ProPublica staff hosted a career-building webinar for “alumni” of our various external programs, including Emerging Reporters, the Data Institute and our conference stipends. Irena Hwang, Maya Miller and Ellis Simani volunteered their time to organize this event and surveyed alumni about what kinds of skills they wanted to build. The virtual event, held in September, included a panel on “building your investigative career” featuring Ginger Thompson, Zahira Torres, Lulu Ramadan and Kavitha Surana. That was followed by breakout rooms on workshopping a pitch, managing up, specialty reporting and becoming an editor. More than 50 early-to-mid-career journalists attended the event, and more than a half-dozen ProPublicans lent their expertise as breakout-room moderators. Our goal is to continue to build on the success of this program in 2024 and provide another opportunity for community members to come together.

Our Ongoing Efforts

ProPublica thinks about its efforts in the following ways: building the pipeline (for us and for all of investigative journalism); recruiting talent and improving our hiring process; and inclusion and retention.

Building the Pipeline

Conference stipends: ProPublica previously offered stipends to help student journalists attend conferences. Last year we changed this program to instead partner with Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) and sponsor five journalists to attend the annual IRE convention. IRE’s diversity scholarship supports journalists, students and educators from diverse backgrounds, including people of color, those who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community and/or people with disabilities. We also sponsored a Journalists of Color mixer at the conference, which was attended by more than 50 people.

Emerging Reporters Program: The program provides financial assistance and mentorship to five students for whom investigative journalism might otherwise be inaccessible so they can pursue early career opportunities in the field. The program includes a $9,000 stipend, virtual programming and an all-expenses paid trip to an IRE conference on computer assisted reporting. This is the program’s ninth year, and it is coordinated by Talia Buford. Check out our most recent class and find out more about the program.

Data Institute: In 2016, ProPublica journalists founded The Data Institute, a workshop for journalists on how to use data, design and code. ProPublica eventually started working with Open News, which coordinates student and instructor participation and provides support for project management and event planning. The Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting and the Center for Journalism & Democracy now organize this in-person event. Last year a half-dozen current and former ProPublicans served as trainers at the institute, which is focused on empowering people with data skills they can bring back to their own newsrooms. ProPublica staffers will continue to serve as trainers at the institute this year.

Recruiting and Hiring

Affinity conferences: Last summer, ProPublica newsroom staff and senior leadership partnered with The Marshall Project and The Trace at the country’s three largest affinity journalism conferences. At the Asian American Journalists Association conference, the three organizations hosted a panel about paths into nonprofit news that also included participation from a staffer at the Center for Public Integrity. The panel was followed by a beverage lounge, where anyone could drop by for refreshments. The organizations hosted a reception at the National Association of Black Journalists conference, put on through the convention’s Investigative Task Force, that included journalists from The Texas Tribune and The Intercept. ProPublica staff also participated in three conference sessions focused on investigative reporting. At the National Association of Hispanic Journalists conference, the three journalism organizations hosted a booth along with The Texas Tribune, The Intercept and CPI. This work was led by ProPublica staffers Maya Miller, Irena Hwang and Ellis Simani. Going forward, ProPublica’s talent department will assume responsibility for this work.

Salary equity and transparency: ProPublica management regularly analyzes salaries in job categories where there are at least four employees and, when necessary, adjusts those salaries to ensure equity by race and gender in each job and location group, while taking into account years of experience. This analysis started in 2021. We do this because we want to try to eliminate the effects of any unconscious bias in setting salaries. In addition, since the fall of 2022, ProPublica has published salary ranges for all posted job openings, regardless of geography.

Rooney Rule: We require that hiring managers interview at least one person who does not self-identify as solely non-Hispanic white. In addition, every application must be read by at least two people.

Freelancer guide: In 2022, ProPublica published a guide for freelancers interested in pitching an investigation to ProPublica. We designed the guide to formalize the pitch process and level the playing field for how freelance projects are presented and considered. Submissions will be reviewed by editors on a rotating basis. ProPublica will respond to anyone who completes the form, even if their proposal is not accepted.

LRN candidate outreach: Editors with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network continued to do personalized recruiting and offered office hours so local journalists could discuss their accountability work with a member of the team. LRN editors were also present at affinity journalism conferences, where they met with interested applicants in an effort to help them with the project-development and application process.

Inclusion and Retention

Welcoming new hires and focusing on internal culture: Our inclusion subcommittee includes about 30 ProPublicans who meet monthly to consider ways to make the newsroom more inclusive and equitable. Duaa Eldeib chairs this subcommittee. Some of the issues the group has been tackling include ways to improve ProPublica’s fact-checking process and build community, particularly for employees who work remotely. The subcommittee launched an internal story club that meets regularly to discuss particularly enjoyable stories, podcasts or books.

Sensitivity subcommittee: Led by Colleen Barry and Andrea Wise, this group serves as a resource for editors and reporters to tap the collective brain trust of our newsroom when working on particularly sensitive stories about suicide, sexual abuse, child abuse, racial trauma and more. The committee maintains a Slack channel where anyone can share resources and where editors and reporters can solicit feedback on drafts or ask questions on how best to report on sensitive subjects. When a “sensitivity read” or the discussions during the editing and production of a story are particularly instructive, the subcommittee has shared those experiences at diversity committee meetings so any lessons can be more broadly applied.

ProPublica Peer Partnership Program: This is an internal program organized by Jodi Cohen and Lisa Song that matches ProPublicans with a mentor or peer partner to meet each other, develop new skills and have someone to turn to for help navigating workplace or career questions. Last year more than 50 ProPublicans participated in this program, which was started in 2018.

Unconscious bias training: Since 2021, ProPublica has contracted with Paradigm Reach to provide ongoing diversity, equity and inclusion training for staff. The training is required of all new managers.

Diversity Committee office hours: We have continued to offer a casual virtual hangout twice a month where ProPublicans can chat with the Diversity Committee co-chairs to brainstorm about diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, ask questions about ProPublica’s ongoing DEI programs or chat about diversity-related concerns in a more intimate setting outside of the monthly committee meetings.

Interested in Working Here?

Here is our jobs page, where we post new positions, including fellowships, full-time and temporary roles.

by Vianna Davila, Melissa Sanchez, Liz Sharp and Myron Avant

I Moved to Rural New Mexico to Report on the Aftermath of a Massive Wildfire. My Neighbors Were My Best Sources.

4 days ago

This article was produced in partnership with Source New Mexico, which was a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2023. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In February 2023, I signed a lease on a dusty studio apartment in Las Vegas, New Mexico, two hours from my apartment in Albuquerque and just outside the burn scar of the largest wildfire in New Mexico history. Based on the railroad ties that served as “vigas,” or ceiling beams, my landlord told me my new home had likely been built in the late 1800s.

The rural communities in the mountains of northern New Mexico have long been wary of outsiders. More than a century ago, a band of white-capped marauders on horseback, known as the Gorras Blancas, rode through the countryside to fight back against the predominantly white speculators and railroad barons taking over the land. The Gorras Blancas cut through newly built fences dividing shared pastureland, known as the “ejido,” and burned piles of railroad ties. But they failed to repel the newcomers, who built Victorian homes on what became the town’s well-to-do east side.

My apartment was on the historically Hispanic, lower-income west side. I had moved there at the beginning of a yearlong collaboration between my newsroom, Source New Mexico, and ProPublica to examine the area’s recovery from the fire. The federal government had accidentally triggered the blaze; now the Federal Emergency Management Agency was in charge of distributing checks to compensate people for the government’s mistake. I knew some survivors wouldn’t appreciate being interviewed by someone they perceived as an outsider, even though I’m from New Mexico and have lived here most of my life. For the next year, my job was to gain their trust.

The fire had broadened divisions among residents: between those who had suffered and those who had been spared; between those who had money to rebuild and those who had to wait for a check from FEMA; between those angry at how long it was taking to be paid and those who had taken jobs with FEMA to help process their neighbors’ claims.

The Big Burnout: Wildland Firefighters and the West

Join Source New Mexico reporter Patrick Lohmann on March 26 for a virtual discussion about New Mexico’s grindingly slow recovery from the state’s biggest wildfire and the exodus of wildland firefighters from the U.S. Forest Service.

I introduced myself to the community in a column published in the weekly newspaper, the Optic, asking people to get in touch. I then set about speaking to anyone willing to open up about the trauma of the disaster, what they saw as a painfully slow release of compensation funds and disaster aid, their fears about losing their culture and their realization that this place had permanently changed. That meant showing up early to public meetings at high school gyms, carrying a stack of business cards and speaking with frustrated survivors until janitors threatened to turn off the lights.

And I worked the phones. After a bit of pestering, a county assessor marked down all the houses she knew had been lost in the fire. I called every property owner, often reaching people who were living far away until they could rebuild or were making do in RVs, friends’ homes, and even, in one case, a tent. Many people were reluctant to talk; some said it was too painful to discuss what they had been through.

One man pretended to speak only Spanish to get me off the phone; I spoke just enough Spanish to convince him to chat with me in English. He taught me a Spanish phrase with a special meaning for those who speak a disappearing dialect unique to the region: “No le busques tres pies del gato sabiendo que tiene quatro.” It means, “Don’t look for three legs on a cat knowing it has four.” He meant it both as a joke and a warning: Tread carefully. He turned out to be friendly, later showing me around his damaged property.

People soon began to recognize me around town. They invited me to sit down and listen in on conversations they were having about the fire that had changed their lives and the long recovery that now consumed their attention. (FEMA officials have said they worked as quickly as they could on a mission that is far different from their typical job of providing short-term disaster aid.)

Many of those conversations reflected the randomness of this disaster, in which some properties were burned to their foundations and others were untouched. Some people had survivors’ guilt; others nursed bitterness. I remember when Juan Ortiz, a rancher, told me that someone with a second home in the area had complained about his own house being spared; the man had hoped to collect the insurance money. Ortiz was devastated over the loss of his home and livelihood. He wished he still had his father’s book collection.

Juan Ortiz displays a photograph of his family’s home in Rociada, New Mexico, taken before the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire destroyed the house, his barns and acres of trees. (Adria Malcolm for ProPublica)

Byard Duncan, an engagement reporter with ProPublica, came out to help in June, about five months after my arrival. We recorded public service announcements and participated in call-in shows on local radio stations, went to church services and set up a folding table at a farmers market in Las Vegas. By then, we knew that the region’s spotty internet access was a barrier to getting people to fill out an online form that we had posted in English and Spanish. We drove over and around the mountains, passing out more than 300 flyers with our contact information at diners, gas stations, grocery stores and post offices.

Byard Duncan, left, and Patrick Lohmann asked locals to share their stories at a farmers market in Las Vegas, New Mexico. (Courtesy of Byard Duncan)

Over those months, I observed the recovery up close. I drove to and from interviews on roads still washed out from the floods that followed the fire. Panicked survivors called me when a small wildfire started in Las Tusas, in an area that had been untouched by the blaze the year before. Like my neighbors, I watched the horizon for storm clouds, wary of the flooding that had become common because the fire-scarred soil couldn’t absorb rainwater. Notices were regularly dropped in my mailbox warning of potential contaminants in the city’s water supply, which had been polluted after the fire.

The many people who generously spoke with us — more than 100 over the course of the year — were vital to our work. The Optic, which has a print circulation of about 3,000, published all our major stories. That’s where most of our sources read them.

Donato Sena, an elderly man who lost his home in the hard-hit village of Rociada, was familiar with my reporting on the fire when I met him. Over the course of several conversations, he told me how grueling life had been in the last year. He and several other survivors had testified in depositions about their losses because they were concerned they would die before they were paid.

Sena had been through four bouts of cancer, which was then in remission. But one day in November, as I was nearing the end of my lease, he collapsed while carrying groceries into his temporary home. The day he died, his wife later told me, he was hopeful he’d be able to move into their new manufactured home on their old property by Christmas.

Maria Luisa Sena sits with a photo of her husband, Donato Sena, in their temporary home. In the photo, Donato Sena stands in front of a replacement mobile home, which the couple bought with their savings while they waited for the federal government to pay for their losses in the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire that destroyed their old home. (Patrick Lohmann/Source New Mexico)

I heard about his death a day later from a volunteer for a group that donated money to survivors struggling to get by. Over the next few days, four friends of his invited me to his memorial service.

I left my notebook in my car when I arrived at a historic church near the Las Vegas plaza to pay my respects alongside more than 100 others. As Sena’s casket was carried to a hearse, I nodded in acknowledgment to those who followed, people I’d met over the past year: his lawyer, volunteers for the aid group, two others who lost their homes, a columnist for the Optic and various local officials. A few days later, Sena’s widow and their daughter graciously invited me into their home for an interview.

After the funeral, I drove back to my apartment to find a chicken roosting on my patio chair. I walked around the block, seeking her owner. Neighbors told me she might’ve belonged to a guy who recently moved away. I posted to a local Facebook group, and within 15 minutes four folks offered to take her in. A man who lived up the street arrived in a pickup truck. We chatted about the fire, the sort of small talk that had become part of practically every conversation I had there. He tucked the chicken under his arm, and I got back to work.

The burn scar viewed from the Hermits Peak summit in May 2023 (Patrick Lohmann/Source New Mexico)

Patrick is still working on the story of the wildfire and its aftermath. Send him tips at PLohmann@SourceNM.com.

by Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico

Chevron Will Pay Record Fines for Oil Spills in California

6 days 14 hours ago

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

Oil giant Chevron has agreed to pay a record-setting $13 million to two California agencies for past oil spills, but some of the company’s spills are ongoing.

The fines, announced Wednesday, come more than three years after an investigation by The Desert Sun and ProPublica found that oil companies are profiting from illegal spills and that oversight of the industry by California’s oil and gas division was lax.

At least one of Chevron’s spills is still running 21 years after it began in a Kern County oilfield, although a state spokesperson said it has been reduced by 98% “from its peak.” The amount spilled from the site, dubbed GS-5, is larger than the Exxon Valdez disaster.

The crude collected from GS-5 generated an estimated $11.6 million in just three years, The Desert Sun and ProPublica found. In fact, rather than stopping potentially deadly inland spills, known as surface expressions, oil companies have routinely tried to contain them with netting or pieces of metal and used more than 100 of them as unpermitted oil production sites in Kern and Santa Barbara counties.

This week’s announcement stopped short of saying GS-5 and other ongoing spills must be stopped, as required under state law. Instead, officials said the settlement “creates a framework for managing the spills with State oversight,” and “Chevron agrees to continue monitoring the site with Department of Conservation oversight.” No specific sites were named.

In follow-up emails and a phone call, spokespeople for the state said the fines cover the first phase of the Cymric spill, in which a river of thick crude flowed down a natural watershed. Chevron for several years denied it posed a risk to health and the environment, and the company fought a $1.6 million fine imposed by state regulators. The penalties also cover dozens of smaller spills that killed or damaged wildlife and habitat.

The new fines, which will be paid to the Department of Conservation and the Department of Fish and Wildlife, are unprecedented for the agencies but are minuscule for Chevron, a multinational that reported $2.3 billion in earnings in the fourth quarter of 2023.

Spills in Chevron’s Cymric oil field had gushed more than 6 million gallons of wastewater and crude as of last June, but the settlement covers only 2 million gallons spilled from unidentified Kern County Chevron operations.

A spokesperson for the Department of Fish and Wildlife said in an email that the fines covered the first phase of the Cymric incident that the agency’s oil spill response teams worked on from June 2019 through April 2020, totaling 1.2 million gallons, about 70% wastewater and 30% oil.

As for the decadeslong GS-5 spill, Department of Conservation spokesperson Jacob Roper said: “As mitigation continues, less oil finds its way to the surface. Mitigation measures include injecting water underground to improve ground stability, sealing subsurface leak paths and removing fluids in shallow areas before they can reach the surface.” (The injected fluid gradually cools hot steam so as to not create more boiling spills.)

Vacuum trucks sucked oil and wastewater out of the GS-5 spill, near McKittrick. GS-5 is one of the largest and longest-running surface spills. (Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun)

At the spill’s peak in 2019, Roper noted, about 2,500 barrels of oil and water came to the surface each day. At the start of 2024, that had fallen to 80, and it has since dropped to 68.

In an email, Chevron North America spokesperson Sean Comey said the settlements “demonstrate our continuing commitment to take action to address issues and prevent similar incidents in the future. Throughout our operations we work collaboratively with government agencies to protect people and the environment and maintain safe and reliable operations.”

He added: “We always strive to meet or exceed our environmental obligations. When we do not achieve that goal, we take responsibility and appropriate action. We are pleased to put this matter behind us in a way that benefits our community so we can continue to focus on providing the affordable, reliable, and ever cleaner energy California needs.”

The California agencies’ announcement received qualified praise from an environmental attorney who monitors the state laws and policies on oil and gas production and spills.

“It’s great to see one of the state’s most prolific polluters fined for its destruction to the environment,” said Hollin Kretzmann, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute. “But it’s outrageous that Chevron earned more than $11 million off selling the oil collected from one surface spill — almost equal to the amount of this historic fine.”

He added: “The Desert Sun-ProPublica investigation that turned up that information was vital, and we need more of that type of scrutiny of oil producers from the state. To protect Californians from oil industry pollution, oil regulators need to step up oversight to minimize the damage this deadly industry does on its way out the door.”

The $5.6 million Chevron will pay the Department of Conservation will be used to plug old, dangerous wells abandoned by other owners without proper cleanup.

“This agreement is a significant demonstration of California’s commitment to transition away from fossil fuels while holding oil companies accountable when they don’t comply with the state’s regulations and environmental protections,” the department’s director, David Shabazian, said. “Every penny collected here will go toward plugging old, orphan wells in order to protect the environment and people of California.”

California’s oil wells could cost $9 billion to plug, according to a 2020 report, and companies have set aside only a fraction of those costs, though the state and federal governments are gradually stepping up funding and requirements.

Conservation staff previously identified 378 wells across six counties to begin working on under the state’s well abandonment program, which permanently seals orphan wells and remediates sites, officials noted in this week’s announcement. Work in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles counties began late last year — thanks to $125 million in state and federal funding to address old and aging oil infrastructure.

California is also eligible for an additional $140 million in federal funding to plug more wells, the news release said, and the Department of Conservation is working to claw back funding from oil companies that “sold off idle, orphan, deserted, or unplugged wells.”

The Department of Fish and Wildlife agreement with Chevron places $6.8 million in the agency’s Environmental Enhancement Fund, which provides grants for projects that acquire habitat or improve habitat quality and ecosystem function. An additional $500,000 will go to the Oiled Wildlife Care Network at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine to maintain facilities in Kern County that care for animals affected by spills and to support regional wildlife response. And $200,000 will be available to respond to future spills.

Officials pledged to tighten regulation of oil company violations, including potential criminal penalties under AB 631, a law that went into effect in January that gives regulators more authority to fine oil companies that cause major spills or other hazards. In 2020, a spokesperson for the state’s oil regulator, the California Geologic Energy Management Division, told The Desert Sun and ProPublica that the agency had issued $191,669 in civil penalties and collected nothing. The then-head of CalGEM pledged more public transparency, including more details on enforcement information. As of Thursday, the agency has issued 13 orders to pay civil penalties in 2024, but it was impossible to determine online if they have been paid.

by Janet Wilson, The Desert Sun

Idaho Legislature Approves $2 Billion for Schools to Repair and Replace Aging Buildings

6 days 23 hours ago

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

School districts across Idaho will soon receive hundreds of millions of dollars to help repair and replace their aging buildings, thanks to a bill that cleared its final hurdle in the Idaho Senate on Thursday.

House Bill 521 will invest $1.5 billion in new funding and redirect $500 million over 10 years for school facilities across the state. But critics say it still won’t be enough to address the years of neglect left from the state’s failure to fund school facilities.

Idaho school districts have for decades struggled to fix or replace their aging, deteriorating schools and build new ones to accommodate the state’s rapid growth. Over the past year, the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica have reported on how Idaho’s restrictive policies and the state’s reluctance to make significant investments in school facilities have led to students learning in schools with failing heating systems, leaking roofs, discolored drinking water and overcrowded classrooms.

Citing the stories, Gov. Brad Little called to make funding for school facilities “priority No. 1” in his State of the State address in January. He proposed putting $2 billion toward school facilities over 10 years, or $200 million per year.

“Together, we delivered,” Little said in a statement on Thursday. “Together, we secured the largest-ever investment in school facilities funding in state history while giving families back more of their hard-earned money with property and income tax relief.”

The bill, which the governor is expected to sign into law, will create a new fund that will allocate money to districts based on average daily attendance. School districts could choose to take the money in a lump sum or annually over 10 years.

Estimates provided to the Statesman and ProPublica last month from the governor’s office show West Ada, the largest district in the state, will receive about $140 million from this fund. The Salmon School District, which has been trying for more than a decade to replace its elementary school and build a new K-8 building in remote Central Idaho, will get about $2.6 million — not nearly enough to construct a new school.

Some legislators raised concerns that the bill doesn’t fully solve the problem, favors urban districts and leaves rural districts without the funding they need. Lawmakers also said the state doesn’t have a complete picture of the scope of the issue, in part because there hasn’t been a statewide facilities assessment in three decades.

“Let’s not pass a billion-dollar bill and then say we fixed facilities at the literal expense of our rural school districts,” said Sen. Carrie Semmelroth, D-Boise.

The bill has been largely supported by education groups and superintendents across the state, though many agree rural areas will still not get the amount they need for new schools and maintenance.

“There are some who seem to believe this fixes the problem,” Moscow Superintendent Shawn Tiegs said in an email. “It doesn’t. It is just the start.”

Under the bill, the Moscow School District will get about $8.4 million from the newly created fund, according to estimates from the governor’s office. Moscow schools have faced issues with overcrowding, leaks, security, and heating and cooling. One of its elementary schools is nearly 100 years old and has a boiler from 1926.

Tiegs said the Legislature should consider prioritizing older schools or poorer districts. Some superintendents believe the Legislature should give a base amount to each district to level the playing field.

A series of supplemental bills introduced Thursday could change how much money school districts get for their facilities. The legislation, known as “trailer bills,” work like amendments by altering bills after they pass. One of the bills, which would still need to be approved by the Legislature, would require that each school district get at least $100,000 and would cap the distributions at $100 million. West Ada is the only district that would be affected by the cap, according to the estimates from the governor’s office. The remaining money would then be redistributed to smaller districts.

Education groups and lawmakers acknowledged the bill that passed Thursday will not eliminate the need for school districts to run bond elections to replace their schools.

“We believe this is an important leap in making these necessary investments in our school facilities,” Quinn Perry from the Idaho School Boards Association said during a legislative hearing this month. “While, again, this is an important investment, it simply will not exclude the reality that most districts will still have to ask their taxpayers for financial support on new builds or even school renovation projects.”

Passing bonds has been difficult for school districts because Idaho is one of two states in the nation that requires two-thirds of voters to support a bond for it to pass. A resolution, which could start the process to lower that threshold, has not yet been debated on the House floor.

The facilities bill that passed Thursday will also add about $25 million a year and redirect about $50 million a year to a fund that school districts can use to pay off their bonds and levies. School districts with remaining funds can use it for facilities projects.

The bill also included a number of concessions to gain support in the heavily conservative Legislature. It will lower the state’s income tax rate and eliminate the August election date, one of the three remaining dates school districts can run bonds and levy elections. Republican leaders say that given the new money, there will be less need for districts to ask their communities for funding. The bill will also phase out a program that used a formula based on income and market values to give some districts money to lower their debts from school bonds.

Some superintendents have also raised concerns because the bill will require school districts on a four-day week that want to receive the funding to meet a minimum number of instructional days. Dozens of Idaho districts have moved to four-day weeks to save money or attract educators, and some districts worry these new guidelines could disrupt their schedules. But bills introduced Thursday could repeal the provision or delay its implementation for a year, giving school districts more time to plan.

Paul Anselmo, the superintendent of the Kamiah School District, a small, rural district in North Idaho, said even with this bill, his district likely won’t get enough to make lasting improvements in its schools. Kamiah will receive about $1.5 million from the newly created fund. Kamiah schools have faced issues with security, leaks, heating and cooling, exposed wiring and holes in the walls.

“While we appreciate the additional funds coming into our district, the amount Kamiah would receive would allow us to continue to put ‘band aids’ on our facility issues,” Anselmo said in an email. “A small district could have severe needs and this funding would not allow them to fully address their needs.”

Asia Fields contributed reporting.

by Becca Savransky, Idaho Statesman

A Marijuana Boom Led Her to Oklahoma. Then Anti-Drug Agents Seized Her Money and Raided Her Home.

1 week ago

This article was produced for ProPublica in partnership with The Frontier. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. Additional funding for this story was provided by the Pulitzer Center.

Qiu He remembers sitting handcuffed on her front porch, her two small children huddled next to her, as state anti-drug agents carrying semi-automatic rifles trooped in and out of her house.

Serving a search warrant, the agents had forced open the front door and arrested her after she allegedly resisted them, according to an affidavit. During the raid last April, agents said they found ledgers, bags of marijuana, a loaded .380-caliber pistol and other evidence they collected as part of an investigation alleging that she is a central figure in an illegal scheme involving at least 23 marijuana operations in central Oklahoma.

She spent the night in jail. Almost a year later, authorities have still not charged her with a crime. But a few days after her arrest, a judge signed an order freezing her bank accounts and agents seized almost a million dollars from the accounts as suspected criminal proceeds. She is fighting the state’s action to confiscate the money, saying she did nothing illegal.

The ledgers, He said, were records for her legitimate businesses. Her biggest tenants are marijuana businesses, which deal mostly in cash, as does the clientele of her consulting firm catering to Chinese immigrants. The gun, she said, was legally purchased by her husband.

“At this point, I don’t love Oklahoma,” said He, who also uses the first name Tina. “I don’t feel safe here. I don’t feel secure here.”

On a recent sunny Sunday afternoon, she was at the bubble tea shop she owns in Edmond, the upscale suburb of Oklahoma City where she lives. The stylishly dressed 39-year-old wore a fuzzy black baseball cap over her short, burgundy-dyed hair. She was joined by a friend, another entrepreneur in the marijuana business, who asked to be identified only as Sharon, the English name she uses.

The eatery, called Oklaboba, is a cheerful, brightly lit space, and business was brisk. But the conversation at the women’s table was somber. Sharon mentioned the murder in January of an Asian friend: Robbers invaded his marijuana farm in rural Okfuskee County and shot him in the neck. There have been no arrests.

The two women said many Asian immigrants they know invested their life savings in Oklahoma’s marijuana boom only to see their licenses revoked, their crop destroyed and their assets seized when authorities accuse them of operating illegally. They said anti-Asian bias plays a role in the state’s crackdown on marijuana growers and has caused people who are trying to do business legally to lose everything.

Since the number of licensed marijuana farms peaked at more than 9,400 in December 2021, the Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority and the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control have taken a more aggressive approach toward license compliance.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond also formed his office’s own organized crime task force that regularly conducts raids on alleged illegal operations.

“We are sending a clear message to Mexican drug cartels, Chinese crime syndicates and all others who are endangering public safety through these heinous operations,” Drummond said. “And that message is to get the hell out of Oklahoma.”

Jeremiah Ross, an Oklahoma City attorney who worked with He, said he has represented dozens of Asian clients accused of breaking marijuana laws over the past few years. Ross said he sees a distinct anti-Asian bias in marijuana licensing and law enforcement.

“The white folks and the locals aren’t having any problems with their [license] renewals,” Ross said. “They’re not having armed guards show up at their grow facility and chop all their plants down.”

Mark Woodward, spokesperson for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, rejected such allegations. He said the agency “has identified and shut down illegal grows, as well as made arrests on illegal farms tied to organized crime from China, Mexico, Russia, Bulgaria, Armenia and the Italian mob over the last three years, as well as numerous American-owned operations.”

Woodward said he did not have readily available information on He’s case and why she has not been charged.

Porsha Riley, spokesperson for the Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority, said the agency is committed to fairness and equity for all license holders.

“We want to assure the public and the medical marijuana industry that we do not discriminate against any licensee,” Riley said. “Our enforcement and compliance efforts are conducted impartially, without bias or prejudice. We remain dedicated to upholding these principles and ensuring a level playing field for all.”

Sharon, who asked that her full name be withheld because she fears retaliation, said she no longer trusts the state to regulate her marijuana business fairly.

“Tell me it’s not racism, because Asians are absolutely feeling it,” Sharon said. Referring to the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, she said, “A lot of people are afraid to poke the bear.”

He’s encounters with law enforcement remind her of the authoritarian regime in her native land, which she left seeking freedom, she said.

“In China, there is one voice and you are not allowed to speak,” she said. “Oklahoma is worse than China.”

Her defiance is atypical in a community that tends to avoid public conflict — and criticism of the Chinese government. ProPublica and The Frontier reported last week that Chinese organized crime has come to dominate the illicit marijuana market in Oklahoma and across the U.S., and that the criminal networks have alleged connections to the Chinese state. He’s story offers a view from inside an immigrant community that she says feels besieged on multiple fronts.

She said she studied business administration and management at Renmin University in Beijing and came to the United States in 2010. In 2020, after years of making good money in commercial real estate development in New York, the economic and cultural disruption of the pandemic made her think it was time for a change, she said.

At the time, she lived in Flushing, a large Chinese immigrant enclave. She was “a city girl” who couldn’t find Oklahoma on the map, she said. But she liked country music and thought a slower-paced life on the plains would let her spend more time with her kids.

“I was thinking I wanted to restart my life,” she said. “So I wanted to go out to see what’s going on.”

She arrived at the peak of Oklahoma’s marijuana boom: a get-rich-quick frenzy of investors, workers, gangsters and money converging from across the country and as far away as China. At first, she said, she wanted to develop ventures serving the burgeoning Chinese population. She opened Oklaboba and bought rental properties in Oklahoma City. Like many other newcomers, she shuttled back and forth with her children to New York, where her husband remained.

She said she got involved in marijuana after helping the owner of a farm who she says had been taken advantage of by a law firm operating a “straw owner” scheme. The 2018 medical marijuana law requires marijuana farms to be 75% owned by residents who have lived in the state at least two years. But some attorneys in the state have paid longtime residents to pose as majority owners to get licenses and buy property. With He’s help, the man was able to get full ownership of the business in his own name and get out from under the straw owner arrangement, she said.

He said she established a consulting firm for investors in the cannabis industry and accumulated hundreds of Chinese clients. Records show she was the registered agent for numerous marijuana and real estate holding companies, and she owned the properties on which many of those companies were located.

She says it was all legitimate. But she soon found herself in the crosshairs of law enforcement. The investigation of a suspected trafficking ring led state anti-drug agents to a New York commercial real estate developer who was an associate of He, court records show. Authorities allege that she was his business partner in marijuana-related activity in Oklahoma, but she said it was only a buyer-seller relationship, as she had bought businesses with active marijuana licenses from him.

Investigators came to suspect that the developer and He were “heavily involved” in the illicit marijuana trade and orchestrating straw owner schemes, court records say. Agents busted a series of illegal grows allegedly linked to He and the developer. When agents raided two sites one morning last April and a tenant called He, she rushed to the property to confront them and demand a search warrant, court records say. What happened next, He said, felt like retaliation for challenging the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.

That evening, a well-armed team of agents showed up at her house with another search warrant. The warrant shows it was requested by agents after the confrontation with He at her business and was signed by a judge only minutes before the raid on her house that night.

The raid left her children terrified, her marriage under strain and her house in shambles, she said.

“My house was destroyed,” she said. “I couldn’t do anything. The jail, they were treating me like a criminal.”

Although He said the pistol that agents found was legally owned by her husband, not her, she said she has taken firearms courses and owns a gun for protection in an increasingly dangerous business.

Ross said when he heard that He’s house was being searched, he was surprised. She was a small business owner, someone who helped the Chinese community in Oklahoma City, the mom of two young boys, not some mobster, Ross said.

It was already night when Ross arrived at He’s house to see if she needed help. She and the children were still sitting on the porch as agents continued their search. Ross was denied entry by law enforcement.

The agents “snatched her up, left her kids there, took her to jail and didn’t release her until the following morning. And they never filed a single charge,” Ross said. “Why in God’s name are they going after her? This is out of control.”

Despite her ordeal, He considers herself lucky because other Chinese immigrants don’t have the financial means or the language skills to fight back. Marijuana in Oklahoma has become a “lose-lose” scenario thanks to what she called a byzantine system choked with costly compliance requirements and arbitrary decisions.

“You set up a game and didn’t know how to play it,” she said. “And yet they call me the super game-player.”

Many Chinese investors have lost faith in the Oklahoma authorities, fearing they will be the next target, she said. Once her legal problems are resolved, she wants to go somewhere else. Maybe Maryland, which just legalized recreational marijuana. Maybe it’s time to think big, she said: a marijuana Starbucks, a marijuana Uber.

At the same time, she’s not sure it’s worth it.

“I don’t want to do this business anymore,” she said. “I don’t want the pressure.”

by Clifton Adcock and Garrett Yalch, The Frontier, and Sebastian Rotella and Kirsten Berg, ProPublica

A Diplomat’s Visits to Oklahoma Highlight Contacts Between Chinese Officials and Community Leaders Accused of Crimes

1 week ago

This article was produced for ProPublica in partnership with The Frontier. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. Additional funding for this story was provided by the Pulitzer Center.

The photos look like a routine encounter between a senior Chinese diplomat and immigrants in the American heartland: dutiful smiles, casual clothes, a teapot on a table, Chinese and U.S. flags on the wall.

But behind the images, there is a potentially concerning story. During two trips to Oklahoma, Consul General Zhu Di of the Chinese embassy visited a cultural association that has been a target of investigations into Chinese mafias that dominate the state’s billion-dollar marijuana industry. And the community leaders posing with him in the photos? A number of them have pleaded guilty or been prosecuted or investigated for drug-related crimes, according to court documents, public records, photos and social media posts.

“He’s meeting with known criminals,” said Donnie Anderson, the director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control, in an interview.

There is no indication of wrongdoing by the consul general, who is one of China’s top diplomats in the United States. Still, the encounters in Oklahoma reflect a pattern of contacts around the world between China’s authoritarian government and diaspora leaders linked to criminal activity — a subject of increasing concern among Western national security officials, human rights groups and Chinese dissidents.

U.S. and foreign national security officials have alleged that the Chinese state maintains a tacit alliance with Chinese organized crime in the U.S. and across the world. Mobsters overtly support pro-Beijing causes and covertly provide services overseas: engaging in political influence work, moving illicit funds offshore for the Chinese elite and helping persecute dissidents, according to Western officials, court cases and human rights groups. Chinese officials reciprocate by tolerating and sometimes supporting their illicit activities, according to those sources.

And this alleged state-mafia partnership has used influential Chinese cultural organizations in foreign countries to project power, according to Western officials. As ProPublica has reported, the leaders of diaspora associations who interact with Chinese and local governments in Europe and elsewhere include accused organized crime figures.

In the United States, Chinese criminal networks have expanded their wealth and influence by taking over much of the nation’s illicit marijuana trade, ProPublica reported last week.

It was in that context that the consul general traveled to Oklahoma.

In November 2022, a Chinese gunman killed four fellow immigrants and wounded another at an illegal marijuana farm in Oklahoma. The consul general hurried to Oklahoma City to discuss the murders with representatives of the community and offer help to relatives of the victims, according to Chinese officials, a participant in a meeting and media reports and photos. Zhu returned for another visit in June, photos and media reports show.

During both trips, meetings took place at the local branch of the American Fujian Association on Classen Boulevard, which in 2020 was the scene of a violent clash that left a convicted criminal with a gunshot wound and two others facing trial. Two years after that shooting, one of the accused assailants died and the other was wounded in the quadruple murder at their marijuana farm. Law enforcement agencies have also investigated the association’s headquarters, a ground-floor suite in a minimall, as a suspected illegal casino and a hub of other illicit activity, according to court records and senior officials.

(Li Zhaoyin via SinoVision, annotations by ProPublica)

During a second visit in June 2023, shown below, the diplomat met with some of the same people, as well as Chuan Min Zhang (circled), who had pleaded guilty to drug-related offenses.

(Li Zhaoyin via SinoVision, annotation by ProPublica)

Although the consul general did not respond to questions addressed to him for this article, officials at the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., said he simply did his duty by going to Oklahoma in response to the deaths of Chinese nationals. While declining to discuss the visits, a consular official said in an interview that the embassy was not aware of the crimes linked to the association and the people who met with Zhu.

In a written statement sent by email, the embassy’s spokesperson, Liu Pengyu, said Chinese officials travel to different states “to understand the living conditions and development of overseas Chinese in the United States, help them better observe the laws and regulations of their country of residence, and encourage them to actively serve and integrate into local communities so as to play a positive role in promoting friendship between the peoples of China and the U.S.”

But U.S. law enforcement experts see a troubling global pattern in ongoing relationships between Chinese government officials and community leaders with criminal ties. Because Chinese officials closely monitor the diaspora, it’s very likely they know about such ties, the experts said.

“These diaspora associations are tools of the Chinese state,” said Donald Im, a former senior official at the Drug Enforcement Administration. “The presence of criminal elements in the leadership suggests an alliance, directly or indirectly, between the Chinese state and organized crime.”

Freedom House, a human rights organization, summed up China’s global reach in a report in 2021, describing a “framework of influence that encompasses cultural associations, diaspora groups, and in some cases, organized crime networks.”

The activities of the 14K triad, one of the Chinese criminal groups that are the dominant money launderers for Latin American drug lords and the Chinese Communist Party elite, highlight another suspected connection to the Chinese state, current and former law enforcement officials say.

The 14K has expanded its portfolio to play a command role over marijuana trafficking networks in Oklahoma and other states, according to Anderson, Im and other current and former officials. The Treasury Department has accused a Macao boss of the 14K of being prominent in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference of the Chinese Communist Party and advancing China’s foreign influence through business ventures and Chinese cultural groups in Asia and the Pacific.

And U.S. federal agents are investigating cases in which Chinese provincial officials allegedly work with criminal groups to get drug money that they then use to finance infrastructure projects in China or abroad in the Belt and Road Initiative, the international public works program that has expanded China’s global might, according to current and former U.S. officials.

“All these provinces are competing with each other and using criminal networks and triads to find revenue for government projects,” Im said. “The marijuana industry in the U.S. is benefiting regional governors and provinces in China. Drug money is like an ad hoc bank for Chinese economic projects and policies.”

Oklahoma authorities admit that it is hard for them to get a grip on the influx of criminal groups, let alone trace a trail back to the Chinese state. Monitoring the activities of foreign diplomats, officials and spies is the jurisdiction of federal agencies working in the secretive realm of counterintelligence.

Nevertheless, state and federal agents have detected interactions between their suspects and Chinese government officials using surveillance, open sources, and photos and communications found in electronic devices, Anderson and other officials said. And the brazen movement of large amounts of money between China and the players in the illicit marijuana trade shows that Chinese officials are either aware or involved, the officials said.

“Our investigations indicate that there are Chinese officials pulling the strings, making money off of and involved in the illegal marijuana industry in Oklahoma,” Anderson said. “Money is invested here and it’s from China, to set up organizations. These are transnational organizations. And money is going back to China.”

Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said during a committee hearing last year that the Chinese government seems “fully aware” of marijuana-related organized crime activity in the United States, but it is “looking away … to increase a negative influence on Americans.”

The Chinese embassy spokesperson called such accusations “groundless,” “irresponsible speculation” and “slander.”

“We urge relevant sides to respect facts, stop fabricating lies, stop discrediting and smearing the Chinese government and diplomatic officials, and stop fomenting and spreading anti-China narratives,” Liu said.

Checkered Pasts

Many owners and workers at Oklahoma marijuana farms are Fujianese immigrants who arrived in recent years from other U.S. states, particularly New York, according to law enforcement officials and Chinese American leaders.

Some are law-abiding. Others are gunslinging gangsters. And still others operate in a gray area created by the national trend toward decriminalization, which has reduced risks and increased rewards associated with black-market marijuana.

ProPublica and The Frontier have identified over a dozen national leaders of Fujianese associations from the East Coast involved in Oklahoma’s marijuana boom. A number of these leaders, who include U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents, have suspected or confirmed links to illegal activity. Yet they interact with Chinese diplomats, Communist Party leaders and even Chinese security officials, according to photos, media reports and interviews. Some also mix with U.S. politicians.

A case in point: an accused drug trafficker named Yunda Chen, known as “Big Boss Yunda,” who traveled regularly between his home in Atlanta and his marijuana farms in Oklahoma, according to court records.

Using vehicle surveillance and a drone, state anti-drug agents followed couriers working for Chen as they transported bales of marijuana and cash shipments, some in Oklahoma and others that were destined for New York, Tennessee and other states in the national black market, court records say. The agents recruited an undercover informant — a local resident whom Chen paid $2,500 and a pound of dope a month to appear on registration documents and medical marijuana licenses as majority owner of his farms, court records say. FBI translators helped translate intercepted phone calls in which Chen used code words to set up deals, talked to suspects linked to alleged trafficking and money laundering in other states, and discussed a fight among more than 20 combatants over a debt in New York, court records say.

Authorities arrested Chen in Florida in December 2022 and charged him and five others in a trafficking conspiracy. Agents raided five farms in Oklahoma and seized nearly 50,000 marijuana plants and several guns, court documents say. They also found workers living in “poor and unsafe” conditions, said Mark Woodward, spokesperson for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.

Last June, prosecutors hit Chen with an additional charge of witness intimidation after he sent a text message warning an accused accomplice “not to talk about the things that don’t concern you” in upcoming testimony, court records say. (Chen is awaiting trial and has not yet entered pleas because defense lawyers requested delays of arraignments. He and his lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.)

The aid of the FBI and the rare use of wiretaps in a state case reflect its significance. As far as investigators were concerned, Chen was a major trafficker.

“He’s as big a player as any we’ve touched,” Woodward said. “He was running a more organized system than many we have dealt with — large scale, more hierarchy.”

In the simultaneously tightknit and far-flung subculture of Fujianese immigrants, though, Chen is a well-connected leader.

He lives in a large house on several acres bordering a country club in suburban Atlanta and owns a chain of restaurants and a catering business, public records show. (In 2012, court records show, he agreed to pay $225,000 in back wages to settle a Labor Department lawsuit accusing him of wage theft from employees who endured conditions that a federal investigator described as “deplorable.” Chen denied wrongdoing and disputed some of the findings in the settlement.)

While serving as executive vice chair of the American Lianjiang Association, which represents people from a coastal district of Fujian, Chen has joined Chinese diplomats and Communist Party officials at U.S. events, according to media reports and photos posted on social media.

Among those events: In 2017, photos and media reports show he spoke at a reception in Atlanta that was attended by a Chinese consul general who was based in Houston. In 2019, he participated with prominent Chinese Communist Party members in a gala and symposium held by his association in New York to “conscientiously study” President Xi Jinping’s campaign for the “reunification” of China and Taiwan — a perennial flashpoint in military tensions with the United States.

Chen is also active in U.S. politics. He went to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s inauguration ceremony in Atlanta in 2019 and donated $6,600 to the governor’s general election campaign, according to public records, photos and social media posts. He has contributed thousands to other local politicians and socialized with them, according to public records and media reports. He received an award from a minority business association in 2019. (A spokesperson for the Kemp campaign declined to comment.)

As of last year, Yunda Chen remained a “specially appointed policy consultant” of the Lianjiang association, according to a Chinese media report.

Like the Big Boss in Georgia, Virginia-based businessman Bi Chao Chen (no relation to Yunda) has interacted with Chinese diplomats, Fujian provincial officials and even representatives of the Ministry of Public Security — the law enforcement juggernaut that oversees China’s police forces — media reports and photos show.

In 2018, he was among leaders who met with a Ministry of Public Security delegation that visited New York, according to a news report that gave few details about the meeting. Photos and media reports also show him at a 2019 dinner with leaders of a powerful organization that is part of the United Front, the influence and intelligence wing of the Chinese Communist Party.

U.S. prosecutors alleged last year that officials of the United Front worked with the public security ministry to set up an illegal Chinese police station in a Fujianese association in New York to monitor and intimidate U.S. dissidents, according to a federal criminal complaint and statements by federal officials. It was one of dozens of such stations directed by Chinese security forces and operating in diaspora associations around the world. The two Chinese-American defendants in the New York case have pleaded not guilty, and the Chinese government has denied any illegal activity on the part of the overseas police stations.

Bi Chao Chen, who appears in a photo with a defendant in the federal case, has had his own run-ins with the law.

In 2015, he was convicted of assault and battery after he menaced a man with a knife, forced him to the ground and stole $5,000 from him in Hampton, Virginia, court records show. He also has multiple convictions in connection to a wildlife poaching operation he led and an additional arrest for assault and battery in which he was not charged, court records show.

In Oklahoma, he has had ties to at least two marijuana ventures, public records show. His name appears on a state marijuana license, limited liability corporation documents and the front gate of a vast expanse of greenhouses and indoor cultivation structures west of Tulsa whose registered agent was a lawyer now facing trial for hatching fraudulent ownership schemes, court records show. Another person who has a marijuana license registered at the same location was involved in a violent dispute in 2021 that ended in an assailant shooting at her with a pistol, court documents say.

In 2022, DEA agents searched the second location, located on the grounds of a former horse racing track, in an investigation into money laundering and marijuana trafficking in Oklahoma and Colorado that has resulted in three guilty pleas, according to court records, which also show that another defendant awaits trial. Chen has had a limited liability corporation registered at the address of the farm.

Authorities have not charged Bi Chao Chen in those cases. He and a lawyer did not respond to email and phone requests for comment.

Chinese officials are likely aware of the questionable backgrounds of these and other leaders because Chinese intelligence agencies systematically gather granular information on overseas communities, according to Western officials, academic reports, human rights groups and Chinese dissidents.

Many immigrants from Fujian, a coastal province with a history of organized crime and official corruption, come from modest backgrounds and entered the U.S. illegally, said Yaqiu Wang, research director for China, Hong Kong and Taiwan at Freedom House. Because they often visit family or do business in China, they feel pressure to develop good relationships with Chinese officials, she said.

“The CCP has leverage over them,” Wang said. “If you want to go back to China, if you need a passport or you want to clean up a criminal record in China, you need to demonstrate loyalty.”

And if leaders show loyalty, Chinese officials are increasingly willing to engage with them — even those who are organized crime figures, experts said.

“As the Chinese government has been expanding its power across the world, the organized crime connections with the state have grown,” a former national security official said. “They have gotten much closer. Chinese government influence has expanded. There is a lot of incentive to work together.”

The Chinese embassy did not respond to questions about specific cases. In an interview, a Chinese consular official acknowledged that Chinese officials have regular contact with U.S. diaspora associations. But the official rejected the idea that the Chinese government has detailed knowledge about community leaders and works with them even if they are involved in criminal activity.

“We have five million Chinese nationals living in the USA,” said the consular official, who requested anonymity because they are not the official spokesperson. “We just have some connection with different organizations, regardless of specific persons. … We couldn’t be able to know everybody.”

In Oklahoma City, the associations themselves have kept law enforcement busy.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, Anderson and other officials told ProPublica and The Frontier that members of Fujianese associations are targets of investigations into organized crime. Leaders of associations in Oklahoma City did not respond to requests for comment.

During a raid last year on the Fuzhou Chamber of Commerce, police busted an illegal casino, arrested three suspects and seized drugs and $79,000 in cash from 18 people, including two who had criminal convictions and several involved in the marijuana industry, according to court documents and public records. Surveillance had detected numerous cars in the parking lot that were connected to narcotics investigations, court records say. (Of the three arrested, one was charged and has pleaded not guilty, another was extradited to Colorado on a warrant in a marijuana cultivation case, and the third has not been charged.)

A block away on Classen Boulevard at the American Fujian Association, city inspectors found card tables, video slot machines and other signs of an illegal casino in 2020, court records show. The police vice squad has investigated alleged gambling in the ground-floor suite, according to court testimony and public records. No charges have been filed in that case. Leaders of the organization did not respond to requests for comment.

Two years after the shooting in 2020 at the association, the two accused assailants became victims in the quadruple murder at the marijuana farm in Kingfisher County. As a result, investigators revisited the 2020 shooting looking for links to organized crime and the farm massacre, and they learned that the killer and some of his victims had spent time at the association.

Despite the troubles of the American Fujian Association, Consul General Zhu chose to meet there with community leaders days after the quadruple murder, according to photos, media reports and a participant in the meeting at the association. During that visit in November 2022, the diplomat talked to relatives of the victims about funeral arrangements and the transport of one of the bodies to New York, according to a media report and a participant at the meeting

Those present included prominent Fujianese figures from New York who have invested in Oklahoma’s marijuana boom, media reports and photos show. One of them was Pan Muyong, a veteran national leader of several groups.

Pan Muyong, circled, at the America Changle Association in Manhattan, where U.S. prosecutors allege an illegal Chinese police station was helping monitor and intimidate dissidents. The blue sign on the left says Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station. (Louis Zhao/YouTube)

“We are deeply anxious and uneasy,” Pan told the visitors from the embassy, according to a report by SinoVision, a Chinese-language media outlet. “We Chinese operate farms and grow marijuana with the licenses approved by the local government and within the scope of the law, not illegally as reported by the media.”

Pan has been an executive of the America Changle Association in New York, according to media reports and photos. Last year, federal prosecutors charged two other leaders of that association with operating the illegal Chinese police station in Manhattan.

Photos and media reports place Pan with the defendants during the period of time when, according to the federal criminal complaint, they allegedly helped Chinese security forces monitor dissidents in the United States. A video shows Pan giving a speech in the association offices that housed the allegedly illegal police station — with a sign about the station visible on a wall.

Pan interacts regularly with Chinese diplomats and other officials, according to photos and media reports. Last year, he and other pro-Beijing leaders held signs as they protested the visit of Taiwan’s president to New York, video and media reports show. Pan and other Oklahoma-connected leaders are also active in New York politics, attending campaign events and making donations, according to photos, media reports and campaign records.

Pan has not been charged with a crime. He did not respond to emails and declined a telephone request for comment.

But four people who posed for photos with him and the consul in Oklahoma City have pleaded guilty or been charged or investigated for offenses including drug trafficking, illegal firearms possession and obstructing officers, court records show.

Ling Chen, for example, pleaded guilty last June to maintaining a place for selling drugs in a case in which authorities confiscated $42,000 from her and two other defendants, court records show. Chuan Min Zhang pleaded guilty in 2021 to possession of cocaine and acquiring drug proceeds, a felony that resulted in the forfeiture of $32,000, court records show. Ke Xiang Chen has pleaded not guilty and awaits trial after an arrest last October for alleged possession of ketamine and ecstasy and acquiring drug proceeds, court records show.

None of the three responded to requests for comment in emails, by phone and through lawyers.

The fourth, Qiu He, was arrested last April in the investigation of an alleged network that set up illegal marijuana farms, court records show. She has not been charged with a crime and denied any wrongdoing in an interview with ProPublica and The Frontier. She is fighting to recover almost a million dollars seized by anti-drug agents.

He, who had a grandparent from Fujian, said members of the community asked her to attend the 2022 meeting with the consul general to translate Mandarin for people who only spoke a Fujianese dialect. But she said she knows little about the association and has not returned.

In addition to He, three other people in the photos with the consul general have surfaced in investigations of fraudulent owner schemes for marijuana farms. Although they have not been charged with crimes in relation to those investigations, Ling Chen, Jun Can Zhang and Weixing Feng have jointly owned marijuana farms with people who are being prosecuted or investigated for serving as paid straw owners for dozens of growing operations, court documents and public records show. They did not respond to requests for comment.

Ling Chen, Ke Xiang Chen and Junli Zhang also managed or had an ownership interest in Lucky Zhang’s, a restaurant and nightclub near the Fujianese association that was outfitted with high-tech lighting and individual karaoke rooms, court documents and public records show. Detectives zeroed in on the club as a suspected site of human trafficking after they learned that young Asian women living at a house were being transported regularly to Lucky Zhang’s and spending the night there, court documents say. Police raided the club on Nov. 5, 2022, and again on Feb. 15, 2023, making arrests and seizing drugs and cash, according to court documents, interviews and social media posts.

The November raid resulted in the prosecution in which the manager, Ling Chen, pleaded guilty, court records show. Another defendant arrested at the club pleaded not guilty and awaits trial on charges of acquiring drug proceeds and possession of ketamine with intent to distribute, according to court records.

Junli Zhang did not respond to email and phone requests for comment. Zhang was also the chair of the association on Classen Boulevard during both of the consul general’s visits, according to Chinese media reports.

Last June, the consul general returned to Classen Boulevard for the second visit. Zhu’s stated goal was to gain “an in-depth understanding of the production, life and work conditions of the farms run by overseas Chinese in Oklahoma,” according to Chinese-language media reports. He listened to “a work report” from the association’s chair, one article said.

“Overseas Chinese will always be members of the big family of the Chinese nation,” the diplomat said, according to the media report. “No matter where you go, the eyes of the motherland are never far away and are always watching and caring about you.”

Correction

March 22, 2024: This story originally misstated what political entity a leader of the 14K triad was said to be an important member of. The Treasury Department alleges that he is prominent in a subentity of the Chinese Communist Party called the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, not in the larger party.

by Sebastian Rotella and Kirsten Berg, ProPublica, and Garrett Yalch and Clifton Adcock, The Frontier

Documents Show Internal Clash Before U.S. Officials Pushed to Weaken Toddler Formula Rules

1 week 1 day ago

Over the past decade, countries around the world have sought to limit the advertising of “toddler formula,” a powdered drink that often promises to improve children’s brains, immunity and eyesight.

Public health experts and advocates have backed the proposed restrictions, saying that the marketing of toddler milk can mislead parents about its health benefits and even convince some to choose formula over breastfeeding. The concerns echo those made about infant formula marketing, which many countries have banned for years.

This story works best on ProPublica's website.

Industry sales, however, have not only persisted but boomed — with the help of a powerful ally: the United States government. As ProPublica reported this week, federal trade agencies have worked in tandem with formula companies to fight restrictions on formula marketing in international forums while also pressuring individual countries to water down or strike their own laws.

While these battles typically play out behind the scenes, ProPublica obtained thousands of pages of government records that provide a rare window into one of the more consequential campaigns of recent years. It happened during the Obama administration in 2016, as member nations of the World Health Organization (known collectively as the World Health Assembly) considered a resolution encouraging limits on the marketing and promotion of foods aimed at infants and young children, including toddler formula.

Concerned that the measure would inspire new laws against formula marketing, the industry spent millions lobbying various U.S. agencies to intervene.

Documents obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request show a stark pattern: representatives of U.S. trade agencies aggressively sought to weaken the WHO resolution while officials from the health agencies scrambled to defend the measure. One Microsoft Word document cataloged dozens of comments and objections.

This visualization captures four of the divisions between the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which advises the president on trade, and federal health entities such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Explore the full visualization on ProPublica's website.

by Lucas Waldron and Heather Vogell

The U.S. Government Defended the Overseas Business Interests of Baby Formula Makers. Kids Paid the Price.

1 week 1 day ago

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LOPBURI, Thailand — When Gustun Aunlamai arrived at school at age 4, he was so overweight that his teacher worried he’d have trouble breathing during naptime. His arms and legs were thick. His mouth peeked out from two ballooning cheeks. He moved slowly.

Throughout his toddler years, Gustun had regularly asked his parents to refill his bottle with his favorite “milk” — a type of formula made especially for kids his age. And they were happy to oblige. Sumet Aunlamai and Jintana Suksiri, who lived in a rural province north of Bangkok, had carefully chosen the brand.

Like other Thai parents, they’d been bombarded by formula advertising on television, online and in grocery stores, where a rainbow of boxes and canisters of powdered toddler milk featured teddy bears in graduation caps and giveaways like toys or diapers. It cost far more than cow’s milk but promised to make Gustun stronger and smarter.

What Jintana didn’t know, as Gustun chugged the formula and his weight neared 70 pounds, was that her son’s choice drink had sparked an international feud.

First image: Gustun Aunlamai and his mother, Jintana Suksiri, at home. Second image: Gustun as a toddler.

In 2017, Thai health experts tried to stop aggressive advertising for all formula — including that made for toddlers. Officials feared company promotions could mislead parents and even persuade mothers to forgo breastfeeding, depriving their children of the vital health benefits that come with it. At the time, Thailand’s breastfeeding rate was already among the lowest in the world.

But the $47 billion formula industry fought back, enlisting the help of a rich and powerful ally: the United States government.

Over 15 months, U.S. trade officials worked closely with formula makers to wage a diplomatic and political pressure campaign to weaken Thailand’s proposed ban on formula marketing, a ProPublica investigation found.

U.S. officials delivered a letter to Bangkok asking pointed questions, including whether the legislation was “more trade restrictive than necessary.” They also lodged criticisms in a bilateral trade meeting with Thai authorities and on the floor of the World Trade Organization, where such complaints can lead to costly legal battles.

Thai officials argued the new regulation would protect mothers and babies. In the end, though, the Thai government backed down. It banned advertising for infant formula but allowed companies to market formula for toddlers like Gustun — one of the industry’s most profitable and dubious products. The final law also slashed penalties for violators.

“Our law is really weak and enforcement is really weak,” said Dr. Siriwat Tiptaradol, who championed the proposed ban as a former adviser to Thailand’s health minister, in an interview in Bangkok. “I was upset and disappointed.”

Dr. Siriwat Tiptaradol, a former adviser to Thailand’s health minister, in Nonthaburi, Thailand

The U.S. endeavor in Thailand was part of a decadeslong, global effort to protect the United States’ significant formula production and export business. ProPublica reviewed thousands of pages of emails and memos by U.S. officials, letters to foreign ministries, correspondence from industry groups and academic research. We also interviewed health experts and government leaders in nearly two dozen countries, including former U.S. officials.

Together, the reporting shows the U.S. government repeatedly used its muscle to advance the interests of multinational baby formula companies, such as Mead Johnson and Abbott, while thwarting the efforts of Thailand and other developing countries to safeguard the health of their youngest children.

Just last March, at a meeting in Dusseldorf, Germany, U.S. officials opposed a reference to formula advertising bans in a new international food standard for toddler milk. The move came after industry lobbying.

At the center of many efforts was the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which advises the president on trade policy. Emails show its staff in regular contact with formula makers and their industry groups through meetings, calls and position papers — which the industry used to hammer its objections to regulations around the world. “Mead Johnson and other infant formula producers have been very vocal, expressing concerns to the Thai and U.S. governments about what they feel is the imminent passage of this measure,” U.S. officials wrote in 2016 as Thailand considered its formula marketing ban.

Documents Show Internal Clash Before U.S. Officials Pushed to Weaken Toddler Formula Rules

Explore the interactive story here.

Officials with the USTR and other trade-focused agencies, including those within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, then echoed those positions in communications with other countries or in international forums like the WTO, the documents showed.

“The U.S. is highly influential,” said Dr. Robert Boyle, a doctor at Imperial College London who has researched international formula use.

In many places, the lobbying appeared to succeed. Hong Kong, for example, watered down some of its formula regulations after objections from U.S. trade officials, who said in a draft letter that the rules “could result in significant commercial loss for U.S. companies.” And a proposal in Indonesia stalled after questions from the U.S. at the WTO.

Notably, such advocacy has not only hindered local attempts to stop formula marketing that critics say is misleading or even predatory, but it has also undermined the work of U.S. foreign aid and health officials, who have long supported breastfeeding across the globe. They call it “one of the highest returns on investment of any development activity” because of its well-documented benefits for babies’ health and cognitive growth.

“I think it is shocking,” said Jane Badham, an independent nutrition consultant and expert in child feeding who works internationally. “One doesn’t realize how much this kind of interference is happening.”

The meddling broke into public view in 2018, when officials from the Trump administration were accused of threatening to withhold military aid from Ecuador if the country didn’t drop its proposed resolution in support of breastfeeding at the World Health Organization; the U.S. ambassador later denied making threats. But ProPublica’s investigation found that the scope of the interference far exceeded that incident and continues today under the Biden administration. In fact, Ecuador and Thailand were just two stops on a worldwide crusade against regulation that has spanned Republican and Democratic presidential administrations and touched more than a dozen countries, including South Africa, Guatemala and Kenya, as well as Southeast Asian nations such as the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam.

The U.S. Has Waged a Global Campaign Against Formula Regulation

U.S. agencies have intervened in at least 17 jurisdictions over the last several decades on behalf of the formula industry, often to oppose measures that would restrict formula marketing or require additional safety precautions.

Source: ProPublica review of academic research, World Trade Organization records, letters and other U.S. government documents, WikiLeaks cables and news accounts. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Neither Abbott nor Mead Johnson responded to requests for interviews or to detailed questions from ProPublica. The latter’s parent company, Reckitt, also did not respond to our request for comment.

USTR officials declined to be interviewed for this story. In response to written questions, an agency spokesperson said in a statement that under President Joe Biden, the trade agency has emphasized respecting the role of foreign governments in deciding the appropriate regulatory approach, including with respect to infant formula. USTR has been committed “to making sure our trade policy works for people — not blindly advancing the will of corporations,” the statement said.

That has meant moving the office “away from the formerly standard view that too often deemed legitimate regulatory initiatives as trade barriers,” the spokesperson said, adding that the move has “enervated” corporate players who have been used to “getting their way at USTR for decades.”

The spokesperson, however, declined to provide examples of the new approach in relation to formula. She also declined to respond to questions about government documents that show the trade office under Biden working with other federal agencies to pursue the same playbook on formula as prior administrations.

In 2021, for example, officials complained to Filipino trade authorities about stricter formula marketing rules they considered “overkill,” and expressed fears about regulatory “spillover” elsewhere in Southeast Asia. In Kenya, they sought to strike a provision in a proposed formula advertising ban after an industry group sent USTR a paper seeking its deletion.

Public health officials are increasingly raising concerns about toddler milk, especially as companies deploy advertising for products using bold — and, critics say, often unsupported — health claims.

In October, the American Academy of Pediatrics published a new report warning about the marketing for toddler formula. “Products that are advertised as ‘follow-up formulas,’ ‘weaning formulas’ or ‘toddler milks and formulas’ are misleadingly promoted as a necessary part of a healthy child’s diet,” said Dr. George Fuchs III, a lead author of the study. The drinks are worse than infant formula for babies under 1 year, he said, and “offer no benefit over much less expensive cow’s milk in most children older than age 12 months.”

A TV advertisement for toddler milk in Thailand

Unlike infant formula, toddler milks are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Nutrition experts have warned about hefty doses of sweeteners and sodium in some brands.

The Infant Nutrition Council of America, a formula industry group, defended toddler drinks, saying they “can contribute to nutritional intake and potentially fill nutrition gaps for children 12 months and older.”

Toddler milk made up just 11% of all formula sales in the United States in 2023, but it was much more popular abroad, according to Euromonitor, which tracks sales data. Worldwide, it made up 37% of sales. In Thailand, it accounted for more than half.

The country is now struggling to address the consequences of the law’s weakening, researchers and officials say. More than 1 in 10 Thai children under 5 years old face what researchers call a “double burden of malnutrition” that leaves some struggling with obesity and others lagging behind growth targets. Increased breastfeeding could help address both problems.

“You go to school and see a lot of kids are overweight,” said Dr. Somsak Lolekha, president of the Royal College of Pediatricians of Thailand and the Pediatric Society of Thailand. “We have a big problem in Thailand.”

Targeting “the Sippy Cups of the World”

Formula is one of only two products with international recommendations to prohibit its marketing. The other is tobacco.

The warning dates to 1981, when the nations that make up the governing body of the WHO passed the International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes. It aimed to stop all promotion of drinks meant to replace breast milk.

The move followed reports in the 1970s that thousands of infants in impoverished countries were falling ill and dying after drinking formula.

A 1974 report by a British group called War on Want about the dangers of baby formula in developing countries featured advertisements for Dumex and Nestlé. (War on Want)

Not only were mothers using costly formula to replace breast milk, which would have given their babies better immunity, but the water parents mixed milk powder with was sometimes contaminated, leading to life-threatening bacterial infections and diarrhea. Overdiluted formula was causing severe malnutrition, too. Activists called for a boycott of the world’s biggest formula maker, Nestlé, which had heavily promoted its products in developing countries.

During the height of the controversy, an average 212,000 babies in low- and middle-income countries died preventable deaths linked to formula use annually, an academic paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated last year. (Nestlé disputed the research and said it was the first formula company to incorporate the WHO recommendations into its marketing policy in 1982.)

The United States cast the sole “no” vote against the international code, with the Reagan administration citing First Amendment protections on advertising. The Washington Post quoted a senior federal official who resigned over the decision, saying it would be “seen in the world as a victory for corporate interests.”

To be sure, formula was crucial for babies who didn’t have access to breast milk. But for those who did, public health experts feared aggressive advertising and free samples would derail a critical cycle. Once babies start drinking formula regularly, research shows, their mothers’ breast milk supply can drop.

“The evidence is strong,” a WHO and UNICEF report explains. “Formula milk marketing, not the product itself, disrupts informed decision-making and undermines breastfeeding and child health.”

In the years since the international code was adopted, at least 144 countries have sought to enshrine its voluntary restrictions into laws that bar formula marketing in stores, hospitals and elsewhere. Despite poor enforcement in many places, the laws have had measurable benefits. Studies have shown that countries that adopted marketing bans saw their breastfeeding rates rise, and more breastfeeding is in turn linked to fewer infant deaths. It also reduces mothers’ risk of certain cancers.

Baby formula manufacturers responded to slower growth in infant formula sales by creating products for older babies and toddlers — age groups that fell outside most regulations.

Brands of infant and children's formula milk on display at a Bangkok supermarket in September

“We have a proven global demand-creation model,” Greg Shewchuk, Mead Johnson’s head of global marketing, told investors in 2013. “Capture baby very early on, often before it’s born, hold onto them through feeding and their feeding challenges and extend them as long as possible.”

Mead, which was based in the United States until a British company bought it in 2017, termed the strategy A-R-E: Acquisition, Retention, Extension.

Slides from a presentation by Mead Johnson Nutrition executives at a 2013 conference in Europe show the company’s business model to promote children’s formula products. (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission)

To make toddler products more attractive to parents, who usually just gave their kids cheaper cow’s milk beginning at age 1, formula makers began adding nutritional supplements like DHA, an omega-3 fatty acid found in fish and algae with purported benefits for brain and eye health.

The claims, however, are unproven. Studies have found no definitive link between babies’ brain and eye development and DHA supplementation, a 2017 meta-analysis of 15 studies found, according to Cochrane, a nonprofit that supports systematic reviews of health research. In fact, breastfed babies perform better on intelligence tests.

Infant Formula Looks Nearly Identical to Toddler Milk on a Grocery Store’s Shelves in Bangkok

Thailand's Milk Code restricts the advertisement of infant formula, but marketing of toddler milk is generally allowed.

Still, formula companies used additives like DHA “as a hook to expand their market share,” said Peter Buzy, CFO and treasurer of Martek Biosciences Corp., which produced DHA, at an analysts’ meeting in 2004. “Really targeting, you know, the sippy cups of the world.”

A spokesperson for the Infant Nutrition Council of America defended the health and nutrition claims, saying they “are based on science and medical research and meet all legal, regulatory and nutritional science requirements.”

The marketing worked. Toddler milk has overtaken infant formula in worldwide sales, according to Euromonitor. Global toddler milk sales have grown by 25% since 2013, to almost $20 billion. A little less than two gallons of toddler milk can cost $30 or more, compared with around $3.94 a gallon for regular milk in the U.S.

For formula manufacturers, the popularity of the product had another benefit: It helped them circumvent local rules against marketing infant formula. By using similar logos, colors or fonts across product lines, legal advertisements for toddler milk effectively promoted baby formula too, even in places where it was subject to a marketing ban. Nutrition experts and advocates called the tactic “cross-promotion.”

During the past decade, sales of regular infant formula grew about 10% worldwide, to $15 billion.

A Focus on Developing Nations

In 2014, Jintana gave birth to the couple’s first child, whom they nicknamed “Captain” after a soccer player.

The family lived in military housing in Lopburi, a rural province two hours north of Bangkok whose capital city is world famous for its flourishing monkey population. With Sumet serving in the Army, Jintana took time off from her job in customer relations to care for the newborn.

She breastfed Captain until it was time to return to work three months later. The couple shopped for formula. Health claims formula makers listed on packages were “very important,” Sumet said through a translator. They settled on a product called Dumex that promised to strengthen Captain’s brain, immunity and eyes. It was made by the French giant, Danone, which boasts that the brand “has happily raised generations of Thais.”

From left, Phacharawit “Gustun” Aunlamai, now 6; Jintana Suksiri; Phacharacamol “Captain” Aunlamai, 9; and Sumet Aunlamai at their home in Lopburi, Thailand, in September

Millions of women like Jintana had been entering the workforce in developing regions such as Southeast Asia. The big six transnational companies that make most of the world’s baby formula saw this as a boon.

For Mead Johnson, the maker of Enfamil, the benefits of developing economies were twofold. “Firstly, in most countries, breastfeeding is incompatible with women participating fully in the workforce,” CEO Kasper Jakobsen said in a 2013 earnings call. “And, secondly, as women participate in the workforce, that creates a rapid increase in the number of dual-income families that can afford more expensive, premium nutrition products.”

By then, Thailand was Mead’s fifth-biggest market worldwide. And Southeast Asia was well on its way to becoming more important to the formula industry than the U.S. and European markets combined.

As business boomed, advocates lambasted the industry for its practices. Mead employees, for example, allegedly bribed health care workers at government hospitals in China so they would recommend the company’s formula to new mothers — charges the company ultimately resolved with a $12 million settlement in 2015; the company did not admit or deny regulators’ findings in the agreement. Danone faced similar allegations from Chinese media related to the brand Captain and Gustun drank, Dumex. Danone said at the time that it accepted responsibility for the lapses and suspended the program involved, according to the BBC.

The industry maintained close relationships with the medical establishment in Thailand, too. One pediatrician and advocate for breastfeeding, Dr. Sutheera Uerpairojkit, told ProPublica that two decades ago, she saw formula companies offer doctors and medical staff trips abroad in exchange for giving patients free samples and collecting their data. Some took the trips. Sutheera did not participate.

Dr. Sutheera Uerpairojkit, a pediatrician at MedPark Hospital in Bangkok

Thailand adopted the international code in 1984 — but only as a voluntary measure. Over the years, Siriwat and others pushed for tougher formula marketing restrictions without success. In one meeting, he and colleagues at the Thai health ministry pressed formula companies to comply with the voluntary rules, which they’d routinely broken. The businesses resisted. “One company said, ‘If I do not violate, I cannot compete with other companies,’” Siriwat recalled in September.

“That makes me very angry,” he said, remembering how he stormed out of the room.

By 2014, with Thailand’s breastfeeding rate at only 12%, according to one survey, Siriwat persuaded the health minister to seek legislation to formally ban marketing infant and toddler formula. He wanted the new law to include enforcement and penalties for violators.

The WHO, a United Nations agency promoting health, wanted more countries to pursue such measures. Its staff in 2016 released new recommendations on ending the promotion of formula products for toddlers, as well as infants. In theory, that guidance could help countries like Thailand fend off trade complaints about new marketing bans. And an endorsement by the WHO’s member nations would underscore the recommendations’ importance.

But public health wasn’t the only concern as nations prepared to vote.

U.S. Intervention on a Global Stage

The WHO effort alarmed formula makers, which worried that it would kick off a new round of laws against formula marketing. “That’s what’s at stake by a new measure that’s being proposed by the WHO, without any scientific evidence,” Audrae Erickson, a Mead Johnson lobbyist, told a trade association crowd.

Industry groups scrambled to arrange meetings with high-level officials in Washington. “Clearly, the potential economic and international trade implications from this proposed draft guidance are quite significant,” the pro-industry Infant Nutrition Council of America said in a letter to an FDA official in 2016.

That year, companies and trade groups connected to commercial milk formula, including Abbott Laboratories and Nestlé, spent almost $7 million lobbying U.S. officials about WHO matters, after a decade in which their lobbying disclosures had not mentioned the organization at all, a study found.

The industry’s outreach spanned Washington. The Infant Nutrition Council of America, for instance, lobbied the Senate, House and USTR — as well as the commerce, state, agriculture and health departments, lobbying records show. The efforts attracted the attention of leaders in both parties, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, who called President Barack Obama about the issue, according to records obtained by ProPublica.

Inside the administration, USTR took up the formula industry’s cause. “USTR does not support issuance of the guidance or resolution” on toddler milk, wrote Jennifer Stradtman, a USTR official, in an email to other federal officials. Furthermore, she wrote, her office “will not be able to accept” any resolution that encouraged WHO member countries to convert any of the guidance into law.

It wasn’t the first time the USTR sided with industry despite public health concerns: In 2013, a group of Democratic senators scolded U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman for a proposal to help tobacco companies use trade law to “subvert” tobacco control measures — a stance the lawmakers called “deplorable and a serious threat to global public health.”

In the debate over toddler milk, officials from Froman’s office repeatedly questioned science, prompting a fight with public health officials, internal documents show.

In one exchange, then-USTR lawyer Sally Laing objected to a sentence from the guidance that said research suggests food preferences are established early in life.

“Unsupported,” Laing wrote.

Health officials pushed back on that, as well as other USTR edits. “MUST NOT DELETE,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention protested in all caps, arguing that key language in the resolution was, in fact, backed by scientific evidence. But such concerns appeared to get lost in the debate, as those sentences were ultimately struck from the text.

Documents Show Internal Clash Before U.S. Officials Pushed to Weaken Toddler Formula Rules

Explore the interactive story here.

Meanwhile, as WHO member nations gathered to vote in Geneva, formula lobbyists had U.S. officials “on speed dial” and urged them to weaken the WHO resolution, said Jimmy Kolker, who led the negotiations for the U.S. as an assistant secretary in the Health and Human Services Department.

And the industry’s agents appeared to have inside knowledge. A baby-formula industry association lobbyist cornered Kolker. “From her approach, it was obvious to me that she had been forwarded an internal, very-limited-distribution USG email,” he wrote in an email to other U.S. government officials. “This is unacceptable and makes our job as negotiators significantly more difficult.”

In the end, the United States delegation persuaded WHO nations not to “endorse” their staffs’ own recommendations. Instead, the body voted only that it “welcomes with appreciation” the guidance — language that undercut its utility. The resolution, lacking the weight of an official endorsement, left many nations puzzled over whether it would help neutralize trade complaints.

“That has caused a lot of confusion,” said Laurence Grummer-Strawn, a WHO official who focuses on child feeding and former nutrition chief for the CDC. “What does that really mean?”

Stradtman and Laing could not be reached for comment. Froman did not respond to requests for comment, and a USTR spokesperson declined to comment on the office’s actions during the WHO debate. In a general statement, the spokesperson said that “with regard to infant formula, USTR, in conjunction with others in the interagency, work to uphold and advocate for policy and regulatory decisions that are based on science.”

The practical impact of the resolution’s weakened wording became clear within months, when the U.S. and other dairy producers like Australia and Canada accused Thailand of attempting to obstruct trade with its marketing ban. Thai officials argued their country had a “strong need for a regulation,” saying the “sales promotion” of milk formula for babies and toddlers contributed to the nation’s low rate of breastfeeding. But when it referenced the WHO’s guidance and resolution to support its position at the WTO, the U.S. countered that those measures did not amount to “an international standard.”

When the Thai National Legislative Assembly finally passed its formula marketing measure in April 2017, the provisions that the U.S. and its allies — plus some Thai doctors and industry lobbyists — had complained about most loudly were either watered down or gone entirely. Lawmakers had reduced the maximum criminal penalty for violations from three years in prison to one year in prison and the maximum fine from about $8,730 to $2,910, a USDA document shows.

Advocates for the Thai Milk Code, including Siriwat, who is clapping, visited the Thai parliament before the law passed. The purple sign says, “Protect Thai kids from being victims of powder milk,” and the white sign says, “I was fed by breastmilk until I was 3 years old.” (Courtesy of Dr. Siriwat Tiptaradol)

The law banned the marketing of infant formula and outlawed cross-promotion, but it still allowed advertising on products for 1- to 3-year-olds.

At a June 2017 meeting of the WTO, the U.S. called the changes “a welcome modification.”

“Addicted to the Bottle”

The next year, Sumet and Jintana celebrated the birth of their second child, Gustun. As she had with her firstborn, Jintana breastfed Gustun until he was 3 months old, then started him on formula so she could go back to work.

The couple diligently followed the “stages” prescribed by Dumex, which came in a cheery red package: Stage 1 formula when Gustun was an infant, Stage 2 when he was an older baby and Stage 3 when he became a toddler. He craved formula, and his parents, believing it was healthy, always gave him more. By the time he was 3, he reached his peak weight of about 66 pounds — the same as an average 9-year-old. He was drinking six or seven bottles a day, each holding about 12 ounces of toddler milk.

Gustun’s picture, from when he was heavier, on display at his school in Lopburi, Thailand

Jintana wasn’t worried at first as Gustun grew pudgy. His brother, Captain, had been big, too — almost 60 pounds — at the same age. But when Gustun started school in person after the pandemic, his teachers were concerned. They had seen others arrive, as one put it, “addicted to the bottle.” The weight slowed Gustun down during movement time, his teacher Tida Rakrukrob said through a translator. “He would move slowly and was less active compared to other children,” she said.

When another teacher posted a video on TikTok showing herself comforting and talking with Gustun one day, it went viral — receiving 732,000 likes and many comments about how cute he was. But his teacher’s concern with his difficulty moving led his parents to bring him to see a doctor, who tested him for a hormone imbalance and checked him for diabetes. The tests came back negative. The parents reduced the fried food, dessert and snacks Gustun ate.

The biggest change the family made, though, was eliminating toddler formula from his diet. His school gave him cow’s milk instead, as it did for other children.

Gustun’s extra weight began to disappear.

Looking back, Jintana said she thinks he gained so much “because of the toddler milk.”

Today at age 6, Gustun is no longer on a restricted diet — he can eat fried food and dessert — and weighs 35 pounds, about half of what he weighed at the peak of his Dumex consumption. He is more outgoing at school, Jintana said, and plays soccer with his older brother every day. Captain lost a similar amount of weight after switching to cow’s milk at school and is now 9 and slim, weighing around 51 pounds.

Gustun and Captain play soccer at home in Lopburi, Thailand.

One Monday in September, the brothers — both in soccer jerseys — kicked a ball back and forth in the driveway of the family’s brightly painted red house. Gustun, who has a lightning bolt shaved into his hairline, chased the ball and tried to get it away from his brother, who darted about quickly, tapping it from foot to foot.

“Now, his movement is perfect,” his mother said.

Danone, the company that makes Dumex, said in a statement that while breast milk offers children the best nutritional start, “50 years of scientific research into nutritional needs in early life underpins our products, and we do not make claims that have not been backed up by scientific research.” The company said that research has shown that toddler milk can provide nutrition and help improve the diet of children age 1 and older, reducing the risk of iron and vitamin D deficiency.

“We encourage parents to follow the guidelines on pack when using our products, which are carefully calibrated so that babies and infants receive the right amount of nutrients they need each day from our products,” the company said.

“The Tactic is ‘I Will Violate Your Law’”

A formula display with a promotional toy keyboard at a grocery store in Bangkok

Thailand’s marketing restrictions have done little to curb practices like cross-promotion, said Nisachol Cetthakrikul, who has worked in the Thai health ministry and studied the law.

Indeed, at two supermarkets in Bangkok, shiny walls of powdered formula boxes seven shelves high greeted shoppers on a warm day in September. There were few differences between packages for products intended for babies and those intended for toddlers.

Formula makers and stores offered steep discounts for toddler milk, calling one a “Mommy Fair Shock Deal.” An offer on one shelf told parents if they spent about $87 on Hi-Q1 toddler formula, made by Danone, they could receive a free yellow and blue swing set worth about $27. Other offers included a clay “pizza dough cooking fun set,” a toy keyboard and microphone, and even a pushable “speedcar trolley” that a toddler could sit in.

A 2022 study led by Nisachol found 227 instances of formula marketing that violated the law.

The government has levied fines for violations, but Thailand’s health ministry doesn’t name offenders. “The tactic is ‘I will violate your law,’” Siriwat said, “‘and prepare the budget for the fine.’”

Thai health authorities have tried to fight back by raising parents’ awareness of the benefits of breastfeeding. The health ministry, for example, erected billboards saying “breast milk is medicine” and called doctors to a meeting to urge them to promote breastfeeding among their patients. But these campaigns are no match for the formula companies’ massive spending on marketing, Siriwat said.

A billboard promoting breastfeeding in Bangkok, Thailand (Heather Vogell/ProPublica)

While Thailand’s exclusive breastfeeding rate for babies six months or younger rebounded to about 29% in 2022, UNICEF found, it is still far short of the WHO’s target of at least 50% by 2025. The country’s rates of obesity and stunting for children 5 and under are higher today than they were in 2016, the year before the watered-down formula law passed.

Dr. Somsak Lolekha, president of the Thai pediatric society, said formula isn’t the only reason for children’s weight problems. But it plays a big role, he said, because it’s so easy to drink — a point that tracks with studies showing that babies who breastfeed longer are less likely to become obese and develop diabetes than those who drink formula.

Dr. Somsak Lolekha, president of the Pediatric Society of Thailand, in Bangkok

Last summer, Thailand joined more than 100 nations at the WHO’s headquarters in Geneva to explore ways to fight unethical formula marketing. Attendees sat at long tables in a sleek, modern auditorium. Like other nations’ representatives, Dr. Titiporn Tuangratananon, an official with Thailand’s health ministry, declared her intentions on brightly colored paper posted at the front of the room: “Fully control” the marketing of formula to young children, and “Increase + expand enforcement.”

In an interview, Titiporn said health officials are trying to update the country’s marketing rules — including making some forms of toddler formula advertising, such as giveaways, discounts and free samples, illegal.

But that could ultimately prove difficult in a country that is now the seventh-largest market in the world for formula.

In fact, according to Titiporn, the government has already been deluged by public comments critical of its regulatory efforts. She suspected the pro-marketing remarks, some of which had been repeatedly copied and pasted, came from representatives of the formula industry.

“We know that it’s not real,” Titiporn said. “It’s not the real mothers.”

Chalida Ekvitthayavechnukul contributed reporting.

by Heather Vogell, ProPublica, photography by June Watsamon Tri-yasakda, special to ProPublica

U.N. Has Flown More Than $2.9 Billion in Cash to Afghanistan Since the Taliban Seized Power, Diverting U.S. Funds

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The United Nations has delivered more than $2.9 billion in cash to Afghanistan since the Taliban seized control, resulting in the flow of U.S. funds to the extremist group, according to a recent government report.

The U.N. deposits the cash into a private Afghan bank and disburses funds to the agency’s aid organizations and nonprofit humanitarian groups. But the money does not stop there, the report found. Some winds up at the central bank of Afghanistan, which is under the control of the Taliban. The group took over the country after the withdrawal of U.S. forces in August 2021.

The report, from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, provides the first detailed account of how U.S. cash falls under the control of the Taliban and adds to a growing body of evidence that contributions to the U.N. are not always reaching Afghans in need. It did not specify how much U.S. funding has been channeled to the central bank.

“Most of the money that’s going in cash through the U.N. is ultimately coming from U.S. taxpayers,” John Sopko, the inspector general, said in an interview. “It’s going to a terrorist group. The Taliban are a bunch of terrorists.”

U.N. officials do not deny that the cash delivered to Afghanistan makes its way to the central bank. But they say there is no avoiding it since the Taliban control the country.

A tweet from the Afghan central bank claims to show photos of humanitarian funds being unloaded at Kabul airport. (Via X)

In a briefing to the U.N. Security Council on March 6, Roza Otunbayeva, the U.N.’s special representative for Afghanistan, did not mention the Afghan central bank. The cash shipments, she said, have helped stabilize the economy and deliver desperately needed medical care and food to Afghans. The shipments have “injected liquidity to the local economy that has in large part allowed the private sector to continue to function and averted a fiscal crisis,” Otunbayeva told council members.

In a letter provided in response to the inspector general’s report, the State Department said the U.N. was responsible for managing the cash transfer program.

“We remain committed to providing critical, life-saving humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people. We will continue to monitor assistance programs and seek to mitigate the risk that U.S. assistance could indirectly benefit the Taliban or could be diverted to unintended recipients,” the letter said.

Lawmakers say the U.S. must do more to prevent the flow of money to the group.

“This is unacceptable,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, in a statement. “The U.S. government must work harder to prevent the Taliban from benefiting from humanitarian aid.”

A spokesperson for the Afghan central bank did not return requests for comment.

Since the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan has suffered numerous humanitarian crises, with half its 40 million people in need of food, water and other basic necessities. Earthquakes last year killed more than 1,200 people and left thousands displaced. Women’s rights have been severely curtailed.

The U.S. remains the largest donor of aid to Afghanistan, providing a total of about $2.6 billion since the collapse of the previous Afghan government. But fears over money ending up in the wrong hands have complicated aid delivery. For instance, U.S. officials have blocked the central bank from receiving money from a trust fund holding Afghan funds that could be used to benefit the country.

“We could not be more clear on this: The United States does not provide funding to the Taliban,” said Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesperson, at a briefing last year.

The inspector general report calls that assertion into question. The State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development have continued to provide money to the U.N. to assist ongoing humanitarian efforts. The U.N., in turn, has said it must send cash to Afghanistan because of the lack of an infrastructure to wire money.

After getting the money from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the U.N. flies shrink-wrapped $100 bills to the Kabul International Airport. The money arrives on a regular basis, as much as $40 million at a time, according to posts from the Afghan central bank on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Once aid organizations receive the U.S. dollars, they must convert the money into afghanis, the country’s currency, to pay for workers and other expenses. They often use private money exchanges, which use the dollars to purchase afghanis from the central bank, known as the Da Afghanistan Bank.

Senior leaders of the Taliban control the central bank, which has no systems in place to prevent terrorism financing or money laundering, according to the inspector general’s report, which cites an analysis paid for by USAID. Officials at the development agency declined to release the study, describing it as a “confidential internal document.”

When money leaves the central bank, there’s yet another concern. Humanitarian organizations are sometimes forced to pay cash directly to the Taliban. Local Taliban leaders have demanded that the U.N. and aid groups hire its members and their relatives or prioritize treatment of widows and wounded militants, according to the inspector general.

“Aid diversion does happen, and when it does, humanitarian work has to halt and solutions need to be found,” said one U.N. official who was not authorized to make public comment. “There are cases where the Taliban seek to take control of distribution according to their priorities, or other cases where aid work is stopped altogether. In other areas we see very positive support and openness.”

The risk of the diversion of foreign aid in wartorn countries has long bedeviled the U.S. and other countries. The only way to stop it would be to halt the flow of money — which humanitarian groups have said could lead to disastrous consequences such as starvation or the collapse of local economies.

In many ways, the U.S. is responsible for the problems it now faces. The distribution of funds to help the vulnerable was a repeated issue during two decades of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. American officials flew more than $12 billion in cash — that’s 363 tons — to Iraq in the early days of the war, according to congressional investigators, making it nearly impossible to determine the final beneficiaries.

But the U.S. and its international allies failed to ever fully implement systems to improve transparency, such as wire transfers or electronic payments, in Afghanistan, despite repeated pleas for such technology by watchdog organizations.

Sopko, the inspector general, said the U.S., the U.N. and multilateral agencies could install better controls over the delivery of cash in Afghanistan, but he acknowledged the inherent difficulty of the task.

“If nobody’s paying attention, then you’re going to have waste, fraud and abuse, big time,” he said.

Mohammad Jawad Alizada, the managing editor for Alive in Afghanistan, a former ProPublica partner, assisted with translation.

by T. Christian Miller

Lawmakers Ignored Warnings About New York’s Broken Guardianship System for Decades. Here’s How They Can Fix It.

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Three decades ago, New York’s guardianship system was in desperate need of an overhaul.

Investigators had found that the legal arrangements, which were supposed to protect people who could not care for themselves, had actually deprived individuals of their rights and were poorly monitored, enabling guardians to abuse, neglect and defraud those under their care. In response, state lawmakers passed progressive legislation to codify wards’ civil liberties and safeguard their welfare.

But just five years into the new statute, known as Article 81 of the Mental Hygiene Law, the judges overseeing the system noticed it was insufficient to protect the “unbefriended,” those who have nobody else to help them and little or no money to their name. For them, the state relied on a patchwork system of loosely regulated nonprofits and private attorneys who take the cases pro bono. The setup, judges found, was straining to meet the crushing demand for services.

Charles Devlin, at the time a judge overseeing guardianship cases in Westchester County, traveled to the state capital to lobby for the members of this largely invisible constituency, who are often tucked away in nursing homes and other facilities, far from public view. Specifically, he advocated for the creation of a role of public guardian, a state-funded entity to care for New York’s most vulnerable.

The meetings didn’t go well. “New York state was not interested,” Devlin recalled in an interview. “They said, ‘Nope, sorry, goodbye.’”

In the years since, others have made similar trips, sounding alarms about New York’s overtaxed guardianship system, which now covers 28,600 people statewide — 60% of whom live in New York City. But state lawmakers have done little in response.

Today the system is in shambles, a ProPublica investigation published earlier this month found. There are not enough guardians to serve the needs of the “unbefriended,” nor are there enough overseers to check guardians’ work. And the quality of the care provided by the groups that do cater to this vulnerable population can be shockingly poor.

For example, the organization featured in the ProPublica report, New York Guardianship Services, placed one of its wards in a dilapidated, rat-infested Queens home for years, often without heat, taking $450 a month from her meager income as compensation while ignoring her complaints, according to interviews and internal records. She was one of about 400 wards who relied on the company to manage their financial and personal affairs. A company executive said he couldn’t answer questions about any specific ward, adding in a statement that NYGS is “accountable to the Court and our annual accounts and reports are scrutinized by Court appointed examiners and any issues would be addressed.” He also said our story was inaccurate but provided no details.

Experts say there are fixes policymakers can and should make to close the gap between Article 81’s promise and its practice. Here are six.

Public Financing for Guardians

As Arthur Diamond, then the supervising guardianship judge in Nassau County, bluntly put it to lawmakers in 2018: “It’s very, very sad that the state of New York has not been able to find a way to take care of this population.”

Following the roundtable where Diamond spoke, the state Legislature awarded Nassau and Suffolk counties $250,000 each to run pilot programs to find guardians for those without the means to pay for them. But the funding wasn’t renewed, and the state has not established a dedicated financing stream to cover the costs of guardianships for thousands of poor New Yorkers. Meanwhile, two of the organizations in the small nonprofit network that serves as the backbone of the system abruptly shuttered due to financial hardship.

Guardianship Access New York, a coalition of nonprofits that’s seeking to improve guardianships, has proposed that the Legislature secure $15 million annually “in sustained funding that would comprehensively support guardianship services statewide.” Advocates say those guardians don’t have to be lawyers, as traditionally has been the case, and should include social workers and other specialists familiar with the needs of the elderly and infirm.

Others have argued for the creation and funding of a separate public entity tasked with serving wards who have little or no money and nobody else to look after them. Some states, including Illinois and Delaware, have such an office, though experts warn they’re no panacea and without proper support and oversight can fail wards as easily as any other guardian can.

Bolstering the Regulatory Ranks

Prior to a small bump in 2019, examiner pay hadn’t been increased in 14 years, resulting in thin ranks of reviewers to ensure proper oversight of guardians. Lawyers make just a few hundred dollars per case annually — a feeble payday that they say isn’t worth the effort.

A recent judicial guardianship task force report has recommended a pay raise for examiners so that the courts can recruit an adequate bench. Today New York City has only 157 examiners to monitor the care and finances of more than 17,000 wards.

Experts say the system needs more court clerks too. These workers play a key role in the oversight process, reviewing examiners’ reports before passing them up to judges, who ultimately sign off on the paperwork. But Diamond and others have said that deep budget cuts to the courts from more than a decade ago drastically reduced the ranks of these employees. More than 400 people — including clerks — were laid off following state budget cuts in 2011. This funding, they said, should be restored.

Finally, Diamond said, judges could be more proactive about monitoring case activity, scheduling regular compliance conferences so that guardians and examiners are forced to explain to the court what accounts for delays in completing their reports.

Strengthening the Examination Process

Though Article 81 requires guardians to file wards’ annual financial accounts by May of the following year, there is no such deadline for examiners. In practice, that means that accounts of wards can — and do — go years without any kind of examination. In the case we featured in our investigation, we found the ward’s file was missing reviews for four whole years, during which time she faced horrendous living conditions and the threat of eviction. The examiner did not respond to questions about the missing reports for that period.

Our review also found that examiners tend to focus almost exclusively on financial paperwork when determining the care and condition of wards. They rarely, if ever, see wards in person.

Experts say that requiring face-to-face check-ins can prevent guardians from hiding horrific situations and that judicial leaders tasked with appointing and overseeing examiners should require such visits. That’s what happens in Davidson County, Tennessee, which includes Nashville: Social services workers there visit wards, review their medical records and interview guardians and their doctors.

Mandating More Training for Guardians

Only ten states nationwide require professional guardians to be certified by the Center for Guardianship Certification, the only national group of its kind. A handful of other states require guardians to be licensed by state agencies, in the same way as plumbers, barbers and other skilled professions.

New York requires neither. Under Article 81, prospective guardians need only take a daylong course to get certified.

Advocates say the state should mandate more stringent training. Guardians should also be required to take regular refresher courses, just as lawyers are, experts say.

Vetting Nonprofit Providers

Once certified, private guardians are required to attest that they haven’t been found to have violated any criminal, civil or professional rules. Nonprofits, however, undergo no such vetting. In fact, they are not even required to provide proof of their charitable status.

That’s a critical gap in oversight given the outsized role nonprofit organizations currently play in caring for the unbefriended.

In our investigation, we found that NYGS repeatedly represented itself as a nonprofit in its court filings and promotional material as it took on more and more cases. Yet authorities told us that the organization is not registered as a charity with the state attorney general’s office nor does it have tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service.

Sam Blau, NYGS’ chief financial officer, declined to answer questions about the company’s tax status, but said in a statement that “a large percentage of our cases are done completely Pro Bono,” which “is certainly in line with our mission to help people of minimal financial means.”

Policing the nonprofit sector is critical, experts say, especially since charitable organizations are exempt from court rules that cap the number of cases and the amount of compensation guardians can receive annually.

Issuing Guidance for Proper Staffing

One of the key indicators of a failing guardianship system involves caseloads that are higher than a 20:1 ratio of wards to staffers, according to a recent report by the country’s premier guardianship researchers. Some states, like Colorado and Virginia, recommend such a cap. But New York offers no guidance.

At New York Guardianship Services, the group ProPublica featured in its report this month, the ward-to-staff ratio has topped 83:1. One worker who was responsible for dozens of wards every day said she quit after six months because she couldn’t keep up with the unrelenting needs of the company’s clients. NYGS did not respond to questions about its caseloads.

Caseload caps, experts say, would improve services and help states more easily identify potential guardianship abuse.

by Jake Pearson

Tennessee Lawmakers Want More Oversight of Juvenile Detention. The Department of Children’s Services Is Pushing Back.

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The commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services publicly said this month that the agency was working with lawmakers to address oversight gaps at juvenile detention facilities across the state. But behind the scenes, the department is working to water down a bill that would do just that, according to one of the bill’s sponsors and others working on the legislation.

Last year, an investigation by WPLN and ProPublica revealed that the Richard L. Bean Juvenile Service Center in Knoxville was illegally locking children alone in cells and that the facility had faced few consequences even as DCS repeatedly documented violations.

In response, one Democratic and two Republican state lawmakers drafted proposed legislation that would give an independent state agency the power to require changes at facilities that violate state standards, effectively forcing DCS to act.

As it stands, DCS inspects and writes reports on youth detention centers across the state. If inspectors document persistent problems, DCS says, it can freeze or slow admissions, decrease capacity or refuse to approve a license. DCS said it has used those interventions at other facilities but never at the Bean Center.

DCS is pushing for different language that would strip the independent agency from having enforcement power and leave DCS in charge of deciding how to respond to problems.

The bill is scheduled for discussion in both the Tennessee House and Senate on Tuesday.

DCS declined to comment on the legislation but said it is working to address the problems at the Bean Center.

WPLN and ProPublica found that inspectors documented that the Bean Center had been improperly using solitary confinement for years. While DCS noted the violations in its reports, the department failed to effectively intervene. DCS says it cannot revoke the Bean Center’s license, but it has not approved its renewal either.

“The Bean Center has been in a nonapproved status for quite some time,” DCS Commissioner Margie Quin told lawmakers in a hearing this month. “We're in that facility on a quarterly basis and continue to work with them.”

But some Tennessee lawmakers and child welfare advocates say it’s not enough to simply document that a facility is out of compliance with state standards. In a letter in November, 14 Democratic lawmakers called on DCS to intervene at the Bean Center and called for the superintendent and namesake of the facility, Richard L. Bean, to lose his job.

Bean did not respond to a request for comment.

“Why is there no accountability, and why isn’t there any attempt to remedy that?” asked state Sen. Heidi Campbell, D-Nashville, one of the sponsors of the bill. She said in the past DCS has improved with oversight. “But right now, there’s nothing,” she said. “It’s just the wild, wild west.”

Despite acknowledging the ongoing problems inside the facility, DCS continues to contract with the Bean Center to place children there, paying about $175 per day per kid.

“Although the facility is not currently in an approved status, there is nothing to indicate conditions at the facility are unsafe,” Ashley Zarach, DCS communications director, said in an emailed statement. DCS said the Bean Center is no longer using seclusion and that its current violations are largely clerical. “We are holding approval to ensure the facility updates its policy and schedules an annual fire inspection,” Zarach said.

But that arrangement is part of the reason lawmakers like Campbell want a third party involved. In the time DCS has been licensing juvenile detention centers in the state, it said, it has never terminated a license.

The original draft of the bill gave enforcement powers to the ombudsman at the independent state agency, the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth. The ombudsman’s office has existed since 1996 to respond to individual complaints about DCS, but it does not have enforcement power. The commission already has access to juvenile detention centers to monitor federal standards but not state standards.

Kylie Graves, policy director at the commission, declined to comment on the bill, saying, “We are going to let the General Assembly go through the legislative process.”

If a facility is in violation and doesn’t follow the ombudsman’s recommendations, the original draft would force DCS to suspend the facility’s license or, for detention centers like Bean’s, stop placing kids there until the violations are fixed.

But those enforcement mechanisms are no longer included in the DCS version.

Instead, the ombudsman would notify the facility of the problems, and if the facility doesn’t comply within a year, DCS would be notified in writing. Then “the department shall provide the ombudsman with an update on actions taken to remedy the findings by December 1, 2025, and annually thereafter,” the agency’s amendment says.

“If you de-fang it enough, you’re not going to have a useful piece of legislation,” Campbell said.

The DCS version does not detail what exactly would happen after that to a facility that is routinely out of compliance, as the Bean Center was. But it would require the ombudsman to report violations publicly to the General Assembly on a regular basis, offering some public accountability.

State Sen. Kerry Roberts, a Republican sponsor of the bill, said he is not surprised that a state agency would push back against oversight legislation of this size and scope.

“DCS is probably arguing right now, ‘Hey, a little bit of flexibility for us is a good thing,’” Roberts said. “And I think some legislators are looking at it and say, ‘Well, we're not sure that we agree with that, because we want to know that certain standards are being met in every situation.’”

Campbell said incremental progress is better than nothing.

“I would love to have a much stronger way to approach this,” she said, “but that having been said, as we say all the time around here, let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

by Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio

Utah Child Care Providers Are Struggling. Lawmakers Haven’t Helped.

1 week 3 days ago

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Aleatha Child struggled to keep her Brigham City, Utah, day care open after federal funding meant to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic ended last September. She raised the fees she charged families and let an employee go.

She put some hope in the Utah legislative session. But instead of providing day cares like hers with more money, lawmakers expanded a child tax credit in a bill that also allows unlicensed care providers to take in more children.

Child concluded that her child care license could soon be useless and decided her day care will close at the end of the month.

“I’ve thought long and hard about this, I love this job and love my families but this is what’s best for my family and they come first,” she wrote in a social media post in mid-February.

Utah’s Republican-dominated Legislature adjourned this month after passing a record 591 bills during its session. Lawmakers earmarked nearly $2 billion in tax subsidies to build an MLB stadium and an NHL arena. They doubled funding for the state’s school voucher program. And they cut the income tax rate.

But they made no direct financial investment in child care, despite the end of federal pandemic relief, which since 2020 had sent nearly $574 million to Utah’s Office of Child Care for various programs.

The bill that lawmakers passed loosens regulations on unlicensed care for the second time in two years by increasing the number of children a provider can care for in their home from six to eight, if none of them are related to the caregiver. (There’s a cap of 10 total kids if some of them are related to the provider.) No more than two of them can be under 3 years old.

Some parents and providers criticized that move as potentially unsafe. In response, lawmakers added a background check requirement for all unlicensed providers, but it’s unclear how that will be enforced.

“We have two problems with child care that we hear about a lot,” Rep. Susan Pulsipher, a Republican, told a House committee. “One is the cost and one is capacity.” The tax credit could help with the cost, she said, and unlicensed providers caring for more children could boost capacity. The new rules are “a tool” that will give parents more choices. She said parents can ask about background checks and any training unlicensed providers might have received.

But licensed providers told ProPublica that the legislation devalues the licenses obtained by in-home care providers whose homes are inspected, who obtain CPR and first-aid training, and who abide by rules such as checking on babies while they’re sleeping.

The new bill, which takes effect May 1, will make Utah one of the most lenient states toward unlicensed child care. Only South Dakota allows more children in an unlicensed day care — up to 12 — according to research into state child care plans compiled by the Committee for Economic Development, a nonpartisan group of business leaders.

Bill Cosgrove, a retired pediatrician and advocate for early childhood education, said in an interview with ProPublica that leaving so many children in the care of one adult can hamper their development.

“It’s the definition of neglect,” said Cosgrove, who testified in Senate and House hearings on the bill.

Child care advocates, parents and providers asked Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, to veto the bill, but Cox signed it March 14.

A recent investigation by ProPublica found that though Utah bills itself as the most “family friendly” state in the nation, it does too little to ensure that care for children of working parents is accessible and affordable. Numerous researchers have detailed the lack of available child care in the state. A 2020 report by the state’s Office of Child Care found that Utah’s child care capacity was meeting only 35% of its needs. A 2018 analysis found that a larger proportion of people in Utah live in areas with few or no licensed child care facilities than in any other state.

After the state received the federal relief funding in 2020 and 2021, the number of licensed child care slots rose by about 30% over two years, according to a report by Voices for Utah Children, a children’s advocacy group.

In January, nonprofits, businesses and child care providers penned an open letter to lawmakers asking them to invest in child care. “Without government investment, families are left with low-quality options that endanger children, and disincentivize providers. We are calling on the Utah Legislature to invest more dollars into the childcare industry. With cross sector collaboration between business, the philanthropic community, and government entities, we can address this crisis and become a model for the nation,” they stated in the letter.

After months of financial struggles, Child plans to close her home day care. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

House Speaker Mike Schultz, a Republican, told reporters in February that funding should be part of Utah’s solution to the child care crisis, but it wasn’t lawmakers’ first priority.

“We have to focus on the supply, and then you can focus on the funding,” Schultz said.

Proponents of the bill said that it offers more choices for parents. Nicholeen Peck, president of the Worldwide Organization for Women, a conservative faith-based group, testified in favor of the legislation. Peck said that her mother cared for five children on her own. The bill would allow someone like her mother to potentially care for five more, which is “not that many.”

“I think it also opens the door for really great people in the community to be able to offer their services more so that people don’t have to be just randomly dropping their children off at somebody that they don’t know,” she said.

At least one study shows the bill is likely to be ineffective at boosting supply. According to an August 2022 policy brief by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a nonprofit that represents educators and issues accreditations, there’s no correlation between regulations and child care supply. “Efforts to loosen regulations, driven by a goal of increasing supply and program revenue, will actually have the opposite effect by driving educator burnout and turnover even higher,” according to the policy brief.

“It’s already a stressful job,” said Anna Lovejoy, acting senior director for early childhood policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning public policy group that worked on the brief. “So when you add more children to the mix, it actually can lower morale and increase provider turnover, which is not good for quality because you need those stable and consistent relationships with caring adults to support the children’s development.”

Utah’s Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees licensing and background checks, said in a statement that it is “working through the details” on how to administer the required background checks.

Enforcing the requirement will be difficult unless there’s a “tattletale system,” said Jamie Bitton, the owner of a child care center in Ogden, Utah, and the president of the Utah Private Child Care Association. “There’s no minimum safety precautions for someone just to babysit children in their homes,” she said. “And it’s scary.”

Child, the day care operator who is closing her business, said as a licensed provider she’s been subject to announced and unannounced visits by state inspectors. And she’s taken numerous trainings on child development in order to maintain her license.

“They’re trying to solve a problem, but I feel like they’re going to make it worse,” Child said. “We can live without stadiums, but as long as we have children and need to work, we cannot live without child care.”

Correction

March 19, 2024: The story overstated the number of children South Dakota allows in unlicensed day cares. The state allows up to 12 children in such day cares, not 13.

by Nicole Santa Cruz

An Oregon Bill to Cut Millions in Timber Taxes Is Dead, Despite Backing by the Industry, the Governor and a Top Lawmaker

1 week 3 days ago

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Oregon state Sen. Elizabeth Steiner seemed to have a lot of power and momentum behind her effort that would have shifted the costs of wildland firefighting further onto taxpayers this year.

The influential timber industry, which stood to save millions and is a major source of campaign cash in the state, worked behind closed doors to help craft Steiner’s proposal. Republican leaders threw their support behind it. Gov. Tina Kotek, whose staff assisted in the bill’s development, also came out in favor.

But there was fallout from the effort. Media reports noted the industry’s central role in shaping the bill. Steiner, a Democrat running for state treasurer, drew a primary challenge from another Democratic state senator, Jeff Golden, who had offered a competing bill to fund wildfire preparedness and other services by raising taxes on logging. His entry into the race had the potential to turn their divergence on the industry into a campaign issue.

And then, in the Legislature’s waning moments, Steiner’s bill died. In an email to ProPublica, she blamed “technical difficulties” without specifying what they were.

“I recognize it is not perfect,” Steiner told Golden in a hearing on Feb. 28, when her bill was still moving forward. “I think it’s damn good, excuse my language, because it’s more progress than we’ve made in a really long time.”

The bill’s failure leaves unresolved a debate over how much the timber industry pays for services like fire protection in Oregon, decades after a series of massive tax cuts whose harms Oregon Public Broadcasting, The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica documented in a 2020 investigation. Those cuts have saved the industry more than $3 billion since the 1990s, the news organizations found, allowing timber companies to profit at the expense of rural communities.

Today, logging companies pay less to cut down trees than they do in neighboring Washington, state analyses have shown.

After catastrophic fires burned thousands of homes in 2020, lawmakers invested $195 million into readiness, including outfitting local fire departments and developing home hardening programs. But with costs rising and the acreage burned by fires doubling over the last decade, lawmakers are still looking for a stable source of money to prepare for and fight wildfires.

Steiner defended her ideas for raising money from taxpayers and homeowners throughout the monthlong 2024 legislative session, saying wildfires had become a statewide problem that demanded funding from all Oregonians, who already subsidize the state’s firefighting capabilities.

A lobbyist for Weyerhaeuser, Oregon’s largest private forestland owner and a participant in the drafting of Steiner’s bill, announced the initial proposal would save the company $500,000 a year. Steiner later committed to reducing the cost shift to taxpayers from $7 million to $3.5 million. When Golden proposed an amendment to ensure big timberland owners didn’t pay any less than they do now, Steiner rejected it.

A Weyerhaeuser spokesperson declined to comment about whether the company expects to pay less in future wildfire funding proposals.

“Wildfires are a shared responsibility that threatens every Oregonian,” the spokesperson said, “and moving forward we’re committed to partnering with Oregon legislators and community members on the complex issue of wildfire funding.”

One of Steiner’s fellow Democrats, state Rep. Mark Gamba, told ProPublica that Steiner’s bill would have reduced what the timber industry pays without solving a real problem that Oregon faces.

“Fires are doubling decade over decade, and our coffers to fight those fires are not doubling,” Gamba said. “I was shocked that this was even brought to us.”

Golden said Oregon needs tens of millions of dollars annually to prepare for increasing wildfire risks. Giving a tax cut to the industry, then turning to the public for more money, would be “a nonstarter,” he said.

Oregon state Sen. Jeff Golden offered a competing bill to fund wildfire response and other services by raising taxes on logging. (Kristyna Wentz-Graff/Oregon Public Broadcasting)

In a departure from Steiner, Golden during the session sought voter approval to reinstate logging taxes eliminated in the 1990s. He introduced a bill that he said could have raised as much as $110 million annually for wildfire fighting, drinking water protection and the county services the logging taxes once funded. That bill stalled, was subsequently weakened to solely seek a study of those taxes, then died in committee.

As Golden and Steiner’s dueling visions for timber taxation and wildfire funding played out, Golden announced he would challenge her in the May Democratic primary for state treasurer. But he withdrew less than two weeks later, saying he realized he didn’t actually want the job.

Kotek, a Democrat, acknowledged in a Feb. 28 letter to lawmakers that differences remain about whether the timber industry is paying its fair share of wildfire costs. How much the industry contributes, she wrote, is a legitimate issue for discussion “as we work to create a comprehensive, long-term fix to our wildfire funding policies.”

Steiner, in an email to ProPublica, said her bill was always intended to be “an intermediate step toward a more equitable, sustainable solution for funding this system. We expect that the next iteration of this proposal will have more nuance.”

Golden said he will continue introducing legislation to tax the industry to pay for wildfire readiness.

“It’s going to come up in some form again,” he said, “as long as I’m in the Legislature.”

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by Rob Davis

An Expert Who Has Testified in Foster Care Cases Across Colorado Admits Her Evaluations Are Unscientific

1 week 4 days ago

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Diane Baird had spent four decades evaluating the relationships of poor families with their children. But last May, in a downtown Denver conference room, with lawyers surrounding her and a court reporter transcribing, she was the one under the microscope.

Baird, a social worker and professional expert witness, has routinely advocated in juvenile court cases across Colorado that foster children be adopted by or remain in the custody of their foster parents rather than being reunified with their typically lower-income birth parents or other family members.

In the conference room, Baird was questioned for nine hours by a lawyer representing a birth family in a case out of rural Huerfano County, according to a recently released transcript of the deposition obtained by ProPublica.

Was Baird’s method for evaluating these foster and birth families empirically tested? No, Baird answered: Her method is unpublished and unstandardized, and has remained “pretty much unchanged” since the 1980s. It doesn’t have those “standard validity and reliability things,” she admitted. “It’s not a scientific instrument.”

Who hired and was paying her in the case that she was being deposed about? The foster parents, she answered. They wanted to adopt, she said, and had heard about her from other foster parents.

Had she considered or was she even aware of the cultural background of the birth family and child whom she was recommending permanently separating? (The case involved a baby girl of multiracial heritage.) Baird answered that babies have “never possessed” a cultural identity, and therefore are “not losing anything,” at their age, by being adopted. Although when such children grow up, she acknowledged, they might say to their now-adoptive parents, “Oh, I didn’t know we were related to the, you know, Pima tribe in northern California, or whatever the circumstances are.”

The Pima tribe is located in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

It went on and on like this. Baird acknowledged that her entire basis for recommending that the foster parents keep the baby girl was a single less-than-two-hour observation and interview that she’d conducted with them — her clients. She’d never met the baby girl’s biological grandmother, whom the county child services department had been actively planning for the girl to be placed with, according to internal department emails. Nor had she even read any case documents.

A fundamental goal of foster care, under federal law, is for it to be temporary: to reunify children with their birth parents if it is safe to do so or, second best, to place them with other kin. Extensive social science research has found that kids who grow up with their own families experience less long-term separation trauma, fewer mental health and behavioral problems as adolescents and more of an ultimate sense of belonging to their culture of origin.

But a ProPublica investigation co-published with The New Yorker in October revealed that there is a growing national trend of foster parents undermining the foster system’s premise by “intervening” in family court cases as a way to adopt children. As intervenors, they can file motions and call witnesses to argue that they’ve become too attached to a child for the child to be reunited with their birth family, even if officials have identified a biological family member who is suitable for a safe placement.

A key element of the intervenor strategy, ProPublica found, is hiring an attachment expert like Baird to argue that rupturing the child’s current attachment with his or her foster parents could cause lifelong psychological damage — even though Baird admitted in her deposition that attachment is a nearly inevitable aspect of the foster care model. (Transitions of children back to their birth families are not just possible, they happen every day in the child welfare system.)

As part of our reporting, we reviewed hundreds of pages of Baird’s reports and testimony from cases over the past decade. We also interviewed more than two dozen attorneys, officials, caseworkers, experts and members of foster and birth families who’ve worked with Baird or observed how she implements her methodology, which she has long called the “Kempe Protocol for Interactional Evaluation,” after the Kempe Center at the University of Colorado, the nation’s leading academic institute focused on child welfare. We found that — leaving aside the question of whether attachment theory should even be used as an argument in these cases — Baird’s assessments of foster children’s relationships aren’t just unscientific. They barely touch the surface of a child’s life.

“I don’t know these children,” she testified in one 2017 case, adding, “I have not met anybody.” Still, she said, she “strongly” recommended that those children’s birth parents’ rights be permanently terminated and that the kids be adopted.

Baird is so consistent in this view that she sometimes copies and pastes from her own past evaluations. In the Huerfano County case, she filed a report saying that the baby girl’s life with her foster parents was “predictable, safe, and filled with love”; that removing her from them and placing her with her biological grandma — with whom the girl had been having regular, joyful visits — would “derail her healthy development and create lifelong risk”; and that her “healthy development and mental health will be best protected if her current caregiving environment does not change.”

That same month, Baird filed a report in a Weld County case saying that a baby boy’s life with his foster parents was “predictable, safe, and filled with love”; that removing him from them and placing him with his biological grandmother — who too was regularly visiting him with the support of the county child services department, but whom Baird had never met — would “derail his healthy development and create lifelong risk”; and that his “healthy development and mental health will be best protected if his current caregiving environment does not change.”

Documents Show Baird Repeated Language in Reports on Different Children

Identical, or nearly identical, text in Diane Baird’s reports in two separate cases is highlighted below. Corresponding colors show where text was repurposed. Names and identifying details have been redacted.

(Anna Donlan/ProPublica)

Baird, in an interview with ProPublica, admitted that “I do sometimes use the same verbiage in one report as I did in others.” But, she added in an email, “My consistency is not a boiler-plate approach, but rather reflects developmental science which applies to all children.”

She emphasized, “In all cases I advocate for what I am convinced is the child’s best interest.”

Baird also noted that in many cases she is hired by county officials, rather than directly by foster parents, although ProPublica’s interviews and review of records show that this typically happens when officials are in agreement with the foster parents that they should get continuing or permanent custody.

Baird, despite not being a child psychologist, achieves credibility with these officials — and with judges — in part via the impressive label that she uses for her methodology: the Kempe Protocol.

“Don’t Believe It Is Our Place to Get Involved”

The University of Colorado’s Kempe Center, widely considered the birthplace of the modern U.S. child welfare system, is where this all began.

Baird developed the Kempe Protocol, alongside colleagues, while working at Kempe in the 1980s and ’90s. She continually used the method both as an employee of the center and after entering private practice in 2017.

Founded in the 1970s, the Kempe Center is best known for getting laws passed across the country requiring “mandated reporters” like teachers and police officers to call in any suspicion of child abuse or neglect to a state hotline — after which kids were to be removed from their families, into foster care, if there was evidence of maltreatment. “No organization,” said Marty Guggenheim, the founder of the nation’s indigent family defense movement, “played a more direct role in shaping the modern system of surveillance, over-reporting, and under-emphasizing of the harms associated with state intervention.”

But in recent years, Kempe has taken a more critical look at its past, accepting some institutional responsibility for what it has called the “myth of benevolence”: the idea that certain kids should be redistributed from their families to (often better-off) foster and adoptive parents. The center recently released a statement saying that it had participated in ignoring poverty by placing sole responsibility for poor children’s health and well-being on their families’ alleged maltreatment of them. The statement acknowledged the center’s “complicity” in its “generation-spanning impacts.”

The center even invited Dorothy Roberts, a law professor and sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who is a leader of the movement to abolish the child welfare system because of its widespread surveillance and separation of Black families in particular, to be a keynote speaker at a recent conference.

Yet when attorneys for poor birth families wrote to Kempe in late 2022 saying that Baird and experts she has trained “are doing real damage to families, and they are doing damage in the name of the Kempe Center,” a University of Colorado lawyer responded by declining the advocates’ request that the center “publicly disavow this protocol and correct the record.” The reason, the lawyer said, was that the judge or jury on a particular case “is in the best position to evaluate arguments raised by involved parties” as to the scientific efficacy of the method. The lawyer added that the center has “worked with hundreds of individuals in its 50-year history in the child welfare arena and we have little ability to control testimony of each individual.”

This response was far from satisfying to some of the Kempe Center’s own faculty, according to interviews with people who work there and internal emails obtained through a Colorado Open Records Act request. “When the Kempe Center was given the opportunity to do the right thing,” wrote one pediatrics professor who has been at Kempe for more than a decade, “it hid behind its legal counsel.”

Alicia Johansen and Fred Thornton with their son Carter, at their home in Colorado. As ProPublica and The New Yorker reported, Baird spent years opposing this birth family’s reunification. But Carter is now back home, bonding with his mom and dad and doing well at school. (Rachel Woolf for ProPublica)

After ProPublica published the article with The New Yorker documenting Baird’s role in the trend of foster parents “intervening” in family court cases, faculty at Kempe started organizing a discussion around our reporting and sought an organizationwide reckoning with our findings. “It was a gut punch to read this,” wrote another professor. “This is likely the most widely distributed reference to the Kempe Center that we’ve seen in the past decade or more.” The tragedy, the professor said, “is that it diminishes all of the good work we have and continue to do for kids and families.” (ProPublica is not naming the Kempe faculty and staff who wrote these emails because several asked not to be named, saying that they were fearful of retaliation by leadership or a negative effect on their academic standing.)

Still another staffer wrote that past cases of hers similar to the one we wrote about “continue to haunt me.”

More emails called Baird’s method a “bogus Kempe protocol” and “junk science” used “to rip apart families.” She is “leveraging the Kempe name to bolster her opinion.”

Even amid this outcry, Dr. Kathryn Wells, the Kempe Center’s executive director, gave a lawyerly explanation to her staff. “Yes,” she wrote in an emailed response to them, “a former employee of the Center has used an approach based on attachment theory and named it after the Center, even though there is no such protocol.” The protocol, she said, was named after Baird’s longtime place of employment — Kempe — but “not trademarked nor listed anywhere in the work that the Center provides.”

In a previous email, Wells, who has national influence on child welfare policy and practice, had explained her reasoning for not taking further action, such as sending Baird a cease-and-desist letter. “If the claims in court are not supported in the literature, that is not ours to get involved with as Diane is not an employee and it is a legal issue for the attorneys to battle in court,” Wells wrote. She added, “Don’t believe it is our place to get involved.”

What Is the Kempe Protocol?

One of Baird’s first steps upon taking a new case, according to ProPublica’s review of records and interviews that we conducted, including with Baird herself, is to meet with the foster parents. She observes the bond that they have with their foster child, which she generally compliments, and then talks to them about the child’s birth family. She asks them about the circumstances of the child’s birth and alleged neglect — neither of which foster parents likely would have been present for — and also about how visits with the birth parents or other relatives have been going.

Drawing from the foster parents’ version of events, Baird routinely reports to the county or testifies in court that visits with the birth family have been detrimental to the child, and, accordingly, she recommends that the foster parents keep the child indefinitely or permanently, on the basis of attachment theory. She has called just this amount of evaluation “the Kempe Protocol” in several cases we reviewed.

In some cases, though, Baird does observe a birth family visit. During these evaluations, she often asks the birth parents or family members a litany of personal questions that can be stressful to answer in a formal visitation setting, including, sometimes, ones about their marital history and why they’re attracted to their significant other. All the while, she judges how they’re interacting with their child, looking for “the little nuances” of how babies communicate, she told me. She calls this, too, the Kempe Protocol.

In Baird’s reports and testimony summarizing her observations from such sessions, she has said, for instance, that a little boy and his birth father seeming to be happy around each other (they were playing catch and saying “I love you!” “I love you more!”; the boy “expressed no negative emotion during their time together”) just showed that the dad was too rigidly setting the emotional tone of the relationship.

She also regularly uses terms like “mirror neurons,” “neurotoxins,” “synapses,” “hormones,” and “encoded trauma in the central nervous system” to justify her conclusions about children’s family relationships. (Baird is not a neuroscientist.)

In interviews and emails with ProPublica, Baird said that she is simply opposed, in almost all cases, to rupturing the current healthy attachment of any child under 3 with that child’s foster parents, even if a birth family member is available and family and cultural heritage stand to be lost forever. She said that this is the age when kids are developing their capacity to form healthy relationships, and that they may experience being removed from their foster parents as a rejection, causing a loss of trust going forward. She also said that kids who have a history of caregiver changes and trauma, which is true of many little ones in foster care, need a sense of “permanency,” often meaning adoption.

Baird’s — and Kempe’s — Legacy

Baird in her office (Trent Davis Bailey for ProPublica)

Baird says that she is likely retiring soon, in part as a result of the increasing scrutiny of her practices that she has been facing. In an email to ProPublica, she wrote, “You have been the catalyst for a good bit of self examination,” adding, “Deep soul searching has followed and your process has helped me as I have worked to be honest with myself.”

Yet Baird still shares thoughts and advice about ongoing cases with a coterie of mostly younger experts — what she called in her deposition a “peer supervision and support” group.

“Do you think it’s maybe advisable that others don’t continue to use that protocol given its controversy and the lack of evidence?” she was asked in the deposition.

“I’ll leave that up to them,” she answered.

Several of these experts, according to their resumes, have trained at Kempe, or they have testified or told ProPublica that they’ve learned directly from Baird either at Kempe or in their continuing practice.

“Kempe is such a weighty voice that no judge is going to be like, ‘Oh, Kempe is wrong,’” said Melissa Michaelis Thompson, executive director of the Office of Respondent Parents’ Counsel, Colorado’s public defender agency for indigent birth parents. Thompson said that her attorneys around the state keep seeing versions of the Kempe Protocol being used in their cases.

Wells, the Kempe Center’s executive director, told ProPublica in a statement earlier this month that the use of attachment theory and parent-child interactional assessments, the procedure that Baird conducts with birth families, “in isolation” and “particularly in non-therapeutic settings and without attention to bias,” is “not consistent with current best practices and can be abused by experts.” Wells added that Kempe does not itself currently provide such evaluations for court proceedings or endorse the methodology for that purpose. “Equity is at the heart of our mission,” she said.

Even if the Kempe Center did fully disavow Baird and her cohort’s use of this protocol and practices like it, there would be no clear recourse for all of the birth families who’ve lost their children in the past because of Baird’s work. Still, those families might better know the truth of what happened to them, many of them say.

Stephanie Riggs, the biological grandmother in the Huerfano County case — “huerfano,” ironically, means “orphan” in Spanish — had been doing everything she could to bring her granddaughter back from foster care. She was working nights to be able to travel to visit the baby girl during the day. She’d dug into her limited budget to get a crib, a dresser and baby clothes, bookshelves and baby books, and a play carpet and a toy box. She successfully completed a safety check of her home, case records show. “The grandmother Mrs. Riggs has been committed” to the child “and loves her very much,” the county said in a report.

A crib, toys and other items in the room Stephanie Riggs prepared for her granddaughter (Courtesy of Stephanie Riggs)

But then “Diane Baird turned everything upside down,” Riggs said. “I didn’t see how she could be unbiased,” Riggs said of Baird, because the foster parent intervenors were “giving her her paycheck.”

Baird told ProPublica that “who pays me is not a factor in any recommendation in any case.” She also noted that she was found credible as an expert by the judge in this case.

The foster father, when reached by phone, declined to comment, citing his family’s desire for privacy and the fact that the case had been emotionally difficult for all parties.

This past fall, with Baird’s help, the foster parents were granted full custody of the baby girl through her 18th birthday. Some visits may still be allowed in the future, at least by video, but Riggs is unsure if her granddaughter will ever meet her aunts, uncles and cousins, or go to their family reunions, or know their family traditions. Only the crib remains, and it is empty.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Eli Hager

“It Feels Impossible to Stay”: The U.S. Needs Wildland Firefighters More Than Ever, but the Federal Government Is Losing Them

1 week 6 days ago

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Join us March 26 to discuss the exodus of wildland firefighters.

Black Butte is an inactive volcano that rises from the high desert in eastern Oregon. In May 2022, a turboprop plane approached its pine-blanketed slopes, carrying about 10 men wearing bulky Kevlar outfits. They were smokejumpers with the United States Forest Service, the agency that directs the majority of the nation’s efforts to manage wildfires. Within the vast and hierarchical fire service, smokejumpers occupy a singular niche, parachuting into remote areas to fight early-stage wildfires. There are only about 450 nationwide, and the physical requirements are rigorous.

One of the smokejumpers on board was Ben Elkind. Thirty-seven years old with a long, athletic build and restless energy, he had been fighting wildfires for 14 years and jumping for the last eight of them. Despite his elite status, Elkind earned about $43,000 in 2021 over the course of the seven-month fire season. His base paycheck, though, was less than half of that. Like most wildland firefighters, he relied on overtime and hazard pay, which can be accumulated on two- or three-week shifts away from home. Many firefighters exceed 1,000 hours of overtime in a season. Elkind chose to be with his wife and two young children more that year and worked a relatively modest 700 hours of overtime, the equivalent of 17 additional weeks.

Still, the beginning of the season usually rekindled the parts of the job that Elkind loved — especially the adrenalized clarity that arrived when his crew’s spotter tapped him on the back, indicating that it was time to jump. In recent years, the Forest Service has switched from round parachutes to rectangular ones, which allow for greater maneuverability. During training exercises that spring, Elkind was still getting accustomed to the new chute. After he slid out of the plane’s open door, a tailwind picked up. He did not descend quickly enough to the landing zone, sailing slightly past it. He saw ponderosa pines rushing toward him and tried to slow his chute. Its canopy collapsed, and he free fell. When he landed, his left leg crashed through his pelvis. Colleagues rushed to him, cutting his suit away. An ambulance sped him to a hospital, where doctors would eventually insert three plates and 12 screws into his hip. He was sent home on painkillers.

Doctors told him he would be on crutches for at least two months, possibly three. When I spoke with Elkind soon after the injury, he said, “I got a lot of pills going, but it’s all right.” Then his tone shifted. “I need to — I would like to — get back jumping,” he said. “That would mean I’ve recovered, but I also know that you don’t always recover from these things.”

He had more immediate worries, though. He could file for workers’ compensation benefits through the Department of Labor, but wildland firefighters have historically struggled to receive those, since federal caseworkers are often unfamiliar with the job’s geographically diffuse nature. (A firefighter based in Idaho might get injured in Arizona, adding a layer of complexity to an already burdensome and bureaucratic process.) A recent survey found that nearly half of Forest Service employees who had suffered an on-the-job injury chose not to report it, assuming that they would receive little or no help. Even if Elkind recovered quickly enough to do office work, he would not be eligible for hazard pay or likely earn overtime, meaning he’d be making around $20,000. His wife, Amber, a physician’s assistant, would be contributing most of the family’s income. “It’s not a great situation,” Elkind told me. “My base check doesn’t cover rent alone.”

Knowing that the government couldn’t offer a swift remedy, his colleagues started a GoFundMe campaign, which quickly raised $50,000. Elkind called it a lifesaver. It was, he said, what wildland fighters did when a colleague was seriously injured. It was, he told me, “standard operating procedure.”

For communities throughout the American West, wildland firefighters represent the last line of defense, but that line is fraying because the government decided long ago that they’re not worth very much. The highly trained men and women protecting communities from immolation earn the same base pay as a fast-food server while taking severe risks with their physical and mental health. Despite the mounting public concern over the increasing severity of wildfires, the federal government has not seen fit to meaningfully address these issues. The effects of this chronic neglect have now become strikingly clear as the fire service is finding it difficult to fill its ranks, prefiguring what advocates are calling a national security crisis.

Fighting wildfires has always been a dangerous occupation, but in the last decade it has become staggering in its demands. Accelerating climate change, coupled with a century of suppression of wildfire, has created thick stands of trees primed to burn across much of the American West. In certain parts of the country, fire seasons that once lasted a few months now span much of the year. In 1993, the federal government fought wildfires on 1,797,574 acres; by 2021, that figure had more than quadrupled. Each spring brings a game of geographic roulette. In 2017, Montana set a state record for wildfires. The next year, California followed suit, with nearly 2 million burned acres, a figure that stood briefly before it was topped twice in the next three years. Experts have been forced to coin a new term for fires exceeding 1 million acres: gigafire.

In many places, wildfire is an essential part of the ecosystem: It clears out dead underbrush and aging foliage, spreads new seeds and enables biodiversity. Extinguishing it, as federal and state governments have done for 100 years, just creates a larger and more dangerous fuel load. Great swaths of the country are now in what scientists call a fire deficit — they haven’t burned for a long time, and they need to, or fires will only get bigger and more destructive. The only way out of such a deficit is to let a wildfire go or to manage it by setting a prescribed burn to reduce the amount of fuel. But in drought-stressed and densely populous places, that is difficult. In 2022 in New Mexico, two prescribed burns got out of control, merged and scorched an area larger than Los Angeles. It can be all but impossible to suppress a megafire, but the government must try, unless it wishes to write off, say, Mora, New Mexico, or Malibu, California. There is no technology up to the task; most of the work is still done by unseen, underpaid people with chainsaws and hand tools.

But at exactly the time when the country needs wildland firefighters more than ever, the federal government is losing them. In the past three years, according to the Forest Service’s own assessments, it has suffered an attrition rate of 45% among its permanent employees. Many people inside and outside the fire service believe this represents one of the worst crises in its history. Last spring, as the 2023 fire season was getting started, I asked Grant Beebe, a former smokejumper who now heads the Bureau of Land Management’s fire program, if there had been an exodus of wildland firefighters. He initially hesitated. “‘Exodus’ is a pretty strong word,” he said. But then he reconsidered. “I’ll say yeah. Yeah.”

“The ship is sinking,” Abel Martinez, a Forest Service engine captain in California and the national fire chair for the National Federation of Federal Employees, the union that represents wildland firefighters, told me. (For this story, almost every wildland firefighter who agreed to use their full name has an official role with the union; the one firefighter identified by their middle name does not.)

Although nobody could provide precise numbers, leaders like Beebe are especially concerned that the attrition has been particularly acute among those with extensive experience — those like Elkind. It takes years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to train a wildland firefighter capable of overseeing the numerous resources — engines, helicopters, smokejumpers — that are deployed on large fires. As Beebe put it, “You can’t just hire some person off the street into one of our higher-level management jobs.”

The reasons for the exodus are many, but fundamentally it reflects an inattentive bureaucracy and a culture that suppresses internal criticism. Only in 2022 did the fire service acknowledge an explicit link between cancer and wildland firefighters, even though officials have long expressed concern about the connection. And it was only last year that the fire service held its first conference on mental health, even though officials have been aware for decades of the high incidence of substance abuse and divorce among wildland firefighters.

But more than anything, wildland firefighters are leaving because they’re compensated so poorly, the result of a byzantine civil service structure that makes it extremely hard to sustain a career. The federal fire service is responsible for managing blazes on nearly 730 million acres of land — an area almost the size of India. Among the five agencies, one dominates in terms of influence and size: the Forest Service, which employs more than 11,000 wildland firefighters, most of whom work from roughly April to October. The hiring system dates to the early years of the agency, when it often recruited from bars and relied on volunteers to suppress wildfires by 10 a.m.

About one third of the workforce is temporary — firefighters who are automatically laid off at the end of each season. Even those who are permanent receive compensation starting at $15 per hour until they accumulate overtime and hazard pay. Because of the way the government classifies their work, it’s extremely difficult for wildland firefighters to increase their base salaries unless they frequently move around the country. Altogether, it’s a pay structure that incentivizes risk taking and a nomadic existence.

For more than a century, the Forest Service was able to call on a ready workforce, one made up largely of rural men. (It is estimated that 84% of wildland firefighters are male.) Because of the reliable flow of applicants, the agency did not need to advocate for increased pay. But the changing nature of fire seasons, combined with the skyrocketing cost of living in the mountain West, has made firefighting less alluring than it once was.

A Forest Service spokesperson wrote that since 2021 the agency has acknowledged the attrition among its workforce: “It is why agency and department leadership have been doing everything possible in coordination with the administration and Congress to provide a permanent, competitive increase in wildland firefighter pay, as well as staffing capacity and mental health programs.” The spokesperson pointed to a raise — from $13 to $15 an hour — created by the Biden administration in 2021. The spokesperson also wrote, "With the increasing duration and intensity of wildfires the agency understands the need to do much more.”

Last fall, the Forest Service processed its applicants for 2024. An official who has been involved in hiring for the agency for more than a decade characterized the returns as “abysmal” — “It’s the smallest list I’ve ever seen,” he told me. A severe dearth of applicants for temporary seasonal jobs — the entry point for the next generation of wildland firefighters — forced the agency to extend its hiring period. For permanent positions, the returns were not much better.

Talk to enough wildland firefighters, and you’ll eventually hear about freedom. Not liberty, necessarily, but the thrill of a job that requires walking around woods with a chainsaw. Hannah Coolidge joined the Forest Service when she was 25, eventually becoming a hotshot, part of an elect crew that tromps far into forests to cut breaks around the largest wildfires to rob them of fuel. For a decade, Coolidge never attended a wedding or a funeral during fire season, but she loved the life — living outside, working with a tight-knit group, having winters for herself, being in phenomenal shape. (Researchers at the University of Montana have found that, during fire season, hotshots can expend about as much energy as cyclists in the Tour de France.) Taylor Hess also came for the time off but found that a Montana fire crew brought communal purpose, something that had been missing in the Midwestern town where she was raised. She liked huddling with colleagues at the end of the day, frying Spam over a wildfire’s dying embers and pouring an electrolyte mix on top. “It’s kind of gross,” she said, but she cherished those moments: “We get so close.”

A lot of the job is grueling and dirty: mopping up the end of a wildfire in a sea of ash; constructing line around piles of downed limbs in advance of lighting a prescribed burn; unrolling a sleeping pad in the woods or an ad-hoc camp, then awakening to the boot of a superintendent or water from the sprinklers on a high school football field. It’s slow until it’s not. Then it becomes vertiginous and hallucinatory. “It is a landscape of extremes,” Eric Franta, a wildland firefighter based in Oregon, told me. During Bobbie Scopa’s first fire, she was walking on a hill above a burning canyon when a chief bellowed for her to cover her head. An air tanker dropped chemical retardant, a great red squall that shook the ground. “I thought, ‘This is the coolest fucking job!’” she said.

In many communities, it’s also the best available employment option. Jake Kennedy, now an engine driver in California, was recruited by a former wrestling coach in a tiny Oregon town where the Forest Service was one of two reliable employers. Morgan Thomsen grew up in a remote part of Idaho where his parents were fire lookouts, so he was raised thinking that fighting fire was a good way to earn a living. Kristina — her middle name — enlisted in part to honor her family. Her grandfather had been a smokejumper, and her parents had both worked as wildland firefighters. “We have this loyalty in my family to the Forest Service,” she said.

Among his peers, Elkind is seen as fortunate. He didn’t join the Forest Service to escape rural poverty — he has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Lewis & Clark College — but rather to seek adventure. He was also a smokejumper, with the status that the job entails. (A fire service joke goes like this: A group of wildland firefighters walk into a bar. How do you know which is the smokejumper? They’ll tell you.) Still, Elkind, like so many of the firefighters I talked to, seemed almost trapped by the freedom he had once sought. “I like my job,” he said. “It’s just hard to see the effects when you’re starting out a career.”

Those effects weren’t just his busted pelvis. It was being away from his family for long stretches. (“It’s a Catch-22,” a firefighter told me. “For us to be able to provide for our families, it requires us to basically detach from our families.”) And it was how difficult the Forest Service made it for someone to rise and earn a decent living. To earn a promotion and reach higher pay grades, firefighters usually have to move among the agency’s nine regions or earn a master’s degree in forestry and leave the fire line.

Elkind didn’t want to do either of those things. He’d grown up in Oregon, and his family was rooted there. In early 2022, he and Amber moved to Redmond, a town of 35,000 in the central part of the state, where the Forest Service has one of its seven smokejumper bases. Compared with nearby Bend — a bacchanalia of Gore-Tex and microbreweries where the median home price hovers above $700,000 — Redmond is middle class. But, as Elkind told me, “This place is blowing up.”

Redmond, like many towns where wildland firefighters live, has experienced an influx of remote workers since the onset of COVID-19, which has driven up housing costs. The rent on the Elkinds’ modest house is $2,300. Even before his accident, he was nervous about making ends meet. In November 2021, the government offered some relief when Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which created a temporary pay raise for wildland firefighters of either $20,000 or 50% of their regular check.

When I visited Elkind at his home, toys were scattered across the floor, an elk mount lay on a couch and bills were piled on the dining room table. He wore shorts and a tank top, and his hair was long. Save for the flecks of gray in his beard, he looked boyish. Three months after his accident, he still walked with a limp and needed a cane but was able to drive his kids to school. He had considered filing for worker’s compensation but decided against it, because it was hard to reach his caseworker and because the Forest Service offered him an office job, which allowed him to benefit from the temporary pay raise.

Until the move, Elkind had been living a split existence, with his family in Portland and his job in Redmond, where he camped out on a colleague’s property during fire season. In the summer of 2020, lightning started a fire on the Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon. It soon spread onto land managed by the Forest Service, and Elkind was dispatched. Upon arriving at a fire camp, he was alarmed by a lack of veteran firefighters. “It was like a ghost town,” he said. He found himself training people from municipal departments who had been hired on temporary contracts to fill vacancies. Over Labor Day weekend, wind carried embers for miles, causing the fire, which became known as the Lionshead, to jump and merge with others. The blazes burned more than 400,000 acres, killing at least five people.

At the same time, his mother’s home near Hagg Lake was under evacuation orders brought on by another fire. Amber was in Portland with the couple’s 2-year-old son, in a house without air conditioning. She was also pregnant. Elkind told her to duct-tape paper towels over a box fan to create a makeshift air filter as smoke from the fires suffused the city. “I think I had a little bit of a mental breakdown,” he told me. “Homes are burning down. People are dying.” Entire forests in western Oregon were disappearing. He couldn’t stop what was happening to the only place he’d ever called his own.

The decision to relocate to Redmond was so Elkind would not be away from his family throughout fire season. Still, he worried about the choice. Amber had been able to find work with a clinic in Redmond. But for him to reach a higher hourly wage would likely require the family to move again. “What’s she supposed to do? Quit her career every year and a half so I can get a dollar-fifty an hour raise?” he asked.

During our discussions, Elkind often edited his sentences so as to not sound as though he was blaming the Forest Service, even though as a union representative he had protection. His affection for his work became a refrain that he repeated to the point of awkwardness: “I like my job. It’s just difficult to justify it with a family.” “I do love my job, but that doesn’t mean that I think it’s worth it for a young person.” “I would almost do it for free,” he wrote in an op-ed that appeared in The Oregonian in 2021 that was critical of the Forest Service’s refusal “to rise to the challenge of climate change and the growing demand that increased fires, short-staffing and low pay presents for our workforce.”

That rhetorical hesitancy was a reflection of Elkind’s torn feelings, but it was also an acknowledgment of something else: The Forest Service is known to function as a company town in rural America, deterring discussions that could result in negative attention. When I spoke with Jaelith Hall-Rivera, the Forest Service deputy chief for state, private and tribal forestry, she acknowledged that the agency has a reputation for discouraging employees from speaking out. “We have tried for a long time to change that culture,” she said. “Especially in fire, you have to be able to speak up when something doesn’t feel right to you.”

The National Federation of Federal Employees says it does not track instances of workplace intimidation or retaliation among wildland firefighters, so it’s impossible to ascertain how often this occurs. But fear of reprisal was a common thread in many of my conversations. At a gathering of wildland firefighters and agency supervisors that I attended last spring, a member of a Forest Service rappel crew approached me eager to discuss the changes she wanted to see in the agency — especially the need for more women in leadership positions. An older colleague quickly pulled her aside; when she returned, she asked if she could see the article before it was published. When I asked if a superior had told her not to speak to me, she said, “I don’t feel comfortable answering that.”

Every year, returning federal wildland firefighters take a refresher course covering safety practices. Firefighters get to choose from a number of videos. One, titled “Smoke: Knowing The Risks,” is led by George Broyles, a former wildland firefighter and public information officer. From 2008 to 2014, he spearheaded the Forest Service’s research into the physiological impacts of wildfire smoke. “Exposure to carbon monoxide and some of these other chemicals is going to impact the way we think,” Broyles says in the video, which emphasizes wildfire smoke’s effect on performance and decision-making. But when it comes to the long-term health effects of working in smoke, the video is circumspect. “That’s an issue that’s still understudied,” Broyles says. The video, which was produced in 2018, never mentions the possibility of cancer, nor does a more recent preparedness guide for new recruits.

It is now widely accepted that all firefighters — structure as well as wildland — are far more susceptible to cancer than the rest of society. In 2022, the International Agency for Research on Cancer declared that the job is carcinogenic to humans. But still the Forest Service and the other federal agencies that employ wildland firefighters have been slow to acknowledge the obvious. Part of the problem is a lack of epidemiological research into the distinct risks that wildland firefighters face. Dr. Jeff Burgess, the director of the Center for Firefighter Health Collaborative Research at the University of Arizona Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, is working to fill that void by conducting long-term epidemiological studies on wildland firefighters. “We just don’t have the same degree of information on cancer risk in wildland firefighting that we do in structure firefighting,” he said.

Last February, I attended an event at the University of Miami called the International Firefighter Cancer Symposium, which brought together firefighters from as far away as Australia and researchers from institutions like the American Cancer Society and the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. It was a gathering for those who study cancer and those who develop it while fighting fires. Many of the researchers were looking into the dangers of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, commonly known as “forever chemicals.” Synthetic compounds, PFAS are ubiquitous in municipal fire- and water-resistant gear and have long been used in firefighting foam. (The Forest Service says it does not know whether its protective gear for wildland firefighters contains PFAS but that it has sent samples to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health for testing.)

The conference’s emphasis on PFAS reflected a huge gap in research. Structure firefighters encounter smoke that is often more toxic than wildfire smoke, but they also use powerful respirators. Wildland firefighters eschew respirators since most are bulky and can be operated for only about 30 minutes at a time. Of the numerous studies presented, only one explicitly focused on wildland firefighters. In that project, which hasn’t yet been published by a peer-reviewed journal, researchers from the University of Miami examined exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, produced during prescribed burning. They found that wildland firefighters had elevated exposures to the compounds, which have been associated in the general population with lung and bladder cancer and cardiovascular dysfunction.

That smoke contains such material is not news to the Forest Service. In 1989, the agency convened its first gathering to discuss the physical effects of smoke and allotted some money for research. Attendees recommended that the agency conduct an epidemiological cohort study to examine long-term health risks. Funding for the study was never appropriated, though.

Eleven years later, researchers employed by the Forest Service published a paper that found that smoke from prescribed burns contained elevated levels of carbon monoxide and particulate matter, including benzene and formaldehyde, both of which are carcinogenic. It noted that, during high winds, the levels were up to three times above what workplace safety organizations recommend. Despite this, it concluded that “the adverse health effects of smoke exposure at prescribed fires seem to be manageable.”

At a summit in 1997, researchers again suggested that the Forest Service undertake a cohort study to look at the effect of wildfire smoke among the workforce, using markers like blood and urine samples. It, too, was never done.

Starting in 2008, Broyles, with the support of the Forest Service, traveled the country and to test fire crews’ smoke exposures. It wasn’t an epidemiological study, but it led to a 2019 peer-reviewed paper that modeled wildland firefighter cancer rates based on what is understood about smoke’s impact on the general population. It projected that wildland firefighters’ incidences of lung cancer would be elevated by between 8% and 43%.

The study was posted on the agency’s website, but, according to Broyles, its findings have led to little change. He said he was brushed off when he proposed an updated version of the smoke video to address the risk of cancer. (When asked about Broyles’ assertion, an agency spokesperson wrote, “The Forest Service is deeply committed to not only understanding occupational risks to employees but mitigating these risks.” They added, “Recruitment materials for wildland fire positions often describe the job as difficult and dangerous.”)

In 2022, the National Wildfire Coordinating Group, which is made up of leaders from the five federal agencies that oversee wildland firefighting, released a new preparedness guide for recruits that made no mention of cancer. “It confounds me,” Broyles told me. “Quite frankly, it breaks my heart.” As of last year, his 2018 smoke video was still being shown to federal firefighters. (When asked why the materials did not refer to cancer, the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior said they were developed before the agencies were provided legal language recognizing a link between the disease and wildland firefighting.)

The firefighters union and an advocacy group called Grassroots Wildland Firefighters used the 2019 paper to lobby the Department of Labor, and in April 2022, the department announced that it would recognize numerous cancers, including lung, testicular and thyroid, as an occupational hazard. (Notably, cancers distinctive to women, such as ovarian, were excluded.) Eight months later, Congress passed a law that called cancer a presumptive sickness for federal firefighters and mandated that the five agencies that make up the fire service file a report on illnesses, including cancer, in the profession. “We’re just starting that,” said Hall-Rivera, the Forest Service deputy chief.

Some advocates have expressed hope that a deeper understanding of wildland firefighter cancer rates might evolve after the launch of the National Firefighter Registry for Cancer, a voluntary database managed by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Congress allocated funding for the registry in 2018, but it went online only last spring. According to current and former employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, NIOSH’s information technology department caused unnecessary delay. “From my perspective this is gross mismanagement,” said one person with direct knowledge of the project. Another official supported that assessment. (In a statement, a NIOSH spokesperson wrote that since 2021, the agency “has designed, built, tested, and deployed a robust enrollment system that incorporates industry best practices for information security and sensitive data management.”)

Immediately after the registry launched, Elkind decided to enter his name. When he arrived at the hospital after his training accident, he underwent a full-body CT scan, which revealed a mass in his thyroid. It proved to be cancerous. He had no family history of thyroid cancer, so he assumes his illness came from smoke inhalation, but he’ll never know. “Not everybody’s as lucky as me to break their pelvis at work and get scanned at the hospital,” he said with deadpan sarcasm. The next time we spoke, three months after the accident, he said, “I’m not upset at the Forest Service. I’m just like — I’ve never heard them say, ‘Hey, this smoke is cancerous.’”

In the fall of 2020, after Oregon’s fire season ended, Elkind went for a run in Portland’s Peninsula Park. He had recently been laid off for the winter. For many wildland firefighters, this period of sudden transition is brutal: When you’ve been operating on intensity for six months, taking out the trash and folding laundry can feel empty. In the past, Elkind had managed the annual pivot by doing construction work and house projects or by traveling with friends. But he was still experiencing the acute pressure he’d felt since the peak of fire season when so much of Oregon burned. Amber had just given birth to the couple’s second son, and he wasn’t sure how to responsibly move forward in his career. “I was so stressed out,” he told me.

Elkind thought he’d try to contact a therapist — something he’d never done. During his run, he called the Employee Assistance Program, a service set up by the federal government that provides workers from any agency as many as six sessions per condition with a mental health professional. Elkind hoped to arrange an appointment in person but was informed that the session was only available right then on the phone. That wasn’t the worst of it: When he shared his employment information, he was told that he would not be eligible to receive help until he returned to work during the next fire season. “I was like, ‘Maybe I’ll drink a few more beers and forget about this,’” Elkind said.

The Forest Service revised its EAP policy a year later and now offers consultations to firefighters for up to six months after their layoff. (“The agency has been proactive in addressing known challenges with past EAP services,” wrote a spokesperson.) However, because the EAP serves a vast federal bureaucracy, multiple wildland firefighters told me that they did not trust its counselors; the people on the other end of the phone, they said, knew little about what their job entailed.

The fire service does offer wildland firefighters access to a crisis intervention program after the death of a colleague, say, but it provides little aid for those facing the daily burdens of the job — and those can be extreme: Trees falling next to where you’re standing. Helicopters flying in to remove the injured. Mopping up for days, surrounded by smoke. Many wildland firefighters, who operate in a culture that prides itself on stoicism, respond to those pressures in ways that aren’t surprising. Some chase more adrenaline: kayaking, skiing, mountain biking. “There’s a lot of dealing with it through drinking and drugs — at best,” Hannah Coolidge, the Washington hotshot, said. In January, researchers with NIOSH and the CDC released a peer-reviewed study that confirmed what Coolidge and others told me. It found that among six federal wildland crews, 78% of the firefighters reported binge drinking.

“We’re so unhealthy in such a ubiquitous way that it’s almost hard to pinpoint,” a Forest Service firefighter in Oregon said. He had returned home from combatting a fire to find his house burned to the ground. Since then, he had endured symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder. A firefighter in Wyoming who recently left the service told me that, like many of his colleagues, he couldn’t maintain a relationship: “I wouldn’t date me either. I’m not emotionally available. I’m gone.” A recent survey of the spouses of wildland firefighters found that almost half had considered leaving their relationships because of the job.

“Wildland firefighting is similar to other high-risk occupations and also similar to the Western American culture around how to manage difficulty,” psychologist Patricia O’Brien, a former hotshot who now oversees the Bureau of Land Management’s mental health program, told me. “There’s been a tradition of not talking about it, of keeping your personal life boxed up and separate and prioritizing work. And a sense that, as long as you’re able to show up and work, you keep your personal problems at home. We know that people may be able to do that for a period of time, but it’s not sustainable, and it’s harmful to people.”

In 2018, O’Brien, who at the time was a doctoral student, conducted a survey of 2,600 wildland firefighters, finding that one-fifth had experienced suicidal thoughts, while nearly 14% of respondents screened positive for probable PTSD — a rate about four times that found in the general population. Six years later, that data remains the most reliable on the mental health of wildland firefighters.

The Forest Service has responded to the mental health struggles of its workforce much the way it has responded to cancer: For years, officials have raised concerns about the issue, and for years, the agency has either ignored or minimized them. In a statement, the agency acknowledged it “has not conducted or funded a study into the mental-health effects of wildland firefighting.” Tom Harbour, a former national director of fire and aviation management at the Forest Service, told me that the agency began discussing the pressures on its workforce in the 1990s. “We started asking ourselves about the cost of the system we had built,” he said, referring to the agency’s emphasis on overtime and hazard pay. “Divorces, heavy drinking — those were just things that were kind of a byproduct of the system.” He added, “Why in the world should it take 30 years to make some of these changes?”

“That’s a fair question,” the Forest Service’s Hall-Rivera said. “We did have to build our awareness. It is hard to get people to talk about it, and we had to shift our focus and start asking for resources, start investing resources.”

In 2021, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allotted $20 million to the agencies overseeing the fire service to establish year-round mental health programs. The Bureau of Land Management had already been taking steps in that direction; five years ago, it launched a pilot program offering pre- and postseason mental health trainings for firefighters to help them transition in and out of the season.

But the Forest Service has lagged behind. Last year, for the first time, the agency announced a wildland firefighter mental health support program; with $1.5 million allotted over two years, it’s still in the planning stage. (The Forest Service’s budget for the fiscal year was $10 billion.) Individual districts have begun contracting at least one mental health provider, Dani Shedden, a former wildland firefighter who in 2022 quit to start a counseling business. Shedden told me that much of her work with the Forest Service is focused on post-season sessions, in which she shows firefighters how to use the EAP and find what she called “culturally competent clinicians” in rural areas. Shedden has conducted 10 such sessions.

Last April, many of the fire service’s leaders — including Hall-Rivera and Beebe — gathered in Boise, Idaho, for what was billed as a first-of-its-kind seminar on mental health. Long the nerve center for the federal fire service, Boise has become a boomtown, pricing out wildland firefighters, with a median home price of $513,000. After the event, attendees gathered at a downtown food court, where Kelly Martin, a co-founder of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, approached Jeff Arnberger, at the time a Bureau of Land Management official who also served on the executive board of the National Wildfire Coordinating Group. They began discussing their hopes for the service — subsidized housing, fair pay, presumptive coverage for PTSD, a more tolerant fire service. “If you ran our model at Nikon or Google or McDonald’s, those places would be out of business in five minutes,” Arnberger said. “We pay our people like shit. We don’t offer them any help when they have a problem.”

By January 2023, doctors had removed the cancer in Elkind’s thyroid, and he had been cleared to return to smokejumping. Amber asked him not to tell her about his first practice jump, so he didn’t. He spent almost the entire summer away from Redmond. In early July, he jumped a fire in Washington and felt his old confidence returning. He then had a long stint learning to be a medical unit leader. When we spoke in September, he was working on a handcrew in western Washington as its assistant — in effect, the second in command. “It feels like I’m almost giving back, helping to train people, which is kind of nice,” he said.

With Elkind away so much, Amber left her job as a physician’s assistant. “I didn’t feel like I could do the summer with me taking care of the children and doing primary care,” she said. Compared with previous years, 2023 was a light fire season. Fewer than 3 million acres had burned — the lowest figure in more than 20 years. That was particularly fortunate for residents of California, where, according to the union, 12% of Forest Service engines went unstaffed and had to be effectively shut down and six hotshot crews did not have enough firefighters to operate. In September — often the height of California’s fire season — the agency’s statewide wildland firefighting force had a vacancy rate of 35%. In one forest, the Modoc, 68% of positions were empty.

The temporary pay raise from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was set to expire in the fall. Kyrsten Sinema, the independent senator from Arizona, introduced a bill in August that would largely protect the increase, which had Republican and Democratic cosponsors. Then, over Labor Day weekend, the Forest Service sent an email to thousands of firefighters, informing them that they would be receiving a 50% pay increase — which turned out to be erroneous. The Forest Service explained that the notification was the result of a clerical mistake. “Please know that this error was not made deliberately,” the Forest Service’s human resources department wrote in a mass email two weeks later.

Elkind was on a fire when this occurred and said his attention was elsewhere. But for other wildland firefighters I spoke with, the email was indicative not just of the agency’s incompetence but of an obliviousness that bordered on cruelty. Congress has since voted to preserve the raise until Sept. 30, 2024, but its future remains uncertain. “I know that some of you are living paycheck to paycheck and do not have the means to save for a rainy day,” Hall-Rivera wrote on the Forest Service’s website. “Rest assured that we remain committed to securing the permanent solution that our wildland firefighters deserve.”

In the fall, when the Forest Service began to assess the state of its workforce for the 2024 fire season, the results were shocking, according to an official. Undesirable applicants were appearing frequently for crucial positions. “This list really stinks,” he said. In Rapid City, South Dakota — typically a popular work location — there was only one applicant for an engine captain position by mid-November. In California, union officials were anticipating a mass departure of engine captains and hotshot superintendents. “We used to have the depth,” Abel Martinez, the California engine captain, said. “We’d just promote everybody up. Now you go to the cupboard, and there’s no food. There’s nobody there.”

When asked about the continuing attrition, an agency spokesperson wrote, “It is accurate to say that the Forest Service has lost firefighters to better paying jobs,” adding that the dynamic “is more pronounced in specific regions and states.”

In January, Elkind resigned from his position as a smokejumper to become an assistant captain on a handcrew. “It feels impossible to stay,” he told me shortly before he made the decision. “It feels irresponsible to stay — with a family.” Then he started, once again, to talk about what he prized about his job: chainsaws, doing something that almost no one else can do, sliding out of the door of a moving plane into the open sky. He would miss that, but he wanted to continue fighting wildfire. It is an incredible force — writhing, leaping, kicking off embers that dart toward other living things. It can be regenerative, but it can also devour.

Clarification, March 18, 2024: After publication, the reporter and ProPublica learned that the smokejumper prominently featured in the story, Ben Elkind, is a nephew of staff reporter Peter Elkind. Peter Elkind had no involvement in the reporting, editing or preparation of the article.

by Abe Streep for ProPublica, illustrations by Hokyoung Kim, special to ProPublica

New EPA Rule to Slash Cancer-Causing Emissions From Sterilization Facilities

1 week 6 days ago

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

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday issued a rule to slash toxic emissions from commercial sterilization facilities that have posed an increased lifetime cancer risk to residents who live near them. These facilities release fumes of ethylene oxide, labeled by the agency as “one of the most potent cancer-causing chemicals.”

Ethylene oxide, a flammable, colorless gas, is used to sanitize medical and dental equipment to reduce the risk of infection, and fumigate certain food products. Long-term exposure to ethylene oxide can cause irritation of the eyes, skin, nose and throat as well as damage to the brain and reproductive system.

The new rule will place stricter limits on how much ethylene oxide commercial sterilizers can release into the outside air, eventually eliminating about 90% of emissions of the gas nationwide, according to the EPA. An analysis by the environmental group Union of Concerned Scientists found about 13 million people live near these facilities, and these emissions pose a disproportionate risk to poor and minority communities. In Texas, residents say a plant in Laredo, Midwest Sterilization Corporation, has contributed to the city’s elevated rates of cancer.

Facilities would be required to install pollution-control equipment, conduct continuous emissions monitoring and file quarterly reports to the EPA. A spokesperson with Midwest Sterilization told ProPublica the company is evaluating the new rule and learning about its requirements. “Our top priority is ensuring we can continue to keep communities safe while helping to save patient’s lives,” the spokesperson wrote, referring to the corporation’s work on sterilizing surgical kits for hospitals.

Reducing cancer in communities exposed to toxic air pollution has been a prime focus of the Biden administration’s environmental agenda. The new rule will address emissions at nearly 90 commercial sterilization facilities, including some in Texas, that are owned and operated by approximately 50 companies.

Prior regulations on commercial sterilizers that use ethylene oxide did not account for the EPA’s latest research. In 2016, the agency concluded that ethylene oxide was 30 times more carcinogenic for adults than previously thought and 50 times more carcinogenic for those who are exposed since birth.

“We have followed the science and listened to communities,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a press release. “We’ve arrived at a historically strong rule that will protect the most exposed communities from toxic air pollution while also ensuring that there will be a process that safeguards our nation’s critical supply of sterilized medical equipment.”

A 2021 investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune revealed the EPA’s yearslong failure to inform communities, including Laredo, a city of more than 250,000 on the Texas-Mexico border, of the risks they faced from the cancer-causing chemical. The Texas Department of State Health Services conducted two assessments in 2022 examining cancer rates from 2006 to 2019 in Laredo and found a higher rate of acute lymphocytic leukemia, breast cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma compared with cancer rates elsewhere in the state.

“We were completely unaware. And to this day, I think many still are not fully aware of what’s right there and how dangerous this chemical is,” said Tricia Cortez, a Laredo resident and executive director of the environmental nonprofit Rio Grande International Study Center, on Thursday.

“The ones who suffer most are our everyday people who live and work right next to these facilities.”

Cortez said that her community has been waiting a long time for EPA’s new rule and that the decision to reduce emissions means a lot.

In 2022, Earthjustice sued the EPA on behalf of environment and community groups including the Rio Grande International Study Center for not updating the rules in nearly a decade and leaving communities unaware of the risks. (The lawsuit is still ongoing.)

Following news reports, the EPA published proposed requirements last year to reduce ethylene oxide at these medical sterilizers. The agency conducted public hearings, webinars and meetings to hear from communities and their health concerns. It also published an analysis of the industry’s self-reported emissions data that showed about a quarter of the nearly 100 commercial sterilizers, including the one in Laredo, were exposing nearby residents to unacceptable cancer risks from ethylene oxide. The agency also published risk maps and other information online for each of the high-risk facilities.

“Overall, I am pleased this rule will protect the health of communities while still considering the importance of medical sterilization devices to hospitals, doctors, and patients,” said U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, in a press release.

Scott Whitaker, president and CEO of the Advanced Medical Technology Association, a group that lobbies for the interests of medical device manufacturers, said in an email on Thursday the group is still examining the new rule’s full impact, but he warned that new regulations could cause problems for patients by creating treatment and surgical delays.

“There are three broad areas we have emphasized throughout the rulemaking: adequate time to implement, flexibility in technologies to remove emissions, and the ability to achieve EPA targets that would not force resubmission of medical devices for FDA approval,” Whitaker wrote.

EPA is assuring the medical industry that these new rules will not impact access to sterilized medical equipment. Harold Wimmer, president and CEO at the American Lung Association, praised the federal agency for striking a balance between new measures for limiting pollution and the need for safe and clean medical supplies.

“No one should have to live with elevated cancer risk because of air pollution in their community,” Wimmer said in a press release.

The new rule will evaluate if facilities are complying based on their cap or allowable amount of emissions they can release into the air per pollutant as listed in their state permits.

“What we know is that these facilities are often releasing more than what they are stating. [The EPA] revised its risk assessment to look at how much a facility is allowed to emit and as a result is more stringent standards, which we think is a major positive,” said Marvin C. Brown IV, a senior attorney at the nonprofit Earthjustice.

In response to questions from ProPublica, Brown said that the news organizations’ joint investigation into industrial emissions and cancer risk played a role in the final rules. “I think it has led to people commenting, participating in the process, pushing EPA to do this and to regulate this industry in a way that will hopefully save a lot of lives in the future,” he said.

While Brown sees the EPA’s new rules as a great first step, he said he was disappointed to see that the agency did not end up requiring commercial sterilization facilities to obtain Title V permits. The agency had included this stipulation in its proposed rule last year, which would have mandated that facilities undergo a permit approval process that includes a review from federal regulators in addition to state regulators, and federal requirements for public participation.

The rules go into effect shortly after they are published in the Federal Register. Facilities will have two years to install monitoring and pollution controls and an additional 180 days to demonstrate compliance. If facilities need more time, they can petition states and the EPA for an extension.

In the past, the state’s environmental regulator, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, has disagreed with the EPA’s science assessment of ethylene oxide’s dangers to health and the environment. The TCEQ launched its own review of the chemical in 2020, which ruled that it was significantly less toxic than the federal agency had found. The TCEQ attempted to enact a new standard that could allow plants to emit more of the chemical, but the EPA rejected it in 2022.

Richard Richter, a spokesperson for the TCEQ, said the agency will implement the new standard and facilities will be required to comply with the new rule.

Lisa Song and Maya Miller contributed reporting.

by Alejandra Martinez, The Texas Tribune

Indiana Enacts Law to Allow State Child Services to Investigate More Abuse Claims at Youth Centers

2 weeks ago

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Amid ongoing concerns about abuse at Indiana’s residential youth centers, Gov. Eric Holcomb signed into law on Wednesday a measure intended to increase scrutiny of care and curb abuse.

The new law authorizes the Indiana Department of Child Services to investigate claims of abuse at residential facilities involving youth ages 18 to 21. DCS previously screened out such complaints without investigating.

The legislation is a response to an IndyStar-ProPublica investigation that uncovered more than two dozen allegations of sexual abuse or inappropriate behavior by employees at Pierceton Woods Academy, a northern Indiana residential treatment center for boys with substance use disorders and sexually harmful behaviors.

In a story published in November, the news organizations found that DCS failed to investigate some of the allegations. In at least one case, records indicated DCS declined to look into claims against a staffer because the alleged victim had turned 18 and was no longer considered a child. The accused staffer went on to sexually abuse a different resident two years later during a walk near the facility’s soccer field, according to a subsequent DCS investigation.

DCS also found that Pierceton Woods knew about sexual abuse claims but did not report them to the state’s child abuse hotline. Indiana’s mandatory reporting law requires suspected abuse to be reported to DCS or law enforcement immediately.

In another story published this month, IndyStar found similar problems at Wernle Youth & Family Treatment Center in Richmond. State records show the facility failed to report allegations of physical or sexual abuse on multiple occasions, including after a 21-year-old counselor engaged in a sexual act with a 14-year-old resident behind a trash receptacle in 2019.

Such revelations stirred concern among lawmakers, especially because Pierceton Woods’ parent organization, Lasting Change Inc., lobbied last year for legislation that would have given residential treatment centers immunity from the most common civil lawsuits filed by abuse victims. Lawmakers were poised to grant the request, but they scrapped the proposal at the last minute after an IndyStar story detailing abuse allegations at Pierceton Woods.

Rep. Victoria Garcia Wilburn, a Democrat, worked across the aisle to get the new provision amended into a bill sponsored by two Republicans, Sen. Greg Walker and Rep. Chris Judy. The bill also codifies qualifications for case managers and others who work in residential facilities.

In a statement, Garcia Wilburn called the measure “an important step forward in empowering residential care facility employees to report suspected abuse, especially as more accounts of abuse at residential facilities have come to light.”

“The children who reside at residential care facilities often have experienced sexual abuse prior to their time at the facility, and it horrifies and saddens me that anyone would take advantage of a child in such a vulnerable state,” she said. “I believe that this will make progress in ensuring that all children at residential care facilities are kept safe and treated with the care, concern and respect they deserve.”

Her statement credited investigative reporting for prompting the legislation.

“The law always comes before any facility ‘policy,’ and we’ve made this crystal clear for employees and administrators alike,” she said. “This code clarification has been a year in the making ever since the Indianapolis Star published an investigation about several employees’ abuse of residents at Pierceton Woods Academy.”

Pierceton Woods, a faith-based nonprofit whose CEO, Tim Smith, is running for Congress, has previously denied failing to protect minors from sexual abuse. In an email on Thursday, company spokesperson Curtis Smith, who is not related to Tim Smith, said, “The reason we supported this bill from the beginning is that we serve, support, and treat all our residents with unconditional respect, and always have.”

Neither DCS nor the governor’s office immediately responded to messages seeking comment.

Garcia Wilburn and other lawmakers say there is still more work to do.

Several related proposals failed to advance during this year’s legislative session, including a measure from Rep. Becky Cash that would have increased criminal penalties for failing to report abuse.

“My hope is that we can get a much larger piece of legislation to protect children and young adults in residential facilities next year,” Cash, a Republican, said. “I am also committed to getting legislation regarding abuses in youth sports and failure to report those abuses passed. We have a lot of work to do to protect children.”

by Tony Cook, IndyStar