ProPublica

by Doug Bock Clark

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Prompted by ProPublica’s reporting on efforts by right-wing activists to disallow ballots, North Carolina Democrats have introduced a bill designed to prevent votes from being tossed out based on postelection rule changes.

The Voter Protection and Reliance Act, filed last week in the North Carolina House, says that ballots cast in state elections will be counted based on the laws and procedures in place on Election Day. It also forbids votes from being discarded because of technical or clerical errors in voter registrations.

ProPublica reported that before the 2024 election, North Carolina activists and members of the Election Integrity Network — a national group led by a lawyer integral to President Donald Trump’s unsuccessful campaign to overturn the 2020 election — discussed whether filing protests aimed at voters whose registration information was incomplete could help candidates overturn losses in close elections.

The strategy debated on that call, which ProPublica obtained a recording of, subsequently was used by Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin to challenge his 734-vote loss to Democrat Allison Riggs for a seat on the state’s Supreme Court.

“ProPublica’s reporting showed people were hunting for pretexts to challenge the election ahead of time,” said Phil Rubin, a Democratic House member who was the primary author of the bill. “Rather than trying to proactively fix those problems before the election, Judge Griffin has retroactively tried to exploit them to overturn his loss. This law would prevent similar abuses in the future and force candidates to act for the good of the voters and not themselves.”

A spokesperson for Griffin, Paul Shumaker, said he couldn’t respond to Rubin’s comments, his bill or questions from ProPublica because North Carolina’s Code of Judicial Conduct prohibits judges and judicial candidates from stating a position on issues that could come before the court.

“It would be a violation to comment on legislation since legislation is subject to judicial review if enacted into law,” Shumaker said.

Last week, the Republican-majority North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled that election officials should discount around 60,000 ballots in the Supreme Court race cast by voters whose Social Security and driver’s license information is missing in the state election database unless the voters provided that information within 15 working days. (That ruling has subsequently been stayed while the state’s Supreme Court considers the matter.)

At the time of the election, state election rules allowed people to vote without that information and allowed members of the military to submit absentee ballots without providing photo ID. Often, the election database was missing Social Security and driver’s license information not because of voters’ errors, but because of administrative mistakes, including a registration form that did not require these forms of identification.

Nonetheless, the appeals court ruled that the state election board — the body that issues election rules — should have required the information.

Griffin’s ballot challenges have been shown by data analyses to disproportionately affect Democrats and minorities, making it possible that their exclusion may upend the election results.

Rubin’s bill also mandates that litigation involving election-related issues must be dealt with on an expedited basis by North Carolina courts so that candidates can resolve issues before elections rather than afterward.

Though some North Carolina and national Republicans have criticized Griffin’s challenges, the Democratic-sponsored bill faces uncertain prospects in the GOP-controlled legislature.

“The bill is going nowhere,” said Mitch Kokai, a senior political analyst for the conservative John Locke Foundation. “It’s more of a statement of the Democratic caucus’ approach to the Griffin-Riggs election and how they think it should have played out.”

North Carolina’s governor and its legislative leadership did not respond to requests for comment.

Rubin said that while the bill reflects issues playing out in North Carolina, it also could serve as a model for other states.

“There is no reason to think that these tactics will be limited to North Carolina,” he said at a press conference on Thursday hosted by the Democratic National Committee and North Carolina Democratic Party about the Supreme Court case litigation, at which he presented the bill.

The Election Integrity Network has chapters in swing states, plus many others, and partners with numerous national conservative organizations.

The leader of the North Carolina chapter did not respond to a request for comment or emailed questions.

by Sharon Lerner

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The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to eliminate long-standing requirements for polluters to collect and report their emissions of the heat-trapping gases that cause climate change. The move, ordered by a Trump appointee, would affect thousands of industrial facilities across the country, including oil refineries, power plants and coal mines as well as those that make petrochemicals, cement, glass, iron and steel, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica.

The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program documents the amount of carbon dioxide, methane and other climate-warming gases emitted by individual facilities. The data, which is publicly available, guides policy decisions and constitutes a significant portion of the information the government submits to the international body that tallies global greenhouse gas pollution. Losing the data will make it harder to know how much climate-warming gas an economic sector or factory is emitting and to track those emissions over time. This granularity allows for accountability, experts say; the government can’t curb the country’s emissions without knowing where they are coming from.

“This would reduce the detail and accuracy of U.S. reporting of greenhouse gas emissions, when most countries are trying to improve their reporting,” said Michael Gillenwater, executive director of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. “This would also make it harder for climate policy to happen down the road.”

The program has been collecting emissions data since at least 2010. Roughly 8,000 facilities a year now report their emissions to the program. EPA officials have asked program staff to draft a rule that will drastically reduce data collection. Under the new rule, its reporting requirements would only apply to about 2,300 facilities in certain sectors of the oil and gas industry.

Climate experts expressed shock and dismay about the apparent decision to stop collecting most information on our country’s greenhouse gas emissions. “It would be a bit like unplugging the equipment that monitors the vital signs of a patient that is critically ill,” said Edward Maibach, a professor at George Mason University. “How in the world can we possibly manage this incredible threat to America’s well-being and humanity’s well-being if we’re not actually monitoring what we’re doing to exacerbate the problem?”

The EPA did not address questions from ProPublica about the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. Instead, the agency provided an emailed statement affirming the Trump administration’s commitment to “clean air, land, and water for EVERY American.”

The agency announced last month that it was “reconsidering” the greenhouse gas reporting program. In a little-noticed press release issued on March 12, when the EPA sent out 24 bulletins as it celebrated the “most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin described the reporting program as “burdensome.” Zeldin also claimed that the program “costs American businesses and manufacturing millions of dollars, hurting small businesses and the ability to achieve the American Dream.”

Project 2025, the far-right blueprint for Trump’s presidency, suggested severely scaling back the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program and also described it as imposing burdens on small businesses.

In contrast, climate experts say the EPA reporting program, which tallies between 85% and 90% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., is in many ways a boon to businesses. “A lot of companies rely on the data and use it in their annual sustainability reports,” said Edwin LaMair, an attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund. Companies also use the data to demonstrate environmental progress to shareholders and to meet international reporting requirements. “If the program stops, all that valuable data will stop being generated,” LaMair said.

The loss of that data could have a devastating effect on the world’s ability to rein in the disastrous effects of the warming climate, according to Andrew Light, who served as assistant secretary of energy for international affairs in the Biden administration. Light noted that addressing the dangerous and costly extreme weather events requires international collaboration — and that our failure to collect data could give other countries an excuse to abandon their own reporting.

“We will not get to the kinds of temperature stabilization needed to protect Americans against the worst climate impacts unless we get the cooperation of developing countries,” Light said. “If the United States won’t even measure and report our own emissions, how in the world can we expect China, India, Indonesia and other major growing developing countries to do the same?”

In its first months, the Trump administration has shown waning support for the reporting program. The EPA left the portal through which companies share data closed for several weeks and, in March, pushed back the emissions reporting deadline. Then last Friday, a meeting held with several program staff members raised further questions about the fate of future data collection, according to sources who were briefed on the meeting and asked not to be named for fear of retribution.

At the meeting, political appointee Abigale Tardif, who is principal deputy assistant administrator of the EPA’s office of air and radiation, instructed staff to draft a rule that would eliminate reporting requirements for 40 of the 41 sectors that are now required to submit data to the program. Tardif did not respond to inquiries from ProPublica about this story. Political appointee Aaron Szabo, who was present at the meeting and is awaiting confirmation as assistant administrator to the office, declined to answer questions, directing a reporter to EPA communications staff.

Before joining the EPA, Tardif and Szabo worked as lobbyists. Szabo represented the American Chemistry Council and Duke Energy among other companies and trade groups and Tardif worked for Marathon Petroleum and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers Association.

Some climate advocates noted that industry stands to benefit from the elimination of greenhouse gas reporting requirements. “T​he bottom line is this is a giveaway to emitters, just letting them off the hook entirely,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Cleetus derided the choice to stop documenting emissions as ostrich-like. “Not tracking the data doesn’t make the climate crisis any less real,” she said. “This is just putting our heads in the sand.”

by Richard A. Webster, Verite News

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.

Calvin Alexander thought he had done everything the Louisiana parole board asked of him to earn an early release from prison.

He had taken anger management classes, learned a trade and enrolled in drug treatment. And as his September hearing before the board approached, his disciplinary record was clean.

Alexander, more than midway through a 20-year prison sentence on drug charges, was making preparations for what he hoped would be his new life. His daughter, with whom he had only recently become acquainted, had even made up a room for him in her New Orleans home.

Then, two months before the hearing date, prison officials sent Alexander a letter informing him he was no longer eligible for parole.

A computerized scoring system adopted by the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections had deemed the nearly blind 70-year-old, who uses a wheelchair, a moderate risk of reoffending, should he be released. And under a new law, that meant he and thousands of other prisoners with moderate or high risk ratings cannot plead their cases before the board. According to the department of corrections, about 13,000 people — nearly half the state’s prison population — have such risk ratings, although not all of them are eligible for parole.

Alexander said he felt “betrayed” upon learning his hearing had been canceled. “People in jail have … lost hope in being able to do anything to reduce their time,” he said.

Calvin Alexander’s daughter, Sabrina Brown, left, and his sister, Jerry Hart. Alexander was planning for his new life with Brown when he found out he was no longer eligible for parole. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)

The law that changed Alexander’s prospects is part of a series of legislation passed by Louisiana Republicans last year reflecting Gov. Jeff Landry’s tough-on-crime agenda to make it more difficult for prisoners to be released.

While campaigning for governor, Landry, a former police officer and sheriff’s deputy who served as Louisiana attorney general until 2024, championed a crackdown on rewarding well-behaved prisoners with parole. Landry said early release, which until now has been typically assumed when judges hand down sentences, is a slap in the face to crime victims.

“The revolving door is insulting,” Landry told state lawmakers last year as he kicked off a special legislative session on crime during which he blamed the state’s high violent crime rate on lenient sentences and “misguided post-conviction programs” that fail to rehabilitate prisoners. (In fact, Louisiana’s recidivism rate has declined over the past decade, according to a 2024 department of corrections report.)

The Legislature eliminated parole for nearly everyone imprisoned for crimes committed after Aug. 1, making Louisiana the 17th state in a half-century to abolish parole altogether and the first in 24 years to do so. For the vast majority of prisoners who were already behind bars, like Alexander, another law put an algorithm in charge of determining whether they have a shot at early release; only prisoners rated low risk qualify for parole.

That decision makes Louisiana the only state to use risk scores to automatically rule out large portions of a prison population from being considered for parole, according to seven national criminal justice experts.

Alexander can’t read or write, so he dictated answers to mailed questions from Verite News and ProPublica to a fellow prisoner. (Obtained by Verite News and ProPublica)

That was not how the tool, known as TIGER, an acronym for Targeted Interventions to Greater Enhance Re-entry, was intended to be used. Developed as a rehabilitative measure about a decade ago, it was supposed to help prison officials determine what types of classes or counseling someone might need to prevent them from landing back behind bars — not be used as a punitive tool to keep them there, said one of its creators.

Criminal justice advocates and civil rights attorneys say the new law could disproportionately harm Black people like Alexander in part because the algorithm measures factors such as criminal history where racial disparities already exist. The law’s opponents also contend that the unique step Louisiana has taken to curtail parole is deeply problematic — and potentially unconstitutional — because it does not take into account the efforts of prisoners to better themselves while incarcerated.

“They deserve that opportunity to show they’ve changed,” said Pearl Wise, who was appointed to the parole board by Landry’s Democratic predecessor and served from 2016 until 2023. “You demonstrate over time the changes that you made and that you are not the person that was sentenced on that day.”

An Immutable Risk Score

Alexander is like thousands of prisoners who have previously appeared before the board — repeat offenders accused of nonviolent crimes, often mired in addiction with limited education or learning disabilities. Alexander can’t read or write, having dropped out of school as a fourth grader in the early 1960s. He needed to help support his family in deeply segregated Mississippi and turned to selling crack cocaine as a child. That period was also the start of his own lifelong struggle with narcotics that resulted in multiple arrests and extended stints in prison.

The department of corrections would not allow an in-person or phone interview with Alexander. Instead, Verite News and ProPublica mailed Alexander written questions, which a fellow inmate read to him and then wrote down his responses. Alexander admitted he was reckless in his youth and that he had violated his parole — related to a 1994 drug possession conviction — by drinking and staying out after curfew. That mistake would prove devastating three decades later because a prisoner’s history of parole violations plays a significant role in their TIGER risk score.

Louisiana’s TIGER scoring system was born out of a 2014 federal initiative to help states reduce their prison populations. The risk assessment tool, developed by the state department of corrections and Louisiana State University researchers using a $1.75 million federal grant, was meant to “treat criminal thinking,” said Keith Nordyke, one of the creators of TIGER. For populations with the highest risk of reoffending, he said, the prison would flood them with services — addiction counseling, therapy, job training — to help keep them out of trouble once they were freed.

“The whole purpose of this was to slow down the revolving door,” Nordyke said.

Louisiana corrections officials started using the TIGER scores as part of the parole determination process in 2018, but it was only in 2024 that they became the sole measure of parole eligibility.

Similar algorithms are used throughout the country in the parole decision-making process, but legal scholars say the way such risk tools calculate a person’s odds of reoffending is among the reasons why no other state exclusively uses them to bar individuals from parole. While algorithms like TIGER can predict on a group level that 40 out of 100 people will reoffend upon their release, they can’t pinpoint exactly who those 40 people will be, according to experts.

The Louisiana department of corrections declined multiple interview requests and did not respond to questions about the state’s use of the risk tool.

The reliance on a TIGER score to potentially block a prisoner’s bid for freedom is especially concerning, experts on risk assessment tools say, because most of the factors considered by the algorithm — the crimes they committed, work history, age at first arrest, whether they had any marijuana-related convictions, prior parole revocations — are from a prisoner’s past, which cannot be changed; they do not include anything related to what people have done in prison to rehabilitate themselves.

Criminal justice scholars say that when scores based on immutable facts are weighted so heavily in parole decisions, prisoners from impoverished, racially segregated communities are more likely to be hurt.

A fellow inmate wrote down Alexander’s answers to Verite and ProPublica’s questions on what he misses and what he would have done had he been granted parole. (Obtained by ProPublica and Verite News)

Take the algorithm’s use of prior employment data: People raised in low-income communities do not have the same work opportunities as those brought up in more affluent neighborhoods, said Megan Stevenson, an economist and criminal justice professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Using such an algorithm to determine someone’s chances of parole, she said, “suggests that poor people should be less eligible for parole than wealthier people.”

Factoring in prior drug convictions, too, is more likely to impact Black prisoners, Stevenson said. Black people use illegal drugs at roughly the same rate as white people, but are arrested and convicted for it in greater numbers because their neighborhoods are more heavily policed, she said.

In using these data points to produce a risk score, “you’re going to create a biased algorithm to make biased decisions,” Stevenson said.

Already, Black people account for nearly two-thirds of Louisiana’s prison population, more than double their share of the state population.

The Landry administration did not respond to requests for comment regarding potential racial biases in the way the TIGER scores are used for parole.

Louisiana’s legislation might also violate the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits laws that retroactively increase the severity of a person’s criminal sentence, according to several legal scholars. Tying parole eligibility to a computerized risk score that can’t be lowered by an inmate through good behavior or other actions appears to do just that since the opportunity for parole has traditionally been considered part of a sentence, said Sonja Starr, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

Some former Louisiana parole board members also bristled at the idea of an algorithm superseding human judgment.

“It doesn’t make much sense to me that a score generated by a process that the inmate has no control over takes away the authority and the power of the parole board,” said Keith Jones, who was appointed by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards and served on the board from 2018 to 2020. “Why have a parole board?”

Jones and two other former parole board members said the introduction of the TIGER tool as part of parole determination wasn’t in itself a bad thing, as long as it remained just one factor to be considered among many.

Although some board members did refuse to parole anyone with a moderate or high risk score before the law took effect, the state’s parole board had much more discretion in determining when a prisoner was released, former board members said.

Tony Marabella, a former East Baton Rouge criminal court judge who served on the parole board until last year, said he had placed greater emphasis on a prisoner’s disciplinary record and completion of self-improvement programs. He also took into account whether the warden or victims supported their release when deciding whether to grant parole.

“If someone was a moderate risk, I wasn’t going to throw them out,” said Marabella, who served on the board for four years under Edwards. “I was more concerned about what they had accomplished.”

That’s exactly what Alonzo Allen was able to show.

Alonzo Allen, outside of his home in Mansfield, Louisiana, was paroled nearly four years ago. He had a moderate risk assessment score, which, after the passage of a 2024 law, would now prohibit him from appearing before the board. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)

In 2021, three years before the new law went into effect, Allen succeeded in convincing the parole board that he was worthy of release — despite having the same TIGER score and a similar criminal history as Alexander.

Allen had been sentenced to 40 years behind bars in 2012 on multiple drug charges and carrying a gun. While in prison, he was written up for possessing contraband, including a pencil sharpener and $2 worth of sugar, and he previously had his parole revoked twice, according to Allen and the parole board.

As a result, he was marked a moderate risk.

During Allen’s parole hearing, Jerry Goodwin, then warden at the David Wade Correctional Center in Homer, where Allen was being held, lauded Allen for his tireless work overcoming his drug addictions and improving his communication skills. Goodwin noted that Allen took classes even when he knew he had reached his limit for “good time” credits, time shaved off a sentence for good behavior.

“He’s worked hard for this opportunity,” Goodwin told the parole board, “and I think he’s really got his best foot forward.”

Allen works full time as a truck driver. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)

Alvin Roche’ Jr., then a member of the parole board, questioned the accuracy of Allen’s TIGER score. “Is it possible that this instrument might be wrong?” Roche’ asked during Allen’s hearing. “You think you are rehabilitated to the point where you can prove that assessment wrong?”

“Yes, sir, very much, sir,” Allen responded. “I do think that is wrong.”

The board unanimously voted to parole Allen.

Speaking by telephone from his home in Mansfield, just south of Shreveport, Allen, 61, said he was grateful for the second chance. He’s stayed sober, works full time as a truck driver and has not violated the terms of his parole in the nearly four years since his release.

“God has been good,” he said.

Allen at home. Since his parole almost four years ago, he’s stayed sober and has held a steady job. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica) Steeply Declining Parole Hearings

Lawmakers who supported Louisiana’s push to place strict limits on parole have maintained that relying on the algorithm over human judgment was the most efficient way to clear a backlog of parole applications.

State Sen. Patrick McMath, R-Covington, the bill’s author, claimed during a Senate committee hearing in February 2024 that so many unrealistic parole petitions were coming before the board that prisoners most deserving of early release were not being prioritized.

“What I’m really trying to do here is make the system run more efficiently and effectively,” McMath said.

But data from the parole board doesn’t support his assertion. According to the parole board’s annual reports, the number of cases heard by the board actually dropped by 40% between 2016 and 2023.

Prison reform advocates and civil rights attorneys say McMath’s bill was never anything more than a Trojan horse designed to kill parole, given the law’s other requirements that make parole substantially harder to achieve, including a unanimous board vote before parole is granted and an increase in the number of years prisoners must maintain clean disciplinary records.

McMath declined to be interviewed and did not answer questions concerning the impact of his legislation.

Landry, who signed the legislation into law in March 2024, appointed five new people to the seven-member board. None of the seven were permitted to comment about the use of TIGER to deny prisoners parole, according to Francis M. Abbott, executive director of the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole, citing board policy. Instead, he provided a statement from board chair Sheryl Ranatza: “We believe Governor Landry’s reforms passed in the special crime session will enhance public safety.”

The average number of people paroled in Louisiana has already dropped from 32 per month in 2023 to six per month since the law went into effect in August, according to Department of Corrections data. And at least 70 parole hearings, including Alexander’s, were canceled between Aug. 1 and Dec. 13 because of the prisoner’s risk score, according to the parole board.

Opponents of the bill predict the new restrictions on parole will swell the state’s prison population, costing taxpayers billions of dollars to build new corrections facilities and leading to more violence behind bars as inmates have fewer incentives to behave.

For Alexander, that means he will not have the same opportunity Allen did to show the parole board that he had heeded their advice to improve himself.

Brown, right, shows a photo on her phone taken when she visited Alexander, center, at Rayburn Correctional Center last year. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)

With his health rapidly deteriorating, his family fears he will not live to see the end of his sentence in five years. “He’s got one eye. He’s diabetic. He’s got poor circulation,” said Alexander’s daughter, Sabrina Brown. “I don’t want to have to go to a funeral for him.”

Instead of moving into Brown’s New Orleans home as planned, Alexander will be able to see his daughter only when she makes the 85-mile trek north to the Rayburn Correctional Center.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, he said.

“They told me once I received my risk score there is nothing I can do to change it,” Alexander said. “It’s like walking into a brick wall.”

by Taylor Kate Brown

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

When Edgar Barrientos-Quintana left prison last November, he told reporters: “Happy to be out here. … It’s the best week. And more to come.” It was an understated moment from a man who had been in prison for close to 16 years for a murder that officials said he didn’t commit. And it provided a stark contrast to the reality television show that depicted the investigation that led to his arrest.

Barrientos-Quintana was freed after the Minnesota attorney general’s Conviction Review Unit found he had been wrongfully convicted and recommended vacating his conviction. The unit’s 180-page report cited failures by police, prosecutors and Barrientos-Quintana’s own defense lawyers. But it also mentioned something reporter Jessica Lussenhop had never seen before in a wrongful conviction case: the involvement of popular true crime show “The First 48.” The show begins each episode with the premise that the chance of solving a murder is “cut in half” if police don’t have a significant lead within 48 hours of a killing — which also creates a sense of deadline pressure.

In two stories ProPublica recently published, Lussenhop follows the show’s involvement in the murder investigation that landed Barrientos-Quintana in prison, and how the show’s two-decade history of filming in cities across the U.S. has left a complicated trail of problems and municipal regret.

I talked to Lussenhop about what she learned about how “The First 48” operates and why so many cities have stopped working with the show.

What did you find surprising while reporting this story?

Finding out that these episodes often air before a defendant’s trial. The show has disclaimers to the effect of “everyone is innocent until proven guilty,” but those words go by in a flash, and as a viewer, I certainly haven’t paid much attention to them. This person is still innocent until proven guilty, but the show does a good job of depicting them as guilty.

What else was surprising was just the sheer number of times there were problems. There are shows like “Live PD” that have had extremely high-profile controversies and have been canceled. But “The First 48” has been on the air for 20 years, and multiple cities ended their relationships with the show. It’s not just the defense bar that’s upset with it. It’s prosecutors, judges, mayors, city council people, all saying, “Why did our police department decide to do this?”

Why do police departments get involved with this show?

As far as we understand it, police departments don’t make any money off this show, and if you take into account the lawsuits, sometimes the show winds up costing cities money. Then the question becomes, well, why would any police department agree to do this? I think the answer is that police departments are often the subject of negative news coverage. They want a light shone on the work of their homicide detectives and everyone who supports their investigations.

But one of the other important things is these are often the kinds of homicides that are not going to get a lot of press attention. “The First 48” does often interview the victim’s family; they’ll show the victim’s picture on television and say a little bit about their lives. That might be way more media attention than these victims would otherwise get. They’re often poor, they’re often people of color, and the kinds of homicides that may get very little attention in their local media. So I think that it does, in a sense, provide a service.

Watch: Reality Cop Show “The First 48” and the Wrongly Convicted Man How is this similar to and different from other wrongful conviction cases?

A lot of what’s in Barrientos-Quintana’s Conviction Review Unit report are the hallmarks of wrongful convictions: very young witnesses being interrogated for a very long time, sometimes without parents or lawyers involved; police not following photo lineup procedures; the defense claiming that the prosecution is withholding evidence from them. But to our knowledge, this is the first exoneration ever to be tied to “The First 48.”

Multiple people, including the Hennepin County prosecutor, told me that the very premise of the show is extremely problematic because it makes it sound like you have to rush. The show has a literal clock that’s ticking down in the corner of the screen. Obviously, you want good leads early on, but you have to keep an open mind to evidence that’s going to come into play later on. One of the big pieces of evidence in Barrientos-Quintana’s exoneration is the existence of surveillance tape of him at a grocery store with a girl roughly 33 minutes before the shooting happened. That was not a piece of evidence that they had within the first 48 hours, or even within the first two weeks.

There’s also just the notion that if you have a camera crew following you around, you’re going to behave differently. Especially if it’s a camera crew for a show called “The First 48,” which implies you better make something happen in 48 hours. That could have an effect on your actions as an investigator.

What did you hear from the family of Jesse Mickelson, the victim Barrientos-Quintana was convicted of killing?

Multiple members of the family have accepted that Barrientos-Quintana is not guilty. Those were some of the most fascinating conversations that I had. If you spent 15 years not only believing that he’s guilty but in a certain sense hating him for destroying your family, and to be presented with new evidence and then be like, “Wait a minute, I think we got this wrong” — that just takes a lot of courage and heart.

I spoke to Mickelson’s half-sister, Tina Rosebear. She thought of the show as sort of a document of this awful experience that her family had gone through, but it was something that acknowledged her brother’s life. She found it almost a source of comfort to watch the episode. But now she has very, very different feelings, and she draws a bright line connecting the television show to the fact that their family may never know who shot and killed Mickelson. Maybe these investigators didn’t do as good a job as they could have because they were rushing to meet this 48-hour thing. For a variety of reasons, the opportunity to catch whoever did this has passed, and she can’t help wondering if that’s in some way the show’s fault.

The companies that produce the show did not respond to numerous requests for comment or to a detailed list of questions. The detectives involved in the case also declined to comment. One prosecutor in the original case against Barrientos-Quintana is now a judge and thus precluded from speaking to the press by the Minnesota Code of Judicial Conduct; another took issue with many of the characterizations in the Conviction Review Unit report but agreed that “The First 48” had been a problem.

by J. David McSwane and Hannah Allam

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On Feb. 10, more than a dozen Department of Homeland Security officials joined a video conference to discuss an obscure, sparsely funded program overseen by its Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. The office, charged with investigating when the national security agency is accused of violating the rights of both immigrants and U.S. citizens, had found itself in the crosshairs of Elon Musk’s secretive Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

It began as a typical briefing, with Homeland Security officials explaining to DOGE a program many describe as a win-win. It had provided some $20 million in recent years to local organizations that provide case workers to keep people in immigration proceedings showing up to court, staff explained, without expensive detentions and ankle monitors.

DOGE leader Kyle Schutt, a technology executive who developed a GOP online fundraising platform, interrupted. He wanted Joseph Mazzara, DHS’s acting general counsel, to weigh in. Mazzara was recently appointed to the post after working for Ken Paxton as both an assistant solicitor general and member of the Texas attorney general’s defense team that beat back public corruption charges.

Schutt had a different interpretation of the program, according to people who attended or were briefed on the meeting.

“This whole program sounds like money laundering,” he said.

Mazzara went further. His facial expressions, his use of profanity and the way he combed his fingers through his hair made clear he was annoyed.

“We should look into civil RICO charges,” Mazzara said.

DHS staff was stunned. The program had been mandated by Congress, yet Homeland Security’s top lawyer was saying it could be investigated under a law reserved for organized crime syndicates.

“I took it as a threat,” one attendee said. “It was traumatizing.”

For many in the office, known internally as CRCL, that moment was a dark forecast of the future. Several said they scrambled to try to fend off the mass firings they were seeing across the rest of President Donald Trump’s administration. They policed language that Trump’s appointees might not like. They hesitated to open complaints on hot-button cases. They reframed their work as less about protecting civil rights and more about keeping the department out of legal trouble.

None of it worked. On March 21, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem shut down the office and fired most of the 150-person staff. As a result, about 600 civil rights abuse investigations were frozen.

“All the oversight in DHS was eliminated today,” one worker texted after the announcement that they’d been fired.

Eight former CRCL officials spoke with ProPublica about the dismantling of the office on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution. Their accounts come at a time when the new administration’s move to weaken oversight of federal agencies has faced legal challenges in the federal courts. In defending its move to shut CRCL, the administration said it was streamlining operations, as it has done elsewhere. “DHS remains committed to civil rights protections but must streamline oversight to remove roadblocks to enforcement,” said DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.

CRCL staff “often functioned as internal adversaries to slow down operations,” McLaughlin added. She did not address questions from ProPublica about the February meeting. Mazzara and Schutt did not reply to requests for comment.

The office’s closure strips Homeland Security of a key internal check and balance, analysts and former staff say, as the Trump administration morphs the agency into a mass-deportation machine. The civil rights team served as a deterrent to border patrol and immigration agents who didn’t want the hassle and paperwork of an investigation, staff said, and its closure signals that rights violations, including those against U.S. citizens, could go unchecked.

The office processed more than 3,000 complaints in fiscal year 2023 — on everything from disabled detainees being unable to access medical care to abuses of power at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and reports of rape at its detention centers. For instance, following reports that ICE had performed facial recognition searches on millions of Maryland drivers, a CRCL investigation led the agency to agree to new oversight; case details have been removed from the DHS website but are available in the internet archive. The office also reported to Congress that it had investigated and confirmed allegations that a child, a U.S. citizen traveling without her parents between Mexico and California, had been sexually abused by Customs and Border Protection agents during a strip search.

Those cases would have gone nowhere without CRCL, its former staffers said.

“Nobody knows where to go without CRCL, and that’s the point,” a senior official said. Speaking of the administration, the official went on, “They don’t want oversight. They don’t care about civil rights and civil liberties.”

The CRCL staff, most of them lawyers, emphasized that their work is not politically motivated, nor is it limited to immigration issues. For instance, sources said the office was investigating allegations that disaster aid workers with the Federal Emergency Management Agency had skipped over houses that displayed signs supporting Trump during the 2024 election.

“The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties touches on everyone,” one fired employee said. “There’s this perception that we’re only focused on immigrants, and that’s just not true.”

Uncertainty and Panic

The final days of the civil rights office unfolded in a cloud of uncertainty and panic, as with other federal offices getting “RIF’d,” the Beltway verb for the government’s “reduction in force.”

Staff members described the weeks before the shutdown as a whittling away of their work. Dozens of investigative memos posted online in a transparency initiative? Deleted from the site. The eight-person team on racial equity issues? Immediately placed on leave. Travel funds to check conditions at detention centers? Reduced to $1.

As fear intensified that the civil rights office would be dismantled, staff tried to lie low. Leaders told staff to stop launching investigations that came from media reports, previously a common avenue for inquiries. Now, only official complaints from the public would be considered.

Staff was particularly frustrated that under this new mandate it couldn’t open an official investigation into the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and legal resident who was arrested for participating in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.

CRCL staff was unable to open an investigation into Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest after they were told to stop launching investigations that came from media reports. (Bing Guan/The New York Times/Redux)

With dozens of employees spread across branches or working remotely, many civil rights staffers had never met their colleagues — until the Trump administration’s return-to-office order forced them to come in five days a week. By early March, when reality had sunk in that their jobs were likely to be eliminated, they began quietly organizing, setting up encrypted Signal chat groups and sharing updates on lawsuits filed by government workers in other agencies.

“It’s inspiring how federal employees are pushing back and connecting,” one worker said.

Beyond Trump’s mandate to remove all references to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, leaders told staff to omit from memos words such as “however,” which might sound combative, or “stakeholders,” which came across as too warm and fuzzy.

“Daily life was one miserable assignment after the next,” a staffer said. The orders coming down from Trump appointees were intended to “basically tell us how to undo your office.”

In what would be the last days of the office, the atmosphere was “chilling” and “intimidating.” Some personnel froze, too afraid to make recommendations, while others risked filing new investigations in final acts of defiance.

When the news came on a Friday that they were all being fired, civil rights staff were told they couldn’t issue any out-of-office reply, one former senior official said.

They are still technically employees, on paid leave until May 23. Many have banded together and are exploring legal remedies to get their jobs back. In the interim, if complaints are coming in, none of the professionals trained to receive them are around.

What’s Been Lost

Days after the meeting in which allegations of money laundering and organized crime were loosely thrown at CRCL employees, the program in question was shut down. That effort had essentially earmarked money to local charities to provide nonviolent immigrants with case workers who connect them to services such as human trafficking screening and information on U.S. law. Created by Congress in 2021, the goal was to keep immigrants showing up to court.

Now, Trump’s DHS is suggesting the case worker program is somehow involved in human smuggling. Erol Kekic, a spokesperson for the charity the federal government hired to administer funds in that program, said Church World Services received a “weirdly worded letter” that baffled the organization’s attorneys.

“They said there could be potential human trafficking,” he said, referring to DHS. “But they didn’t accuse us directly of it.”

The nonprofit is working on its response, he said.

Elsewhere, the absence of Homeland Security’s civil rights oversight is already reverberating.

With their office closed, CRCL staff now fear the hypotheticals: At ports of entry, Americans’ Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizure are relaxed; if CBP abuses its power to root through phones and laptops, who will investigate? And if DHS began arresting U.S. citizens for First Amendment protected speech? Their office would have been the first line of defense.

As an example of cases falling through the cracks, CRCL staff told ProPublica they had recommended an investigation into the deportation of a Lebanese professor at Brown University who was in the country on a valid work visa. Federal prosecutors said in court she was detained at an airport in Boston in connection with “sympathetic photos and videos” on her phone of leaders of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Reuters reported she told border authorities she did not support Hezbollah but admired the group’s deceased leader Hassan Nasrallah for religious reasons.

Staff also wanted to look into the case of a 10-year-old girl recovering from brain cancer who, despite being a U.S. citizen, was deported to Mexico along with her parents when they hit an immigration checkpoint as they rushed to an emergency medical visit.

In Colorado, immigration attorney Laura Lunn routinely filed complaints with CRCL, saying pleas with ICE officials at its Aurora detention center were often ignored. Those complaints to CRCL have stopped her clients from being illegally deported, she said, or gotten emergency gynecological care for a woman who had been raped just before being detained.

But now, she asks, “Who do I even go to when there are illegal things happening?”

Lunn’s group, the Rocky Mountain Immigration Advocacy Network, has also joined in large group complaints about inadequate medical care, COVID-19 isolation policies and access to medical care for a pod of transgender inmates.

She’s among those trying to find clients who were housed in the Aurora facility but have mysteriously disappeared. Her clients had pending proceedings, she said, yet were summarily removed, something she’d never seen in 15 years of immigration law.

“Ordinarily, I would file a CRCL complaint. At this moment, we don’t have anyone to file a complaint to,” Lunn said.

That sort of mass deportation is something CRCL would have inspected. In fact, staff members said they had just launched a review into Trump’s increased use of Guantanamo Bay to detain migrants, an inquiry which now appears to have vanished.

A new camp site where the Trump administration plans to house thousands of undocumented migrants at Guantánamo Bay, seen in February 2025. A recent CRCL review of the administration’s use of Guantanamo Bay has vanished. (Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux)

In New Mexico, immigration lawyer Sophia Genovese said she’s filed more than 100 CRCL complaints, helping her secure medical care and other services for sick and disabled people.

She said she has several pending complaints, including one about a detainee who has stomach cancer but can’t get medication stronger than ibuprofen and another involving an HIV-positive patient who hasn’t been able to see a doctor.

“CRCL was one of the very few tools we had to check ICE, to hold ICE accountable,” Genovese said. “Now you see them speeding to complete authoritarianism.”

by Jesse Eisinger

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

In his Rose Garden speech launching a global trade war by announcing the most sweeping tariffs in modern history, President Donald Trump bestowed a history lesson on his audience that diverged from the factual record:

“Then in 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government. Then in 1929, it all came to a very abrupt end with the Great Depression, and it would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy; it would have been a much different story.”

So why did we institute an income tax? Were there any humans who knew what the reasoning was? And did the actions of 1913 lead to the Great Depression in 1929?

There is a clear consensus among historians on these points. No, the income tax was not a mistake.

But it was something stranger: both a 40-year struggle and an accident.

In 1913, the states ratified the 16th Amendment, which gave the federal government the power to “collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived.”

This was not the first income tax effort, however.

For a few short years during and after the Civil War, the United States imposed its first tax on income to help fund the massive costs of the war. Placed on relatively high incomes but only collecting a modest percentage, it was cast as both a way to generate needed revenue and a way to maintain fairness.

Yes, that’s right, one of the chief selling points of taxing income was that it was a way of achieving “equity” in the burdens of the war. Responding to allegations that only poor men were fighting and dying, President Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Party made sure the law required that the taxes people paid would be publicly disclosed. Unsurprisingly, the wealthy men of the dawning Gilded Age did not like seeing their tax information in the pages of The New York Times. Wealthy interests forced a repeal of the income tax in 1871, and the federal government returned to funding itself with proceeds from user fees and tariffs.

Efforts to rein in the rich persisted, however. Congress moved in 1894 to reintroduce an income tax. The populist Kansan politician William Jennings Bryan gave a famous speech on the floor of Congress. Responding to the argument that the wealthy would leave America if they had to pay such a tax, then proposed as 2% on the top incomes, he said:

“Of all the mean men I have ever known, I have never known one so mean that I would be willing to say of him that his patriotism was less than 2 per cent deep. … If ‘some of our best people’ prefer to leave the country rather than pay a tax of 2 per cent, God pity the worst.”

Congress passed the law. One year later, however, the Supreme Court controversially rejected it, 5-4, in the case of Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company. The party of Lincoln, now dominated by wealthy Northeastern interests, celebrated. Its 1894 platform had declared that an income tax “will bring odium on any party blind enough to support it” and predicted that party’s “funeral.”

Populists like Bryan didn’t give up. A young Democratic congressman from Tennessee named Cordell Hull said in his maiden speech on the floor in 1908, in which he proposed passing another income tax, that he was willing to risk the “odium and the funeral.”

Hull’s effort didn’t gather much momentum that time, but he didn’t give up. He obsessively talked with anyone and everyone about an income tax, so much so that when leaders of his own party saw him approaching, they “would turn and walk in another direction,” he later recalled.

Soon he would succeed, but only thanks to the help of the party that was against the income tax — the Republicans.

In 1909, the country was facing a severe drop in federal revenue and a widening deficit after the financial panic of 1907, which had ended only thanks to a bailout led by J.P. Morgan, the most powerful banker of the age. At the same time, with new responsibilities like trying to keep food and medicines safe and maintaining a growing empire abroad, the federal government’s needs were exploding. A few years earlier, Congress had allocated $1 billion in spending for the first time ever (about $30 billion in today’s dollars).

To address these issues, the Republican party turned to tariffs. Tariffs not only remained the cornerstone of Republican economic policy, they were also the key to the party’s political power. Each time a new tariff bill came up for consideration was like “throwing bananas in a cage of monkeys,” economist Henry George said. Lobbyists from every corner of American industry descended on the capital to push for lower imposts on their companies and, if possible, to have them raised on someone else.

Tariffs and levies on things like tobacco and alcohol were deeply unpopular with the public. They were regressive, costing working people a far greater percentage of their income than the rich. In one of his speeches, Hull attacked the new dominant class of oligarchs: “The world has never seen such colossal fortunes as we behold in the present age ... the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, and the Rockefellers, with their aggregated billions of hoarded wealth.”

Hull said, “It would seem that this class of people consider themselves almost immune from any kind of taxation.” He closed a speech with a warning to his congressional colleagues: “Public sentiment is becoming aroused.”

In Washington, lawmakers had a bounty of novel ideas for raising funds. Some members of Congress suggested an inheritance tax, others a corporate profits tax, and still others wanted some version of a stamp tax on commercial documents. As president, Theodore Roosevelt supported an income tax, though he didn’t do much to push it legislatively. Most Republican senators, many of whom were millionaires themselves, had mild aversions to some of the proposals and a particular loathing for the income tax.

Nelson Aldrich, the Senate majority leader from Rhode Island, a millionaire and the father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr., was arguably the most powerful politician in the country at the time. Teddy Roosevelt nicknamed him the “King Pin.” In 1909, Aldrich was trying to pass a new tariff bill. Hull’s Democrats posed a problem for him, but not the only one. He also faced a rebellious faction within his own party, the progressive Republicans. These were largely Midwestern and Western leaders who argued for what they described as working people’s interests, as well as reforms to improve public safety and the strengthening of labor unions. They also supported an income tax.

Aldrich tried a series of legislative maneuvers to delay votes on anything about the income tax. The proponents were undeterred, and, as a next step, he and then-President William Taft put their weight behind a corporate income tax, contending that it would be a lesser evil than a personal income tax. The wealthy did not like it, but it passed surprisingly easily, leaving Republicans hopeful the income tax was dead. In a private letter to a friend, the president explained, “A good many people who are attacking [the corporate income tax] now will be glad to use it as a means of preventing the income tax later on.”

Taft proved to be overly optimistic. Supporters of the income tax kept pushing, seeking to raise money directly from the wealthy. A debate ensued about whether Congress could simply pass an income tax law or, since the Supreme Court had struck one down recently, whether a constitutional amendment was needed. Hull pointed out that the makeup of the court had changed and argued that a law could now pass muster with the justices.

Then, one progressive Republican proposed an income tax amendment.

Aldrich pounced on what he perceived as his opponents’ misstep. He threw his support to the measure as a means of placating the advocates for a national income tax. In exchange, enough lawmakers agreed to back Aldrich’s tariff bill.

Aldrich, of course, did not support the income tax amendment, but he believed it was too radical to be ratified by three-fourths of the states, the minimum required by the Constitution. Leading politicians assumed that the defeat of the amendment would likely kill the income tax for years, if not a generation.

Hull agreed with that analysis and was despondent. “It has long been understood that the Republicans never support a worthy cause until forced by public sentiment. Too stupid to devise and enact wholesome laws and to formulate and execute sound administrative policies, this piratical organization is wont to wait until Democrats point the way,” he said in a speech on the floor.

And so Nelson Aldrich, the senator who had done more than almost any other American politician in history to protect the wealthy, introduced what would turn out to be an historic measure to amend the Constitution and explicitly allow income taxes on the rich. A few days later, with little fanfare, the amendment passed the Senate by a unanimous vote of 77-0.

Soon after, Congress passed the Payne-Aldrich Tariff bill, giving Aldrich his victory.

But Aldrich had miscalculated and Hull had been too gloomy. After a slow start for the ratification movement, political winds shifted and enough states came around. The amendment was ratified four years later. Then it fell to Hull to almost singlehandedly write what became the 1913 income tax law.

Hull’s plan proved prescient. He had foreseen that if the United States ever became entangled in a war that involved attacks on shipping, imports would dry up and tariff revenue would plummet. When the United States joined the war against Germany in 1917, Congress had to raise income tax rates to generate the money needed to pay for the expense of sending soldiers to Europe.

So no, President Trump, the origins of the income tax are not lost to history.

But did the tax cause the Great Depression 16 years after its enactment, as Trump has argued? No serious economist thinks so. Here’s one data point: In the 1920s, Republicans regained the presidency. Andrew Mellon, one of the richest men in the country, became Treasury secretary. One of the main causes he worked for was lowering income taxes, and the lead-up to the worst economic calamity of the 20th century was actually marked by a decline in those tax rates.

The evidence is similarly clear on Trump’s argument that continued reliance on tariffs to fund the government would have averted the Great Depression. In June of 1930, President Herbert Hoover signed into law the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, significantly raising taxes on imported goods in hopes of boosting American industries and increasing domestic employment. Hoover brushed aside the arguments of his own economists who warned that other nations would respond with their own tariffs, touching off a trade war in which every country would lose.

Economists now agree that Hoover’s tariffs deepened the economic downturn that had begun with the 1929 stockmarket crash. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gradually reduced the tariffs during his presidency, and his Democratic and Republican successors continued that pattern well into the 21st century.

Today’s situation has similarities to the pre-income-tax years. The American economy is again marked by wealth inequality, with the largest gap between rich and poor we’ve seen since the Gilded Age. We are having debates about how to reduce the federal deficit, about how to fairly and adequately tax the rich and about what the appropriate size of government would be. Last week, Trump reached back in history to restore U.S. tariffs to the Smoot-Hawley levels, triggering a global selloff in stock markets around the world.

Correction

April 8, 2025: This story originally incorrectly identified William Jennings Bryan as a Kansan politician. He represented Nebraska.

by Doug Bock Clark

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.

Members of a bipartisan committee of North Carolina senators are asking the state auditor to investigate how money intended to stop human trafficking had been spent and managed, in response to ProPublica’s reporting.

ProPublica had reported how the Republican-dominated legislature had directed $15 million for sexual abuse survivors away from Democratic-led agencies that had long overseen such money, sending it to a tiny commission in the Republican-helmed state court system. The Human Trafficking Commission struggled to disburse the funds in a timely manner, according to its former grants administrator. Staffers at 18 crisis centers told ProPublica payments were delayed for months and led to cuts, some of which continue to limit urgent, potentially lifesaving services.

“It sounds like something that we can definitely put the auditor on,” said Sen. Steve Jarvis, a Republican co-chair of the Committee on Regulatory Reform, after a Democratic senator highlighted ProPublica’s reporting in a meeting last week.

The committee subsequently advanced a bill to empower the state auditor to create a team to investigate waste, fraud and inefficiency in state spending and report to lawmakers what can be cut. The DAVE Act — named for Republican State Auditor Dave Boliek — would create under him the Division of Accountability, Value and Efficiency. This division has been widely described as North Carolina’s version of the federal Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Boliek told the senators that he was moving quickly to respond to ProPublica’s reporting. Boliek said that he had read the article and put it on his team’s “whiteboard,” and that he had established a “rapid response team” as “a way for us to be proactively reactive” even before the division is officially established. Boliek did not respond to questions about the nature and timing of the investigation sent to his office.

Sen. Woodson Bradley, a Democratic member of the committee, said in the meeting that as a survivor of domestic violence, “this story broke my heart. It broke my trust.” Bradley said she had heard from numerous survivors across the state about the story.

“So I’m asking publicly, before the DAVE Act goes to the Senate floor, to explain to all of North Carolina what went wrong here? How can we fix this?” Bradley said, leading to the promises from the Republican senator and state auditor to look into the Human Trafficking Commission.

Bradley said that after the meeting, “The auditor gave me personal assurances that he or his team would look into this. Though the existence of such investigations is rarely made public, I followed up to ask for a formal investigation, and I’m waiting for” written confirmation.

In the meeting, Bradley also raised concerns that the DAVE Act could be politicized, with investigations targeting agencies led by Democrats or serving them, as Democrats have accused DOGE of doing. She argued that the redirection of the $15 million to the Human Trafficking Commission had happened through a partisan maneuver in a past state budget and worried that the DAVE Act could be similarly skewed. “It needs to be an honest and bipartisan review,” Bradley said.

Boliek promised to do his job in “a nonpartisan way that’s data-centric” and based on “what we’re actually getting as a return on investment on taxpayer dollars.”

In addition to the $15 million redirected to the Human Trafficking Commission, lawmakers gave the commission additional money specifically for faith-based groups. The group that received the most money from the commission — $640,000 — had been created by the former head of the state GOP about two months before it was named in the 2021 budget. In October 2024, the group wrote in its quarterly report to the court system that it had assisted only four victims, and its executive director said that at least three of those women had been given only food and gas and no long-term services. The executive director told ProPublica that as of March 2025 the group had helped about two dozen victims.

A spokesperson for the court system declined to comment for this article, pointing ProPublica to its past statements.

“Our experience is that support for fighting human trafficking is nonpartisan in the legislature,” the spokesperson had previously told ProPublica, “as it is in the Judicial Branch.”

After the meeting, Jarvis told ProPublica that the DAVE Act was meant to address situations “exactly” like those with the Human Trafficking Commission.

The goal of the DAVE division, Jarvis said, would be to get down into the details of how efficiently agencies are working to make sure they are “operating the right way.”

by Mark Olalde

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.

President Donald Trump’s executive orders shrinking the federal workforce make a notable exception for public safety staff, including those who fight wildland fires. But ongoing cuts, funding freezes and hiring pauses have weakened the nation’s already strained firefighting force by hitting support staff who play crucial roles in preventing and battling blazes.

Most notably, about 700 Forest Service employees terminated in mid-February’s “Valentine’s Day massacre” are red-card-carrying staffers, an agency spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica. These workers hold other full-time jobs in the agency, but they’ve been trained to aid firefighting crews, such as by providing logistical support during blazes. They also assist with prescribed burns, which reduce flammable vegetation and prevent bigger fires, but the burns can only move forward if there’s a certain number of staff available to contain them. (Non-firefighting employees without a red card cannot perform such tasks.)

Red-card-carrying employees are the “backbone” of the firefighting force, and their loss will have “a significant impact,” said Frank Beum, a board member of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees who spent more than four decades with the agency and ran the Rocky Mountain Region. “There are not enough primary firefighters to do the full job that needs to be done when we have a high fire season.”

ProPublica spoke to employees across the Forest Service — which manages an area of land nearly twice the size of California — including staff working in firefighting, facilities, timber sales and other roles, to learn how sweeping personnel changes are affecting the agency’s ability to function. The employees said cuts, which have hit the agency’s recreation, wildlife, IT and other divisions, show the Trump administration is shifting the agency’s focus away from environmental stewardship and toward industry and firefighting.

But notwithstanding Trump’s stated guardrails, the cuts have affected the Forest Service’s more than 10,000-person-strong firefighting force. Hiring has slowed as there are fewer employees to get new workers up to speed and people are confused about which job titles can be hired. Other cuts have led to the cancellation of some training programs and prescribed burns.

“It’s all really muddled in chaos, which is sort of the point,” one Forest Service employee told ProPublica.

“This agency is no longer serving its mission,” another added.

The employees asked not to be named for fear of retribution.

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The Forest Service did not respond to questions about the impact of cuts other than to clarify the number of terminated employees. The Forest Service spokesperson said about 2,000 probationary employees — typically new staff and those who were recently promoted, groups that have fewer workplace protections — were fired in February. Others with knowledge of the terminations, including a representative of a federal union and a Senate staffer, said the original number of terminated employees was 3,400 but that decreased, likely as workers were brought back in divisions such as timber sales.

The White House and a representative from the Department of Government Efficiency did not respond to requests for comment.

In early March, an independent federal board that reviews employees’ complaints compelled the Department of Agriculture, the Forest Service’s parent department, to reinstate more than 5,700 terminated probationary employees for 45 days. During their first weeks back on the payroll, many, including Forest Service personnel, were put on paid administrative leave and given no work.

The administration and DOGE continue working toward layoffs amid court challenges to their moves. Word circulated throughout the Forest Service in March that departmental leadership had compiled lists containing the names of thousands of additional Forest Service employees who could be soon laid off, according to some workers.

Additionally, understaffing in the agency’s information technology unit is threatening firefighting operations, according to an agency employee. In December, the branch chief overseeing IT for the agency’s fire and aviation division left the job. The Department of Agriculture posted the job opening, describing the division as providing “support to the interagency wildland fire community’s technical needs.” This includes overseeing software that firefighting crews use to request equipment — everything from fire-resistant clothing to hoses — from the agency’s warehouses so first responders have uninterrupted access to lifesaving equipment.

The day after Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Agriculture removed the IT job posting. The position remains unfilled, according to an employee with knowledge of the situation.

The hiring of new firefighters has also bogged down amid the deluge of sometimes-conflicting orders from the administration and DOGE, Forest Service staffers said.

“We are really, really behind onboarding our employees right now,” a Forest Service firefighter told ProPublica.

The staffing issues exacerbate challenges that predate the second Trump administration. To address a massive budget shortfall, the Forest Service under President Joe Biden last year paused the hiring of seasonal workers, except those working on wildfires. (Firefighters did see a permanent pay increase codified by Congress in its recently approved spending bill.)

Still, many permanent employees, including many firefighters, work on a seasonal basis and are placed on an unpaid status for several months each year when there is less work. Uncertainty within the federal government has led many of these employees to give up on government work and look elsewhere.

“Some of our people have taken other jobs,” one Forest Service employee told ProPublica. “People aren’t going to wait around.”

Cuts to the agency’s legal department will also curb its ability to care for the nation’s forests and fight wildfires, an employee told ProPublica. Large prescribed burns and other vegetation-removal projects require environmental review, a process that is often targeted with lawsuits, including by green groups concerned that the efforts go too far in removing trees.

A smaller legal staff could lead to fewer prescribed burns, increasing the risk of catastrophic fires, according to a lawyer for the Department of Agriculture who worked on Forest Service projects. The lawyer was fired in the mid-February purge of probationary employees.

“Every time we lose a case out West, it means the Forest Service can’t do a project, at least temporarily,” the lawyer said.

“They’re going to get sued more, and they’re going to lose more,” said the lawyer, who was reinstated in March following the board ruling that the Department of Agriculture’s mass firings were illegal.

The employee received back pay but was immediately put on administrative leave. Because of the cuts to support staff, it was several weeks before many of the returning employees were reissued government laptops and badges and allowed to do any work.

“Government efficiency at its finest,” the lawyer said.

by Dave Altimari and Ginny Monk, The Connecticut Mirror

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

This year, the head of Connecticut’s Department of Motor Vehicles made a startling public admission, telling lawmakers that the agency, which regulates the towing industry, has never enforced a century-old law meant to protect drivers whose cars are towed.

Under that law, if vehicle owners don’t reclaim their towed cars or can’t afford the fees, towing companies can sell them, but they are required to hold onto the proceeds for a year so the vehicle owner can claim the money. Tow companies are entitled to subtract their fees. But, even if the owner still doesn’t come forward, the companies aren’t supposed to pocket the profits and must turn over any remaining money to the state.

DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera told lawmakers the agency had never set up a process to accept deposits and wasn’t tracking whether any money had come in.

In fact, the DMV commissioner said he wasn’t aware of that part of the statute until The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica brought it to his attention last fall as part of an investigation into how Connecticut’s laws favor towing companies at the expense of drivers. After the story’s publication, the state treasurer’s office audited its deposits and determined that no tow truck company or the DMV had ever turned over money from sales in the history of the law.

In a statement, Guerrera said, “This law has been in effect since the 1930’s, yet unfortunately, there has never been a system in place to effectively monitor its implementation.”

Tony Guerrera, the commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles, told lawmakers the state doesn’t have a system to ensure that towing companies turn over the unclaimed profits from car sales. (Shahrzad Rasekh/The Connecticut Mirror)

This failure has hurt both vehicle owners and the state itself: Owners don’t have the opportunity to get money back that the law says should be theirs, and the state is missing out on both the potential payments and any interest or investment income that would accrue from the deposits.

The unenforced law is another example of how the DMV has failed to oversee the towing industry, which sells thousands of cars following tows each year. In an extreme case, reported by the news organizations last month, a DMV employee was found to be part of a scheme to undervalue cars and sell them for thousands in profit, according to an internal DMV investigation. The employee denied he did anything wrong and still works at the DMV.

In another, criminal court records show, a Norwalk towing company owner was caught driving a Mercedes-Benz he had towed, racking up nearly 6,000 miles in 22 months. The tower was charged with larceny and participated in a diversion program, after which his record was expunged. CT Mirror and ProPublica have spoken to dozens of people who had their cars towed and never saw them again. Many said they weren’t notified that their cars would be sold.

Legislators are now aiming to create a system to make sure car owners — or eventually the state — get that money. A wide-ranging bill to overhaul the entire towing statute would require towing companies to submit documentation to the DMV of the sale price, any towing and storage fees they incurred and information on the vehicle and its owner within 15 days of a sale.

The bill would also reform the process of “escheating,” or remitting money to the state. After reviewing the sale document, the DMV would require the tower to send a certified letter notifying the owner or lienholder of the sales proceeds. Instead of the general fund, leftover money would be sent to the state’s unclaimed property fund and appear on a publicly posted list.

Guerrera said the DMV recently added more staff charged with overseeing the sales system and added a section to its website this year to ensure tow companies are aware of the requirement to turn money over to the state.

During an interview late last year, Guerrera said that implementing the process wasn’t the DMV’s responsibility and that doing so was up to the state treasurer’s office. But the treasurer pushed back on that in a statement, saying it fell under DMV rules. After the initial CT Mirror and ProPublica story was published, Guerrera took more ownership.

“I am glad this has been brought to my attention and I am more than prepared to address this issue, ensuring that it is now being handled properly and in accordance with its intended purposes,” he said in a statement.

The Transportation Committee approved the bill on March 19, sending it to the House. Some lawmakers opposed it, arguing the bill was intended to target a “few bad apples” but adds unnecessary regulations on all towing companies.

House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, said he expects lots of debate as the bill winds its way through the legislature, but he said the escheating process needs to be addressed.

“There’s got to be some accountability and transparency on that for sure,” Ritter said. “This is people’s property.”

Timothy Vibert, president of Towing and Recovery Professionals of Connecticut, said a past association president asked DMV officials about how to return funds to the state but received no answers.

He said tow companies rarely make back their towing and storage fees when they sell cars and questioned why any tower would ever give the state money.

“There might have been a little bit of a windfall with one car or another, but there’s been a whole lot of losers, so why does the state get a chance to take it?” asked Vibert, who owns Farmington Motor Sports.

He added that many towers would rather return the cars.

“What the towers are doing is keeping those cars and then just getting rid of them for $500 or $600,” Vibert added. “So we’re keeping the cars for, I’m going to guess 45 days, maybe sometimes 50, depending on the paperwork, and then we’re just disposing of them because they’re not worth anything.”

House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, said he thinks there usually isn’t money left over after fees. “I think, frankly, what usually happens is the tow companies wait for the towing and storage fees to exceed the value, so it never ends up going to the state or back to the individual,” he said.

Kristianne Hall experienced the fees piling up firsthand while she was bartending in downtown New Haven. The job posed a delicate balance. She had to work her shift and offer sufficient service to get good tips. But she also had to keep the parking meter fed. There were a few times Hall couldn’t get to the meter, and parking tickets stacked up.

Kristianne Hall said she should have received thousands of dollars after her car was towed and sold, but she never got anything. (Octavio Jones for ProPublica)

In 2015, her car got booted and then towed when she couldn’t afford to pay the $500 to get the device taken off. By the time she had that money saved, she said, the towing company quoted her $2,000 to get the vehicle back from its lot.

Hall couldn’t afford that and never saw the car again. She estimated the 2008 Chevrolet Aveo was worth about $5,000, which is supported by a Kelley Blue Book report, thousands more than what the towing company told her she’d need to pay to get it back.

“Why was I not entitled to the rest of that money if I own that car outright?” she asked.

After the tow, Hall struggled to get to and from work. She had to take an Uber home because the city bus stopped running before her shifts ended. She quickly ran low on money and had to turn to her roommates to help her pay bills before she eventually moved in with her grandparents in Florida.

“I felt like a failure because I couldn’t hack it,” Hall said. “It was a really, really hard and almost traumatic situation.”

Has Your Car Been Towed in Connecticut? Share Your Story and Help Us Investigate.

Asia Fields contributed reporting.

by Megan O’Matz

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

When Susan Crawford, Wisconsin’s newly elected Supreme Court justice, took the stage in Madison on Tuesday night to claim victory, four women flanked her, beaming, hands on one another’s shoulders. One had her fist raised in triumph.

The supporters were four justices now serving on the state’s Supreme Court, representing the court’s liberal faction. Pictures and video of the moment captured the overt display of partisanship in a contest for the state’s highest court.

Missing from the scene: the court’s three conservative leaning justices. About 60 miles east, one of them, Rebecca Bradley, joined the election event of the opposing candidate, former Republican Attorney Gen. Brad Schimel, where she expressed disappointment that he lost and blamed liberals for politicizing the court.

“I also think the way Judge Crawford ran her race was disgusting,” Bradley said, according to the news site The Bulwark. Bradley accused the Democratic Party of “buying another justice.”

Bradley added: “It needs to stop. Otherwise, there is no point in having a court. This is what the Legislature is supposed to do, to make political decisions based on policy. That’s not what a court’s supposed to do, and unfortunately, we’re going to see this happening for at least the next several years.”

Officially the Supreme Court race was nonpartisan. Crawford and Schimel did not run with an R or D beside their name. Wisconsin judges take an oath to be faithful to the state constitution, to administer justice without favoritism and to act impartially.

But the spectacularly high-profile Wisconsin contest was undeniably political. The nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice estimated the spending topped $100 million — making it the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history. Large sums came from political action committees and shadowy third-party groups that funneled money into TV ads, mailers, canvassing and other assistance.

President Donald Trump, taking a keen interest in the race, endorsed Schimel and held a “tele-rally” for him. His close adviser, billionaire Elon Musk, funneled roughly $25 million into the race, via his super PAC, an associated dark-money entity and direct party donations. The outlays included offers to pay Schimel volunteers $50 for every photo of a voter outside a polling station, as well as million-dollar checks as prizes to three supporters. At one point in the race, Schimel posed for photos in front of a giant inflatable likeness of Trump.

On the other side, the Democratic Party endorsed Crawford and steered over $11 million to her campaign from contributions made to the party by donors that included billionaires such as George Soros and Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. On social media in the waning days of the campaign, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton urged support for Crawford. Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler attended Crawford’s victory party in Madison.

Wisconsin’s raw partisan display reflects a growing focus on the importance of these courts in shaping policy — especially on hot-button issues like abortion, redistricting and voting rights. At the same time, it feeds a growing concern nationally about the independence of state high courts. Some government watchdogs worry that the blatant partisanship around who serves on these courts is increasing distrust by the public in judicial decisions, jeopardizing the system of checks and balances needed in a functioning democracy.

The targeting of state supreme courts by special interests and ultrawealthy individuals, some court observers say, can leave the public with the impression that justices are no different than any senator or representative or governor: devoted to serving their political allies. At that point, will court orders no longer carry the moral weight and respect needed to carry them out?

At the national level, a federal judge is considering whether the Trump administration defied a court order to halt planes deporting immigrants to a prison in El Salvador, prompting Trump to call for the judge’s impeachment. In Wisconsin, meanwhile, Musk exhorted voters to sign a petition against “activist judges.”

“Especially at this moment, when courts are being tested and are serving as a crucial bulwark in our democracy, it is very important that the public be able to trust them and keep demanding that other elected officials follow court decisions,” said Douglas Keith, senior counsel for the Brennan Center, a policy institute that studies judicial elections and advocates for a fair and independent judiciary.

Similar to how U.S. Supreme Court nominations have been subject to political maneuvering, state courts in recent years have seen battles over ideological control.

Billionaire Elon Musk, right, spent roughly $25 million in an attempt to get former Republican Attorney Gen. Brad Schimel elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, including handing out million-dollar checks to supporters. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

In North Carolina, where justices run under partisan labels, the Republican-led Supreme Court blocked the certification of a Democrat elected to the bench in November, while the GOP candidate challenges the validity of more than 60,000 ballots cast in the race. On Friday, the state’s lower court of appeals, in a 2-1 decision led by Republicans, ordered those voters to provide their driver’s license or Social Security number within 15 days to demonstrate their eligibility to vote. Democrats vowed to challenge the ruling in front of the state Supreme Court.

And in Iowa, after the Supreme Court in 2018 ruled that the state constitution protected the right to an abortion, the Legislature changed who can serve on the state’s judicial nominating commission. New justices, appointed by the state’s Republican governor, in 2022 reconsidered the abortion issue and reversed course, also citing the constitution.

The debate over money in Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court races goes back more than 15 years, when the state enacted public financing for such contests to limit spending. But that did not last long. Republicans threw out spending reforms in 2015, and the money devoted to these races has grown exponentially.

In Wisconsin eight years ago, a group of 54 retired judges were so worried about the influence of money on the work of the judiciary that they petitioned the Wisconsin Supreme Court. They sought to amend the Code of Judicial Conduct to require parties in lawsuits to disclose campaign contributions over $250 and impose recusal standards in cases involving sizable donations.

“As money in elections becomes more predominant, citizens rightfully ask whether justice is for sale,” the petition stated.

The state Supreme Court voted 5-2 to deny the petition, with conservatives, including current Justices Annette Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley, lined up against it on constitutional grounds.

Michael Kang, a professor at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, has studied the effect of campaign donations on state supreme court decisions and found that judges elected in competitive races were more likely to rule in favor of business litigants as the amount of campaign donations they received from corporate interests increased. His research, over many years, also found that contributions from political parties correlated with subsequent judicial voting in election disputes over issues such as ballot counting or candidate eligibility.

But Kang’s work went further by examining judges barred from running again because of mandatory retirement ages. He found that the effect of money drops off for lame duck judges who are spared from having to raise money to run again.

“You can go a long way toward addressing the role of money, even with judicial elections, by giving judges one long term, but they're not eligible for reelection at the end,” he said at a recent panel discussion. “And that, to an important degree, ought to reduce the influence of money.”

In Wisconsin, Crawford’s victory cements liberal control of the court for the next three years.

Beside her on stage in Madison were liberal justices: Jill Karofsky, Rebecca Dallet, Ann Walsh Bradley, who is retiring, and Janet Protasiewicz, who was elected in 2023 with the help of $10 million from the Democratic Party. That contest broke spending records, at roughly $56 million, and shifted the balance of the court to the left after 15 years of conservative dominance.

The court’s current session ends in June, and Crawford’s swearing in will be in August. In the future, the seven-member court is likely to confront issues with huge implications for both parties or their supporters.

Crawford’s victory signals that Wisconsin likely will continue to permit access to abortion, which now is legal up to 20 weeks in the pregnancy. Anti-abortion advocates backed Schimel, and had he won, it was assumed that Wisconsin could revert to an 1849 law that outlawed most abortions. Over a decade ago, as a county district attorney, he signed on to a legal white paper advocating support for the 1849 provision, which does not allow for exceptions in the case of rape or incest or protecting the mother’s health. Crawford, as a private attorney, fought for abortion rights.

Democrats at some point are widely expected to bring another lawsuit challenging the state’s gerrymandered congressional maps. Wisconsin voters are evenly divided politically, but representation in the U.S. House is skewed to favor the GOP. Six seats are held by Republicans and two by Democrats. Last year, the liberal-controlled court didn’t fall in lockstep with some expectations about its political leanings, handing Republicans a small victory in declining to consider a Democratic lawsuit challenging those maps.

In other states, justices — who once could largely toil above the political fray — have paid a political price for their decisions.

In Ohio in 2022, Republican lawmakers briefly toyed with impeaching Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a fellow Republican, after she sided with three Democrats in repeatedly overturning the state’s legislative maps, which had been drawn by Republicans. She later retired.

In Oklahoma last November, voters tossed out Yvonne Kauger, who had served over 30 years on the bench. A campaign to remove her and two colleagues, fueled by $2 million in dark money, painted them as too liberal, noting they were appointed by Democratic governors.

“Is it any surprise all three are activist liberal judges, killing common sense lawsuit reform, adding millions to the cost of doing business, padding the pockets of trial lawyers?” one video ad blared.

Justices traditionally don’t campaign in Oklahoma retention elections, which Kauger told a news outlet left the judges “helpless” to defend themselves. “I am saddened and alarmed that the system is being used to attack the independent judiciary based on dissatisfaction with a few specially selected opinions,” she said.

In Wisconsin, ads from both sides painted unflattering portraits of the candidates. Crawford was labeled a “radical liberal judge” who gave a light sentence to a child molester. Schimel was accused of giving plea deals to despicable criminals. Both were attacked for their views on abortion.

Musk and Trump, meanwhile, depicted Schimel’s installment on the court as a vital step in carrying out Trump’s agenda and keeping GOP control of Congress.

In Green Bay, two days before the election, Musk told supporters the state Supreme Court race “is a vote for which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives.” Republicans now control the chamber by only 7 votes. Redrawing congressional lines in Wisconsin could make some seats more competitive for Democrats.

“That is why it is so significant. And whichever party controls the House, you know, it, to a significant degree, controls the country, which then steers the course of Western civilization,” Musk told the crowd.

In the end, Crawford won with 55% of the vote.

“Today, Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy, our fair elections, and our Supreme Court, and Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price,” Crawford told her supporters. “Our courts are not for sale.”

Retired Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul Pfeifer said he does not like big money in politics at any level, from county commissioner to state Supreme Court. But after decades of wrestling with the issue he’s concluded that spending controls are unworkable, as loopholes invariably open.

“I view it much like a water bed,” he said. “You push down here and it pops up over there.”

by Renee Dudley

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

A few weeks ago, my colleague Doris Burke sent me a story from The New York Times that gave us both deja vu.

The piece reported that Starlink, the satellite internet provider operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, had, in the words of Trump administration officials, “donated” internet service to improve wireless connectivity and cell reception at the White House.

The donation puzzled some former officials quoted in the story. But it immediately struck us as the potential Trump-era iteration of a tried-and-true business maneuver we’d spent months reporting on last year. In that investigation, we focused on deals between Microsoft and the Biden administration. At the heart of the arrangements was something that most consumers intuitively understand: “Free” offers usually have a catch.

Microsoft began offering the federal government “free” cybersecurity upgrades and consulting services in 2021, after President Joe Biden pressed tech companies to help bolster the nation’s cyber defenses. Our investigation revealed that the ostensibly altruistic White House Offer, as it was known inside Microsoft, belied a more complex, profit-driven agenda. The company knew the proverbial catch was that, once the free trial period ended, federal customers who had accepted the offer and installed the upgrades would effectively be locked into keeping them because switching to a competitor at that point would be costly and cumbersome.

Former Microsoft employees told me the company’s offer was akin to a drug dealer hooking users with free samples. “If we give you the crack, and you take the crack, you’ll enjoy the crack,” one said. “And then when it comes time for us to take the crack away, your end users will say, ‘Don’t take it away from me.’ And you’ll be forced to pay me.”

What Microsoft predicted internally did indeed come to pass. When the free trials ended, vast swaths of the federal government kept the upgrades and began paying the higher subscription fees, unlocking billions in future sales for the company.

Microsoft has said all agreements with the government were “pursued ethically and in full compliance with federal laws and regulations” and that its only goal during this period was “to enhance the security posture of federal agencies who were continuously being targeted by sophisticated nation-state threat actors.”

But experts on government contracting told me the company’s maneuvers were legally tenuous. They circumvented the competitive bidding process that is a bedrock of government procurement, shutting rivals out of competition for lucrative federal business and, by extension, stifling innovation in the industry.

After reading the Times story about Starlink’s donation to the White House, I checked back in with those experts.

“It doesn’t matter if it was Microsoft last year or Starlink today or another company tomorrow,” said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School. “Anytime you’re doing this, it’s a back door around the competition processes that ensure we have the best goods and services from the best vendors.”

Typically, in a competitive bidding process, the government solicits proposals from vendors for the goods and services it wants to buy. Those vendors then submit their proposals to the government, which theoretically chooses the best option in terms of quality and cost. Giveaways circumvent that entire process.

Yet, to hear Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick tell it, the Trump administration wants to not only normalize such donations but encourage them across Washington.

Last month, during an appearance on the Silicon Valley podcast “All-In,” he floated his concept of a “gratis” vendor who “gives product to the government.” In the episode, released just a few days after The New York Times published its Starlink story, Lutnick said such a donor would not “have to go through the whole process of becoming a proper vendor because you’re giving it to us.” Later, he added: “You don’t have to sign the conflict form and all this stuff because you’re not working for the government. You’re just giving stuff to the government. You are literally giving of yourself. You’re not looking for anything. You’re not taking any money.”

Since President Donald Trump took office in January, Musk, who is classified as an unpaid “special government employee,” has made a show of providing his services to the president and products from his companies to the government “at no cost to the taxpayer.” The White House donation was just the latest move. In February, he directed his company SpaceX to ship 4,000 terminals, at no cost, to the Federal Aviation Administration for installation of its Starlink satellite internet service.

During our Microsoft investigation, salespeople told me that within the company the explicit “end game” was converting government users to paid upgraded subscriptions after the free trial and ultimately gaining market share for Azure, its cloud platform. It’s unclear what the end game is for Musk and Starlink. Neither responded to emailed questions.

Federal law has long attempted to restrict donations to the government, in large part to maintain oversight on spending.

At least as far back as the 19th century, executive branch personnel were entering into contracts without seeking the necessary funding from Congress, which was supposed to have the power of the purse. Lawmakers didn’t want taxpayers to be on the hook for spending that Congress hadn’t appropriated, so they passed the Antideficiency Act, a version of which remains in effect today. One portion restricted “voluntary services” to guard against a supposed volunteer later demanding government payment.

But in 1947, the General Accounting Office (now called the Government Accountability Office), which offers opinions on fiscal laws, made an exemption: Providing what became known as “gratuitous services” would be allowed as long as the parties agree “in writing and in advance” that the donor waives payment.

Microsoft used that exemption to transfer the consulting services it valued at $150 million to its government customers, entering into so-called gratuitous services agreements. To give away the actual cybersecurity products, the company provided existing federal customers with a “100% discount” for up to a year.

It is unclear whether gratuitous services agreements were in place for Musk’s giveaways. The White House and the FAA did not respond to written questions. Neither did SpaceX. An official told The New York Times last month that a lawyer overseeing ethics issues in the White House Counsel’s Office had vetted the Starlink donation to the White House.

For the experts I consulted, the written agreements might help companies comply with the letter of the law, but certainly not with the spirit of it. “Just because something is technically legal does not make it right,” said Eve Lyon, an attorney who worked for four decades as a procurement specialist in the federal government.

The consequences of accepting a giveaway, no matter how it’s transferred, can be far reaching, Lyon said, and government officials “might not grasp the perniciousness at the outset.”

Tillipman agreed, saying the risk for ballooning obligations is particularly pronounced when it comes to technology and IT. Users become reliant on one provider, leading to “vendor lock-in,” she said. It’s too soon to tell what will come of Starlink’s donations, but Microsoft’s White House Offer provides a preview of what’s possible. In line with its goal at the outset, the world’s biggest software company continues to expand its footprint across the federal government while sidestepping competition.

A source from last year’s Microsoft investigation recently called to catch up. He told me that, with the government locked into Microsoft, rivals continue to be shut out of federal contracting opportunities. When I asked for an example, he shared a 2024 document from the Defense Information Systems Agency, or DISA, which handles IT for the Department of Defense. The document described an “exception to fair opportunity” in the procurement of a variety of new IT services, saying the $5.2 million order “will be issued directly to Microsoft Corporation.”

The justification? Switching from Microsoft to another provider “would result in additional time, effort, costs, and performance impacts.” DISA did not respond to emailed questions.

Doris Burke contributed research.

by Kayla Guo, The Texas Tribune

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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.

Attorney General Ken Paxton has spent much of his career, which has taken him to the heights of Republican politics, trailed by a raft of criminal and civil accusations.

But in the final days of the Biden administration, The Associated Press reported Thursday, the Justice Department defused the most serious legal threat he faced — a federal criminal probe into allegations of corruption — by declining to prosecute and effectively ending the investigation.

With the investigation over, Paxton has nearly cleared his crowded slate of career-threatening legal battles, just as he gears up for a likely 2026 primary run against U.S. Sen. John Cornyn.

“The end of this investigation is both politically and personally a huge boon for Ken Paxton,” said Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University. “Paxton can point to that and say, ‘You see, even under a Democratic administration, they didn’t feel that there was anything there that merited moving forward.’”

Two sources familiar with the issue, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, told the AP of the Justice Department’s decision, including that it was made while President Joe Biden was still in office. The DOJ did not immediately respond to questions about confirming the AP report.

The development extends a multiyear string of legal victories vindicating the once-embattled Republican. It underscores Paxton’s durability through all manner of political, personal and legal troubles and helps burnish his reputation among the right wing of his party as a fighter who, like President Donald Trump, has defied numerous efforts by his detractors to take him down.

“It really sets up those parallels to Trump that will play very well among the Republican primary electorate,” Wilson said. “Paxton is a political survivor. People have written his obituary a couple of times, and he has really forged this loyal base among the grassroots activists in the Republican Party.”

Paxton’s attorney Dan Cogdell said he learned of the outcome from the AP because the Justice Department never notified him of its decision not to prosecute.

“The fact that they declined prosecution is not a surprise,” Cogdell said. “I don’t really think they ever had a case to begin with.”

There was little concern that the case would continue under the Trump administration’s Justice Department, given Paxton’s close alliance with the president.

In January, the Texas Supreme Court tossed the State Bar of Texas’ lawsuit against Paxton over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election won by Biden.

Prosecutors last year dropped felony securities fraud charges against Paxton just three weeks before he was set to face trial, after he agreed to perform 100 hours of community service, take 15 hours of legal ethics courses and pay $271,000 in restitution to those he was accused of defrauding more than a decade ago. The deal ended a nearly nine-year-old felony case that had dogged Paxton since his early days in office.

And when the state Legislature sought to impeach him for the same allegations of corruption that spurred the federal investigation, the Texas Senate acquitted him of 16 charges of bribery, abuse of office and obstruction – charges that more than 70% of his own party had supported in the House.

Paxton’s last outstanding legal battle is a whistleblower lawsuit filed against him by four of the former senior aides who reported him to the FBI, who allege that he fired them improperly after they spoke out. The Texas Supreme Court said in November that Paxton would not have to sit for a deposition in the lawsuit — another win for the attorney general, who has managed to avoid testifying about the corruption allegations through the civil lawsuit, his impeachment trial and the federal investigation. Paxton last year said he would no longer contest the facts of the case in order to end what he called “wasteful litigation” and a distraction for his office.

The whistleblowers are now waiting on a Travis County district judge to rule on a settlement.

“DOJ clearly let political cowardice impact its decision. The whistleblowers — all strong conservatives — did the right thing and continue to stand by their allegations of Paxton’s criminal conduct,” TJ Turner and Tom Nesbitt, attorneys for some of the whistleblowers, told the AP in a statement.

On Thursday, Paxton referenced the end of the federal investigation to take a swing at Cornyn, who has been critical of Paxton’s legal controversies and steadfast in his bid for reelection.

“This former TX Supreme Court Justice and TX Attorney General ignored the rule of law, the Constitution, and innocent until proven guilty while standing with the corrupt Biden DOJ cheering on the bogus witch hunts against both me and President Trump,” Paxton posted on social media in reference to Cornyn, adding, “Care to comment now, John?”

In response to an attempt by Paxton to tag Cornyn as insufficiently conservative and supportive of Trump, Cornyn had said, “Hard to run from prison, Ken.”

The likely matchup could prove to be Cornyn’s toughest primary battle yet as Texas Republican primary voters lurch toward the right and his popularity among GOP voters drops from 2020 highs.

Among Republican-identifying voters, according to polling by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, Cornyn has a 49% approval rating, compared to Paxton’s 62% approval rating. Texas’ other senator, Ted Cruz, meanwhile, has an approval rating of 78% among Republicans.

Still, Cornyn, who has trounced past challengers, is a prodigious fundraiser and wields widespread influence as a senior senator. He has also worked to smooth over his relationship with the hard-right in Texas and tout his work in the Senate in support of Trump.

On Thursday, Cornyn declined to comment on Paxton or the Justice Department decision not to prosecute, saying he was “not going to have any comments about that until he’s an announced candidate. Then I’ll have a lot to say.”

In response to a request for comment, Cornyn’s campaign, meanwhile, sent an endorsement from the National Border Patrol Council that was announced Thursday.

Cruz declined to comment.

“Fundamentally, he’s a fighter, and he’s also a risk-taker,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Republican strategist and the former Travis County GOP chair, describing Paxton’s position heading into a potential campaign with the federal investigation behind him. “What I think this whole episode taught him is, trust your instincts and never quit. The psychology of that has to be very powerful for him in approaching this race.”

Katharine Wilson of The Texas Tribune and Vianna Davila with ProPublica contributed reporting.

by Stacy St. Clair, Chicago Tribune, and Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica

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

Amid a standout season last year, University of Illinois men’s basketball stars found themselves in high demand as they reached the Elite Eight in the 2024 NCAA Tournament.

Three players appeared in a commercial for a local BMW dealership.

One did an Instagram post for TurboTax.

Another promoted an apartment complex near the Urbana-Champaign campus.

But not one of those endorsements — which are allowed now that student-athletes can profit from their personal brands — was reported to the university, as state law requires.

In fact, the entire Illini team reported just $9,100 in name, image and likeness deals during the 2023-24 season, according to records obtained by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica. By comparison, the average earnings reported for a male basketball player in the Big Ten and the three other biggest college conferences were more than $145,000 during that school year, according to data that institutions voluntarily provided to the NCAA.

The Illini basketball team’s missing disclosures reflect an indifference to documenting NIL deals across the athletic department, the news organizations found. Athletes from 20 sports combined have reported earning only about $1.2 million in three-plus years, compared with the $20 million Ohio State University’s football team reportedly received in a single year, or a University of Missouri quarterback who alone is estimated to have made more than $1 million in NIL deals.

By shrugging its shoulders at Illinois’ reporting requirements, the university is failing to compile a complete picture of how its students — some of them still teenagers — are navigating a relatively new terrain rife with legal, moral and financial pitfalls.

“I find that maddening and irresponsible,” said Bill Carter, founder of Student-Athlete Insights, which provides NIL consulting services. “It seems unethical to me to allow 18-to-23-year-olds to participate in something life-altering like this but provide no structure, no support, no direction.”

A University of Illinois cheerleader rallies fans at the start of a women’s basketball game in February. The lead sponsor of the state’s law on college athletes’ name, image and likeness deals said one goal of the mandatory reporting provision was to examine potential gender gaps in compensation. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune)

Officials from the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics say they inform the school’s athletes of their responsibilities but acknowledge they do not enforce compliance, despite the Illinois law requiring athletes to disclose all deals to their schools. The officials downplayed those failures by asserting that reporting is spotty nationwide.

Athletes “should just disclose the deals, but both here and across the country, they just kind of don’t really do that,” Kamron Cox, a U of I assistant athletic director and the school’s NIL specialist, said in an interview.

In a three-page response to questions, the athletic department acknowledged students are underreporting their earnings and did not dispute any of the figures in this story. The statement noted it is students’ responsibility to report NIL agreements and said the university has fulfilled its obligations under the law by paying for an app that allows athletes to do so. It called the state’s disclosure rules — which the university had advocated for — “ineffective,” noting the law carries no penalties and arguing that punishing players internally would harm the institution’s reputation.

“Our program, like most across the country, is doing its best to navigate in uncharted waters,” the statement said. It contended that 70% of NIL deals nationwide go unreported, citing one industry insider whose estimates have varied. “Blind adherence to an untenable process does not appear to be the expectation of the state, the NCAA, or our industry.”

Administrators also said they do not know how much money Illini basketball players — or any of the student-athletes — are receiving through NIL, even though today’s collegiate marketplace requires understanding the amounts needed to recruit and retain star athletes.

That lack of knowledge “is not possible and it’s not believable,” Carter said.

More than 20 states, including Illinois, passed laws requiring athletes to disclose their deals after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled four years ago that collegiate competitors have the right to make money. ProPublica and the Tribune obtained records of the deals reported by U of I athletes from July 2021 through October 2024 via the Freedom of Information Act, offering the public a rare look at the lack of accountability in the big-money world of college sports.

Michael LeRoy, a University of Illinois professor who has studied name, image and likeness deals in collegiate athletics, said he wonders why the Illinois athletic department hasn’t done more to ensure compliance with NIL reporting requirements. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune)

The records the U of I provided to the Tribune and ProPublica included 1,037 deals across all sports with the names of the athletes redacted by agreement. Sponsored social media posts were, by far, the most frequent way athletes reported earning money, followed by autograph signings and personal appearances.

In this far-from-complete data, deals ranged from a male basketball player’s $326,000 arrangement with a Porsche dealership in Kentucky to $10 for a track athlete to endorse a men’s soap called “Freshticles.”

The Illinois law on NIL requires athletes to provide their schools with copies of contracts when the deals are valued at $500 or more. Illini athletes reported more than 175 deals that meet that standard. But when the news organizations filed a public records request seeking contracts for 12 of the largest reported deals, a university administrator responded that the campus did not have any of them.

“There is nothing in the Illinois law that would be difficult for any Big Ten athletic program to follow,” said Michael LeRoy, a labor and employment relations professor at U of I and former chair of the school’s athletic board. “But they’re clearly choosing not to do it. You have to wonder why.”

The NCAA declined to speak with reporters for this story, but it has issued multiple statements stressing the need for transparency in NIL agreements. It established a policy last year to encourage athletes nationwide to report deals to their institutions, so schools could then provide the information to the NCAA to make available on a public dashboard intended to help students navigate the NIL marketplace.

But up to now, there have been no consequences for athletes or institutions that fall short.

That could soon change. Next week, a $2.8 billion settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by student-athletes against the NCAA is expected to gain final approval, shifting the landscape again. Under the deal, known as the House settlement after one of the plaintiffs, a school would be able to pay its athletes directly from a revenue-sharing budget capped at $20.5 million for the next school year.

Schools also could be directly involved in negotiating NIL deals for their athletes, and deals worth at least $600 and those made with collectives would need to be reported to an outside entity. That entity would evaluate whether the payments align with a fair market value and ensure the money is not a pay-to-play deal. Those reports are not expected to be made public.

The four largest conferences — the Atlantic Coast Conference, Big Ten, Southeastern Conference and Big 12 — have said they plan to create an organization that would both implement and enforce the rules as the NCAA’s oversight role shrinks. It also could issue penalties.

“The ante has been upped,” said Joshua Lens, a University of Iowa sports management professor who has studied NIL extensively. “It will require disclosure like we have all along, but now … the schools and athletes could be penalized.”

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, shown at State Farm Center on the University of Illinois campus, signed legislation in 2021 that allows college athletes in the state to make money off their brand while requiring them to report such deals to their school. (Anthony Zilis/The News-Gazette) Face Wash and Physical Therapy

The NIL era in Illinois began on June 29, 2021, at the State Farm Center on the University of Illinois campus. Gov. JB Pritzker signed the groundbreaking legislation, known as the Student-Athlete Endorsement Rights Act, while surrounded by several Illini athletes, including gymnast Dylan Kolak.

Illinois was among the first states to pass an NIL law, and Kolak was ready to seize the moment. He had begun making TikTok videos during the pandemic to promote men’s gymnastics and fitness, amassing more than 500,000 followers in a little over a year.

When companies approached him about the possibility of endorsement deals, Kolak said he either ignored their messages or explained that NCAA rules prohibited him from earning money that way. For Kolak, a partial-scholarship athlete who excelled at the floor exercise and vault, it stung each time he passed up an offer.

Former Illini gymnast Dylan Kolak reported his NIL deal with Athletico, a physical therapy provider, to the university, in keeping with state law. (TikTok video obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune)

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He’s the type of athlete state Rep. Kam Buckner, a former Illini defensive lineman, had in mind when the Chicago Democrat sponsored legislation codifying moneymaking opportunities for student-athletes. He was joined by two former Northwestern University athletes, state Sen. Napoleon Harris and Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch.

Buckner said he remembered what it was like to be a college athlete and need extra cash for necessities.

“In a way, it had the underlying air of indentured servitude where you don’t even own your own space,” Buckner said. “And so for me, this was about fairness.”

The state law’s rules for NIL are straightforward: Athletes can’t take money from the gambling, tobacco or alcohol industries. They can’t use a university logo without permission. They can’t wear their uniforms in advertisements unless they have prior approval from their institutions.

And they have to report their NIL deals to their schools. From Buckner’s standpoint, that clause offered universities and their athletes a baseline for understanding what kind of deals — and what kind of dollars — were available in this new and unfamiliar world. The data also could help identify any gender or racial gaps that emerged, Buckner said.

By all accounts, the school took the reporting requirement seriously in the beginning.

“We were told to report our deals constantly,” Kolak said. “We were told we could lose our eligibility if we didn’t. Nobody wanted to risk that.”

Kolak said he reported everything that came his way, including $900 for an Instagram post about a face wash, $1,300 for promoting men’s shoes on TikTok and $2,375 for documenting his physical therapy at Athletico.

Illinois state Rep. Kam Buckner, a former Illini football player, was a chief sponsor of the state’s NIL legislation. He said he remembers what it was like to be a college athlete and need extra money for necessities. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune)

The reporting requirement became so ingrained in Kolak and his teammates in those early NIL days that the men’s gymnastics squad logged 128 deals in 2021 and 2022. It was the most of any Illini men’s team, with only women’s softball recording more deals.

The number dropped significantly, however, by 2023 and 2024, after the university stopped stressing the importance of reporting. The men’s gymnastics team reported just 44 deals in those years — still the most reported by any men’s team.

Cox, the U of I assistant athletic director, said he regularly reminded students about the disclosure rules during the first year of NIL. But after the NCAA in October 2022 barred schools from arranging or negotiating NIL deals for athletes, the department stopped stressing the importance of reporting, according to Cox.

The fall 2022 guidance didn’t say to stop, however. In fact, it stated, “when permitted by applicable state laws — schools can and should require student-athletes to report NIL activities to the athletics department.”

Roger Denny, the U of I athletic department’s chief operating officer, said in an interview that the department still conducts several presentations each year for athletes to go over contracts, taxes and disclosure rules. The department’s statement said it sends weekly emails to athletes and conducts sessions with an NIL consultant. Asked for an example of the emails, the department shared the most recent newsletter, in which the last item reminded athletes to disclose their NIL deals.

Buckner, the Illinois lawmaker, said that he was unaware of the reporting practices and the rules should be followed so athletes understand the playing field. “I don’t believe in just throwing arbitrary mechanisms into policy that aren’t followed,” he said. “If they’re not doing what they’re intended to do, we’ve got to figure out how to change that.”

The university’s lack of attention to students’ reporting is apparent in the school’s data, which shows the reported value of NIL deals dropped by 85% on the Urbana-Champaign campus in the 2023-24 academic year. According to the records, student-athletes reported making a total of just $103,000 that year, down from $702,500 in 2022-23.

First image: University of Illinois gymnast Sam Phillips pets his cat, Richard Parker, at his apartment in Champaign. Phillips, who recently injured his Achilles tendon, said his former school, the University of Nebraska, exercised more oversight over his NIL agreements than the U of I does. Second image: Phillips displays an Instagram promotion he did for Degree deodorant. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune)

Illini gymnast Sam Phillips, a two-time All-American who transferred from the University of Nebraska last year, said NIL rules were mentioned at a meeting for new U of I athletes. But there hasn’t been additional discussion about NIL, he said. By contrast, at Nebraska, Phillips said he regularly received advice from an athletic department compliance officer who reminded him to disclose his deals to the university.

He did so through an app that many universities use called Opendorse, which helps athletes find NIL deals and report them to university officials. U of I is spending $260,000 on a contract with Opendorse through mid-2026, which the athletic department said fulfills its obligation under the state’s NIL law to facilitate reporting.

Nebraska’s compliance officer reviewed each of Phillips’ agreements at that school, according to the app, but as of December there was no indication U of I had examined the deals Phillips had reached since his transfer, including with Abbott, Degree deodorant and Savage X Fenty underwear. The university said its athletic department reviews deals submitted through Opendorse but that it does not document it on the app and it is not required to.

“I haven’t spoken to anyone in [the U of I] administration at all,” said Phillips, a nonscholarship athlete who uses the money to pay for living expenses. “It has been on my own.”

Quattrone, who owns five auto dealerships in the Champaign area, has autographed sports memorabilia on display in his office at Serra Buick GMC in Savoy. Quattrone said he has sold cars to student-athletes at hefty discounts, among other compensation, in exchange for their appearances and participation in ads. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune) “A Ridiculously Good Deal”

At Illinois, the reporting failures are best exemplified through the university’s marquee men’s sports: football and basketball.

Relying on social media, news releases and media interviews, ProPublica and the Tribune identified dozens of endorsements that were not included in the database provided by U of I. The missing endorsements include several promoted during March Madness in 2024, including the TurboTax ad from basketball player Marcus Domask and a popular commercial for a Serra Champaign car dealership that featured three of his teammates.

In that ad, Terrence Shannon Jr., Coleman Hawkins and Ty Rodgers wore Groucho Marx glasses as they sought an autograph from Illini teen superfan Tommy Rouse. The players, who have all driven luxury vehicles from Serra, had their cars cleaned while they shot the video in the showroom, according to dealership owner Ben Quattrone.

Quattrone, a longtime supporter of the athletic department, said he has sold cars to athletes at hefty discounts in exchange for their appearances and participation in ads, as well as provided car washes in exchange for signed basketballs, all permitted under the NIL rules. He estimates he has spent about $150,000 in the past few years to purchase TV ads and other media promotions featuring Illini athletes.

Illini athletes have posted videos on social media showing them driving BMWs, including a BMW XM, an SUV with a sticker price of $160,000. “I make them a ridiculously good deal,” said Quattrone.

Records on NIL deals reported to the University of Illinois did not include this 2024 commercial for a Champaign car dealership in which Illini players Coleman Hawkins, Terrence Shannon Jr. and Ty Rodgers appeared in Groucho Marx glasses. (Obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune)

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No Illinois athlete, however, has disclosed a deal with Serra to the university, records show. Quattrone said he reminds athletes to set aside money to pay taxes on their NIL deals but said he was unsure of their reporting obligations to the university.

Around the same time as the Serra ad came out, the Pacifica on Green — a new apartment complex that caters to students — also tried to capitalize on the success of the university’s basketball team and its football program. The Tribune and ProPublica identified at least six football and men’s basketball players featured on the apartment complex’s Instagram, including then-Illini forward Dain Dainja, who appeared in multiple posts throughout the 2023-24 season.

In one post, which celebrated the team advancing to the Elite Eight, Pacifica gave a signed Dainja jersey to a tenant who renewed his lease during March Madness. An earlier photo showed Dainja signing the jersey for the renewal promotion while wearing an olive green Pacifica T-shirt.

No men’s basketball or football players disclosed receiving any kind of payment from the complex. Only one Illini athlete — a female basketball player — told the university about receiving compensation from Pacifica: more than $16,000 for Instagram reels, according to the data.

Former Illini basketball player Marcus Domask promoted TurboTax in a “paid partnership” Instagram post last year. The deal was not included in the NIL records provided by the university. (Screen recording by ProPublica. Cropped by ProPublica.)

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None of the athletes in the Serra, Pacifica or TurboTax promotions or their representatives agreed to comment for this story. A Pacifica representative also did not respond to interview requests.

The failure by many male athletes to disclose their deals also makes it difficult to assess differences in NIL compensation between male and female students at U of I — a stated goal of the Illinois law’s lead sponsor.

That a gender gap exists is clear, despite the flawed nature of the data. In the three-year period examined by the Tribune and ProPublica, male athletes accounted for more than $1 million in reported earnings, compared with $160,000 total for female athletes.

But in the 2023-24 school year, after administrators stopped stressing the importance of reporting, men disclosed only $44,500 in NIL deals, compared with $58,500 for the women.

The falloff in reporting also obscures the role played by a boosterlike nonprofit organization called the Icon Collective in raising NIL money for Illinois student-athletes. Such collectives have become common at many universities, raising millions of dollars paid to players in exchange for community service such as volunteering at a food bank.

Icon is supposed to be independent from the U of I’s athletic department, though records show they work together on everything from athlete appearances to the beer sold at Memorial Stadium.

Reporters identified at least six U of I athletes who promoted the Pacifica on Green apartment complex on Instagram, but only one deal with Pacifica, involving an unnamed woman, was included in the NIL data from the university. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune)

In announcing Icon’s launch in early 2023, a university press release said the collective had raised more than $1.5 million intended for student-athletes.

But Illini athletes reported receiving only about $99,000 from Icon between February 2023 and October 2024, with the bulk of it — $75,000 — going to Illini football players. No men’s basketball players reported receiving any money via the collective, though the group regularly uses images of men’s players in its marketing material.

Icon’s president, Kathleen Knight, a former athletic department employee, declined to answer questions about the inconsistencies between the athletes’ reports and her organization’s purported fundraising.

In a brief statement, Knight said Icon does not publicly share its financial information.

Cox, the assistant athletic director and NIL specialist, said he does not know how much money Icon has distributed to its athletes, in part because of the lack of disclosures.

The university made a similar statement on Thursday. Leadership of the athletic department “remains unaware of the terms of Icon’s agreements with most of our student-athletes,” it said.

Several experts told ProPublica and the Tribune that the idea an athletic department wouldn’t know the amount of money a collective gave to its athletes defies credulity, given the well-known financial demands of the college marketplace and the typically close relationships between collectives and athletic departments.

“It’s not even putting their head in the sand,” said Carter, the NIL expert. “It’s patently false.”

A video board at the University of Illinois’ State Farm Center displays an advertisement for a new Icon Collective membership drive. The collective raises NIL money to benefit Illini student-athletes. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune) The Future of Transparency

At a congressional hearing last month, Illini athletic director Josh Whitman talked about the future of NIL and the importance of creating national standards for revenue-sharing and NIL deals instead of a patchwork of state-by-state legislation.

“We certainly don’t have an interest in micromanaging those opportunities for our student athletes,” he told federal lawmakers. “But it is important that we do try and create some system to monitor that, to create some level of transparency. Our student-athletes want that transparency.”

U of I administrators, however, have argued against public transparency when it comes to NIL deals. Cox, also an adjunct professor at the university’s law school, wrote in a law publication last year that “the best move for all institutions to support student-athletes is to refuse disclosure of student-athlete NIL information as a matter of policy.”

Administrators then succeeded in getting a law passed that they contend exempts NIL records from the Freedom of Information Act, severely hindering any further public analysis or accountability. Indeed, the U of I said in early January that it would no longer release the type of records obtained by the Tribune and ProPublica for this investigation.

“Our position is that that’s not the public’s business,” Whitman told a reporter last year.

The Illinois athletic department also referenced the FOIA exemption in its three-page response to ProPublica and the Tribune, saying that although there is public desire for NIL information, “the privacy of students is the more pressing concern.”

But even as Illinois administrators pushed to change the law last year, the requirement that athletes report the deals to their institutions remained. And athletes will be required to disclose their deals under the House settlement — a mandate the university celebrated in its written statement.

In the face of “strong and swift accountability,” officials said, their athletes would comply.

Joe Mahr of the Chicago Tribune contributed data analysis. Mariam Elba of ProPublica contributed research reporting.

by Heather Vogell

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

Workers at one of the nation’s largest baby formula plants say the Abbott Laboratories facility is engaging in unsanitary practices similar to those that led it to temporarily shut down just three years ago, sparking a nationwide formula shortage.

Current and former employees told ProPublica that they have seen the plant in Sturgis, Michigan, take shortcuts when cleaning manufacturing equipment and testing for microbes. The employees said leaks in the factory are sometimes not fixed, a dangerous problem that can promote bacterial growth. They also said workers at the facility do not always take required swabs to check for pathogens while performing maintenance during production. Supervisors have urged workers to increase production and have retaliated against workers who complained about problems, the employees said.

One worker complained to the Food and Drug Administration in February, saying the plant has experienced “persistent leaks” and “unaddressed contamination issues,” according to correspondence between the worker and the agency viewed by ProPublica. Water and chemicals have pooled on the floor, the worker said. In one spot, white sweetener oozed from a pipe and formed a pile like a stalagmite on top of a tank used for blending, the employee said.

The complaints come as the Trump administration is dismantling wide swaths of the federal government — including conducting mass layoffs at the FDA — and filling some key regulatory positions with industry-friendly voices. The new head of the FDA division that oversees baby formula is a corporate lawyer who previously defended Abbott against a lawsuit.

The workers ProPublica spoke to said they did not want to be named because they feared repercussions from Abbott management, but they felt compelled to speak up out of concern that a baby who drank formula made at the plant would fall ill.

“I can’t have this on my conscience,” one of the workers said.

Abbott called workers’ assertions “untrue or misleading,” denied their claims about retaliation and said the company “stands behind the quality and safety of all our products including those made at Sturgis.” In a statement, a spokesperson said that since 2022, the company had increased plant staff by 300 people, spent $60 million on upgrades and stationed multiple food-safety consultants there on weekdays. The company said the plant often takes more than 10,000 environmental swabs across the facility in a month to check for microbes.

“We believe Sturgis is the most inspected, tested, and swabbed infant formula manufacturing facility in the U.S., and likely in the world,” the statement said.

That said, Abbott conceded that the plant acted “outside of our quality process” in one incident from last May.

Workers told ProPublica that, instead of retrieving a portable pump, an employee used a piece of cardboard from a trash bin to funnel coconut oil, a formula ingredient, into a tank during production of the company’s Pure Bliss by Similac Organic brand. Abbott said the cardboard “was reactively used to prevent spilling onto the floor.” The company denied that there was a trash receptacle in the area and said plant practice was for cardboard to be stacked on a pallet before being recycled.

Food-safety laws require companies to use clean tools to transfer ingredients, not a makeshift implement like cardboard, said Patrick Stone, a former FDA inspector who works as a consultant.

“No one would think that’s a proper use,” he said. “It’s not something that’s been cleaned and verified it’s clear of contamination.”

Abbott, however, downplayed the significance of the incident, saying it occurred early in the manufacturing process, before pasteurization, and the product underwent “enhanced testing” that came back negative for microbes.

“We acknowledge that this is outside of our quality process, and this has been addressed,” Abbott’s statement said. The company said the plant had a discussion with the employee reiterating the proper procedure.

Employees complained about the incident at the time and some hoped the plant had destroyed the formula. But a few weeks later, they received an email, which ProPublica viewed, that said the plant had released all batches “not just on time, but early.” It congratulated workers for an “amazing milestone and achievement for Sturgis.”

Abbott said there have been no medical complaints related to the lot. The brand is advertised as suitable for newborns.

In another incident in February, an employee said that the company had signed off on the use of an amino acid that was 10 months past its manufacturer’s “best by” date. A photo of the label viewed by ProPublica showed a best by date of April 2024. The law requires that ingredients in formula not expire before the formula as a whole, Stone said.

Abbott said that the powder’s expiration date had been “extended,” which it said regulations permit in some cases, after the company used third-party testing to confirm its nutrient levels.

But the worker said the amino acid powder was “chunky” and employees refused to add it to a formula mixture. It had been manufactured in October 2023.

Abbott told ProPublica that two containers of amino acid mix were, in fact, placed on hold due to “crustiness” and later destroyed. “When we find products that don’t meet all specifications, we dispose of them,” the company said.

Some of the workers said they’ve felt pressure not to disrupt the manufacturing process. At one meeting in February, a worker said a senior manager told employees the plant needed to improve its profit margins by either increasing production or reducing the amount of formula it was discarding as unusable.

Abbott disputed the idea that it is cutting corners to make more formula.

“Any assertion that quality is being sacrificed at the expense of volume and profit is patently untrue,” it said. The company said that in 2024, Abbott made 41% less formula at Sturgis than it had in 2021, the year before the shutdown.

For its part, the FDA did not respond to questions about whether an inspection or investigation is taking place at the Sturgis plant in response to the complaint it received. The agency said it generally does not comment on “potential or ongoing inspections or investigations.”

In a statement, the FDA said that it “takes reports related to infant formula seriously and follows up as appropriate.”

The case could prove to be a major test for President Donald Trump’s second administration, which just last month announced an effort to “ensure the ongoing quality, safety, nutritional adequacy, and resilience of the domestic infant formula supply.” Dubbed Operation Stork Speed, it promised to increase ingredient testing and communicate regularly with consumers and the industry “as significant developments occur to ensure transparency, including information regarding nutrients and health outcomes.”

“Egregiously Unsanitary” Conditions

The Abbott employees’ concerns come three years after the company voluntarily recalled several formula brands, including Similac, Alimentum and EleCare, and temporarily halted production at Sturgis amid reports of unsanitary conditions and infant deaths.

A former plant employee in 2021 had told the FDA that the plant was using lax cleaning practices, falsifying records and releasing untested infant formula to the public. FDA inspectors found leaking equipment valves, standing water and a type of bacteria at the plant called Cronobacter sakazakii, which is common but can be deadly for young babies. Company documents showed the manufacturer had even discovered the bacteria in its finished formula in 2019 and 2020, the report said. Food-safety laws require companies to test samples of their formula to check the nutrient content and look for harmful microorganisms.

Those inspection findings were “shocking,” a former FDA chief said later. He called the plant “egregiously unsanitary.”

Initial reports said several infants were hospitalized and two died from an illness caused by the Cronobacter bacteria after drinking formula made at the Sturgis plant, according to an inspector general’s report. Between December 2021 and June 2022, it said the FDA received a total of 16 consumer complaints involving infant deaths and Sturgis facility products.

The report said the FDA did not directly link drinking formula from the plant to any of the infants’ illnesses or deaths. Abbott said no unopened Abbott formula has ever tested positive for Cronobacter.

Still, in May of 2022, Abbott signed a consent decree with the Department of Justice and the FDA and committed to following improved procedures at the facility. The decree is still in effect. It says the company can be fined up to $30,000 a day for violations, with a maximum of $5 million in a year.

The plant’s nearly four-month-long shutdown in 2022 sparked a nationwide formula shortage, which was worsened by COVID-19-related supply-chain issues. Store shelves emptied of formula, leaving parents desperate. Some babies developed symptoms such as spitting up and diarrhea after being forced to switch brands, researchers found. Nearly half of parents in one survey of primarily low-income families said they’d resorted to at least one unsafe feeding practice, such as watering down formula.

Abbott said it disagreed “vehemently” with the FDA chief’s comments on the Sturgis plant being unsanitary, and it said the former employee who filed the 2021 complaint with the agency was dismissed for “serious violations” of its food-safety policies. Abbott said the employee’s specific claims were not supported by the FDA. “It’s time to stop giving credence and fame to individuals with questionable agendas” that have led to “unnecessary” formula shortages, Abbott said.

New Complaints Arise as FDA Is Cut

It’s unclear how the Trump administration, with its reduced federal workforce, will respond to the newest complaints. The administration recently eliminated 3,500 FDA jobs as part of extensive cuts in federal health workers’ ranks. While officials said the reductions will not impact inspectors, the agency did not answer a question about whether any of the employees being let go are involved in inspection or enforcement for the Sturgis facility.

The White House also recently installed a corporate lawyer in a top FDA post, putting him in charge of the agency’s regulation of formula. Kyle Diamantas, acting deputy commissioner for human foods, previously defended Abbott against a lawsuit in which families alleged the company failed to warn them about a deadly bowel condition that premature babies who are fed formula have a greater risk of developing. Abbott has appealed a verdict in which it was ordered to pay $495 million.

Meanwhile, at the Department of Agriculture, officials disbanded an advisory committee that had been studying the threat of Cronobacter contamination in powdered formula. The USDA said at the time that it did so to comply with an executive order seeking to reduce bureaucracy but it remained committed to food safety. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for a Trump presidency had listed as one of its goals reevaluating “excessive regulation” of infant formula.

Families using formula aren’t being protected if the FDA is acting like a partner to companies like Abbott instead of overseeing them, said Jennifer Pomeranz, a professor and expert in public health and food policy at New York University who has served as a witness for plaintiffs suing Abbott over the bowel condition. She called Diamantas’ appointment the “perfect example of regulatory capture.”

In its statement to ProPublica, the FDA said it is “committed to enhancing regulatory oversight of all infant formula manufacturers to help ensure that the industry is producing infant formula under the safest conditions possible.”

The Sturgis plant is a major supplier of formula in the United States and had been producing about 20% of the nation’s formula when it shut down in 2022. Abbott provides formula to more than half of babies in the government-backed nutrition-assistance program, called WIC, that subsidizes families’ formula purchases. The company has contracts to be the sole source of formula for WIC recipients in 36 states and Washington, D.C., as of August of last year.

“If You Have Leaks, Forget About It”

Since the 2022 consent decree, FDA records show it has completed 10 inspections, including a multiweek review that was underway when employees said the cardboard incident took place. (The company says that according to its records, it has been inspected by FDA 12 times in that period.) No action was required in response to most of those visits, according to a database that tracks FDA inspections.

But for one inspection that ended in December 2022, the FDA issued a citation that noted concerns related to contamination prevention, worker hygiene and the handling of consumer complaints, documents say.

A report from that inspection — completed just seven months after Abbott signed the consent decree — said the agency found problems similar to those that had shut down the plant.

The report noted, among other things, six instances of employees failing to collect required swabs to test for bacterial contamination after cleaning up a leak. It also said inspectors found “apparent insects and dust like debris” near formula-making equipment. “You did not establish a system of process controls covering all stages of processing that was designed to ensure that infant formula does not become adulterated due to the presence of microorganisms in the formula or in the processing environment,” the report said.

Stone, the former FDA inspector who is now a consultant, said the citation is significant. “FDA should have really hammered on them harder,” he said, “but they’re weak and they’re scared.”

Without taking those swabs and testing them, the company cannot know if the formula is contaminated, Stone said.

“Unless you’re monitoring your environment, you don’t know what’s in your environment,” he said. “If you have leaks, forget about it. You don’t know what’s in there.”

Abbott said it “has addressed all FDA observations” from 2022. FDA inspectors have raised no major issues since then, the company said.

In 2023, Abbott confirmed the Department of Justice had opened a criminal investigation into conduct at the plant. A spokesperson for the department’s Western District of Michigan did not respond to a request for information about the investigation’s status. Abbott did not respond to a question about the probe but said at the time that it was “cooperating fully.” The Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Trade Commission were also scrutinizing the company after the problems surfaced in Sturgis. Spokespeople for the SEC and FTC, which released a report on the formula supply disruptions, declined to comment. Abbott did not respond to questions about the investigations.

More recently, some employees who spoke to ProPublica said plant leaders have urged them to speed up production — even though the consent decree aimed to add more safety protocols. “Imagine a 10-page rule book you’re told you have to operate by no matter what,” one said. “No deviations. You’re doing that, and then your boss says, ‘You’re not doing your job fast enough.’”

The workers said some employees have pushed supervisors to follow sanitary procedures more closely and at times refused to run equipment until their concerns about sanitation were met, even as they feared losing their jobs. Abbott is one of the largest and highest-paying employers in the largely rural area near the Indiana border. The plant’s tall white tower, emblazoned with a large green “a,” looms over nearby homes.

An employee said that since the consent decree, he had witnessed leaks of formula, oil, chemicals and water that were not cleaned up, fixed or documented properly. Sometimes, the worker said, supervisors resisted shutting down machinery — always a money-losing proposition — to address a leak. The worker reported seeing a leak that hadn’t been handled correctly more than once a month. “It’s all over,” the employee said.

Photos taken in the plant show equipment whose outer surface was streaked with drips from formula ingredients that had leaked. In one instance, an absorbent mat had been placed on the floor to catch drips. Procedures require the plant to contain leaks, fix equipment and test the area for pathogens, workers say. Leaks can become breeding grounds for bacteria.

Abbott said “in a facility the size of Sturgis, with literally miles of pipes, leaks, drips, and condensation are inevitable.” The plant has a team it deploys quickly to contain leaks, then swab, test and sanitize the area, the company said. The plant aims to limit standing water and sanitize regularly to prevent bacterial growth, Abbott said, and it runs six times the number of Cronobacter tests on finished product samples as required by federal regulations.

“Abbott has a quality policy that we make our products as if they were for our own families,” the company’s statement said. “If quality were not our first priority Abbott would not still be here at 137 years.”

A contractor Abbott hired to improve its processes has raised concerns about the facility not following protocols or procedures in past audits but cited no such problems in the audit completed earlier this year, said Mansour Samadpour, co-founder of IEH Laboratories and Consulting Group. IEH, which began its work after the consent decree, reports back to Abbott and the FDA on what the plant needs to correct. Neither Abbott nor IEH provided a copy of the most recent audit.

Samadpour declined to detail the earlier concerns. He said it was possible an employee could miss a swab, but said there’s no systemic problem. He said he does not have concerns about sanitary practices in the plant.

“If I have any concerns, they will hear from me and FDA will hear from us,” said Samadpour, who spoke with ProPublica at Abbott’s request. “That is our job.”

Debbie Cenziper contributed reporting.

by Jessica Schreifels, The Salt Lake Tribune

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

The last time Sam met with his therapist, Scott Owen, the session was nothing more than an hour of Owen sexually abusing him, he told a Provo, Utah, courtroom this week. Sam remembers sitting in his car afterward, screaming as loud as he could.

“I could feel him all over my skin,” he said. “I could not believe this was happening.”

It was October 2017, and Sam had been seeing Owen for therapy for more than a year. A faithful member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he was struggling with what he called “unwanted same-sex attraction.” Owen was a high-ranking leader in the LDS Church at that time, and Sam said Owen assured him that he had helped more than 200 men who felt similarly.

Instead, he said, Owen “meticulously leveraged” his two roles as a therapist and a church leader to assure him that the sexual touching during their sessions was key to helping him heal, learn how to accept intimacy and grow closer to God.

“He exploited my trust, he weaponized my faith and dismantled my confidence,” Sam told the courtroom. “What he did was not just unethical. It was calculated, predatory and destructive.”

Police began investigating Owen in 2023 only after The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica reported on a range of sex abuse allegations against Owen, who had built a reputation over his 20-year therapy career as a specialist who could help gay men who were members of the LDS Church. Some of the men who spoke to The Tribune said their bishop in the faith referred them to Owen and used church funds to pay for sessions where Owen allegedly also touched them inappropriately.

Austin Millet at his home in Oregon. Millet is one of several men who told The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica that Owen abused them during sessions paid for with funds from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (Amanda Lucier for ProPublica)

In February, Owen pleaded guilty to three charges, admitting he sexually abused Sam and a second patient who also said he sought Owen’s help because he was struggling with his sexuality and Latter-day Saints faith. Owen also pleaded no contest in another case, saying prosecutors likely had enough evidence to convict him at a trial on an allegation that he had groped a young girl during a therapy session.

But the number of people who say that Owen harmed them is much larger — and they filled a Provo courtroom on Monday as Owen was sentenced to spend at least 15 years in prison.

One by one, they stood at a podium in court and told Owen how he had hurt them. Most were his patients, like Sam, a pseudonym to protect his identity from his community.

One man told the court Owen had abused him when Owen was a leader of a young men’s group organized by the LDS Church.

“He had sleepovers at his house,” Mike Bahr said. “I was there once, and I have lived in a nightmare since.”

Also speaking were family members of a man who had died by suicide, including his brother who said his sibling disclosed to him that Owen had abused him just days before he took his life.

And there was one of Owen’s own family members, his cousin, who alleges that Owen molested him on a family trip when he was a kid. After becoming more public with his own abuse allegations several years ago, James Cooper has worked to gather others who say his cousin victimized them.

James Cooper speaks during Owen’s sentencing hearing. Cooper is Owen’s cousin and alleges the man abused him when he was a child. (Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune)

He spoke about the dynamics that allowed Owen to hurt others for so long without repercussions.

“Certainly, we know how charismatic he is, and what it’s like to be a victim of sexual assault. The shame you carry. The guilt you carry,” he said. “The fear of Scott. The fear of not being accepted by your family, your society, your church. All those things are enormous factors.”

One woman spoke about Owen touching her inappropriately during therapy when she was 13 years old, in 2007. During the hearing, the only woman to have publicly accused him said Owen had made her feel like something was wrong with her. Now, she added, “He no longer holds power over me.”

When Owen, 66, was given a chance to speak, he said there was no excuse or rationale for what he had done.

“I am so sorry,” he said. “All I have to offer is what’s left of my life. And I hope that in offering those years, justice will have been met in some small fashion, and those who I have hurt can disconnect from me and move forward with their healing.”

Defense attorney Earl Xaiz said Owen did not want leniency from the judge but mentioned in court that his client had been sexually abused himself as a child and had struggled with his sexuality.

Fourth District Judge Kraig Powell sentenced Owen on Monday to 15 years to life in prison. Given Owen’s age and the nature of his crimes, both prosecutors and the defense agreed it is likely he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Powell became emotional as he handed down the sentence, telling Owen that he harmed not only those who spoke publicly on Monday, but all of those therapists and church leaders who are ethical and working to help people.

“Thousands and thousands of these people, I fear, will be affected by this terrible, abhorrent case,” the judge said.

Owen was sentenced to prison after he admitted he sexually abused patients during sessions. (Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune)

While Owen gave up his therapy license in 2018 after several patients complained to state licensors that he had touched them inappropriately, the allegations were never investigated by the police and were not widely known.

Under a negotiated settlement with Utah’s licensing division, Owen was able to surrender his license without admitting to any inappropriate conduct, and the sexual nature of his patients’ allegations is not referenced in the documents he signed when he gave up his license. He continued to have an active role in his therapy business, Canyon Counseling, until The Tribune and ProPublica published their investigation.

Police interviewed more than a dozen former patients of Owen’s, all of whom reported that he touched them in ways they felt were inappropriate during therapy sessions. But Owen faced charges in connection with only three patients, because the type of touching that the other men alleged fell under parts of the criminal code that had a shorter window of time for prosecutors to file a case, called the statute of limitations. The crimes that Owen was charged with are all felonies that have no statute of limitations.

Both state licensors and local leaders in the LDS Church knew of inappropriate touching allegations against Owen as early as 2016, reporting by The Tribune and ProPublica showed, but neither would say whether they ever reported Owen to the police.

The church said in response to that reporting that it takes all matters of sexual misconduct seriously, and that in 2019 it confidentially annotated internal records to alert bishops that Owen’s conduct had threatened the well-being of other people or the church.

The church also said it has no process in place to vet the therapists its church leaders recommend and pay for using member donations. It is up to individual members, a church spokesperson has said, to “make their own decisions” about whether to see a specific therapist that their bishop recommends.

Michael, a former patient of Owen’s who agreed to be photographed but asked to be identified by only his first name, looks at his wife while speaking in court about the inappropriate touching he said happened in therapy sessions. (Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune)

For some who accused Owen of abuse, Monday’s sentencing was the only chance they had to address Owen because charges could not be brought in their cases. That includes Michael, who asked to be identified by only his first name. He said he saw Owen for therapy on and off for about a decade, starting when he was 14. He read a letter to his younger self in court on Monday.

“I just learned on Thursday that we are beyond our legal opportunity to fix this problem,” he said. “And it broke my heart to learn that I can’t pursue a court case for you. … You’ll have to be strong. It’s going to be so hard, but you’re going to make it through.”

Editor’s note: Sam is identified only by a pseudonym because he requested anonymity. We have granted this request because of the risk to his standing in his community. The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica typically use sources’ full names in stories. But sometimes that isn’t possible, and we consider other approaches. That often takes the form of initials or middle names. In this case, we felt that we couldn’t fully protect our source by those means. We know his full name and have corroborated his accounts in documents and through interviews with others.

by Alec MacGillis

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

The first time I saw Andrew Rabinowitz, it was in April 2017 at Baltimore District Court, where he was representing a property management company owned by the family of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law. That day, the company had three cases against tenants at Dutch Village, one of the many large apartment complexes the Kushner Companies owned in the Baltimore area.

One tenant was a Morgan State University student facing struggles typical of residents in the Kushner complexes. She had given notice that she was moving at the end of March, having tired of the perpetually clogged toilet and the ceiling leak in her closet. But when she paid March rent via the automated system tenants had to use, the money somehow ended up with an adjacent Kushner complex, and the company started eviction proceedings — even though she had already signaled her intent to leave a few weeks later.

A sheriff’s deputy changed the locks on her door when she was out of town, preventing her from moving her things out. She got her keys back, but by then she no longer had access to a moving truck. The company was also after her for April’s rent, despite the fact that it had physically barred her from being able to move before April.

In court, Rabinowitz, a 33-year-old in a jacket and tie, spoke to the judge in a polished, even-keeled tone, in contrast to the student, who grew more agitated as the hearing went on. The judge sided with Rabinowitz, ordering the student to pay $471.23 for part of April’s rent.

When I approached Rabinowitz as he was leaving the courthouse, to ask about the company’s aggressive approach, he looked startled. “What’s the article regarding?” he said. “I’m not inclined to give a statement.”

The next day, he was back in court to defend the company against the student’s criminal complaint over the unfounded eviction. This time, he offered a deal: He agreed to let her stay, rent-free, until the end of May to give her time to move out, as long as she paid for April. Afterward, she asked Rabinowitz if he could make sure that the hot water would be turned back on. “I’m just the attorney,” he demurred. (The hot water stayed off.)

The next time I saw Rabinowitz in court was in February, almost eight years later. Kushner’s father-in-law was back in the White House. But Rabinowitz’s situation had changed. He was no longer demanding payment from beleaguered tenants. Instead, he was defending them.

I had learned of his dramatic career shift when I ran into him once in downtown Baltimore. But I needed to see it to believe it. So I tracked him down one midday at the Landlord and Tenant Branch of the District of Columbia Courts, where he now spends his days. As I spotted him, he was in a hallway speaking to a fretful older man who was seeking assistance. “Give me four minutes. Let me just go check and see if I can serve you,” Rabinowitz said, before ducking into the office of his new employer, Rising for Justice, a nonprofit that provides free legal representation to low-income tenants facing eviction.

A moment later, after attending to the man, Rabinowitz came over to say hello. He still wore a tie, but now had long hair to go along with it. He was looking far less anxious than he had when I approached him back at the Baltimore courthouse. In fact, he was positively glowing.

So much has changed in this country and the world since 2017 — much of it, arguably, not for the better. I wanted to know: What had happened with Rabinowitz?

American culture is rife with glamorous depictions of high-stakes, high-paying Big Law firms, from “L.A. Law” to “Michael Clayton” to “Suits.” But there is a humbler realm more typically glimpsed via highway billboards and subway ads. This is the level at which millions of people encounter the justice system, for better or worse.

And this is the corner through which Rabinowitz entered the profession. He grew up in Ellicott City, Maryland, outside Baltimore. His mother was dean of admissions at the University of Maryland School of Nursing; his father was chief of social work at the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Washington. He attended Frostburg State University, in western Maryland. Interested in the law, he spent a couple years as a paralegal before heading to law school at Barry University in Orlando, Florida.

His aspiration was to become a criminal defense attorney, but the job he found after getting his degree was with Barry Glazer, a colorful Baltimore personal injury lawyer known for attention-getting ads. One script went like this: “I am sick and tired of these insurance companies telling you what good neighbors they are and how you’re in such good hands. If your car is totaled and you owe more than it’s worth, they give you the lesser amount and you continue to pay a finance company the difference. Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.” Under pressure from the Bar Association, Glazer changed “pee” to “urinate.”

It was an eye-opening experience, the first time Rabinowitz had come into regular contact with people on the lower rungs of the social ladder — people with big problems but unable to afford big firms. He left after a couple years for a small defense practice because he wanted to pursue his original aspiration. This proved disappointing. Criminal law, he found, turned out to be less a stirring quest for justice and more an exercise in squeezing fees out of poor clients in desperate circumstances.

Rabinowitz started looking around again, in 2015, and joined Jeffrey Tapper, whose small firm in the Baltimore suburb of Owings Mills specialized in representing landlords large and small as they pursued tenants.

At first, Rabinowitz liked the work. Despite his natural introversion, he had come to enjoy being in court, in front of a judge. And in this new job, he was in court a lot — as many as 10 hearings per day.

He prided himself on being able to negotiate settlements, getting landlords to accept less than what they believed they were owed and working out payment plans with tenants. This was what he recalled of the case where I had first met him — that he had been able to work out a deal with the college student to give her an extra month to move out of the Kushner unit.

He even gave some tenants his phone number, urging them to call if they ended up falling behind again, so they could work something out before it landed them back in court. He wasn’t really sure what to think when, one day, he heard a judge say to a tenant, “Step into the hallway with Mr. Rabinowitz. He’s the fairest debt collector in town.”

To many people, “fairest debt collector” sounds about as noble as “kindest executioner.” But the label was apt. A couple of times, he appeared opposite Joe Mack, a tenant’s rights attorney whom he had gone to camp with as a kid. Mack recalled Rabinowitz persuading a judge that Mack’s client had failed to provide enough notice before breaking a lease and thus owed the landlord a sizable sum. Making the loss easier to take, Mack said, was that Rabinowitz had been respectful in the courtroom. “I can imagine,” Mack added, “that some other things he was doing might have been rougher.”

My eventual 2017 article laid bare the harsher reality of many of the cases involving the Kushner complexes. The company pursued one woman for several years for about $3,000, eventually having her wages garnished, even though she had received written permission to break her lease. A second woman ended up in court after moving out from a unit with maggots coming out of the living-room carpet and raw sewage flowing out of the kitchen sink. Yet another was pursued for about $4,000 even though she had written permission to move out of a unit with black mold.

After the article appeared, the Maryland attorney general filed suit against the Kushner company, which in 2022 settled with the state for $3.25 million, though the company did not acknowledge wrongdoing. In March, a group of former tenants won class-action status in their own lawsuit against the company. The company, which denied wrongdoing in the class-action case, did not respond to a request for an interview for this article. Over the years, the company has sold most of the properties ProPublica originally reported on.

Back in 2017, a company executive had responded to questions by saying that it had a “fiduciary obligation” to its investment partners to collect as much revenue as possible from tenants, and that its practices in doing so were “consistent with industry standards.”

Rabinowitz offers a similar defense. The Kushner approach was not noticeably different from other big landlords, he said: “They were all the same.” He had no particular feelings for the company itself, and he had never actually met Kushner or any other executives. “They’re so disconnected from the property,” Rabinowitz told me. “It’s just money for them.” But he was protective of his boss, Tapper, who he felt had treated him fairly. (Tapper died last year.)

Rabinowitz himself had not set foot inside the Kushner complexes. The sorts of poor upkeep described in the article did not figure much in the cases, he said. “I know most people wouldn’t want to live in housing like that,” he said, “but I remember driving past those communities and I don’t remember being like, ‘Those were horrible places.’”

He insists he did not regret his years working for the Kushners and other landlords. There was a system in place, and he had played a part in that system. “I honestly felt that if every attorney could have had the same philosophy and treated people fair and put people in the position to take control of their life,” he said, “then debt collectors wouldn’t be such bad people. They’d be assistants to people paying off their debts.”

Still, the article instilled an unease that only grew with time. He was almost always facing off against people who lacked their own attorney, in a state with laws that were unusually favorable to landlords. “It was like a heavyweight sparring featherweights over and over again,” he said. “That’s just not satisfying.”

His longtime partner started to notice that he was agitated on nights before trials; sometimes he’d even mutter things like “objection!” in his sleep. “She could tell my mind was in court, constantly,” he said. To try and escape the burden, he went whitewater kayaking on weekends.

Around this time, his parents were nearing retirement. Accolades poured in from people they had served over the years, at the nursing schools and the retirement home. One man was wheeled in on his hospital bed to thank Rabinowitz’s father. “When I saw all the people who came out, I realized they had so much impact on so many people’s lives,” Rabinowitz said. He paused. “And I’m just putting money into rich people’s pockets.”

Then came the coronavirus pandemic. Maryland suspended evictions in March 2020, and, when the moratorium ended in 2021, it passed a law establishing (and funding) the right to an attorney for any tenant facing eviction.

Rabinowitz saw his chance. He applied for an entry-level opening in the Baltimore County office of Maryland Legal Aid. The organization recognized his experience and urged him to apply to be the supervisor of a staff of 20 in its newly expanded Baltimore City housing office. The job came with a “fairly significant” drop in pay, but he took it.

It wasn’t easy telling Tapper, who had recently offered to make him a partner in the firm before he retired. But Tapper understood. “I went to the enemy, on the one hand,” Rabinowitz said. “On the other hand, he was proud.”

The transition was awkward at first. Rabinowitz and his new colleagues at Legal Aid were occasionally facing off against a former colleague. And he could tell that some of his new colleagues were initially wary. After all, while many lawyers move from public-service roles to private practice, precious few head in the other direction. “People wanted to know if I was for real,” he said.

A few years later, Rabinowitz made his way to Rising for Justice, as director of the organization’s Tenant Justice Program. He now oversees four staff attorneys and a paralegal while supervising about nine law students from Georgetown University and the University of the District of Columbia.

It means a near-daily rail commute from Baltimore. But he likes working in the Washington court, which has such a nonconfrontational vibe that it makes do without bailiffs. The organization’s clients are grateful for the assistance, and he likes that it includes a social-service branch to help people find nonlegal help.

The law students assigned to him were surprised when they learned that their supervisor had once been on the other side. But they said it came in handy, too. “We get very emotional. It’s easy to get frustrated for your clients and wrapped up and involved,” said Savannah Myers, a Georgetown student, “and Drew has the unique perspective to say, ‘OK, well, this is what’s happening on your end, here’s probably what’s happening on the other end and here’s how you can proceed in the best way to help your client within the legal system.’”

One recent day, I watched in court as an older Ethiopian woman faced off against a landlord who was demanding back rent that she owed after having lost her job. The woman, who was using a walker, had an interpreter to assist her but no attorney. She tried to argue that the debt should be lowered because of a broken air conditioner and a problem with vermin in the rental.

After the judge, Sherry Trafford, ordered her to make monthly payments of $2,989 to the landlord, she also gently suggested that she seek out help from Rising for Justice in advance of the next hearing on her case.

“Where are they?” said the woman.

“It’s at the end of this hallway,” said Trafford.

The woman made her way slowly down, and it so happened that the person manning the intake desk at that moment was Andrew Rabinowitz. He welcomed her. “Do you have some court paperwork?” he asked through the interpreter, and then came back with a law student to assist her.

Later, Rabinowitz told me that it was poor housing conditions like the ones the woman was dealing with that were his ultimate goad these days. “That’s what motivates me,” he said. “I want people to have clean housing like mine.” Why had those conditions not registered so much with him back when he was on the other side? “I guess that stuff didn’t really get to me,” he said.

I was struck again by Rabinowitz’s reluctance to judge his earlier self. But there was no obscuring one effect of his new role. “I sleep well,” he said.

by Jesse Coburn

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

Three federal lawmakers are calling on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to stop any initiatives involving cryptocurrency and the blockchain, saying the scantly regulated technologies should be kept far away from the agency’s work overseeing the nation’s housing sector.

In a letter to HUD Secretary Scott Turner on Wednesday, Reps. Maxine Waters, Stephen Lynch and Emanuel Cleaver sharply criticized the agency for considering such experiments, given cryptocurrency’s volatility and vulnerability to fraud. The Democratic representatives, all members of the House Financial Services Committee, warned of repeating “the same mistakes of the past,” noting that the 2008 financial crisis was triggered in part by the proliferation of risky financial assets in the housing market.

“The federal government cannot allow under-regulated financial products to infiltrate critical housing programs, especially when they have already proven to be dangerous, speculative, and harmful to working families,” the lawmakers wrote.

The letter is a response to reporting by ProPublica that the housing agency recently discussed taking steps toward using cryptocurrency. The article described meetings in February in which officials discussed incorporating the blockchain — and possibly a type of cryptocurrency known as stablecoin — into the agency’s work. The discussion at one meeting centered on a pilot project involving one HUD grant, but a HUD finance official in attendance indicated the idea could be applied much more expansively across the agency.

“We are looking at this for the entire enterprise,” he said in that meeting, a recording of which was obtained by ProPublica. “We just wanted to start in CPD,” he added, referring to HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development. The office administers billions of dollars in grants to support low- and moderate-income people, including funding for affordable housing, homeless shelters and disaster recovery, raising the prospect that these forms of aid might one day be paid in an unstable currency.

Asked for comment on the letter, HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett referred ProPublica to a prior comment by Turner, in which he said, “There’s no merit to it.” Lovett previously told ProPublica: “The department has no plans for blockchain or stablecoin. Education is not implementation.”

It’s unclear how a crypto project would work. But HUD officials alluded to the possible use of stablecoins, which are pegged to the U.S. dollar or another asset. That is supposed to protect stablecoins from the wild swings in value common among bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, although such fluctuations have happened with stablecoins in the past.

The HUD proposal raised alarm among some officials, with one comparing the idea in internal discussions to paying grant recipients in “Monopoly money.” At best, one HUD staffer told ProPublica previously, the idea was a waste of time and resources; at worst it was a threat to the stability of the housing sector.

“It’s just introducing another unregulated security into the housing market as though 2008, 2009 didn’t happen,” the staffer said, referring to the subprime mortgage crisis. “I don’t see any way this will help anything. I see a lot of ways this could hurt.”

The HUD official pushing the idea internally was Irving Dennis, the agency’s new principal deputy chief financial officer, a staffer said at one of the meetings. Dennis denied to ProPublica that HUD was considering any such experiment. He published a book in 2021 in which he wrote that HUD should use the blockchain.

The blockchain is a digital ledger most commonly used to record cryptocurrency transactions. Boosters of the technology depict it as a way to cut middlemen such as banks out of financial transactions and to make those transactions more transparent and secure. One such evangelist is Robert Judson, an executive at the consulting firm EY, who is listed in a document obtained by ProPublica as an attendee of one of the HUD meetings. Judson has written glowingly about the potential of blockchain to prevent aid money from being misused. (Dennis was previously a partner at EY.)

Judson and EY did not respond to requests for comment for this article, but Judson previously confirmed to ProPublica that EY had discussed the matter with agency officials.

In their letter, the three representatives requested extensive information from HUD about its consideration of crypto and the blockchain, including whether the agency had assessed the risks of using the technology. The House Financial Services Committee is scheduled to consider a bill Wednesday that would regulate stablecoins.

by Jeremy Schwartz, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Dan Keemahill, The Texas Tribune

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

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.

In 2022, conservative groups celebrated a “great victory” over “wokeified” curriculum when the Texas State Board of Education squashed proposed social studies requirements for schools that included teaching kindergartners how Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez “advocated for positive change.”

Another win came a year later as the state board rejected several textbooks that some Republicans argued could promote a “radical environmental agenda” because they linked climate change to human behavior or presented what conservatives perceived to be a negative portrayal of fossil fuels.

By the time the state board approved science and career-focused textbooks for use in Texas classrooms at the end of 2023, it appeared to be comfortably in sync with conservatives who had won control of local school boards across the state in recent years.

But the Republican-led state education board had not gone far enough for the conservative majority on the school board for Texas’ third-largest school district.

At the tail end of a school board meeting in May of last year, Natalie Blasingame, a board member in suburban Houston’s Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, proposed stripping more than a dozen chapters from five textbooks that had been approved by the state board and were recommended by a district committee of teachers and staffers.

The chapters, Blasingame said, were inappropriate for students because they discussed “vaccines and polio,” touched on “topics of depopulation,” had “an agenda out of the United Nations” and included “a perspective that humans are bad.”

In a less-publicized move, Blasingame, a former bilingual educator, proposed omitting several chapters from a textbook for aspiring educators titled “Teaching.” One of those chapters focuses on how to understand and educate diverse learners and states that it “is up to schools and teachers to help every student feel comfortable, accepted and valued,” and that “when schools view diversity as a positive force, it can enhance learning and prepare students to work effectively in a diverse society.”

Blasingame did not offer additional details about her opposition to the chapters during the meeting. She didn’t have to. The school board voted 6-1 to delete them.

Natalie Blasingame, a member of the Cypress-Fairbanks School Board, proposed cutting chapters from five textbooks. (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

The decision to strip chapters from books that had already won the approval of the state’s conservative board of education represents an escalation in local school boards’ efforts to influence what children in public schools are taught. Through the years, battles over textbooks have played out at the state level, where Republicans hold the majority. But local school boards that are supposed to be nonpartisan had largely avoided such fights — they weighed in on whether some books should be in libraries but rarely intervened so directly into classroom instruction. Cypress-Fairbanks now provides a model for supercharging these efforts at more fine-grained control, said Christopher Kulesza, a scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

“One of the things that would concern me is that it’s ideology pushing the educational standards rather than what’s fact,” he said.

The board’s actions send a troubling message to students of color, Alissa Sundrani, a junior at Cy-Fair High School, said. “At the point that you’re saying that diversity, or making people feel safe and included, is not in the guidelines or not in the scope of what Texas wants us to be learning, then I think that’s an issue.”

With about 120,000 students, nearly 80% of whom are of Hispanic, Black and Asian descent, Cy-Fair is the largest school district in Texas to be taken over by ideologically driven conservative candidates. Blasingame was among a slate of candidates who were elected through the at-large voting system that ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found has been leveraged by conservative groups seeking to influence what children are taught about race and gender. Supporters say the system, in which voters cast ballots for all candidates districtwide instead of ones who live within specific geographic boundaries, results in broader representation for students, but voting rights advocates argue that it dilutes the power of voters of color.

First image: Cy-Fair’s administration building. Second image: People gather before a school board meeting. (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Blasingame and others campaigned against the teaching of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that discusses systemic racism. Most of the winning candidates had financial backing from Texans for Educational Freedom, a statewide PAC that sought to build a “stronghold” of school board trustees “committed to fighting Critical Race Theory and other anti-American agendas and curriculums.” The PAC helped elect at least 30 school board candidates across the state between 2021 and 2023, in part because it focused on anti-CRT sentiment, said its founder, Christopher Zook Jr. “You could literally go out and say, CRT, you know, ‘Stop critical race theory in schools,’ and everyone knew what that means, right?” he said. “The polling showed that that messaging works.”

Shortly before Blasingame and two fellow conservatives won election in 2021, Texas lawmakers passed a landmark law that sought to shape how teachers approach instruction on race and racism. The law, which aimed to ban critical race theory, prohibits the “inculcation” of the notion that someone’s race makes them “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

Blasingame made no mention of the law when she pushed to remove chapters about teaching a diverse student body, but pointed to it as the reason for her objection in text messages and an interview with ProPublica and the Tribune. Though Blasingame acknowledged that one of the chapters had “very good presentation on learning styles,” she said removing the whole chapter was the only option because administrators said individual lines could not be stricken from the book.

The textbook referred to “cultural humility” and called for aspiring teachers to examine their “unintentional and subtle biases,” concepts that she said “go against” the law. The school board needed to act because the book “slipped through” before the state’s education agency implemented a plan to make sure materials complied with the law, Blasingame said.

Blasingame recommended removing several chapters from a textbook called “Teaching.” The chapters included references to “cultural humility” and “unintentional and subtle biases,” which she believes are not permitted under state law, which specifies how topics concerning race can be taught. (Document obtained and sentences enlarged by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

State Board Chairman Aaron Kinsey, who is staunchly anti-CRT, declined to say if he thought the body had allowed textbooks to slip through as Blasingame suggested. Kinsey, however, said in a statement that contracts with approved publishers include requirements that their textbooks comply with all applicable laws. He did not comment on Cy-Fair removing chapters.

Cy-Fair appears to have taken one of the state’s most aggressive approaches to enforcing the law, which does not address what is in textbooks but rather how educators approach teaching, said Paige Duggins-Clay, the chief legal analyst for the Intercultural Development Research Agency, a San Antonio-based nonprofit that advocates for equal educational opportunity.

“It definitely feels like Cy-Fair is seeking to test the boundaries of the law,” Duggins-Clay said. “And I think in a district like Cy-Fair, because it is so diverse, that is actively hurting a lot of young people who are ultimately paying the cost and bearing the burden of these really bad policies.”

The law’s vagueness has drawn criticism from conservative groups who say it allows school districts to skirt its prohibitions. Last month, Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against the Coppell school district in North Texas and accused administrators of illegally teaching “woke and hateful” CRT curriculum. The suit points to a secret recording of an administrator saying that the district will do what’s right for students “despite what our state standards say.” The lawsuit does not provide examples of curriculum that it alleges violates state law on how to teach race. In a letter to parents, Superintendent Brad Hunt said that the district was following state standards and would “continue to fully comply with applicable state and federal laws.”

Teachers and progressive groups have also argued that the law leaves too much open to interpretation, which causes educators to self-censor and could be used to target anything that mentions race.

Blasingame disputes the critique. A longtime administrator and teacher whose family emigrated from South Africa when she was 9 years old, she said she embraces diversity in schools.

“Diversity is people and I love people,” she said. “That’s what I’m called to do, first as a Christian and then as an educator.”

But she said she opposes teaching about systemic racism and state-sanctioned efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion, saying that they overemphasize the importance of skin color.

“They seed hate and teach students that they are starting off behind and have unconquerable disadvantages that they will suffer all their lives,” Blasingame said. “Not only does this teach hate among people, but how could you love a country where this is true?”

The assertion that teaching diversity turns students of color into victims is simply wrong, educators and students told the news organizations. Instead, they said, such discussions make them feel safe and accepted.

One educator who uses the “Teaching” textbook said the board members’ decision to remove chapters related to diversity has been painful for students.

“I don’t know what their true intentions are, but to my students, what they are seeing is that unless you fit into the mold and you are like them, you are not valued,” said the teacher, who did not want to be named because she feared losing her job. “There were several who said it made them not want to teach anymore because they felt so unsupported.”

The board’s interpretation of the state’s law on the teaching of race has stifled important classroom discussions, said Sundrani, the student in the district. Her AP English class, a seminar about the novel “Huckleberry Finn,” steered clear of what she thinks are badly needed conversations about race, slavery and how that history impacts people today.

“There were topics that we just couldn’t discuss.”

by McKenzie Funk

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The deportation flight was in the air over Mexico when chaos erupted in the back of the plane, the flight attendant recalled. A little girl had collapsed. She had a high fever and was taking ragged, frantic breaths.

The flight attendant, a young woman who went by the nickname Lala, said she grabbed the plane’s emergency oxygen bottle and rushed past rows of migrants chained at the wrists and ankles to reach the girl and her parents.

By then, Lala was accustomed to the hard realities of working charter flights for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She’d learned to obey instructions not to look the passengers in the eyes, not to greet them or ask about their well-being. But until the girl collapsed, Lala had managed to escape an emergency.

Lala worked for Global Crossing Airlines, the dominant player in the loose network of deportation contractors known as ICE Air. GlobalX, as the charter company is also called, is lately in the news. Two weeks ago, it helped the Trump administration fly hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador despite a federal court order blocking the deportations, triggering a showdown that experts fear could become a full-blown constitutional crisis.

In interviews with ProPublica, Lala and six other current and former GlobalX flight attendants provided a window into a part of the deportation process that is rarely seen and little understood. For migrants who have spent months or years trying to reach this country and live here, it is the last act, the final bit of America they may experience.

An ICE detainee waves from inside a bus that transported passengers to the airport before departing from Seattle’s Boeing Field on a GlobalX deportation flight in February. (Emily Schultz)

All but one of the flight attendants requested anonymity or asked that only a nickname be used, fearing retribution or black marks as they looked for new jobs in an insular industry.

Because ICE, GlobalX and other charter carriers did not respond to questions after being provided with detailed lists of this story’s findings, the flight attendants’ individual accounts are hard to verify. But their stories are consistent with one another. They are also generally consistent with what has been said about ICE Air in legal filings, news accounts, academic research and publicly released copies of the ICE Air Operations Handbook.

That morning over Mexico, Lala said, the girl’s oxygen saturation level was 70% — perilously low compared with a healthy person’s 95% or higher. Her temperature was 102.3 degrees. The flight had a nurse on contract who worked alongside its security guards. But beyond giving the girl Tylenol, the nurse left the situation in Lala’s hands, she recalled.

Lala broke the rule about talking to detainees. The parents told Lala their daughter had a history of asthma. The mom, who Lala said had epilepsy, seemed on the verge of her own medical crisis.

Lala placed the oxygen mask on the girl’s face. The nurse removed her socks to keep her from further overheating. Lala counted down the minutes, praying for the girl to keep breathing.

The stories shared by ICE Air flight attendants paint a different picture of deportations from the one presented to the public, especially under President Donald Trump. On social media, the White House has depicted a military operation carried out with ruthless efficiency, using Air Force C-17s, ICE agents in tactical vests and soldiers in camo.

The reality is that 85% of the administration’s “removal” flights — 254 flights as of March 21, according to the advocacy group Witness at the Border — have been on charter planes. Military flights have now all but ceased. While there are ICE officers and hired security guards on the charters, the crew members on board are civilians, ordinary people swept up in something most didn’t knowingly sign up for.

When the flight attendants joined GlobalX, it was a startup with big plans. It sold investors and new hires alike on a vision of VIP clients, including musicians and sports teams, and luxury destinations, especially in the Caribbean. “You can’t beat the eXperience,” read a company tagline.

A GlobalX post on Facebook recruiting flight attendants in March. Alexandria, Louisiana, is a hub for ICE Air. (Screenshot by ProPublica. Redacted by ProPublica.)

But as the airline grew, more and more of its planes were filled with migrants in chains. Some flight attendants were livid about it.

Last year, an anonymous GlobalX employee sent an all-caps, all-staff screed that ricocheted around the startup. “WHERE IS THE COMPANY GOING?” the email asked. “YOU SIGNED A 5 YEAR CONTRACT WITH ICE? ... WHAT HAPPENED TO THIS BECOMING A PRESTIGE CHARTER AIRLINE?”

One flight attendant said he kept waiting for the sports teams his new bosses had talked about as he flew deportation routes. “You know, the NFL charters, the NBA charters, whatever the hockey one is …” he said.

A second said his planes’ air conditioning kept breaking — an experience consistent with at least two publicly reported onboard incidents — and their lavatories kept breaking, something another flight attendant reported as well. But the planes kept flying. “They made us flush with water bottles,” he said.

But the flight attendants were most concerned about their inability to treat their passengers humanely — and to keep them safe. (In 2021, an ICE spokesperson told the publication Capital & Main that the agency “follows best practices when it comes to the security, safety and welfare of the individuals returned to their countries of origin.”)

They worried about what would happen in an emergency. Could they really get over a hundred chained passengers off the plane in time?

“They never taught us anything regarding the immigration flights,” one said. “They didn’t tell us these people were going to be shackled, wrists to fucking ankles.”

“We have never gotten a clear answer on what we do in an ICE Air evacuation,” another said. “They will not give us an answer.”

“It’s only a matter of time,” a third said, before a deportation flight ends in disaster.

Lala didn’t think she had a chance at a flight attendant job. She hadn’t, in truth, remembered applying to GlobalX until a recruiter called to say the startup was coming to her city. “But I guess I did apply through LinkedIn?” she said. She’d been working an office job — long hours, little flexibility — and was looking for something new.

The job interviews were held at a resort hotel. The room was packed with dozens of aspirants when Lala showed up. After the first round, only about 20 were asked to stay. She couldn’t believe she was one of them. After the second round came a job offer: $26 an hour plus a daily expense allowance. Soon Lala got a uniform: a blue cardigan, a white polo shirt and an eye-catching scarf in cyan and light green.

For part of her Federal Aviation Administration-mandated four-week training, her class stayed in a motel with a pool at the edge of Miami International Airport. Just across the street, on the fourth floor of a concrete-clad office building ringed by palm trees, was GlobalX’s headquarters.

“In the beginning, we were told that because it’s a charter, it’s only gonna be elites, celebrities,” Lala said. “Everybody was really excited.”

But flying was not going to be all glitz. The real reason for having flight attendants is safety. GlobalX was certified by the FAA as a Part 121 scheduled air carrier, the same as United or Delta, and it and its crew members were subject to the same strict standards.

“We’re there to evacuate you,” one recruit told ProPublica. “Yes, we make good drinks, but we evacuate you.”

Lala’s class practiced water landings in the pool at the nearby Pan Am Flight Academy. They practiced door drills — yelling out commands, shoving open heavy exit doors — in a replica Airbus A320 cabin. They learned CPR and how to put out fires. They took written and physical tests, and if they didn’t score at least 90%, they had to retake them.

They were reminded, over and over, that their job was a vocation, one with a professional code: No matter who the passengers were, flight attendants were in charge of the cabin, responsible for safety in the air.

Lala’s official “airman” certificate arrived from the FAA a few weeks after training was done. She was cleared to fly, ready to see the world.

But what she would see wasn’t what she signed up for. The company was growing beyond glamorous charters. GlobalX was moving into the deportation business.

Her bosses delivered the news casually, she recalled: “It was like, ‘Oh yeah, we got a government contract.’”

The new graduates were offered a single posting: Harlingen, Texas. Deportation flights were five days a week, sometimes late into the night. Lala went to Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia and, for refueling, Panama.

A standard flight had more than a dozen private security guards — contractors working for the firm Akima — along with a single ICE officer, two nurses, and a hundred or more detainees. (Akima did not respond to a request for comment.) The guards were in charge of delivering food and water to the detainees and taking them to the lavatories. This left the flight attendants, whose presence was required by the FAA, with little to do.

“Arm and disarm doors, that was our duty,” Lala said.

The flights had their own set of rules, which the crew members said they learned from a company policy manual or from chief flight attendants. Don’t talk to the detainees. Don’t feed them. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t walk down the aisles without a guard escorting you. Don’t sit in aisle seats, where detainees could get close to you. Don’t wear your company-issued scarf because of “safety concerns that a detainee might grab it and use it against us,” Lala said.

“You don’t do nothing,” said a member of another GlobalX class. “Just sit down in your seats and be quiet.” If a detainee looked at him, he was supposed to look out the window.

A chained detainee boards a GlobalX flight at Seattle’s Boeing Field in February. (Emily Schultz)

A rare public statement from the company about life aboard ICE Air came in a 2023 earnings call with GlobalX founder and then-CEO Ed Wegel, when he discussed the company’s work for federal agencies like ICE. GlobalX employees “essentially don’t do much on the airplane,” Wegel said. “Our flight attendants are there in case of an emergency. The passengers are monitored by guards that are placed on board the airplane by one of those agencies.”

Fielding a question about how GlobalX ensures passengers are treated humanely, Wegel continued: “There have been threats made to our crew members, and they’re especially trained to deal with those. But we haven’t seen any mistreatment at all.”

Flight attendants said they had little to do but sit in their jumpseats after delivering the preflight safety briefing in English to the mostly Spanish-speaking passengers. Above 10,000 feet, the two in the rear usually moved to passenger rows near the cockpit, then sat again. Some did crosswords. Others took photos out the window. On a deportation to Guatemala, one saw his first erupting volcano.

Lala had been scared before her first deportation flight, worried that violence might break out. But fear soon gave way to discomfort at how detainees were treated. “Not being able to serve them, not being able to look at them, I didn’t think that was right,” she said.

Some flight attendants, drawn to the profession because they liked taking care of people, couldn’t help but break protocol with passengers. “If they said ‘hola’ or something,” one said, “I’d say ‘hola’ back. We’re not jerks.”

Another recalled taking a planeload of children and their escorts on a domestic transfer from the southern border to an airport in New York. He tried to slip snacks to the kids. “Even the chaperones were like, ‘Don’t give them any food,’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Where is your humanity?’” (A second flight attendant said that children on a New York flight were fed by their escorts.)

While flight attendants were allowed to interact with the guards, the dynamic was uncomfortable. It came down to a question of who was in charge — and which agency, ICE or the FAA, ultimately held sway. (The FAA declined to comment on this story and directed questions to ICE.)

The guards often asked flight attendants to heat up the food they brought from home. They asked for drinks, for ice. “They treated us like we were their maids,” said Akilah Sisk, a former flight attendant from Texas.

“In their eyes, the detainees are not the passengers,” another flight attendant said. “The passengers are the guards. And we’re there for the guards.”

Some guards thumbed their noses at the FAA safety rules that flight attendants were supposed to enforce while airborne, multiple flight attendants recalled. “One reported me because I asked him to sit down in the last 10 minutes,” Sisk said. “But you’re still on a freaking plane. You gotta listen to our words.”

Flight attendants said that if they told guards to fasten seatbelts during takeoff or stow carry-ons under a seat, they risked getting reported to their bosses at GlobalX, who they said wanted to keep ICE happy. The guards would complain to the in-flight supervisor, Sisk said, and eventually it would get back to the flight attendant.

“We’d get an email from somebody in management: ‘Why are you guys causing problems?’” another flight attendant recalled. “They were more worried about losing the contract than about anything else.”

Nothing bothered flight attendants more than the fact that most of their passengers were in chains. What would happen if a flight had to be evacuated?

Most of the migrants crowding the back seats of ICE Air’s planes have not been, historically, convicted criminals. ICE makes restraints mandatory nonetheless. “Detainees transported by ICE Air aircraft will be fully restrained by the use of handcuffs, waist chains, and leg irons,“ reads an unredacted version of the 2015 ICE Air Operations Handbook, which was obtained by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy group.

The handbook allows for other equipment “in special circumstances, i.e., spit masks, mittens, leg braces, cargo straps, humane restraint blanket, etc.” Multiple lawsuits on behalf of African asylum-seekers concern the use of one such item, known as the Wrap, a cross between a straitjacket and a sleeping bag. A flight attendant said detainees restrained in the device are strapped upright in their seats or, if less compliant, lengthwise across a row of seats. Getting “burritoed, I call it,” the person said.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties investigated the asylum-seekers’ complaints and found ICE lacked “sufficient policies” on the Wrap, but how the immigration agency addressed the finding is not publicly known. ICE responded to one lawsuit by saying detainees were not abused; it said another should be dismissed, in part because it was filed in the wrong place. The cases are pending.

Use of the Wrap continues. A video from Seattle’s Boeing Field taken in February shows officers and guards carrying a wrapped migrant into the cabin of a deportation plane.

A choppy video feed shows ICE officers and guards carrying a migrant in a full-body restraint into a GlobalX deportation plane at Seattle’s Boeing Field in February. (Obtained by ProPublica via a public records request)

Watch video ➜

Neither the ICE Air handbook, nor FAA regulations, nor flight attendant training in Miami explained how to empty a plane full of people whose movements were, by design, so severely hampered. Shackled detainees didn’t even qualify as “able-bodied” enough to sit in exit rows.

To flight attendants, the restraints seemed at odds with the FAA’s “90-second rule,” a decades-old manufacturing standard that says an aircraft must be built for full evacuation in 90 seconds even with half the exits blocked.

Lala and others said no one told them how to evacuate passengers in chains. “Honestly, I don’t know what we would do,” she said.

The flight attendants are not alone in voicing concerns.

In an interview with ProPublica, Bobby Laurie, an airline safety expert and former flight attendant, called the arrangement on ICE Air flights “disturbing.”

“Part of flight attendant training is locating those passengers who can help you in an evacuation,” Laurie told ProPublica. That would have to be the guards. “But if they have to help you,” who is helping the detainees, Laurie wondered.

According to formal ICE Air incident reports reviewed by Capital & Main, the deportation network had at least six accidents requiring evacuations between 2014 and 2019. In at least two cases, both on a carrier called World Atlantic, the evacuations were led not by flight attendants but by untrained guards. Both took longer than 90 seconds, though not by much: two-and-a-half minutes for the first, “less than 2 minutes” for the next. But in a third case, it took seven minutes for 115 shackled detainees to escape a smoke-filled jet.

In one of the World Atlantic incidents, part of the landing gear broke, a wing caught fire and the smell of burning rubber seeped in, according to investigative records obtained by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights. In an email to ICE Air officials, an agency employee aboard the plane later wrote that flight attendants made no emergency announcements for passengers. The flight attendants simply got themselves out.

The ICE officer, guards and nurse were “confused on what to do and in which direction to exit during distress,” the officer wrote. He said that other than the flight crew, “no one has received any training on emergency evacuation situations.”

The University of Washington’s collection does not include findings or recommendations from ICE based on what happened, and ICE did not say what they were when asked by ProPublica. The National Transportation Safety Board said that after the accident, World Atlantic launched a campaign to reinspect landing gear, gave employees and contractors further training, and revised its procedures for inspections. The airline did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

An ICE Air flight was evacuated in Alexandria, Louisiana, in April 2018 after a piece of the landing gear failed upon touchdown. All detainees were helped off the plane by guards, according to emails to ICE officials from an agency employee who was on board. (Courtesy of the University of Washington Center for Human Rights)

Other reports obtained by the University of Washington mention fuel spills, loss of cabin air pressure and a “large altercation” on ICE Air after 2019 but no more evacuations, at least as of June 2022. More recent incidents that have been mentioned in the press include an engine fire last summer on World Atlantic and a failed GlobalX air conditioning unit that sent 11 detainees to the hospital with “heat-related injuries.”

The rare guidance some flight attendants said they received on carrying out ICE Air evacuations came during briefings from pilots. What they heard, they said, was chilling and went against their training.

“Just get up and leave,” one recalled a GlobalX pilot telling him. “That’s it. … Save your life first.”

He understood the instructions to mean that evacuating detainees was not a priority, or even the flight attendants’ responsibility. The detainees were in other people’s hands, or in no one’s.

When asked if they got similar guidance from pilots, three flight attendants said they did not, and one did not answer. Two more, like the first, said pilots gave them instructions that they took to mean they shouldn’t help detainees after opening the exit doors.

“That was the normal briefing,” said a flight attendant from Lala’s class. “‘If a fire occurs in the cabin, if we land on water, don’t check on the immigrants. Just make sure that you and the guards and the people that work for the government get off.’”

“It was as if the detainees’ lives were worthless,” said the other.

The day the girl collapsed on Lala’s flight, the pilot turned the plane around and they crossed back into the United States.

The flight landed in Arizona. Paramedics rushed on board and connected the girl to their own oxygen bottle. They began shuttling her off the plane. Her parents tried to join. But the guards stopped the father.

Shocked, Lala approached the ICE officer in charge. “This is not OK!” she yelled. The mom had seizures. The family needed to stay together.

But the officer said it was impossible. Only one parent could go to the hospital. The other, as Lala understood it, “was going to get deported.”

Most of the flight attendants who spoke with ProPublica are now gone from GlobalX. Some left because they found other jobs. Some left even though they hadn’t. Some left because the charter company, as it focused more and more on deportations, shut down the hub in their city.

Lala eventually left because of the little girl and her family, because she couldn’t do the deportation flights anymore. Her GlobalX uniform hung in her closet for a time, a reminder of her career as a flight attendant. Recently, she said, she threw it away.

She never learned whether the little girl lived or died. Lala just watched her mom follow her off the plane, then watched the dad return to his seat.

“I cried after that,” she said. She bought her own ticket home.

by Steve Mills

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.

The Art Institute of Chicago announced recently that it had returned to Nepal a sculpture that had been in its collection for at least a quarter century. Conspicuously left out of the press release: that the sculpture had been a gift from a wealthy Chicago donor.

That omission obscured a simmering controversy about whether Chicago philanthropists Marilynn Alsdorf and her husband, James, both of whom are dead, improperly built their collection of hundreds of South Asian works and why the Art Institute, which houses some of that collection in its Alsdorf Galleries, has been reluctant to return those works to countries with compelling claims for them.

The 12th-century sculpture the museum returned to Nepal is called “Buddha Sheltered by the Serpent King Muchalinda” and is about 17.5 inches tall. The Art Institute said it was stolen from the Kathmandu Valley, although it’s unclear when the theft occurred or how or when the Alsdorfs acquired the piece.

It was among more than a dozen pieces identified by ProPublica and Crain’s Chicago Business in 2023 as having claims on them by other countries, including Nepal. At one time, each piece had belonged to the Alsdorfs, the investigation found.

The Art Institute devotes a page online to works that have been removed from its collection, a process museums call deaccessioning. But unlike other pages on its site about artwork or pieces on display, pages for deaccessioned items don’t include ownership information and, in this case, the listing doesn’t mention the Alsdorfs.

Melissa Kerin, the director of the Mudd Center for Ethics at Washington and Lee University in Virginia and a professor of art history who specializes in South Asian and Tibetan art and architecture, said the Art Institute is trying to have it both ways with the Buddha’s repatriation. It is seeking credit for having a provenance division and returning the Buddha, she said, but is not disclosing the involvement of its own donors.

“It looks proactive. They’re getting rid of a problematic object,” said Kerin. “But people will never know the full details of it. They are face-saving the Alsdorfs and their relationship with them and with all donors. They have a lot to lose.”

The Art Institute declined a request for an interview, but in response to written questions, a spokesperson said that it had followed a museum-wide policy on disclosing the history and ownership of deaccessioned objects. Once an object is no longer in the museum’s collections, it does not include the item’s provenance on its website — a practice some art historians criticize.

The investigation by the news organizations focused on an ornate piece called the Taleju necklace, an inscribed gilt-copper work embellished with semiprecious stones and intricate designs. A 17th-century Nepali king offered the necklace to the Hindu goddess Taleju.

Officials with the government in Nepal as well as activists have centered much of their attention on the necklace, which they believe was stolen during a period of political upheaval in the country. It remains prominently featured in the Alsdorf Galleries even though some say it is offensive to display such a sacred work in public.

Activists said that their frustration with the Art Institute applies to other pieces as well.

“It’s not only about the necklace,” said Sanjay Adhikari, a lawyer and secretary of the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign, an organization that seeks the return of a number of pieces taken from the country. “It’s about many other cultural properties out there. There’s a big frustration with the Art Institute of Chicago.”

The Alsdorfs, who lived in Chicago, were influential in the city’s art world, donating more than $20 million to the Art Institute over the course of their lives. James Alsdorf, the son of a Dutch diplomat and the owner of a business that manufactured glass coffee-making equipment, was chair of the museum’s board from 1975 to 1978. He died in 1990.

Marilynn Alsdorf was a trustee of the museum and president of its Woman’s Board. She exhibited her and her husband’s collection at the museum in 1997, and the Alsdorf Galleries opened in 2008. She died in 2019.

Controversy has surrounded the Alsdorfs’ vast collection for decades. In the 1970s, the Thai government sought the return of a stone carving, and, after a protest outside the museum, it was given back.

In 2002, a California man sued Marilynn Alsdorf to recover a Picasso painting called “Femme en Blanc,” or “Lady in White,” that he alleged had belonged to his grandmother before it was looted by the Nazis during World War II. Marilynn Alsdorf eventually paid the man $6.5 million in exchange for keeping the painting. She said she did nothing wrong in obtaining it.

Alsdorf’s son, Jeffrey, is listed in tax forms as the president of the Alsdorf Foundation, which gave the Art Institute a $40,000 educational grant or contribution as recently as 2023. Asked about the repatriation of the Buddha, he said, “I hope the deal goes through and everyone is happy with it.” Then he hung up on the reporter.

An official at the Embassy of Nepal in Washington said the deal had gone through and that she was present at a ceremony where the Buddha was handed over to Nepali officials. Several museum representatives took part in the ceremony and spoke about continuing to work with the Nepali officials.

The Art Institute spokesperson said in a statement that the museum is “committed to prioritizing provenance research across departments, which includes our Arts of Asia collection.” Over the last five years, the statement continued, the museum has created positions dedicated primarily to issues of provenance, including the role of executive director of provenance. The museum has previously said that many of the pieces the Alsdorfs donated were accepted and vetted under standards in place at the time.

The spokesperson said in the statement that the museum has returned two pieces in the past year from its permanent collection to their countries of origin and, over the past several years, has returned additional works that were on loan. The spokesperson didn’t provide details on those repatriations.

The Buddha, according to the statement, had been a “research priority” for the museum for several years. After obtaining new information about the sculpture, the Art Institute reached out to the government of Nepal in 2024 to begin the process of returning it to the country.

The museum appeared to draw a distinction between the return of the Buddha and the request from Nepal for the Taleju necklace’s return, saying: “The provenance of this object is separate from and not comparable to other objects in our collection.”

The spokesperson said in the statement that the museum had sent a letter to the government of Nepal in May 2022 asking for additional information about the necklace but that it was still waiting for a reply. Nonetheless, the museum said it has an “ongoing dialogue” with Nepali officials and will continue working with them. The embassy official did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the necklace or the museum’s request for additional information.

Adhikari, of the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign, said the Art Institute was intentionally making the process difficult for Nepal.

“I believe the burden of proof should be on the Art Institute of Chicago to prove that it belongs to them,” he said of the Taleju necklace. “This is a violation of our cultural rights.”

Erin Thompson, a professor of art crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said the Art Institute’s policy about objects it returns — the Buddha, for example — can make it harder for researchers to track an object’s provenance. It can also cast doubt on other objects in a collection.

“You don’t erase that history to save somebody a little embarrassment,” she said.