ProPublica

by Anjeanette Damon

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They went to a Las Vegas conference this month that promised pathways to an “unlimited lifespan.” But at least two attendees left in ambulances and were hospitalized in critical condition, requiring ventilators to breathe.

The two women, who are recovering, fell ill after receiving peptide injections at a conference booth. The doctor who ran the booth was a Los Angeles physician specializing in “age reversal” therapies who did not have permission to practice medicine or dispense prescriptions in Nevada. Public health investigators are trying to determine if anyone else who attended the Revolution Against Aging and Death Festival experienced a similar illness.

The investigation comes as peptides grow in popularity, thanks in part to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s promotion of the amino acid chains as a way to fight aging and chronic disease. Since becoming Health and Human Services secretary, Kennedy has vowed to end the Food and Drug Administration’s “war on peptides” and other alternative health therapies. Kent Holtorf, the doctor overseeing the booth where the women became ill, also has called for less regulation of alternative therapies and has criticized the FDA for blocking compounds he sees as lifesaving.

Holtorf told ProPublica he is cooperating with the investigation. “Of course, I want to get to the bottom of it. But almost assuredly it will come out that it was not the peptides.”

He said he became convinced the peptides weren’t the cause of the severe reactions after plugging everything he knows about the incident into an artificial intelligence app, which he said gave him a 57-page report that “basically says that it is impossible it was the peptides.” He refused to comment on what the report attributed the illnesses to.

“I don’t think it was the peptides, but I don’t want to try and push the blame and say it wasn’t us,” he said. “We are reassessing everything we are doing.”

Holtorf acknowledged he is not licensed in Nevada but said he hired a practitioner who is and did not personally write prescriptions or administer therapies at his booth. “I knew what was going on but was not hands on,” he said.

He described the situation as “horrific” and “unacceptable” and said he’s “terribly sorry.”

The FDA has approved dozens of peptide-based medications for treating serious health problems such as cancer, obesity and diabetes. But peptide therapies for anti-aging and regenerative health are largely made by compounding pharmacists who use peptide components to formulate drugs that aren’t commercially available or approved for that particular use. Compounded drugs are not reviewed for safety and efficacy by the FDA. The agency also has found “significant safety risks” with at least 18 of the most popular peptide compounding components.

“Anyone who undergoes any sort of medical treatment, no matter how benign, needs to be very wary that even the most benign intervention can have fatal side effects,” said Dr. Amy Gutman, a Florida emergency room doctor who speaks about metabolic research and ketogenic diets and appeared at RAADFest. “And if you are in a hotel and don’t have lifesaving equipment near you, then that is a risk you have to be aware of.”

The two women, a 38-year-old from California and a 51-year-old from Nevada, received injections on July 13 at RAADFest, which is organized by an Arizona-based nonprofit that has built a community hoping to cheat death. According to a police report, both were injected at a booth run by Holtorf, who is licensed in California but not Nevada. Holtorf’s advocacy for alternative therapies has invited controversy in the past, including his criticism of the H1N1 swine flu vaccine in a Fox News interview in 2009. More recently, his practice was advised by the Federal Trade Commission to cease making claims on its website that his peptide therapies could treat or prevent COVID-19. Holtorf said he removed the claims from his website even though he still believes certain peptides can be beneficial in treating COVID-19 and other viral infections.

Both the Southern Nevada Health District and the Nevada Board of Pharmacy confirmed they are investigating what led to the hospitalizations after being notified by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police that possibly as many as seven people at the conference were hospitalized. According to the police report, detectives were unable to confirm whether additional attendees got sick.

Investigators are examining whether the illnesses were caused by an infection, contamination related to the injections or an issue with the medication itself, according to documents obtained by ProPublica. The two women who were taken by ambulance to the hospital reported feeling as if their tongues were swelling and had trouble breathing and increased heart rates. By the time they reached the hospital, one was already intubated and the other had lost muscle control in her neck and couldn’t open her eyes or communicate with doctors, according to the police report.

Holtorf said he was “so freaked out” by what happened because none of the women’s symptoms “made any sense.” In 30 years of providing such treatments, he said he’s never seen such a reaction.

Event organizer James Strole, an Arizona businessman who has built a 50-year career selling the promise of eternal life to followers, said the two patients are recovering after several days in the hospital. He said “it’s not clear the people got sick as a result of treatment from Dr. Holtorf,” adding he’s “anxious” for the illnesses to be “deeply investigated.” He said nothing similar has happened in the 10 years he has been producing RAADFest.

This is the first year Holtorf offered therapies at the conference, Strole said. He added that Holtorf provided the therapies to 60 people at the event and has attempted to reach them to learn whether they experienced any problems. Holtorf said only six patients received peptides.

Strole said the coalition’s science board scrutinizes therapy providers before granting them permission to operate a booth in the conference’s exhibition hall, which organizers referred to as a clinic.

“The big concern is safety,” he said. “We look at who is doing the administering, whether it’s an injection or supplement. We look at the person and the company itself, what the efficacy is, how they operate, their safety measures. We look at all that.”

Strole said peptides are considered “generally safe” when taken under the direction of a doctor, adding that he takes them regularly. Holtorf also said he believes they are safe and that they saved his life when he was a young man suffering from a severe illness.

A review by ProPublica of both the pharmacy and medical board license databases showed no Nevada licenses for Holtorf or his medical practice. Out-of-state doctors who come to provide care at a conference such as RAADfest are required to obtain a special event license from the Nevada Board of Medical Examiners. (As of Friday, 103 doctors had obtained such a license.) To dispense or possess pharmaceuticals, practitioners must also be licensed by the Nevada Board of Pharmacy. RAADFest’s organizers, however, said they were unaware that Holtorf is not licensed to provide medical care or dispense medications in the state.

“In order to practice medicine in the state, you must be licensed,” said David Wuest, executive secretary of the Nevada Board of Pharmacy.

The Nevada Legislature has passed stricter laws as alternative therapies have become popular outside traditional medical settings. In 2017, for example, the state banned so-called Botox parties, requiring the anti-wrinkle injections only be administered in a medical office or spa equipped to deal with life-threatening emergencies. But beyond its standard medical licensing requirements, the state doesn’t have rules governing an event like RAADFest, where attendees receive an array of anti-aging therapies including gene therapies, peptide injections, dialysis-like blood detoxification, bone scans and light therapy.

Strole said he wasn’t aware that providers need a special in-state license to provide the type of therapies Holtorf offered, which he described as “neutraceuticals.”

“I’ve never heard they had to get from the state permission to do that under the auspices of giving a treatment of that nature, that’s not actually treating some disease or something,” Strole said.

According to the police report, Holtorf contracted with a Nevada-licensed nurse practitioner, who administered the injection to one of the women. He also contracted with another doctor, who mixed the vials and administered the injection to the second woman, the report said. That doctor does not appear to have the necessary Nevada licenses.

Holtorf declined to comment on the practitioners he hired for the event, other than to say he had worked with the doctor in the past.

Wuest said multiple providers might be investigated, but he wouldn’t confirm whether Holtorf is a subject of the probe. The board also is investigating whether the therapy provided to the patients required a medical or pharmaceutical license. The FDA is assisting in the investigation to determine what was in the injections, including whether it was a manufactured pharmaceutical or a compounded medication, Wuest said.

Holtorf’s medical practice and the peptide company he founded are affiliated with an organization, Forgotten Formula, that asserts a constitutional right to provide treatments as they see fit. On its website, the private membership association warns “all bodies in the public sector” that they “do not have any jurisdiction” over their doctors. “All doctors, healers, and members are protected under the shield of this organization,” the website says. “We operate member to member. Ignoring this disclaimer can lead to legal consequences against the party at fault.”

According to the police report, Holtorf told officers he obtained the peptides dispensed at the festival from Forgotten Formula. In the interview with ProPublica, however, he denied that, saying he’s not sure which of the many manufacturers he works with provided the peptides used at the booth.

The women received different peptide concoctions, according to the police report. Both included at least one component described by the FDA as posing significant risks when compounded. Holtorf said it is difficult to keep up with which peptides are banned and which are still acceptable for compounding.

“There is so much gray area,” he said. “People know they just get patients better.”

Despite the FDA warnings, peptides were popular among RAADFest attendees who were promised “beautiful life-saving therapies” at the event’s clinic. Event organizers touted that 70 longevity experts would be on hand during the four-day event at the Red Rock Casino Resort Spa but did not list the vendors providing treatments on the event website.

“We have a RAAD clinic, where people will be able to come in at discounted prices and try and do these therapies safely with doctors,” Strole told a Las Vegas TV news program while promoting the event.

Strole is executive director of the Scottsdale, Arizona-based Coalition for Radical Life Extension, one of a cluster of for-profit and nonprofit entities devoted to helping people achieve immortality founded by Strole and two “immortalist” business partners. Of the three co-founders, only Strole, who is in his 70s, is still alive.

Charles Brown, the original founder, claimed to have had a spiritual experience in the 1950s that showed him the path to immortality and proclaimed he could share that path with others, according to an Arizona Republic story. Brown died of Parkinson’s disease in 2014. His wife, Bernadeane “Bernie” Brown, who operated the for-profit People Unlimited with Strole, died of breast cancer in 2024. Her body is said to have been cryogenically preserved.

The nonprofit organizes the annual anti-aging festival, which charges more than $400 for a ticket, while People Unlimited offers monthly memberships for as much as $255 a month, according to its website. Members get access to weekly meetings, where Strole delivers motivational sermons on immortality and age reversal, as well as talks by guest speakers on wellness, discounts on “longevity protocols” and access to a community of people who “want you to live as much as they want to live.”

Gutman, the Florida emergency room doctor, spoke at the event earlier this month, her first time attending RAADFest. She left before the last day, when the two women were hospitalized, and hadn’t heard about the incident before a reporter called. But she said their symptoms — swollen tongue, trouble breathing, increased heart rate — sounded like an allergic reaction, which she said isn’t terribly common in peptide injections. But she cautioned that before injection the drugs are mixed with an agent that can sometimes pose problems.

Although she was skeptical of some of the therapies provided at the festival’s clinic, she said everyone she met there seemed to have “their heart in the right place” and genuinely wanted to help others “live their best lives.”

by Melissa Sanchez

Leer en español.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our Dispatches newsletter; sign up to receive notes from our journalists.

In the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term, I spent a few weeks observing Chicago’s immigration court to get a sense of how things were changing. One afternoon in March, the case of a 27-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker caught my attention.

Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra stared into the camera at his virtual bond hearing. He wore the orange shirt given to inmates at a jail in Laredo, Texas, and headphones to listen to the proceedings through an interpreter.

More than a year earlier, Rodríguez had been convicted of shoplifting in the Chicago suburbs. But since then he had seemed to get his life on track. He found a job at Wrigley Field, sent money home to his mom in Venezuela and went to the gym and church with his girlfriend. Then, in November, federal authorities detained him at his apartment on Chicago’s South Side and accused him of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

“Are any of your tattoos gang related?” his attorney asked at the hearing, going through the evidence laid out against him in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement report. “No,” said Rodríguez, whose tattoos include an angel holding a gun, a wolf and a rose. At one point, he lifted his shirt to show his parents’ names inked across his chest.

He was asked about a TikTok video that shows him dancing to an audio clip of someone shouting, “Te va agarrar el Tren de Aragua,” which means, “The Tren de Aragua is going to get you,” followed by a dance beat. That audio clip has been shared some 60,000 times on TikTok — it’s popular among Venezuelans ridiculing the stereotype that everyone from their country is a gangster. Rodríguez looked incredulous at the thought that this was the evidence against him.

That day, the judge didn’t address the gang allegations. But she denied Rodríguez bond, citing the misdemeanor shoplifting conviction. She reminded him that his final hearing was on March 20, just 10 days away. If she granted him asylum, he’d be a free man and could continue his life in the U.S.

I told my editors and colleagues about what I’d heard and made plans to attend the next hearing. I saw the potential for the kind of complicated narrative story that I like: Here was a young immigrant who, yes, had come into the country illegally, but he had turned himself in to border authorities to seek asylum. Yes, he had a criminal record, but it was for a nonviolent offense. And, yes, he had tattoos, but so do the nice, white American moms in my book club. I was certain there are members of Tren de Aragua in the U.S., but if this was the kind of evidence the government had, I found it hard to believe it was an “invasion” as Trump claimed. I asked Rodríguez’s attorney for an interview and began requesting police and court records.

Five days later, on March 15, the Trump administration expelled more than 230 Venezuelan men to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, a country many of them had never even set foot in. Trump called them all terrorists and gang members. It would be a few days before the men’s names would be made public. Perhaps naively, it didn’t occur to me that Rodríguez might be in that group. Then I logged into his final hearing and heard his attorney say he didn’t know where the government had taken him. The lawyer sounded tired and defeated. Later, he would tell me he had barely slept, afraid that Rodríguez might turn up dead. At the hearing, he begged a government lawyer for information: “For his family’s sake, would you happen to know what country he was sent to?” She told him she didn’t know, either.

Rodríguez lifts his shirt to display some of his tattoos. The Trump administration has relied, in part, on tattoos to brand Venezuelan immigrants as possible members of the Tren de Aragua gang. Experts have told us tattoos are not an indicator of membership in the gang. (Andrea Hernández Briceño for ProPublica)

I was astonished. I am familiar with the history of authoritarian leaders disappearing people they don’t like in Latin America, the part of the world that my family comes from. I wanted to think that doesn’t happen in this country. But what I had just witnessed felt uncomfortably similar.

As soon as the hearing ended, I got on a call with my colleagues Mica Rosenberg and Perla Trevizo, both of whom cover immigration and had recently written about how the U.S. government had sent other Venezuelan men to Guantanamo. We talked about what we should do with what I’d just heard. Mica contacted a source in the federal government who confirmed, almost immediately, that Rodríguez was among the men that our country had sent to El Salvador.

The news suddenly felt more real and intimate to me. One of the men sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador now had a name and a face and a story that I had heard from his own mouth. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

As a news organization, we decided to put significant resources into investigating who these men really are and what happened to them, bringing in many talented ProPublica journalists to help pull records, sift through social media accounts, analyze court data and find the men’s families. We teamed up with a group of Venezuelan journalists from the outlets Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News who were also starting to track down information about the men.

We spoke to the relatives and attorneys of more than 100 of the men and obtained internal government records that undercut the Trump administration’s claims that all the men are “monsters,” “sick criminals” and the “worst of the worst.” We also published a story about how, by and large, the men were not hiding from federal immigration authorities. They were in the system; many had open asylum cases like Rodríguez and were waiting for their day in court before they were taken away and imprisoned in Central America.

On July 18 — after I’d written the first draft of this note to you — we began to hear some chatter about a potential prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Venezuela. Later that same day, the men had been released. We’d been in the middle of working on a case-by-case accounting of the Venezuelan men who’d been held in El Salvador. Though they’d been released, documenting who they are and how they got caught up in this dragnet was still important, essential even, as was the impact of their incarceration.

The result is a database we published last week including profiles of 238 of the men Trump deported to a Salvadoran prison.

From the moment I heard about the men’s return to Venezuela, I thought about Rodríguez. He’d been on my mind since embarking on this project. I messaged with his mother for days as we waited for the men to be processed by the government of Nicolás Maduro and released to their families.

Rodríguez, surrounded by his mother, right, aunt, above, and grandmother, left, is back in Venezuela. (Andrea Hernández Briceño for ProPublica)

Finally, one morning last week, he went home. We spoke later that afternoon. He said he was relieved to be home with his family but felt traumatized. He told me he wants the world to know what happened to him in the Salvadoran prison — daily beatings, humiliation, psychological abuse. “There is no reason for what I went through,” he said. “I didn’t deserve that.”

The Salvadoran government has denied mistreating the Venezuelan prisoners.

We asked the Trump administration about its evidence against Rodríguez. This is the entirety of its statement: “Albert Jesús Rodriguez Parra is an illegal alien from Venezuela and Tren de Aragua gang member. He illegally crossed the border on April 22, 2023, under the Biden Administration.”

While Rodríguez was incarcerated in El Salvador and no one knew what would happen to him, the court kept delaying hearings for his asylum case. But after months of continuances, on Monday, Rodríguez logged into a virtual hearing from Venezuela. “Oh my gosh, I am so happy to see that,” said Judge Samia Naseem, clearly remembering what had happened in his case.

Rodríguez’s attorney said that his client had been tortured and abused in El Salvador. “I can’t even describe to this court what he went through,” he said. “He’s getting psychological help, and that's my priority.”

It was a brief hearing, perhaps five minutes. Rodríguez’s lawyer mentioned his involvement in an ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration over its use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans. The government lawyer said little, except to question whether Rodríguez was even allowed to appear virtually due to “security issues” in Venezuela.

Finally, the judge said she would administratively close the case while the litigation plays out. “If he should hopefully be able to come back to the U.S., we’ll calendar the case,” she said.

Naseem turned to Rodríguez, who was muted and looked serious. “You don’t have to worry about reappearing until this gets sorted out,” she told him. He nodded and soon logged off.

We plan to keep reporting on what happened and have another story coming soon about Rodríguez and the other men’s experiences inside the prison. Please reach out if you have information to share.

by Joaquin Sapien

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

Last week, a federal appeals court overturned the conviction of Pedro Hernandez for the murder and kidnapping of Etan Patz, a 6-year-old New York boy who disappeared in 1979 in one of the most famous missing child cases in U.S. history.

The three-judge panel ruled that a trial court judge had given jurors “manifestly inaccurate” guidance regarding a confession Hernandez made before he had been advised of his Miranda rights. Jurors asked whether, if they decided the first confession was involuntary, that meant they should disregard two videotaped confessions that came afterward.

The trial judge said “the answer is no” and offered no further explanation.

The appellate judges, in their opinion, said that by doing so, “the state trial court contradicted clearly established federal law.” They threw out Hernandez’s conviction and ordered that he be released or retried. He is now 64 years old and has served 13 years of a 25-years-to-life sentence in a case that has haunted New York City for decades.

The body of the 51-page decision echoed stories published by ProPublica starting in 2013, before Hernandez was convicted, that raised questions about the veracity and legality of his confessions.

We reported that Hernandez met many of the criteria of a person prone to making false confessions, a growing phenomenon and leading cause of wrongful conviction. We also discovered that Hernandez’s statements to law enforcement and others over the years were inconsistent and did not match the known facts of the case.

On the morning of May 29, 1979, Patz was allowed to walk alone to his school bus stop two blocks away and then vanished. His disappearance ignited national concern around missing children, as he became one of the first “milk carton kids” and his image was plastered across New York City.

A massive search ensued, and law enforcement spent thousands of hours looking for him: Divers plunged into the East River searching for his remains following a tip from a psychic. Leads were chased as far as Israel. But no arrests were made. No charges brought.

In 2012, New York police and the FBI suddenly and very visibly took action on another lead, digging up the basement of a workshop near the Patz family home used by a carpenter who knew Etan and was briefly considered a suspect.

Nothing came of the dig, but the surge of media attention prompted one of Hernandez’s relatives to call police with a tip about rumors that he had a role in the disappearance of Patz.

New York police officers arrived at Hernandez’s home in New Jersey on the morning of May 23, 2012, and brought him to a local prosecutor’s office to question him. In the ensuing hours, Hernandez asked several times to go home, said the officers were trying to trick him, sobbed, clutched at his stomach, lay on the floor in a fetal position, had a fentanyl patch placed on his chest to treat his chronic pain, and mentioned his mental illness diagnoses. After more than six hours, he told officers that he “did it.”

He said he offered Patz a soda to lure him down into the basement of a bodega where he was working. He said he choked the boy, placed the body in a garbage bag, put the bag in a box and left it around the corner in broad daylight.

It wasn’t until after that confession that the officers read Hernandez his rights. They then had him repeat his statement in two video-recorded interviews over the next 24 hours. The stories he told contained several inconsistencies.

The federal court found that the trial court judge’s instruction to the jury about the confessions was “manifestly inaccurate,” that the jury should have been given more thorough instructions and that it could in fact disregard the recorded confessions.

The jury, which had asked about the un-Mirandized confession on the second of nine days of deliberations, was “clearly grappling with what weight, if any, to give to the confessions,” the appeals court wrote.

ProPublica covered the early phases of the case against Hernandez extensively, interviewing the people to whom he supposedly confessed over the years and speaking with a variety of legal and psychological experts about how police tactics can induce false confessions.

We found early on that Hernandez’s previous claims of having harmed a child not only conflicted with each other but bore little resemblance to the details of his confession to police. Once, for example, he said that he had killed a Black child. Patz was white.

We also learned that the bodega Hernandez was working out of had become a kind of police hub for the officers searching for Patz. Hernandez said in one of his confessions that he tossed the boy’s book bag behind a refrigerator there. It was never found.

Experts told us that a handful of factors are often at play in producing false confessions and that Hernandez’s situation contained many of them: He had low IQ, had a history of mental illness, and confessed to a high-profile crime where many of the details were widely known over the course of an intense, long interrogation.

The judges, in their decision, took note of many of these same characteristics, which, in their view, made it all the more important for the jury to have proper instructions to evaluate the confessions.

ProPublica also highlighted how the trial judge, Maxwell Wiley, held a hearing early in the proceedings to determine for himself whether Hernandez was properly informed of his rights and if he had the capacity to meaningfully waive them. He decided that the confession could be used. Later, Wiley, a former Manhattan prosecutor, limited the questions that could be asked about it and kept some subsequent hearings on the matter secret, drawing fire from several news organizations. Wiley, who is now retired, did not respond to calls for comment.

In an email, Cyrus Vance Jr., who handled the case against Hernandez as Manhattan district attorney, said it was “exceptionally challenging given the passage of time but also very strong.”

He said the recent decision came as a surprise, as other appellate courts had reviewed and sustained the confession and verdict.

“Clearly, the jury heard substantial expert testimony from both the prosecution and the defense, and considered both and the legal instructions by the court during deliberations and before the verdict,” he said, adding that he continues to believe Hernandez is guilty and that his “thoughts are with the Patz family and with Etan.”

Now Vance’s successor, Alvin Bragg, will have to decide whether to retry Hernandez for the third time. The first of his two trials ended in a hung jury.

In a statement from Bragg’s office, a spokesperson said only: “We are reviewing the decision.”

by Patricia Callahan

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The Food and Drug Administration is cracking down on a generic drugmaker that was the subject of a ProPublica investigation last year, citing problems with safety tests that delayed the recall of a medicine linked to deaths in the U.S.

In December, ProPublica reported that a Glenmark Pharmaceuticals factory in central India was responsible for an outsized share of recalls for pills that didn’t dissolve properly and could harm American patients. Among the string of recalls, federal regulators had determined that more than 50 million potassium chloride extended-release capsules sold in the U.S. could be deadly. Yet, federal drug inspectors at that point hadn’t set foot in the Madhya Pradesh factory for more than four years, ProPublica found.

Seven weeks after that story was published, FDA inspectors showed up at the plant and found serious problems. Glenmark subsequently recalled an additional two dozen medicines made there and sold to U.S. patients.

Now the FDA has sent Glenmark a warning letter, a disciplinary tool the regulator uses to lay out significant violations of federal requirements and demand changes. If Glenmark fails to fix any of the problems outlined, the FDA warned, it may bar drugs made at the factory from entering the U.S.

What’s more, the FDA pointed out that the company had made similar serious mistakes at three other manufacturing sites and acknowledged that those factories had been the subject of previous warning letters from the agency since 2019. The problems at one were so severe that federal regulators blocked drugs made there from being imported to Americans. ProPublica’s December investigation highlighted this pattern, noting that three of the five factories where Glenmark made drugs for the U.S. market in recent years had been in trouble with federal regulators. Despite that track record, the FDA — backlogged from the pandemic — waited five years before sending its inspectors back to the Madhya Pradesh plant.

In his July 11 warning letter, the director of the FDA’s Office of Manufacturing Quality wrote, “These repeated failures at multiple sites demonstrate that management oversight and control over the manufacture of drugs is inadequate.” (The agency made the letter public last week.)

“You should immediately and comprehensively assess your company’s global manufacturing operations to ensure that systems, processes, and the products manufactured conform to FDA requirements,” he added.

A spokesperson for the company said in a written statement: “Glenmark is actively engaging with the U.S. FDA and has initiated corrective actions to address the agency’s observations. Patient safety, product quality and regulatory compliance are foundational to how we operate.”

Citing ongoing litigation the company faces, she declined to comment further.

ProPublica has been investigating the FDA’s oversight of foreign factories that make generic drugs for the U.S. market.

Since last year, ProPublica repeatedly has asked the FDA why it didn’t send inspectors to the Glenmark factory sooner, given the outsized share of recalls and the company’s troubled track record at its other plants. The agency hasn’t answered the question. After the inspection found problems this year, an FDA spokesperson said the agency can only discuss potential or ongoing compliance matters with the company involved.

Among the most serious violations outlined in the FDA letter to Glenmark was the company’s failure to promptly test pills to ensure they dissolve properly during their normal shelf life, the subject of ProPublica’s investigation last year.

Companies hold on to samples of pills from batches sold to U.S. customers and test them periodically until they reach their expiration date. Medicines that don’t dissolve properly can cause perilous swings in dosing. This flaw is what made Glenmark’s potassium chloride pills potentially deadly since high potassium levels can stop the heart, according to the June 2024 recall notice.

Glenmark’s backlogged testing “was overdue by 3 months or longer for a large proportion of your samples,” the FDA wrote in the warning letter. The failure to perform these tests on time held up Glenmark’s discovery of defective pills and delayed the needed recalls, the agency said.

In multiple instances, the FDA found that it took 100 days from the time Glenmark pulled samples of potassium chloride for testing until the company learned the capsules had failed to dissolve correctly.

A delay in that recall could factor into a lawsuit that alleges Glenmark’s potassium chloride pills were responsible for the death last year of Mary Louise Cormier, a 91-year-old Maine woman. A letter alerting Cormier that her pills had been recalled arrived three weeks after she died. In court filings, Glenmark has denied responsibility for her death. The company stopped making the drug for U.S. patients.

Between July and December last year, Glenmark told the FDA that it had received reports of eight deaths in patients who took the recalled potassium chloride, federal records show. The reports, which companies must file so the FDA can monitor drug safety, contained so few details that ProPublica was unable to independently verify what happened in each case. In general, these adverse event reports reflect the opinions of those who filed them and don’t prove that the drug caused the harm, the FDA says. The agency didn’t mention these deaths in the warning letter.

The FDA lambasted Glenmark for failing to thoroughly investigate why pills made at its Madhya Pradesh factory weren’t dissolving properly. The agency listed possible reasons that Glenmark failed to consider, but FDA censors redacted so many passages — citing the protection of trade secrets and confidential business information — that it’s impossible to discern what could have gone wrong.

Citing the same confidentiality provision, the FDA kept secret the name of another Glenmark drug that the agency said failed these same tests. When asked why consumers shouldn’t be told which medication had the problem, the FDA didn’t answer.

More broadly, the FDA’s warning letter criticized Glenmark for failing to validate the tests it relies on to prove that its drugs have the identity, strength, quality and purity that they’re supposed to have.

“Without evaluating the validity of methods, you lack the basic assurance that your laboratory data accurately reflects drug product quality,” the FDA wrote.

by Aliyya Swaby

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.

One afternoon in mid-September, a group of middle school girls in rural East Tennessee decided to film a TikTok video while waiting to begin cheerleading practice.

In the 45-second video posted later that day, one girl enters the classroom holding a cellphone. “Put your hands up,” she says, while a classmate flickers the lights on and off. As the camera pans across the classroom, several girls dramatically fall back on a desk or the floor and lie motionless, pretending they were killed.

When another student enters and surveys the bodies on the ground in poorly feigned shock, few manage to suppress their giggles. Throughout the video, which ProPublica obtained, a line of text reads: “To be continued……”

Penny Jackson’s 11-year-old granddaughter was one of the South Greene Middle School cheerleaders who played dead. She said the co-captains told her what to do and she did it, unaware of how it would be used. The next day, she was horrified when the police came to school to question her and her teammates.

By the end of the day, the Greene County Sheriff’s Department charged her and 15 other middle school cheerleaders with disorderly conduct for making and posting the video. Standing outside the school’s brick facade, Lt. Teddy Lawing said in a press conference that the girls had to be “held accountable through the court system” to show that “this type of activity is not warranted.” The sheriff’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the incident.

Widespread fear of school shootings is colliding with algorithms that accelerate the spread of the most outrageous messages to cause chaos across the country. Social videos, memes and retweets are becoming fodder for criminal charges in an era of heightened responses to student threats. Authorities say harsh punishment is crucial to deter students from making threatening posts that multiply rapidly and obscure their original source.

In many cases, especially in Tennessee, police are charging students for jokes and misinterpretations, drawing criticism from families and school violence prevention experts who believe a measured approach is more appropriate. Students are learning the hard way that they can’t control where their social media messages travel. In central Tennessee last fall, a 16-year-old privately shared a video he created using artificial intelligence, and a friend forwarded it to others on Snapchat. The 16-year-old was expelled and charged with threatening mass violence, even though his school acknowledged the video was intended as a private joke.

Other students have been charged with felonies for resharing posts they didn’t create. As ProPublica wrote in May, a 12-year-old in Nashville was arrested and expelled this year for sharing a screenshot of threatening texts on Instagram. He told school officials he was attempting to warn others and wanted to “feel heroic.”

In Greene County, the cheerleaders’ video sent waves through the small rural community, especially since it was posted several days after the fatal Apalachee High School shooting one state away. The Georgia incident had spawned thousands of false threats looping through social media feeds across the country. Lawing told ProPublica and WPLN at the time that his officers had fielded about a dozen social media threats within a week and struggled to investigate them. “We couldn’t really track back to any particular person,” he said.

But the cheerleaders’ video, with their faces clearly visible, was easy to trace.

Jackson understands that the video was in “very poor taste,” but she believes the police overreacted and traumatized her granddaughter in the process. “I think they blew it completely out of the water,” she said. “To me, it wasn’t serious enough to do that, to go to court.”

That perspective is shared by Makenzie Perkins, the threat assessment supervisor of Collierville Schools, outside of Memphis. She is helping her school district chart a different path in managing alleged social media threats. Perkins has sought specific training on how to sort out credible threats online from thoughtless reposts, allowing her to focus on students who pose real danger instead of punishing everyone.

The charges in Greene County, she said, did not serve a real purpose and indicate a lack of understanding about how to handle these incidents. “You’re never going to suspend, expel or charge your way out of targeted mass violence,” she said. “Did those charges make that school safer? No.”

When 16-year-old D.C. saw an advertisement for an AI video app last October, he eagerly downloaded it and began roasting his friends. In one video he created, his friend stood in the Lincoln County High School cafeteria, his mouth and eyes moving unnaturally as he threatened to shoot up the school and bring a bomb in his backpack. (We are using D.C.’s initials and his dad’s middle name to protect their privacy, because D.C. is a minor.)

D.C. sent it to a private Snapchat group of about 10 friends, hoping they would find it hilarious. After all, they had all teased this friend about his dark clothes and quiet nature. But the friend did not think it was funny. That evening, D.C. showed the video to his dad, Alan, who immediately made him delete it as well as the app. “I explained how it could be misinterpreted, how inappropriate it was in today’s climate,” Alan recalled to ProPublica.

It was too late. One student in the chat had already copied D.C.’s video and sent it to other students on Snapchat, where it began to spread, severed from its initial context.

That evening, a parent reported the video to school officials, who called in local police to do an investigation. D.C. begged his dad to take him to the police station that night, worried the friend in the video would get in trouble — but Alan thought it could wait until morning.

The next day, D.C. rushed to school administrators to explain and apologize. According to Alan, administrators told D.C. they “understood it was a dumb mistake,” uncharacteristic for the straight-A student with no history of disciplinary issues. In a press release, Lincoln County High School said administrators were “made aware of a prank threat that was intended as a joke between friends.”

But later that day, D.C. was expelled from school for a year and charged with a felony for making a threat of mass violence. As an explanation, the sheriff’s deputy wrote in the affidavit, “Above student did create and distribute a video on social media threatening to shoot the school and bring a bomb.”

During a subsequent hearing where D.C. appealed his school expulsion, Lincoln County Schools administrators described their initial panic when seeing the video. Alan shared an audio recording of the hearing with ProPublica. Officials didn’t know that the video was generated by AI until the school counselor saw a small logo in the corner. “Everybody was on pins and needles,” the counselor said at the hearing. “What are we going to do to protect the kids or keep everybody calm the next day if it gets out?” The school district declined to respond to ProPublica’s questions about how officials handled the incident, even though Alan signed a privacy waiver giving them permission to do so.

Alan watched D.C. wither after his expulsion: His girlfriend broke up with him, and some of his friends began to avoid him. D.C. lay awake at night looking through text messages he sent years ago, terrified someone decades later would find something that could ruin his life. “If they are punishing him for creating the image, when does his liability expire?” Alan wondered. “If it’s shared again a year from now, will he be expelled again?”

Alan, a teacher in the school district, coped by voraciously reading court cases and news articles that could shed light on what was happening to his son. He stumbled on a case hundreds of miles north in Pennsylvania, the facts of which were eerily similar to D.C.’s.

In April 2018, two kids, J.S. and his friend, messaged back and forth mocking another student by suggesting he looked like a school shooter. (The court record uses J.S. instead of his full name to protect the student’s anonymity.) J.S. created two memes and sent them to his friend in a private Snapchat conversation. His friend shared the memes publicly on Snapchat, where they were seen by 20 to 40 other students. School administrators permanently expelled J.S., so he and his parents sued the school.

In 2021, after a series of appeals, Pennsylvania’s highest court ruled in J.S.’s favor. While the memes were “mean-spirited, sophomoric, inartful, misguided, and crude,” the state Supreme Court justices wrote in their opinion, they were “plainly not intended to threaten Student One, Student Two, or any other person.”

The justices also shared their sympathy with the challenges schools faced in providing a “safe and quality educational experience” in the modern age. “We recognize that this charge is compounded by technological developments such as social media, which transcend the geographic boundaries of the school. It is a thankless task for which we are all indebted.”

After multiple disciplinary appeals, D.C.’s school upheld the decision to keep him out of school for a year. His parents found a private school that agreed to let him enroll, and he slowly emerged from his depression to continue his straight-A streak there. His charge in court was dismissed in December after he wrote a 500-word essay for the judge on the dangers of social media, according to Alan.

Thinking back on the video months later, D.C. explained that jokes about school violence are common among his classmates. “We try to make fun of it so that it doesn’t seem as serious or like it could really happen,” he said. “It’s just so widespread that we’re all desensitized to it.”

He wonders if letting him back to school would have been more effective in deterring future hoax threats. “I could have gone back to school and said, ‘You know, we can’t make jokes like that because you can get in big trouble for it,’” he said. “I just disappeared for everyone at that school.”

When a school district came across an alarming post on Snapchat in 2023, officials reached out to Safer Schools Together, an organization that helps educators handle school threats. In the post, a pistol flanked by two assault rifles lay on a rumpled white bedsheet. The text overlaid on the photo read, “I’m shooting up central I’m tired of getting picked on everyone is dying tomorrow.”

Steven MacDonald, training manager and development director for Safer Schools Together, recounted this story in a virtual tutorial posted last year on using online tools to trace and manage social media threats. He asked the school officials watching his tutorial what they would do next. “How do we figure out if this is really our student’s bedroom?”

According to MacDonald, it took his organization’s staff only a minute to put the text in quotation marks and run it through Google. A single local news article popped up showing that two kids had been arrested for sharing this exact Snapchat post in Columbia, Tennessee — far from the original district.

“We were able to reach out and respond and say, ‘You know what, this is not targeting your district,’” MacDonald said. Administrators were reassured there was a low likelihood of immediate violence, and they could focus on finding out who was recirculating the old threat and why.

In the training video, MacDonald reviewed skills that, until recently, have been more relevant to police investigators than school principals: How to reverse image search photos of guns to determine whether a post contains a stock image. How to use Snapchat to find contact names for unknown phone numbers. How to analyze the language in the social media posts of a high-risk student.

“We know that why you’re here is because of the increase and the sheer volume of these threats that you may have seen circulated, the non-credible threats that might have even ended up in your districts,” he said. Between last April and this April, Safer Schools Together identified drastic increases in “threat related behavior” and graphic or derogatory social media posts.

Back in the Memphis suburbs, Perkins and other Collierville Schools administrators have attended multiple digital threat assessment training sessions hosted by Safer Schools Together. “I’ve had to learn a lot more apps and social media than I ever thought,” Perkins said.

The knowledge, she said, came in handy during one recent incident in her district. Local police called the district to report that a student had called 911 and reported an Instagram threat targeting a particular school. They sent Perkins a photo of the Instagram profile and username. She began using open source websites to scour the internet for other appearances of the picture and username. She also used a website that allows people to view Instagram stories without alerting the user to gather more information.

With the help of police, Perkins and her team identified that the post was created by someone at the same IP address as the student who had reported the threat. The girl, who was in elementary school, confessed to police that she had done it.

The next day, Perkins and her team interviewed the student, her parents and teachers to understand her motive and goal. “It ended up that there had been some recent viral social media threats going around,” Perkins said. “This individual recognized that it drew in a lot of attention.”

Instead of expelling the girl, school administrators worked with her parents to develop a plan to manage her behavior. They came up with ideas for the girl to receive positive attention while stressing to her family that she had exhibited “extreme behavior” that signaled a need for intensive help. By the end of the day, they had tamped down concerns about immediate violence and created a plan of action.

In many other districts, Perkins said, the girl might have been arrested and expelled for a year without any support — which does not help move students away from the path of violence. “A lot of districts across our state haven’t been trained,” she said. “They’re doing this without guidance.”

Watching the cheerleaders’ TikTok video, it would be easy to miss Allison Bolinger, then the 19-year-old assistant coach. The camera quickly flashes across her standing and smiling in the corner of the room watching the pretend-dead girls.

Bolinger said she and the head coach had been next door planning future rehearsals. Bolinger entered the room soon after the students began filming and “didn’t think anything of it.” Cheerleading practice went forward as usual that afternoon. The next day, she got a call from her dad: The cheerleaders were suspended from school, and Bolinger would have to answer questions from the police.

“I didn’t even know the TikTok was posted. I hadn’t seen it,” she said. “By the time I went to go look for it, it was already taken down.” Bolinger said she ended up losing her job as a result of the incident. She heard whispers around the small community that she was responsible for allowing them to create the video.

Bolinger said she didn’t realize the video was related to school shootings when she was in the room. She often wishes she had asked them at the time to explain the video they were making. “I have beat myself up about that so many times,” she said. “Then again, they’re also children. If they don’t make it here, they’ll probably make it at home.”

Jackson, the grandmother of the 11-year-old in the video, blames Bolinger for not stopping the middle schoolers and faults the police for overreacting. She said all the students, whether or not their families hired a lawyer, got the same punishment in court: three months of probation for a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge, which could be extended if their grades dropped or they got in trouble again. Each family had to pay more than $100 in court costs, Jackson said, a significant amount for some.

Jackson’s granddaughter successfully completed probation, which also involved writing and submitting a letter of apology to the judge. She was too scared about getting in trouble again to continue on the cheerleading team for the rest of the school year.

Jackson thinks that officials’ outsize response to the video made everything worse. “They shouldn’t even have done nothing until they investigated it, instead of making them out to be terrorists and traumatizing these girls,” she said.

Paige Pfleger of WPLN/Nashville Public Radio contributed reporting.

by ProPublica

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The continents are rapidly drying out and the earth’s vast freshwater resources are under threat, according to a recently released study based on more than 20 years of NASA satellite data. Here are the report’s key findings and what they portend for humankind:

Much of the Earth is suffering a pandemic of “continental drying,” affecting the countries containing 75% of the world’s population, the new research shows.

The study, published in the journal Science Advances, examined changes to Earth’s total supply of fresh water and found that nearly 6 billion people live in the 101 countries facing a net decline in water supply, posing a “critical, emerging threat to humanity.”

Mining of underground freshwater aquifers is driving much of the loss.

According to the study, the uninhibited pumping of groundwater by farmers, cities and corporations around the world now accounts for 68% of the total loss of fresh water at the latitudes where most people live.

Much of the water taken from aquifers ends up in the oceans, contributing to the rise of sea levels.

Mined groundwater rarely seeps back into the aquifers from which it was pumped. Rather, a large portion runs off into streams, then rivers and ultimately the oceans. According to the researchers, moisture lost to evaporation and drought, plus runoff from pumped groundwater, now outpaces the melting of glaciers and the ice sheets of either Antarctica or Greenland as the largest contributor of water to the oceans.

Water From Land Has Become a Leading Driver of Sea Level Rise

Most of the water lost from drying regions is from groundwater pumping, which ultimately shifts fresh water from aquifers into the oceans.

Note: Glaciers refer to the parts of the continents covered in glaciers but excludes the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Drying land and aquifers refer to the water lost by the continents in areas not covered by glaciers, including river flow and evaporation. Groundwater loss accounts for 68% of the drying in those places. As droughts grow more extreme, farmers increasingly turn to groundwater.

Worldwide, 70% of fresh water is used for growing crops, with more of it coming from groundwater as droughts grow more extreme. Only a small amount of that water seeps back into aquifers. Research has long established that people take more water from underground when climate-driven heat and drought are at their worst.

Drying regions of the planet are merging.

The parts of the world drying most acutely are becoming interconnected, forming what the study’s authors describe as “mega” regions. One such region covers almost the whole of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia.

Drying of the Earth has accelerated in recent years.

The study examines 22 years of observational data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, satellites, which measure changes in the mass of the earth and have been applied to estimate its water content. Since 2002, the sensors have detected a rapid shift in water loss across the planet. Around 2014, the study found the pace of drying appears to have accelerated. It is now growing by an area twice the size of California each year.

The Drying of the Earth Accelerated in Recent Years

The dramatic depletion of groundwater and surface water plus the melting of glaciers between 2014-24 has connected once-separate arid places, forming “mega-drying” regions that stretch across whole continents.

Watch video ➜

Note: Data is for February 2003 to December 2013 and January 2014 to April 2024. The first time period contains seven more months of data than the second. Water pumped from aquifers is not easily replaced, if it can be at all.

Major groundwater basins underlie roughly one-third of the planet, including about half of Africa, Europe and South America. Many of those aquifers took millions of years to form and might take thousands of years to refill. The researchers warn that it is now nearly impossible to reverse the loss of water “on human timescales.”

As continents dry and coastal areas flood, the risk for conflict and instability increases.

The accelerated drying, combined with the flooding of coastal cities and food-producing lowlands, heralds “potentially staggering” and cascading risks for global order, the researchers warn. Their findings all point to the likelihood of widespread famine, the migration of large numbers of people seeking a more stable environment and the carry-on impact of geopolitical disorder.

Data Source: Hrishikesh. A. Chandanpurkar, James S. Famiglietti, Kaushik Gopalan, David N. Wiese, Yoshihide Wada, Kaoru Kakinuma, John T. Reager, Fan Zhang (2025). Unprecedented Continental Drying, Shrinking Freshwater Availability, and Increasing Land Contributions to Sea Level Rise. Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0298

Graphics by Lucas Waldron

by Abrahm Lustgarten, Graphics by Lucas Waldron, Illustrations by Olivier Kugler for ProPublica

As the planet gets hotter and its reservoirs shrink and its glaciers melt, people have increasingly drilled into a largely ungoverned, invisible cache of fresh water: the vast, hidden pools found deep underground.

Now, a new study that examines the world’s total supply of fresh water — accounting for its rivers and rain, ice and aquifers together — warns that Earth’s most essential resource is quickly disappearing, signaling what the paper’s authors describe as “a critical, emerging threat to humanity.” The landmasses of the planet are drying. In most places there is less precipitation even as moisture evaporates from the soil faster. More than anything, Earth is being slowly dehydrated by the unmitigated mining of groundwater, which underlies vast proportions of every continent. Nearly 6 billion people, or three quarters of humanity, live in the 101 countries that the study identified as confronting a net decline in water supply — portending enormous challenges for food production and a heightening risk of conflict and instability.

The paper “provides a glimpse of what the future is going to be,” said Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar, an earth systems scientist working with Arizona State University and the lead author of the study. “We are already dipping from a trust fund. We don’t actually know how much the account has.”

The research, published on Friday in the journal Science Advances, confirms not just that droughts and precipitation are growing more extreme but reports that drying regions are fast expanding. It also found that while parts of the planet are getting wetter, those areas are shrinking. The study, which excludes the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, concludes not only that Earth is suffering a pandemic of “continental drying” in lower latitudes, but that it is the uninhibited pumping of groundwater by farmers, cities and corporations around the world that now accounts for 68% of the total loss of fresh water in those areas, which generally don’t have glaciers.

Groundwater is ubiquitous across the globe, but its quality and depth vary, as does its potential to be replenished by rainfall. Major groundwater basins — the deep and often high-quality aquifers — underlie roughly one-third of the planet, including roughly half of Africa, Europe and South America. But many of those aquifers took millions of years to form and might take thousands of years to refill. Instead, a significant portion of the water taken from underground flows off the land through rivers and on to the oceans.

The researchers were surprised to find that the loss of water on the continents has grown so dramatically that it has become one of the largest causes of global sea level rise. Moisture lost to evaporation and drought, plus runoff from pumped groundwater, now outpaces the melting of glaciers and the ice sheets of either Antarctica or Greenland as the largest contributor of water to the oceans.

Water From Land Has Become a Leading Driver of Sea Level Rise

Most of the water lost from drying regions is from groundwater pumping, which ultimately shifts fresh water from aquifers into the oceans.

Note: Glaciers refer to the parts of the continents covered in glaciers but excludes the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Drying land and aquifers refer to the water lost by the continents in areas not covered by glaciers, including river flow and evaporation. Groundwater loss accounts for 68% of the drying in those places.

The study examines 22 years of observational data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, satellites, which measure changes in the mass of the earth and have been applied to estimate its water content. The technique was groundbreaking two decades ago when the study’s co-author, Jay Famiglietti, who was then a professor at the University of California, at Irvine, used it to pinpoint where aquifers were in decline. Since then, he and others have published dozens of papers using GRACE data, but the question has always lingered: What does the groundwater loss mean in the context of all of the water available on the continents? So Famiglietti, now a professor at Arizona State University, set out to inventory all the land-based water contained in glaciers, rivers and aquifers and see what was changing. The answer: everything, and quickly.

Since 2002, the GRACE sensors have detected a rapid shift in water loss patterns around the planet. Around 2014, though, the pace of drying appears to have accelerated, the authors found, and is now growing by an area twice the size of California each year. “It’s like this sort of creeping disaster that has taken over the continents in ways that no one was really anticipating,” Famiglietti said. (Six other researchers also contributed to the study.) The parts of the world drying most acutely are becoming interconnected, forming what the study’s authors describe as “mega” regions spreading across the earth’s mid-latitudes. One of those regions covers almost the whole of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia.

The Drying of the Earth Accelerated in Recent Years

The dramatic depletion of groundwater and surface water plus the melting of glaciers between 2014-24 has connected once-separate arid places, forming “mega-drying” regions that stretch across whole continents.

Watch video ➜

Note: Data is for February 2003 to December 2013 and January 2014 to April 2024. The first time period contains seven more months of data than the second.

In the American Southwest and California, groundwater loss is a familiar story, but over the past two decades that hot spot has also spread dramatically. It now extends through Texas and up through the southern High Plains, where the Ogallala aquifer is depended on for agriculture, and it spreads south, stretching throughout Mexico and into Central America. These regions are connected not because they rely on the same water sources — in most cases they don’t — but because their populations will face the same perils of water stress: the most likely, a food crisis that could ultimately displace millions of people.

“This has to serve as a wake-up call,” said Aaron Salzberg, a former fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the former director of the Water Institute at the University of North Carolina, who was not involved with the study.

Research has long established that people take more water from underground when climate-driven heat and drought are at their worst. For example, during droughts when California has enforced restrictions on delivery of surface water to its farmers — which the state regulates — the enormous agriculture enterprises that dominate the Central Valley have drilled deeper and pumped harder, depleting the aquifer — which the state regulates less precisely — even more.

For the most part, such withdrawals have remained invisible. Even with the GRACE data, scientists cannot measure the exact levels or know when an aquifer will be exhausted. But there is one foolproof sign that groundwater is disappearing: The earth above it collapses as the ground compresses like a drying sponge. The visible signs of such subsidence around the world appear to match what the GRACE data says. Mexico City is sinking as its groundwater aquifers are drained, as are large parts China, Indonesia, Spain and Iran, to name a few. A recent study by researchers at Virginia Tech in the journal Nature Cities found that 28 cities across the United States are sinking — New York, Houston and Denver, among them — threatening havoc for everything from building safety to transit. In the Central Valley, the ground surface is nearly 30 vertical feet lower than it was in the first part of the 20th century.

Ground subsidence around the world is one of the clearest ways to identify where groundwater is overdrawn.

When so much water is pumped, it has to drain somewhere. Just like rivers and streams fed by rainfall, much of the used groundwater makes its way into the ocean. The study pinpoints a remarkable shift: Groundwater drilled by people, used for agriculture or urban supplies and then discarded into drainages now contributes more water to the oceans than melting from each of the world’s largest ice caps.

People aren’t just misusing groundwater, they are flooding their own coasts and cities in the process, Famiglietti warns. That means they are also imperiling some of the world’s most important food-producing lowlands in the Nile and Mekong deltas and cities from Shanghai to New York. Once in the oceans, of course, groundwater will never again be suitable for drinking and human use without expensive and energy-sucking treatment or through the natural cycle of evaporating and precipitating as rain. But even then, it may no longer fall where it is needed most. Groundwater “is an intergenerational resource that is being poorly managed, if managed at all,” the study states, “at tremendous and exceptionally undervalued cost to future generations.”

That such rapid and substantial overuse of groundwater is also causing coastal flooding underscores the compounding threat of rising temperatures and aridity. It means that water scarcity and some of the most disruptive effects of climate change are now inextricably intertwined. And here, the study’s authors implore leaders to find a policy solution: Improve water management and reduce groundwater use now, and the world has a tool to slow the rate of sea level rise. Fail to adjust the governance and use of groundwater around the world, and humanity risks surrendering parts of its coastal cities while pouring out finite reserves it will sorely need as the other effects of climate change take hold.

How Groundwater Becomes Ocean Water

1. The process starts when deep underground aquifers are tapped to make up for a lack of water from rainfall and rivers.
2. Worldwide, 70% of fresh water is used for growing crops, with more of it coming from groundwater as droughts grow more extreme. Only a small amount of that water seeps back into aquifers.
3. Instead, most of the water runs off the land into streams, eventually flowing into rivers.
4. The rivers ultimately drain into the ocean, where fresh water becomes salt water. For that water to be usable again, it must either be industrially treated or return to the land as rain. But with climate change, these same drying regions are seeing less rainfall.

If the drying continues — and the researchers warn that it is now nearly impossible to reverse “on human timescales” — it heralds “potentially staggering” and cascading risks for global order. The majority of the earth’s population lives in the 101 countries that the study identified as losing fresh water, making up not just North America, Europe and North Africa but also much of Asia, the Middle East and South America. This suggests the middle band of Earth is becoming less habitable. It also correlates closely with the places that a separate body of climate research has already identified as a shrinking environmental niche that has suited civilization for the past 6,000 years. Combined, these findings all point to the likelihood of widespread famine, the migration of large numbers of people seeking a more stable environment and the carry-on impact of geopolitical disorder.

Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, lauded the new report for confirming trends that were once theoretical. The ramifications, he said, could be profoundly destabilizing. “The massive overpumping of groundwater,” Gleick said, “poses enormous risk to food production.” And food, he pointed out, is the foundation for stability. The water science center he co-founded, the Pacific Institute, has tracked more than 1,900 incidents in which water supplies were either the casualty of, a tool for or the cause of violence. In Syria, beginning in 2011, drought and groundwater depletion drove rural unrest that contributed to the civil war, which displaced millions of people. In Ghana, in 2017, protesters rioted as wells ran dry. And in Ukraine, whose wheat supports much of the world, water infrastructure has been a frequent target of Russian attacks.

“Water is being used as a strategic and political tool,” said Salzberg, who spent nearly two decades analyzing water security issues as the special director for water resources at the State Department. “We should expect to see that more often as the water supply crisis is exacerbated.”

India, for example, recently weaponized water against Pakistan. In April, following terrorist attacks in Kashmir, Prime Minister Narendra Modi suspended his country’s participation in the Indus Waters Treaty, a river-sharing agreement between the two nuclear powers that was negotiated in 1960. The Indus system flows northwest out of Tibet into India, before turning southward into Pakistan. Pakistan has severely depleted its groundwater reserves — the region is facing one of the world’s most urgent water emergencies according to the Science Advances paper. The Indus has only become more essential as a supply of fresh water for its 252 million people. Allowing that water to cross the border would be “prejudicial to India’s interests,” Modi said. In this case, he wasn’t attempting to recoup water supply for his country, Salzberg said, but was leveraging its scarcity to win a strategic advantage over his country’s principal rival.

What’s needed most is governance of water that recognizes it as a crucial resource that determines both sovereignty and progress, Salzberg added. Yet there is no international framework for water management, and only a handful of countries have national water policies of their own.

The United States has taken stabs at regulating its groundwater use, but in some cases those attempts appear to be failing. In 2014, California passed what seemed to many a revolutionary groundwater management act that required communities to assess their total water supply and budget its long-term use. But the act doesn’t take full effect until 2040, which has allowed many groundwater districts to continue to draw heavily from aquifers even as they complete their plans to conserve those resources. Chandanpurkar and Famiglietti’s research underscores the consequences for such a slow approach.

Arizona pioneered groundwater regulations in 1980, creating what it called active management areas where extraction would be limited and surface waters would be used to replenish aquifers. But it only chose to manage the water in metropolitan areas, leaving vast, unregulated swaths of the state where investors, farmers and industry have all pounced on the availability of free water for profit. In recent years, Saudi investors have pumped rural water to grow feed for cattle exported back to the Arabian Peninsula, and hedge funds are competing to pump and sell water to towns near Phoenix. Meanwhile, four out of the original five active management areas are failing to meet the state’s own targets.

“They like to say, ‘Oh, the management’s doing well,’” Famiglietti said, but looking out over the next century, the trends suggest the aquifers will continue to empty out. “No one talks about that. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say it’s an existential issue for cities like Phoenix.”

Both California and Arizona grow significant portions of America’s fruits and vegetables. Something has to give. “If you want to grow food in a place like California,” Famiglietti asked, “do you just bring in water? If we deplete that groundwater, I don’t think there’s enough water to really replace what we’re doing there.” The United States might not have much choice, he added, but to move California’s agriculture production somewhere far away and retire the land.

Chandanpurkar, Famiglietti and the report’s other authors suggest there are ready solutions to the problems they have identified, because unlike so many aspects of the climate crisis, the human decisions that lead to the overuse of water can be speedily corrected. Agriculture, which uses the vast majority of the world’s fresh water, can deploy well-tested technologies like drip irrigation, as Israel has, that sharply cut use by as much as 50%. When California farms reduced their take of Colorado River water in 2023 and 2024, the water levels in Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, jumped by 16 vertical feet as some 390 billion gallons were saved by 2025. Individuals can reduce water waste by changing simple routines: shortening showers or removing lawns. And cities can look to recycle more of the water they use, as San Diego has.

A national policy that establishes rules around water practices but also prioritizes the use of water resources for national security and a collective interest could counterbalance the forces of habit and special interests, Salzberg said. Every country needs such a policy, and if the United States were to lead, it might offer an advantage. But “the U.S. doesn’t have a national water strategy,” he said, referring to a disjointed patchwork of state and court oversight. “We don’t even have a national water institution. We haven’t thought as a country about how we would even protect our own water resources for our own national interests, and we’re a mess.”

Data Source: Hrishikesh. A. Chandanpurkar, James S. Famiglietti, Kaushik Gopalan, David N. Wiese, Yoshihide Wada, Kaoru Kakinuma, John T. Reager, Fan Zhang (2025). Unprecedented Continental Drying, Shrinking Freshwater Availability, and Increasing Land Contributions to Sea Level Rise. Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0298

Visual editing by Alex Bandoni. Additional design and development by Anna Donlan.

Correction

July 25, 2025: This story originally included a quote from Jay Famiglietti characterizing Arizona’s water supply as facing total depletion by the end of the century. Famiglietti communicated a correction to that assertion to ProPublica, which failed to incorporate it before the story was published. The quote has been adjusted to reflect Famiglietti’s view that Arizona’s water supply will be diminished but may not disappear.

by Renee Dudley, with research by Doris Burke

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Last week, Microsoft announced that it would no longer use China-based engineering teams to support the Defense Department’s cloud computing systems, following ProPublica’s investigation of the practice, which cybersecurity experts said could expose the government to hacking and espionage.

But it turns out the Pentagon was not the only part of the government facing such a threat. For years, Microsoft has also used its global workforce, including China-based personnel, to maintain the cloud systems of other federal departments, including parts of Justice, Treasury and Commerce, ProPublica has found.

This work has taken place in what’s known as the Government Community Cloud, which is intended for information that is not classified but is nonetheless sensitive. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, the U.S. government’s cloud accreditation organization, has approved GCC to handle “moderate” impact information “where the loss of confidentiality, integrity, and availability would result in serious adverse effect on an agency’s operations, assets, or individuals.”

The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division has used GCC to support its criminal and civil investigation and litigation functions, according to a 2022 report. Parts of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education have also used GCC.

Microsoft says its foreign engineers working in GCC have been overseen by U.S.-based personnel known as “digital escorts,” similar to the system it had in place at the Defense Department.

Nevertheless, cybersecurity experts told ProPublica that foreign support for GCC presents an opportunity for spying and sabotage. “There’s a misconception that, if government data isn’t classified, no harm can come of its distribution,” said Rex Booth, a former federal cybersecurity official who now is chief information security officer of the tech company SailPoint.

“With so much data stored in cloud services — and the power of AI to analyze it quickly — even unclassified data can reveal insights that could harm U.S. interests,” he said.

Harry Coker, who was a senior executive at the CIA and the National Security Agency, said foreign intelligence agencies could leverage information gleaned from GCC systems to “swim upstream” to more sensitive or even classified ones. “It is an opportunity that I can’t imagine an intelligence service not pursuing,” he said.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has deemed China the “most active and persistent cyber threat to U.S. Government, private-sector, and critical infrastructure networks.” Laws there grant the country’s officials broad authority to collect data, and experts say it is difficult for any Chinese citizen or company to meaningfully resist a direct request from security forces or law enforcement.

Microsoft declined interview requests for this story. In response to questions, the tech giant issued a statement that suggested it would be discontinuing its use of China-based support for GCC, as it recently did for the Defense Department’s cloud systems.

“Microsoft took steps last week to enhance the security of our DoD Government cloud offerings. Going forward, we are taking similar steps for all our government customers who use Government Community Cloud to further ensure the security of their data,” the statement said. A spokesperson declined to elaborate on what those steps are.

The company also said that over the next month it “will conduct a review to assess whether additional measures are needed.”

The federal departments and agencies that ProPublica found to be using GCC did not respond to requests for comment.

The latest revelations about Microsoft’s use of its Chinese workforce to service the U.S. government — and the company’s swift response — are likely to fuel a rapidly developing firestorm in Washington, where federal lawmakers and the Trump administration are questioning the tech giant’s cybersecurity practices and trying to contain any potential national security fallout. “Foreign engineers — from any country, including of course China — should NEVER be allowed to maintain or access DoD systems,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote in a post on X last Friday.

Last week, ProPublica revealed that Microsoft has for a decade relied on foreign workers — including those based in China — to maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems, with oversight coming from U.S.-based digital escorts. But those escorts, we found, often don’t have the advanced technical expertise to police foreign counterparts with far more advanced skills, leaving highly sensitive information vulnerable. In response to the reporting, Hegseth launched a review of the practice.

ProPublica found that Microsoft developed the escort arrangement to satisfy Defense Department officials who were concerned about the company’s foreign employees, given the department’s citizenship requirements for people handling sensitive data. Microsoft went on to win federal cloud computing business and has said in earnings reports that it receives “substantial revenue from government contracts.”

While Microsoft has said it will stop using China-based tech support for the Defense Department, it declined to answer questions about what would replace it, including whether cloud support would come from engineers based outside the U.S. The company also declined to say whether it would continue to use digital escorts.

Microsoft confirmed to ProPublica this week that a similar escorting arrangement had been used in GCC — a dynamic that surprised some former government officials and cybersecurity experts. “In an increasingly complex digital world, consumers of cloud products deserve to know how their data is handled and by whom,” Booth said. “The cybersecurity industry depends on clarity.”

Microsoft said it disclosed details of the GCC escort arrangement in documentation submitted to the federal government as part of the FedRAMP cloud accreditation process. The company declined to provide the documents to ProPublica, citing the potential security risk of publicly disclosing them, and also declined to say whether the China-based location of its support personnel was specifically mentioned in them.

ProPublica contacted other major cloud services providers to the federal government to ask whether they use China-based support. A spokesperson for Amazon Web Services said in a statement that “AWS does not use personnel in China to support federal contracts.” A Google spokesperson said in a statement that “Google Public Sector does not have a Digital Escort program. Instead, its sensitive systems are supported by fully trained personnel who meet the U.S. government’s location, citizenship and security clearance requirements.” Oracle said it “does not use any Chinese support for U.S. federal customers.”

by Avi Asher-Schapiro and Jeff Ernsthausen

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On Monday, the Department of Defense announced that it had awarded a massive new contract to build the nation’s largest migrant detention camp on the Fort Bliss military base, a facility that will play a key role in the Trump administration’s deportation plans.

Unmentioned was that one of the subcontractors slated to work on the project, Disaster Management Group, is owned by Nathan Albers, who previously co-owned a company that pleaded guilty in 2019 to a scheme to hire undocumented workers and conceal them from immigration authorities. Albers is a big-time Republican donor who has spent time at Mar-a-Lago.

Two people with direct knowledge of the award and two familiar with the company told ProPublica that Disaster Management Group would help build the new facility, receiving a substantial chunk of the more than $1.2 billion the government has allocated for the project.

“The idea that you could use illegal labor and then sell services to ICE, the irony is thick,” said Scott Shuchart, a former official with the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during President Donald Trump’s first term and later under President Joe Biden, referring to the immigration case involving TentLogix, the company Albers once co-owned.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a spokesperson for Disaster Management said that Albers and Disaster Management had been dropped from the DHS’ investigation of TentLogix and exonerated. Upon learning of illegal actions by TentLogix’s co-founder, the spokesperson said, “Mr. Albers parted ways as a minority and non-operating owner of TentLogix.”

The spokesperson didn’t directly answer questions about Disaster Management’s role in the detention camp at Fort Bliss, saying only that the company “is proud to support projects of national importance for nearly 20 years.”

The White House didn’t answer questions about Disaster Management or Albers, referring ProPublica to the DOD and DHS, neither of which provided comment.

The new migrant detention camp near El Paso, Texas, is expected to hold up to 5,000 people. The prime contractor is Virginia-based Acquisition Logistics, and people with direct knowledge of the work at Fort Bliss told ProPublica that Amentum, a major engineering and technology services contractor, will be another subcontractor.

Neither Acquisition Logistics nor Amentum replied to questions from ProPublica about the project.

Disaster Management specializes in building temporary structures. Since 2020, it’s won over $500 million in government contracting work, mostly to construct lodgings for a U.S. program to resettle Afghan refugees.

Last year, the Department of Labor announced that it had found Disaster Management and subcontractors it worked with on the Afghan refugee contract violated federal labor laws, including those on minimum wages and overtime. The agency recovered nearly $16 million in pay for workers, and Disaster Management signed a compliance agreement with the agency designed to prevent further violations. The company didn’t respond to questions about the case.

Albers’ ties to TentLogix wouldn’t have excluded him or Disaster Management from other government contracting work, explained Scott Amey, the general counsel at the Project On Government Oversight.

TentLogix reported its criminal conviction in the federal contracting database, but Albers and his other businesses are considered separate legal entities. Companies awarded federal contracts are required to certify that they operate with a satisfactory record of business ethics, but “a lot of things are not required to be reported,” Amey said. “I don’t even think this would appear on the radar of a contracting officer.”

Still, there’s a web of connections between TentLogix and Disaster Management. Albers was one of TentLogix’s two directors when it pleaded guilty to violating immigration law. The other, Gary Hendry, co-founded Disaster Management with Albers, and the two were once brothers-in-law. When immigration authorities raided TentLogix in 2018, it shared an address with Disaster Management.

The raid followed a 2016 Homeland Security Investigations audit of Tentlogix, which found the company had 96 undocumented employees on its books. According to court records, Hendry then attempted to deceive investigators by creating a shell company and transferring the undocumented workers to that entity to conceal them from Homeland Security Investigations auditors. But the agency discovered the scheme and found undocumented workers at the company’s site when officials raided it in 2018. That year, Albers was listed as one of four officers on the company’s corporate filings.

In 2019, Hendry pleaded guilty to immigration charges alongside another company officer and was sentenced to a year in prison. (He served a little over three months, then was granted an early release because of the pandemic.) TentLogix, the corporate entity, also pleaded guilty and was ordered to forfeit over $3 million. Although Albers was not personally charged, he signed off on the company’s guilty plea, court records show. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2020.

Hendry did not respond to a request for comment.

Disaster Management’s federal contracting work has been lucrative for Albers. Last year, he purchased a $30 million house in Jupiter, Florida, that then ranked as the area’s most expensive home.

Albers also has recently become a large donor to Republican campaigns, to which he’s given more than $150,000 in the last year alone. He and his wife spent election night at Mar-a-Lago in 2024 and once co-chaired a charity fundraiser at the Trump National Golf Club with the president’s son, Eric, and his wife. They attended the “Crypto Ball,” a cryptocurrency event sponsored by Trump supporters in the digital currency industry; participants paid between $2,500 and $1 million for tickets. (The Trump Organization did not respond to questions from ProPublica.)

Kimberly Albers, center, posted photos on Instagram showing her and her husband, Nathan, right, at Mar-a-Lago on election night last year. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Since late last year, Disaster Management has spent $210,000 lobbying Congress and the administration on immigration-related issues, including “funding related to temporary facilities.” The company had no prior history of lobbying, according to federal disclosures.

Disaster Management’s share of the immigration detention contract for Fort Bliss could rank among the company’s largest contracts.

The Fort Bliss award comes as immigration arrests have soared in recent months and ICE is running low on space to hold everyone it has detained. In the past, those arrested by ICE would mostly be housed in brick-and-mortar detention facilities.

But in its urgency to increase deportations, the Trump administration has turned to contractors to build so-called soft-sided facilities — tents with rigid structures inside — that can be set up much more quickly.

The administration has eyed military bases as locations to set up these new detention camps. In April, ICE announced a $3.8 billion award to build such a facility to Deployed Resources, which had operated the lion’s share of the soft-sided facilities used in the past to temporarily house immigrants entering the country along the southern border.

ICE abruptly canceled that contract just days after it was announced without explanation. Now it appears Disaster Management could do much of that work. An industry insider estimated to ProPublica that Disaster Management’s slice of the $1.2 billion contract at Fort Bliss could be worth hundreds of millions for the company in the next year, though it’s not clear how the three contractors will split the work. Bloomberg first reported the total value of the Fort Bliss contract.

The facility at Fort Bliss is expected to be the first of many. Earlier in the month, Trump signed a spending bill that allocates $45 billion to build new migrant detention sites. Experts estimate this could roughly double the country’s capacity for immigration detention from around 50,000 people to more than 100,000.

Mica Rosenberg contributed reporting. Pratheek Rebala, Kirsten Berg and Mario Ariza contributed research.

by Sergio Hernández

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We updated our Supreme Connections database with newly released financial disclosures from eight Supreme Court justices on Friday, covering the 2024 calendar year.

Supreme Connections is our database that makes it easy for anyone to browse justices’ financial disclosures and to search for connections to people and companies mentioned within them.

This update includes disclosures filed in May and made public late last month. Justice Samuel Alito received a 90-day extension, and his disclosure is expected later this summer.

The latest update details millions in book income, almost 40 trips and one gift.

Among the disclosures:

• Justice Clarence Thomas’ 2024 disclosure listed no gifts or travel reimbursements. In 2023, a ProPublica investigation revealed that Thomas was a frequent recipient of luxury travel and gifts from billionaire benefactors — and that he often failed to disclose them.
• Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson reported a $2.07 million advance from Penguin Random House for her memoir, “Lovely One,” published in 2024. She also disclosed more than a dozen reimbursed trips to cities including Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Seattle, Chicago and Boston, mostly in connection with her book tour.
• Justice Sonia Sotomayor disclosed a $60,000 book advance and over $73,000 in additional royalty payments, also from Penguin Random House. She listed eight reimbursed trips from various universities, including international travel to Panama City, Zurich and Vienna, as well as a $1,437 gift from the Coterie Theatre in Kansas City, Mo.
• Justice Neil Gorsuch reported $250,000 in royalties from HarperCollins, plus income from teaching at George Mason University. He took at least six paid-for trips, including international travel to Germany and Portugal, and domestic stops in Los Angeles, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Williamsburg, Virginia.
• Justice Amy Coney Barrett received $31,815 in teaching income from the University of Notre Dame and reported three trips, including travel to Malibu, California, and two visits to Notre Dame.
• Justice Brett Kavanaugh reported $31,815 in teaching income from Notre Dame and listed two trips there.
• Justice Elena Kagan reported a trip to New York City for a speech at New York University.
• Chief Justice John Roberts disclosed two reimbursed trips: one to Galway, Ireland, and another to West Point, New York, for events hosted by New England Law and the United States Military Academy, respectively.

We’ve also added new ways to view the justices’ investment holdings. Previously, investments were sorted by value. Now, you can group investments by account to see how justices structure their holdings, or you can sort investments by the order in which they appear on the original disclosure forms, making it easier to cross-reference our data to the original filings.

Browse the database to learn more.

Do you have any tips on the Supreme Court? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at joshua.kaplan@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

by Zach Despart, The Texas Tribune

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.

One day in late May 2024, lawyer Zina Bash spent 6 1/2 hours working on a case against Facebook parent company Meta on behalf of the state of Texas. She reviewed draft legal filings. She participated in a court-ordered mediation session and then discussed the outcome with state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

In her previous job as senior counsel on Paxton’s leadership team, that labor would have cost Texas taxpayers $641.

But Bash had moved to private practice. Paxton hired her firm to work on the Meta case, allowing her to bill $3,780 an hour, so that day of work will cost taxpayers $24,570.

In the past five years, Paxton has grown increasingly reliant on pricey private lawyers to argue cases on behalf of the state, rather than the hundreds of attorneys who work within his office, an investigation by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica found. These are often attorneys, like Bash, with whom Paxton has personal or political ties.

In addition to Bash, one such contract went to Tony Buzbee, the trial lawyer who successfully defended Paxton during his 2023 impeachment trial on corruption charges. Three other contracts went to firms whose senior attorneys have donated to Paxton’s political campaigns. Despite these connections and what experts say are potential conflicts of interest, Paxton does not appear to have recused himself from the selection process. Although he is not required to by law, this raises a concern about appearing improper, experts who study attorneys general said.

Paxton appears to have also outsourced cases more frequently than his predecessors, available records show. And he’s inked the kind of contingent-fee contracts, in which firms receive a share of a settlement if they win, far more often than the attorneys general in other large states, including California, New York and Pennsylvania. Since 2015, the New York and California attorneys general have awarded zero contingent-fee contracts; Pennsylvania’s has signed one. During that period, Paxton’s office approved 13.

One of those was with Bash’s firm, Chicago-based Keller Postman, at the time known as Keller Lenkner, which she joined as partner in February 2021 after resigning from her job at the attorney general’s office. Paxton had signed a contract with the company two months earlier to investigate Google for deceptive business practices and violations of antitrust law. A little more than a year later, Bash’s firm won a state contract to work on the Meta litigation, alleging its facial recognition software violated Texans’ privacy. This time, Bash was the co-lead counsel.

Meta, which called the lawsuit meritless, settled the case for $1.4 billion in the summer of 2024. It was a windfall for Keller Postman. The firm billed $97 million, the largest fee charged by outside counsel under Paxton’s tenure. Bash’s work alone accounted for $3.6 million of that total.

A letter from Zina Bash to the Texas attorney general’s office informs the office that the state owes her firm, Keller Postman, almost $97 million for its work on the state’s case against Meta. (Obtained by The Texas Tribune. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Bash, a former U.S. Supreme Court clerk, said in a statement she is honored the attorney general’s office partnered with Keller Postman based on the firm’s “first-rate attorneys and extensive experience.”

“We have a record of taking on the most significant litigation in the country against the most powerful defendants in the world,” Bash said.

Keller Postman did not respond to a request for comment.

There is little to stop Paxton, or any other occupant of his office, from handing these contracts out. The attorney general can award them without seeking bids from other law firms or asking anyone’s permission.

Asked to provide competitive-bid documents for the contingent-fee contracts it has awarded, the attorney general’s office said it had none because state law “exempts the OAG from having to do all of the solicitation steps when hiring outside counsel.”

Given the high-profile nature of representing an attorney general and the potential for a big payday, many qualified firms would be eager to compete for this work, said Paul Nolette, a professor of political science at Marquette University who studies attorneys general.

“I’d be curious to know what the justification is for this not going on the open market,” Nolette said.

Paxton declined interview requests for this story. He has publicly defended the practice of hiring outside law firms, arguing that his office lacks the resources in-house to take on massive corporations like tech companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers.

“These parties have practically unlimited resources that would swamp most legal teams and delay effective enforcement,” Paxton told the Senate finance committee during a budget hearing in January.

A spokesperson for Paxton said in a statement that the outside lawyers hired by the office are some of the best in the nation. With the contingent-fee settlements to date, more than $2 billion, the state “could not have gotten a better return on its investment,” the statement said.

Chris Toth, former executive director of the National Association of Attorneys General, questioned why so much extra help is needed. Outside counsel is appropriate for small states, he said, that “only have so many lawyers with so many levels of expertise.”

The Texas attorney general’s office, one of the largest in the country, has more than 700 attorneys.

“Large states typically don’t hire outside counsel,” Toth said. “They should have the people in-house that should be able to go toe-to-toe with the best attorneys that are out there.”

A Troubled History

When a Texas attorney general previously made a practice of giving lucrative contracts to private counsel, it didn’t end well.

Dan Morales was the last Democrat to hold the office. He became embroiled in scandal after he used outside firms to help secure a $17 billion settlement in Big Tobacco litigation in 1998.

Republicans, including then-Gov. George W. Bush, blasted the $3.2 billion payout to the outside lawyers as exorbitant. Their attacks grew more intense when Morales sought to steer $500 million of that sum to a lawyer, a personal friend, who did very little work on the case. Morales pleaded guilty in 2003 to related federal corruption charges. He served 3 1/2 years behind bars.

John Cornyn, the Republican who succeeded Morales in 1999, criticized his predecessor’s handling of the tobacco case during his campaign for the office. In an interview for this story, Cornyn said he never hired outside counsel as attorney general because he focused on recruiting talented in-house lawyers that he felt could handle all the office’s cases.

Paxton is challenging Cornyn, now a four-term U.S. senator, in next year’s Republican primary.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the Republican who led the office after Cornyn, appears to have rarely used private lawyers. The attorney general’s office was able to produce records for only part of Abbott’s 12-year term because state law allows the files to be deleted after so many years. The office signed nine outside counsel contracts between 2010 and 2014, all pro bono or for hourly rates rather than contingency. Abbott did not respond to an interview request.

Paxton also seldom outsourced cases during his first five years in office. Through 2019, he awarded only nine outside counsel contracts, all pro bono or hourly rate. The most expensive contract capped fees at $500,000 — far less than $143 million the state paid to the two firms, including Bash’s, that handled the Meta case.

He changed course in 2020.

That summer, the attorney general’s office was gearing up to file its first case against Google. It related to allegations that the company monopolized the online advertising market, raising costs for advertisers, who increased the price of their products for average consumers as a result. Paxton initially had no plans to hire outside counsel for the litigation, three former deputy attorneys general told the Tribune and ProPublica.

But before the case was filed, the attorney general’s office was thrown into upheaval. At the end of September, seven of Paxton’s senior advisers reported him to the FBI, concerned his relationship with an Austin real estate investor had crossed the line into bribery and corruption. State House members would later impeach Paxton on counts related to the accusations; state senators eventually acquitted him. The federal criminal investigation into Paxton did not result in any criminal charges.

Over fall 2020, each of the lawyers in his office who had accused Paxton of wrongdoing quit or was fired. That included Darren McCarty, the head of civil litigation who was supposed to lead the Google litigation before he reported his boss to the FBI. He resigned on Oct. 26.

Less than two months later, on Dec. 16, Paxton signed contracts with The Lanier Law Firm and Keller Postman to investigate Google. They filed the lawsuit against the tech giant in federal court the same day.

Paxton replaced the lawyers who complained to the authorities. The staffing of the antitrust and consumer protection divisions, which would have handled these cases, remained constant at more than 80 employees in the following years. Yet Paxton continued to outsource lawsuits against large corporations to private lawyers.

Under Keller Postman’s contract, the firm would be paid only if it secured a settlement or won at trial. These contingent-fee cases have the potential to be far more profitable for the outside firms than those in which they bill at a regular hourly rate. In a successful case, the contracts say that firms are paid either a percentage of a settlement or the sum of hours billed by the firm times four, whichever is less.

In the Meta case, Keller Postman was entitled to 11% of the state’s settlement, a share that totaled $154 million. But because the firm’s fees and expenses totaled $97 million, it billed that sum.

In multiple legislative sessions, Paxton has testified that outsourcing was the only way his office could stand toe-to-toe with corporate titans.

If Paxton has a shortage of qualified in-house attorneys, Cornyn told the newsrooms, that’s because of the damage the whistleblower scandal did to the reputation of the attorney general’s office as a home for ambitious young lawyers.

“He’s a victim of his own malfeasance and mismanagement because people did not want to work for him anymore,” Cornyn said. “And if you run off your best lawyers because you engage in questionable ethical conduct, then you’re left with very few options. But this shouldn’t be a way to reward bad behavior.”

Former Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said he was surprised Paxton began hiring contingent-fee outside lawyers only after the scandal, since those contracts, with their potential for high profits, are tougher to ethically defend.

“I would have thought it would have been the other way around — that he got more careful after he got the whistle blown on him,” said Goddard, a Democrat. “But it looked like he got more reckless.”

Attorney General Ken Paxton, right, sits with lawyer Tony Buzbee on the ninth day of Paxton’s’s impeachment trial at the Texas Capitol in Austin on Sept. 15, 2023. (Julius Shieh/The Texas Tribune) Connections to Contract Recipients

Paxton’s style of procurement also benefited Buzbee, the man who successfully defended him during his impeachment trial, which stemmed from allegations the whistleblowers raised.

The attorney general chose to skip most of the proceedings, so for the 10 days of trial in the Texas Senate, his most vociferous advocate was the loquacious Buzbee. The pair sat side by side when the attorney general did attend.

A little more than a year later, Paxton hired The Buzbee Law Firm to pursue an antitrust suit against the investment firms BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard that accuses the companies of manipulating the coal market in a way that allegedly increased electricity prices for Texans. The firms deny wrongdoing.

Buzbee is a successful litigator and one of Houston’s most famous plaintiffs’ attorneys. Among other victories, he won settlements for victims of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and $73 million for Gulf of Mexico oil drillers in a 2001 antitrust case. But he’s known primarily for personal injury work, not antitrust litigation.

His firm, one of two hired for this latest attorney general’s office contingent-fee case, could collect 10% of any judgment or settlement. The case is in its early stages, though the Trump administration in May filed a brief in the case in support of Texas.

Buzbee downplayed the potential for a big payday in an email to the newsrooms and argued there is no buddy system at play, noting he believed other law firms also interviewed with Paxton’s office for the job. (The attorney general’s office did not confirm this.) He said his firm has to pay for significant expenses up front, without any guarantee of payment.

“The current arrangement may be a good deal for other lawyers, but in all candor, it’s not for me,” Buzbee said, adding that his normal hourly rate is $2,250. “Frankly, the only reason I’m even doing it is that I am proud to represent the state in such a landmark case.”

A page from an outside counsel contract, signed by both Buzbee and Paxton, shows The Buzbee Law Firm was hired to represent the state in litigation against BlackRock Inc., State Street Corp. and The Vanguard Group Inc. (Obtained by The Texas Tribune)

The connections between Paxton and the lawyers he has hired also extend to other firms. The attorney general’s office hired the firm Norton Rose Fulbright, one of the largest in the country with more than 3,000 lawyers on staff, to work on separate Google cases for the state, focusing on consumer protection allegations.

The attorney general’s office has awarded three contracts to the firm since 2022 for cases against the tech giant. Three times during that period, Joseph Graham, the firm’s lead counsel on the Google litigation, contributed $5,000 to Paxton’s campaign for attorney general. Twice, the donations came within 16 days of Graham signing one of the firm’s contracts with the attorney general.

The firm and its attorneys have contributed $39,500 to Paxton’s campaign since he took office. Neither Graham nor Norton Rose Fulbright responded to requests for comment.

Mark Lanier, founder of The Lanier Law Firm, which the state hired to work on a separate Google case, is a large donor to Texas elected officials. He has contributed $31,000 to Paxton’s campaigns since 2015. The largest contribution, for $25,000, came six months after Lanier signed his firm’s Google contract.

The Lanier contract is slightly different from the others the attorney general’s office awarded, in that the firm’s payment is partially based on a basic hourly rate but it could also be paid more if it wins the case, as in the contingent-fee model. Lanier noted in an emailed statement to the newsrooms that he took a reduced fee on this case and maintained that the attorney general’s office needed the kind of firepower his team can bring against an opponent like Google.

“The Texas AG office and its lawyers are good, but specialists are needed in a war like this. And it is a war,” Lanier wrote. “It would be irresponsible to pursue Google on behalf of Texans without bring[ing] the fullest resources you can.”

A competitive, open process for awarding contracts can be a strong defense against accusations of favoritism, Goddard said.

Unlike some other states, Texas does not require these contracts be put out to competitive bid.

Florida, for example, has one of the most robust laws in the country for procuring outside counsel, requiring the attorney general to explain in writing why a contingent-fee contract is necessary. It also mandates most contracts be put out to competitive bid and caps contingent-fee payouts at $50 million.

Texas has no such cap.

It also has virtually no method for state lawmakers to truly supervise this kind of practice. State law mandates only that the attorney general notify the Legislature when his office awards a contingent-fee contract, and certify that no in-house lawyers or private attorneys at an hourly rate can handle the task. Paxton has done so in boilerplate two-page letters that all say outside attorneys are needed because of the “scope and enormity” of the cases.

If lawmakers are concerned about these contracts, there is no mechanism for them to challenge Paxton’s determination that private counsel is needed.

Having lawyers bid for work would eliminate the appearance of impropriety that hangs over Paxton’s hires, Goddard said.

“A couple look like paybacks, which is extraordinarily improper, in other words to award a contract to someone who’s a major contributor or has recently left your office,” he said. “All of those would not be allowed in our state.”

Officials in other states have said they can still secure big wins for their constituents without relying on private firms.

California, for example, reached a $93 million settlement with Google in 2023 over claims that the company was clandestinely tracking users’ locations. A year earlier, in a case with similar allegations, Oregon and Nebraska led a 40-state coalition that won a $392 million settlement against the company. Texas was not part of this suit.

The latter agreement required Google to make new privacy disclosures to consumers, restricted its ability to share users’ location information with advertisers and required the company to prepare an annual report detailing how it was complying with the settlement terms.

Doug Peterson, the Republican attorney general of Nebraska at the time, said negotiating the financial penalty — Nebraska’s share was $11.9 million — was a secondary goal of the settlement.

“The most important thing we’re trying to do is to stop the bad behavior,” Peterson said.

McCarty, one of the attorney general employees who blew the whistle on Paxton, said private lawyers can be talented, but they have an incentive to fixate on the financial portion of settlements — which is tied to their compensation — rather than enforcement provisions that may best protect a state’s residents.

“Government enforcers, especially in the antitrust context, can focus on more effective solutions,” McCarty said.

Norton Rose Fulbright has yet to send its final billing records to the attorney general’s office but is likely to be rewarded handsomely. The firm helped the state secure a $1.38 billion settlement with Google in May. Google spokesperson José Castañeda said the Texas settlement, which has not been finalized, will contain no new restrictions on the company’s practices.

Under the terms of its contracts, the firm’s fees could exceed $350 million.

by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News

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On March 15, President Donald Trump’s administration sent more than 230 Venezuelan immigrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. Without providing evidence, Trump has called the men “some of the most violent savages on the face of the Earth.”

Last week, the men were released as suddenly as they’d been taken away. Now, the truth of all their stories — one by one — will begin to be told.

Starting here.

We’ve compiled a first-of-its-kind, case-by-case accounting of 238 Venezuelan men who were held in El Salvador.

ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of Venezuelan journalists from Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates) and Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters) spent the past four months reporting on the men’s lives and their backgrounds. We obtained government data that included whether they had been convicted of crimes in the U.S. or had pending charges. We found most were listed solely as having immigration violations. We also conducted interviews with relatives of more than 100 of the men; reviewed thousands of pages of court records from the U.S. and South America; and analyzed federal immigration court data.

Some of our findings:

• We obtained internal data showing that the Trump administration knew that at least 197 of the men had not been convicted of crimes in the U.S. — and that only six had been convicted of violent offenses. We identified fewer than a dozen additional convictions, both for crimes committed in the U.S. and abroad, that were not reflected in the government data.

• Nearly half of the men, or 118, were whisked out of the country while in the middle of their immigration cases, which should have protected them from deportation. Some were only days away from a final hearing.

• At least 166 of the men have tattoos. Interviews with families, immigration documents and court records show the government relied heavily on tattoos to tie the men to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — even though law enforcement experts told us that tattoos are not an indicator of gang membership.

• The men who were imprisoned range in age from 18 to 46. The impact of their monthslong incarceration extended beyond them. Their wives struggled to pay the rent. Relatives went without medical treatment. Their children wondered if they would see them again.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson did not respond to questions about the men in the database but said Trump “is committed to keeping his promises to the American people and removing dangerous criminal and terrorist illegals who pose a threat to the American public.” She referred questions to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not respond.

Read the men’s stories in our database.

Reporting by: Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune; Melisa Sánchez, ProPublica; Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica; Gabriel Sandoval, ProPublica; Jeff Ernsthausen, ProPublica; Ronna Risquez, Alianza Rebelde; Adrián González, Cazadores de Fake News; Adriana Núñez Moros, independent journalist; Carlos Centeno, independent journalist; Maryam Jameel, ProPublica; Gerardo del Valle, ProPublica; Cengiz Yar, ProPublica; Gabriel Pasquini, independent journalist; Kate Morrisey, independent journalist; Coral Murphy Marcos, independent journalist; Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune; Nicole Foy, ProPublica; Rafael Carranza, Arizona Luminaria; Lisa Seville, ProPublica

Design and development by: Ruth Talbot, ProPublica

Additional design and development by: Zisiga Mukulu, ProPublica

Additional data reporting by: Agnel Philip, ProPublica

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.

Louisiana passed a new police accountability law following allegations of civil rights violations against a sheriff’s deputy caught on video dragging a Black woman by her hair and slamming her head into the ground.

The woman, Shantel Arnold, sued the deputy and the sheriff, accusing the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office of conspiring to cover up the 2021 assault. The Sheriff’s Office agreed in March to pay Arnold $300,000 after three days of trial but before jury deliberations began, Arnold’s attorney said.

After the incident, ProPublica, in partnership with WRKF, WWNO and The Times-Picayune, published an investigation detailing the long history of excessive-force complaints against Jefferson Parish sheriff’s Deputy Julio Alvarado. Alvarado, a 20-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Office, was employed by the department as of March.

Arnold’s attorney, state Sen. Gary Carter, D-New Orleans, said he introduced the legislation after it emerged that Alvarado had failed to write a report about his encounter with Arnold despite his department’s policy that officers document each time they use force. Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joseph Lopinto said during his testimony in the March trial over Arnold’s lawsuit that Alvarado’s commanders instructed him against writing such a report after video of his actions spread across social media.

Arnold’s run-in with Alvarado, which was captured in a 14-second video, left the woman with bruises and scratches across her body, a busted lip and recurring headaches, according to her subsequent account to police investigators.

“Had it not been for a bystander capturing how this officer beat up Shantel Arnold, there would be no report, there would be no evidence of it, there would be no indication that it ever happened,” Carter said in a recent interview.

The new law, passed unanimously by state legislators and signed by Gov. Jeff Landry in June, will require all law enforcement agencies to report every time an officer’s use of force results in serious injury. It directs the Council on Peace Officer Standards and Training, which certifies police officers, to adopt a policy on mandatory use-of-force reporting by Jan. 1. Details of how the process will work have not been spelled out, nor has the penalty for failing to comply.

The bill was introduced as “Shantel Arnold’s Law,” but Carter said that name was removed because “Sheriff Lopinto got very upset about that, and that almost killed the bill.”

Neither the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office nor Alvarado’s attorney responded to requests for comment or an interview.

Alvarado came across Arnold in September 2021, when the officer responded to a 911 call about a fight among 25 people in Jefferson Parish. When the deputy pulled up in his patrol car, Alvarado saw Arnold, covered in dirt, walking down the street. Arnold told the deputy she was attacked by a group of boys who frequently bullied her. When Alvarado ordered her to stop, Arnold said she just wanted to go home and kept walking. That’s when the deputy jumped out of his vehicle, grabbed Arnold and slammed her into the sidewalk, according to several witnesses.

In a video taken by a bystander, Alvarado drags Arnold along the pavement, holds her by her braids and slams her repeatedly onto the pavement. Arnold was not charged with a crime and was later taken to a hospital. The Sheriff’s Office did not use body cameras at the time but has since begun using them.

The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office denied wrongdoing. A 2022 internal investigation by the Sheriff’s Office determined Alvarado’s actions against Arnold were “both reasonable and acceptable.” Alvarado received an “approximately” 40-hour suspension for failing to file a written report, Lopinto said in his March testimony.

Arnold alleged in her 2022 lawsuit that the Sheriff’s Office knew Alvarado had a propensity for violence against Black people and other minority groups yet continued to have him patrol such communities, putting the public in danger.

Lopinto attributed Alvarado’s history of complaints to his working a high-crime beat, according to a 2022 Times-Picayune interview. “It’s not like he’s getting a complaint every month,” Lopinto said. During that same interview, Lopinto dismissed Arnold’s account and accused her of “looking for a paycheck.”

Alvarado’s alleged misdeeds fit a broader pattern in the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, as the yearlong investigation into the Sheriff’s Office by ProPublica, WRKF and WWNO found. Between 2013 and 2021, deputies disproportionately discharged guns against Black people. Of the 40 people shot at by Jefferson Parish deputies during that time, 73% were Black, more than double their share of the population. Twelve of the 16 people who died after being shot or restrained by deputies during that time were Black.

Alvarado has been named in at least 10 federal civil rights lawsuits since 2007, all involving the use of excessive force; eight of the plaintiffs were members of minority groups.

The Sheriff’s Office settled three of those lawsuits. Arnold’s $300,000 payout is the third — and largest — settlement involving Alvarado. Five other lawsuits were closed in favor of the Sheriff’s Office, one was dismissed on a legal technicality and one was indefinitely delayed.

The Sheriff’s Office said in filings responding to the eight lawsuits that were not dismissed or delayed that officers’ actions were “reasonable under the circumstances” and characterized the claims as “frivolous.”

Prior to the 2021 incident involving Arnold, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office had settled a 2016 lawsuit accusing Alvarado of grabbing a 14-year-old Hispanic boy by the neck and slamming his head against the concrete as the child screamed, “Why are you doing this to me?” A woman had called the police complaining that the boy and a friend were wrestling in a parking lot. Alvarado then threatened to have the boy and his family deported, according to the suit. The Sheriff’s Office, which paid the boy’s family $15,000, said in court filings that Alvarado’s actions were “reasonable under the circumstances.”

In 2018, another lawsuit claimed Alvarado and three deputies beat Atdner Casco, a Honduran native, and stole more than $2,000 from him during a traffic stop the year before, then conspired to have him deported. Casco claimed Alvarado beat and choked him until he agreed to keep silent about being robbed. The Sheriff’s Office denied wrongdoing but settled that case in 2020 for $50,000.

Both incidents were cited in Arnold’s lawsuit as evidence that Alvarado has exhibited a pattern of behavior throughout his career that made him unfit for duty. Carter, Arnold’s attorney, raised yet another incident during the March trial in which sheriff detectives in December 2019 witnessed Alvarado patronizing a massage parlor that was being investigated for suspected prostitution. Alvarado denied he went there to “have a sexual act performed on him.” He was demoted from sergeant to deputy for “bringing the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office in disrepute” and for patronizing an “illegitimate business while on duty and neglecting your responsibilities to detectives under your command,” Carter said during the trial, citing an internal police report.

Carter said in an interview that Lopinto’s continued defense and employment of Alvarado represented a permissive attitude toward questionable behavior.

“He stood by” Alvarado, who “shows no contrition, no remorse,” Carter said.

by Perla Trevizo, Melissa Sanchez, Mica Rosenberg and Maryam Jameel

Leer en español.

The Trump administration sent more than 230 Venezuelan immigrants to CECOT, a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, and accused them of being members of the violent Tren de Aragua gang. For the past four months, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have been reporting on these men, their backgrounds and how they ended up in custody. We’ve written about how the administration knew before removing them that the vast majority had not been convicted of any crimes in the U.S., contradicting its claims that the men were “the worst of the worst,” and how, by and large, they were abiding by the immigration system and not absconding from authorities. Now that they’ve been returned to Venezuela, we’re continuing to report on who the men are and what they went through.

Do you have information about the men or about the operation in which they were deported that you can share? Fill out this form or contact us via Signal at 917-512-0201 or WhatsApp at 917-327-4868.

We appreciate you sharing your story and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering this information for the purposes of our reporting, and we will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.

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.

Ka’ila Farrell-Smith grew up in a community that was deeply involved in the fight for Indigenous rights, protesting broken treaties and other mistreatment of Native American people. Members of the movement, she said, understood that law enforcement agencies were surveilling their activities.

“I’ve been warned my entire life, ‘The FBI’s watching us,’” said Farrell-Smith, a member of the Klamath Tribes in Oregon.

Government records later confirmed wide-ranging FBI surveillance of the movement in the 1970s, and now the agency is focused on her and a new generation of Indigenous activists challenging development of a mine in northern Nevada. Farrell-Smith advises the group People of Red Mountain, which opposes a Canadian company’s efforts to tap what it says is one of the world’s largest lithium deposits.

Law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, have for years worked alongside private mine security to surveil the largely peaceful protesters who oppose the mine, called Thacker Pass, according to more than 2,000 pages of internal law enforcement communications reviewed by ProPublica. Officers and agents have tracked protesters’ social media, while the mining company has gathered video from a camera above a campsite protesters set up on public land near the mine. An FBI joint terrorism task force in Reno met in June 2022 “with a focus on Thacker Pass,” the records also show, and Lithium Americas — the main company behind the mine — hired a former FBI agent specializing in counterterrorism to develop its security plan.

“We’re out there doing ceremony and they’re surveilling us,” Farrell-Smith said.

“They treat us like we’re domestic terrorists,” added Chanda Callao, an organizer with People of Red Mountain.

All told, about 10 agencies have monitored the mine’s opponents. In addition to the FBI, those agencies include the Bureau of Land Management, Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Nevada State Police Highway Patrol, Winnemucca Police Department and Nevada Threat Analysis Center, the records show.

Andrew Ferguson, who studies surveillance technology at the American University Washington College of Law, called the scrutiny of Indigenous and environmental protesters as potential terrorists “chilling.”

“It obviously should be concerning to activists that anything they do in their local area might be seen in this broad-brush way of being a federal issue of terrorism or come under the observation of the FBI and all of the powers that come with it,” Ferguson said.

The FBI did not respond to requests for comment. The Bureau of Land Management, which coordinated much of the interagency response, declined to comment. Most of the law enforcement activity has focused on monitoring, and one person has been arrested to date as a result of the protests.

Mike Allen, who served as Humboldt County’s sheriff until January 2023, said his office’s role was simply to monitor the situation at Thacker Pass. “We would go up there and make periodic patrol activity,” he said.

Allen defended the joint terrorism task force, saying it was “where we would just all get together and discuss things.” (The FBI characterizes such task forces, which include various agencies working in an area, as the front line of defense against terrorism.)

In this May 2022 email, an FBI special agent invites Nevada’s Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office to a joint terrorism task force meeting focused on Thacker Pass. (Records obtained by Siskiyou Rising Tide and Information for Public Use. Highlighted and redacted by ProPublica.)

Tim Crowley, Lithium Americas’ vice president of government and external affairs, said in a statement: “Protestors have vandalized property, blocked roads and dangerously climbed on Lithium Americas’ equipment. In all those cases, Lithium Americas avoided engagement with the protestors and coordinated with the local authorities when necessary for the protection of everyone involved.”

Crowley noted that Lithium Americas has worked with Indigenous communities near the mine to study cultural artifacts and is offering to build projects worth millions of dollars for the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe, such as a community center and greenhouse.

But individuals and the community groups opposed to the mine don’t want money. They worry mining will pollute local sources of water in the nation’s driest state and harm culturally significant sites, including that of an 1865 massacre of Indigenous people.

“We understand how the land is sacred and how much culture and how much history is within the McDermitt Caldera,” Callao said of the basin where Thacker Pass is located. “We know how much it means to not only the next generation, but the next seven generations.”

First image: Construction at Lithium Americas’ Thacker Pass mine near Orovada, Nevada. Second image: Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, center, and Rep. Mark Amodei, left, tour the site of a future housing facility for miners in Winnemucca, Nevada. (David Calvert/The Nevada Independent) A Familiar Conflict

Indigenous groups are increasingly at odds with mining companies as climate change brings economies around the globe to an inflection point. Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are contributing to increasingly intense hurricanes, heat waves, wildfires and droughts. The solution — powering the electrical grid, vehicles and factories with cleaner energy sources — brings tradeoffs.

Massive amounts of metals are required to manufacture solar panels, wind turbines and other renewable energy infrastructure. Demand for lithium will skyrocket 350% by 2040, largely to be used in electric vehicles’ rechargeable batteries, according to the International Energy Agency.

The U.S. produces very little lithium — and China controls a majority of refining capacity worldwide — so development of Thacker Pass enjoys bipartisan support, receiving a key permit in President Donald Trump’s first administration and a $2.26 billion loan from President Joe Biden’s administration. (Development ran into issues in June, when a Nevada agency notified the company that it was using groundwater without the proper permit. Company representatives have said they are confident that they will resolve the matter.)

Many minerals needed to produce cleaner energy are found on Indigenous lands. For example, 85% of known global lithium reserves are on or near Indigenous people’s lands, according to a 2022 study by researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia, the University of the Free State in South Africa and elsewhere. The situation has put Indigenous communities at odds with mining industries as tribes are asked to sacrifice land and sovereignty to combat climate change.

Luke Danielson is a mining consultant and lawyer who for decades has researched how mining affects Indigenous lands. “What I fear would be we set loose a land rush where we’re trampling over all the Indigenous people and we’re taking all the public land and essentially privatizing it to mining companies,” he said.

If companies or governments attempt to force mining on such communities, it can slow development, noted Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh, a professor emeritus of Australia’s Griffith University and author of “Indigenous Peoples and Mining.”

“If there are bulldozers coming down the road and they are going to destroy an area that is central to people’s identity and their existence, they are going to fight,” he said. “The solution is you actually put First Peoples in a position of equal power so that they can negotiate outcomes that allow for timely, and indeed speedy, development.”

Environmental activists Will Falk, left, and Max Wilbert led early opposition to the mine, after which the Bureau of Land Management fined them tens of thousands of dollars for the cost of monitoring them. (David Calvert/The Nevada Independent) “We’re Not There for an Uprising”

Most of the documents tracing law enforcement’s involvement at Thacker Pass were obtained via public records requests by two advocacy groups focused on climate change and law enforcement, Siskiyou Rising Tide and Information for Public Use. They shared the records with ProPublica, which obtained additional documents through separate public records requests to law enforcement agencies.

Given the monitoring of mining’s opponents highlighted in the records, experts raised questions about authorities’ role: Is the government there to support industrial development, protect civil liberties or act as an unbiased arbiter? At Thacker Pass, the documents show, law enforcement has helped defend the mine.

Protests have at times escalated.

A small group of more radical environmentalists led by non-Indigenous activists propelled the early movement, setting up a campsite on public land near the proposed mine site in January 2021. In June 2022, a protester from France wrote on social media, “We’ll need all the AR15s We can get on the frontlines!” Tensions peaked in June 2023, when several protesters entered the worksite and blocked bulldozers, leading to one arrest.

That group — which calls itself Protect Thacker Pass — argued that its actions were justified. Will Falk, one of the group’s organizers, said that, in any confrontation, scrutiny unfairly falls on protesters instead of companies or the government. “As a culture, we’ve become so used to militarized police that we don’t understand that, out of the group of people gathered, the people who are actually violent are the ones with the guns,” he said.

Falk and another organizer were, as a result of their participation in protests, barred by court order from returning to Thacker Pass and disrupting construction, and the Bureau of Land Management fined them for alleged trespass on public lands during the protest. The agency charged them $49,877.71 for officers’ time and mileage to monitor them, according to agency records Falk shared with ProPublica. Falk said his group tried to work with the agency to obtain permits and is disputing the fine to a federal board of appeals.

“None of us are armed. We’re not there for an uprising,” said Gary McKinney, a spokesperson for People of Red Mountain, which parted ways with Falk’s group before the incident that led to an arrest.

McKinney, a member of the Duck Valley Shoshone-Paiute Tribe, leads annual prayer rides, journeying hundreds of miles across northern Nevada on horseback with other Native American activists to Thacker Pass. He described the rides, intended to raise awareness of mining’s impact on tribes and the environment, as a way to exercise rights under the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which protects tribes’ ability to practice traditional spirituality. Still, the group feels watched. A trail camera once mysteriously appeared near their campsite along the path of the prayer ride. They also crossed paths with security personnel.

Beyond the trail rides, the FBI tracks McKinney’s activity, the records show. The agency informed other law enforcement when he promoted a Fourth of July powwow and rodeo on his reservation, and it flagged a speech he delivered at a conference for mining-affected communities.

“We’re being watched, we’re being followed, we’re under the microscope,” McKinney said.

First image: Then-Humboldt County Sheriff Mike Allen questioned whether Raymond Mey, a Lithium Americas security contractor, had a state private investigator’s license in a June 2021 email. Second image: Mey pushed the Bureau of Land Management, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office and others for a coordinated law enforcement strategy to address protests at Thacker Pass in a June 2021 email. (Records obtained by Siskiyou Rising Tide and Information for Public Use. Highlighted, redacted and excerpted by ProPublica.)

The records show security personnel hired by Lithium Americas speaking as if an uprising could be imminent. “To date, there has been no violence or serious property destruction, however, the activities of these protest groups could change to a more aggressive actions and violent demeanor at any time,” Raymond Mey, who joined Lithium Americas’ security team for a time after a career with the FBI, wrote to law enforcement agencies in July 2022.

Mey also researched protesters’ activities, sharing his findings with law enforcement. In an April 2021 update, for example, he provided an aerial photograph of the protesters’ campsite. Law enforcement agencies worked with Mey, and he pushed to make that relationship closer, seeking “an integrated and coordinated law enforcement strategy to deal with the protestors at Thacker Pass.” The records indicate that the FBI was open to him attending its joint terrorism task force.

Mey is not licensed with the Nevada Private Investigators Licensing Board, which is required to perform such work in the state, according to agency records.

Mey said that he didn’t believe he needed a license because he wasn’t pursuing investigations. He said that his advice to the company was to avoid direct conflict with protesters and only call the police when necessary.

First image: Gary McKinney, spokesperson for People of Red Mountain. Second image: Members of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, People of Red Mountain, the Burns Paiute Tribe and others march in Reno, Nevada, to oppose the Thacker Pass mine. (David Calvert/The Nevada Independent) “We Shouldn’t Have to Accept the Burden of the Climate Crisis”

The battle over Thacker Pass reflects renewed strife between mining and drilling industries and Indigenous people. Two recent fights at the heart of this clash have intersected with Thacker Pass — one concerning an oil pipeline in the Great Plains and the other over a copper mine in the Southwest.

Beginning in 2016 and continuing for nearly a year, a large protest camp on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation sought to halt construction of the 1,172-mile Dakota Access Pipeline. Members of the Indigenous-led movement contended that it threatened the region’s water. The protest turned violent, leading to hundreds of arrests. Law enforcement eventually cleared the camp and the pipeline was completed.

Law enforcement agencies feared similar opposition at Thacker Pass, the records show.

In April 2021, Allen, then the local sheriff, and his staff met with Mark Pfeifle, president and CEO of the communications firm Off the Record Strategies, to discuss “lessons learned” from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Pfeifle, who helped the Bush administration build support for the second Gulf War, had more recently led a public relations blitz to discredit the Standing Rock protesters. This involved suggesting using a fake news crew and mocking up wanted posters for activists, according to emails obtained by news organizations. Pfeifle sent Allen presentations about the law enforcement response at Standing Rock, including one on “Examples of ‘Fake News’ and disinformation” from the protesters. “As always, we stand ready to help your office and your citizens,” he wrote to the sheriff.

The department appears not to have hired Pfeifle, although Allen directed his staff to also meet with Pfeifle’s colleague who worked on the Standing Rock response.

Around July 2021, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office held a meeting “to plan for the reality of a large-scale incident at Thacker Pass” similar to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Police referred to the ongoing protests on public land at Thacker Pass as an “occupation.”

Allen said he didn’t remember meeting with Pfeifle but said he wanted to be prepared for anything. “We didn’t know what to expect, but from what we understand, there were professional protestors up there and more were coming in,” he said.

Pfeifle didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Members of People of Red Mountain have also traveled to Arizona to object to the development of a controversial copper mine that’s planned in a national forest east of Phoenix. There, some members of the San Carlos Apache Tribe oppose the development because it would destroy an area they use for ceremonies. (In May, the Supreme Court handed down a decision allowing a land transfer, removing the final key obstacle to the mine.)

On these trips, Callao and others have frequently found a “notice of baggage inspection” from the Transportation Security Administration in their checked luggage. She provided ProPublica with photos of five such notices.

An agency spokesperson said that screening equipment does not know to whom the bag belongs when it triggers an alarm, and officers must search it.

To Callao, the surveillance, whether by luggage inspection, security camera or counterterrorism task force, adds to the weight placed on Indigenous communities amid the energy transition.

“We shouldn’t have to accept the burden of the climate crisis,” Callao said, “We should be able to protect our ancestral homelands.”

by Abe Streep

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.

Despite the Trump administration’s public pronouncements that it has hired enough wildland firefighters, documents obtained by ProPublica show a high vacancy rate, as well as internal concern among top officials as more than 1 million acres burn across 10 states.

Less than a month ago, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced that the Trump administration had done a historically good job preparing the nation for the summer fire season. “We are on track to meet and potentially exceed our firefighting hiring goals,” said Rollins, during an address to Western governors. Rollins oversees the wildland firefighting workforce at the U.S. Forest Service, a subagency of the Department of Agriculture. Rollins had noted in her remarks that the administration had exempted firefighters from a federal hiring freeze, and she claimed that the administration was outdoing its predecessor: “We have reached 96% of our hiring goal, far outpacing the rate of hiring and onboarding over the past three years and in the previous administration.”

Since then, the Forest Service’s assertions have gotten even more optimistic: The agency now claims it has reached 99% of its firefighting hiring goal.

But according to internal data obtained by ProPublica, Rollins’ characterization is dangerously misleading. She omitted a wave of resignations from the agency this spring and that many senior management positions remain vacant. Layoffs by the Department of Government Efficiency, voluntary deferred resignations and early retirements have severely hampered the wildland firefighting force. According to the internal national data, which has not been previously reported, more than 4,500 Forest Service firefighting jobs — as many as 27% — remained vacant as of July 17. A Forest Service employee who is familiar with the data said it comes from administrators who input staffing information into a computer tool used to create organization charts. The employee said that while the data could contain inaccuracies in certain forests, it broadly reflects the agency’s desired staffing levels. The employee said the data showing “active” unfilled positions was “current and up-to-date for last week.”

The Department of Agriculture disputes that assessment, but the figures are supported by anecdotal accounts from wildland firefighters in New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, California and Wyoming. According to a recent survey by Forest Service fire managers in California, 26% of engine captain positions and 42% of engineer positions were vacant. A veteran Forest Service firefighter in California characterized the Trump administration’s current estimate of the size of its firefighting workforce as “grossly inaccurate.”

Last week, Tom Schultz, the chief of the Forest Service, circulated a letter to high-ranking officials in the agency that underscored the dire moment. “As expected, the 2025 Fire Year is proving to be extremely challenging,” wrote Schultz in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by ProPublica. “We know the demand for resources outpaces their availability.” Schultz at once directed staff to employ full suppression — stomping out fires as quickly as possible, instead of letting them burn for the sake of landscape management — and acknowledged that the resources necessary to pursue such an aggressive strategy were lacking. All options were on the table, he wrote, including directing human-resources employees to fight fires and asking recently departed employees with firefighting qualifications to return to work.

When asked about the discrepancy between Schultz’s memo and Rollins’ public statements on firefighting staffing at the Forest Service, an agency spokesperson said that Schultz was referring to employees who can be called on to bolster the agency’s response “as fire activity increases,” while Rollins was pointing only to full-time firefighters. “The Forest Service remains fully equipped and operationally ready to protect people and communities from wildfire,” the spokesperson said, noting that “many individuals that have separated from the Agency either through retirements or voluntary resignations still possess active wildland fire qualifications and are making themselves available to support fire response operations.”

The federal government employs thousands of wildland firefighters, but the precise number is opaque. Throughout the Department of the Interior, which is overseen by Secretary Doug Burgum, there are about 5,800 wildland firefighters in four agencies that have been impacted by cuts. An employee at a national park in Colorado that is threatened by wildfire said that they were “severely understaffed during the Biden administration on most fronts, and now it’s so much worse than it’s ever been.”

But the Forest Service is by far the largest employer of wildland firefighters, and it has long used gymnastic arithmetic to paint an optimistic picture of its staffing. Last summer, ProPublica reported that the Forest Service under President Joe Biden had overstated its capacity. Robert Kuhn, a former Forest Service official who between 2009 and 2011 co-authored an assessment of the agency’s personnel needs, recently said that the practice of selectively counting firefighters dates back years. “What the public needs to understand is, that is just a very small number of what is needed every summer,” he said. Riva Duncan, a retired Forest Service fire chief and the vice president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a labor advocacy organization, said staffing is a constant frustration for managers on the ground. “We have engines that are completely unstaffed,” said Duncan, who remains active in wildland firefighting, having worked in temporary roles this summer. “We have vacant positions in management.”

That said, there is a difference this fire season from years past. Officials in the previous administration publicly acknowledged the danger presented by an exodus of experienced wildland firefighters. The Trump administration has taken a different approach — claiming to have solved the problem while simultaneously exacerbating it. When asked about the staffing cuts, Anna Kelly, a White House deputy press secretary, wrote, “President Trump is proud of all Secretary Rollins has accomplished to improve forest management, including by ending the 2001 Roadless Rule for stronger fire prevention, and Secretary Burgum’s great work protecting our nation’s treasured public lands.”

In March, Congress finally codified a permanent raise for federal wildland firefighters via the appropriations process, a change that advocates have sought for years. In her remarks in June, Rollins credited the president: “Out of gratitude for the selfless service of our Forest Service firefighters, President Trump permanently increased the pay for our federal wildland firefighters.”

But in February, the Trump administration laid off about 700 employees who support wildland fire operations, from human-resource managers to ecologists and trail-crew workers. Those employees possess what are known as red cards — certifications that allow them to work on fire crews. Many were subsequently rehired, but the administration then pushed Forest Service employees to accept deferred resignations and early retirements.

Last month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior to combine their firefighting forces. For the moment, it’s unknown what form that restructuring will take, but many Forest Service firefighters are anticipating further staffing cuts. A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior wrote, “We are taking steps to unify federal wildfire programs to streamline bureaucracy.”

Administration officials have maintained that employees primarily assigned to wildland fire were exempted from the resignation offers this spring. But according to another internal data set obtained by ProPublica, of the more than 4,000 Forest Service employees who accepted deferred resignations and early retirements, approximately 1,600 had red cards. (A spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture wrote that the actual number was 1,400, adding that 85 of them “have decided to return for the season.”)

Even those figures don’t account for all the lost institutional knowledge. The departures included meteorologists who provided long-range forecasts, allowing fire managers to decide where to deploy crews. One of the meteorologists who left was Charles Maxwell, who had for more than 20 years interpreted weather models predicting summer monsoons at the Southwest Coordination Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, an interagency office. The thunderstorms can fuel wildfire, with lightning and wind, and extinguish them, with great rains. Lately, according to Maxwell, the monsoons have become less and less reliable, and understanding their nuances can be challenging. Maxwell said that he’d already been planning to retire next year. But he also said he “was concerned with the degree of chaos, the potential degradation of services and what would happen to my job.”

Maxwell noted that his work had been covered by knowledgeable fill-ins from out of state. But another firefighter who worked on blazes in New Mexico said that Maxwell’s understanding of the monsoon had been missed. A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior, which oversees the interagency office where Maxwell worked, wrote, “We do not comment on personnel matters.”

The monsoon season is now here and has brought deadly flash flooding along old burn scars in Ruidoso, New Mexico, while distributing sporadic rain in the state’s Gila National Forest.

It is shaping up to be a severe fire season. On Monday, federal firefighters reported 86 new fires across the West; by Tuesday, there were 105 more. And there’s already been some criticism of the federal response. Arizona’s governor and members of Congress have called for an investigation into the Park Service’s handling of a blaze this month that leveled a historic lodge on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim. Last month, Rollins acknowledged, “Fires don’t know Republican or Democrat, or which side of the aisle you are on.” This much, at least, is true.

Ellis Simani contributed data analysis.

by Heather Vogell and Topher Sanders

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The Trump administration is considering slashing rules meant to protect the environment and the public during commercial rocket launches, changes that companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX have long sought.

A draft executive order being circulated among federal agencies, and viewed by ProPublica, directs Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy to “use all available authorities to eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for launch licenses. It could also, in time, require states to allow more launches or even more launch sites — known as spaceports — along their coastlines.

The order is a step toward the rollback of federal oversight that Musk, who has fought bitterly with the Federal Aviation Administration over his space operations, and others have pushed for. Commercial rocket launches have grown exponentially more frequent in recent years.

Critics warn such a move could have dangerous consequences.

“It would not be reasonable for them to be rescinding regulations that are there to protect the public interest, and the public, from harm,” said Jared Margolis, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit that works to protect animals and the environment. “And that’s my fear here: Are they going to change things in a way that puts people at risk, that puts habitats and wildlife at risk?”

The White House did not answer questions about the draft order.

“The Trump administration is committed to cementing America’s dominance in space without compromising public safety or national security,” said White House spokesperson Kush Desai. “Unless announced by President Trump, however, discussion about any potential policy changes should be deemed speculation.”

The order would give Trump even more direct control over the space industry’s chief regulator by turning the civil servant position leading the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation into a political appointment. The last head of the office and two other top officials recently took voluntary separation offers.

The order would also create a new adviser to the transportation secretary to shepherd in deregulation of the space industry.

The draft order comes as SpaceX is ramping up its ambitious project to build a reusable deep-space rocket to carry people to Earth’s orbit, the moon and eventually Mars. The rocket, called Starship, is the largest, most powerful ever built, standing 403 feet tall with its booster. The company has hit some milestones but has also been beset by problems, as three of the rockets launched from Texas this year have exploded — disrupting air traffic and raining debris on beaches and roads in the Caribbean and Gulf waters.

The draft order also seeks to restrict the authority of state coastal officials who have challenged commercial launch companies like SpaceX, documents show. It could lead to federal officials interfering with state efforts to enforce their environmental rules when they conflict with the construction or operation of spaceports.

Derek Brockbank, executive director for the Coastal States Organization, said the proposed executive order could ultimately force state commissions to prioritize spaceport infrastructure over other land uses, such as renewable energy, waterfront development or coastal restoration, along the coastline. His nonprofit represents 34 coastal states and territories.

“It’s concerning that it could potentially undermine the rights of a state to determine how it wants its coast used, which was the very fundamental premise of the congressionally authorized Coastal Zone Management Act,” he said. “We shouldn’t see any president, no matter what their party is, coming in and saying, ‘This is what a state should prioritize or should do.’”

SpaceX is already suing the California Coastal Commission, accusing the agency of political bias and interference with the company’s efforts to increase the number of Falcon 9 rocket launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The reusable Falcon 9 is SpaceX’s workhorse rocket, ferrying satellites to orbit and astronauts to the International Space Station.

The changes outlined in the order would greatly benefit SpaceX, which launches far more rockets into space than any other company in the U.S. But it would also help rivals such as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and California-based Rocket Lab. The companies have been pushing to pare down oversight for years, warning that the U.S. is racing with China to return to the moon — in hopes of mining resources like water and rare earth metals and using it as a stepping stone to Mars — and could lose if regulations don’t allow U.S. companies to move faster, said Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Space Federation, a trade group that represents eight launch companies, including SpaceX, Blue Origin and Rocket Lab.

“It sounds like they’ve been listening to industry, because all of those things are things that we’ve been advocating for strongly,” Cavossa said when asked about the contents of the draft order.

Cavossa said he sees “some sort of environmental review process” continuing to take place. “What we’re talking about doing is right-sizing it,” he said.

He added, “We can’t handle a yearlong delay for launch licenses.”

The former head of the FAA’s commercial space office said at a Congressional hearing last September that the office took an average of 151 days to issue a new license during the previous 11 years.

Commercial space launches have boomed in recent years — from 26 in 2019 to 157 last year. With more than 500 total launches, mostly from Texas, Florida and California, SpaceX has been responsible for the lion’s share, according to FAA data.

But the company has tangled with the FAA, which last year proposed fining it $633,000 for violations related to two of its launches. The FAA did not answer a question last week about the status of the proposed fine.

SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab and the FAA did not respond to requests for comment.

Currently, the FAA’s environmental reviews look at 14 types of potential impacts that include air and water quality, noise pollution and land use, and provide details about the launches that are not otherwise available. They have at times drawn big responses from the public.

When SpaceX sought to increase its Starship launches in Texas from five to 25 a year, residents and government agencies submitted thousands of comments. Most of the nearly 11,400 publicly posted comments opposed the increase, a ProPublica analysis found. The FAA approved the increase anyway earlier this year. After conducting an environmental assessment for the May launch of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 9 from Texas, the FAA released documents that revealed as many as 175 airline flights could be disrupted and Turks and Caicos’ Providenciales International Airport would need to close during the launch.

In addition to seeking to cut short environmental reviews, the executive order would open the door for the federal government to rescind sections of the federal rule that seeks to keep the public safe during launches and reentries.

The rule, referred to as Part 450, was approved during Trump’s first term and aimed to streamline commercial space regulations and speed approvals of launches. But the rule soon fell out of favor with launch companies, which said the FAA didn’t provide enough guidance on how to comply and was taking too long to review applications.

Musk helped lead the charge. Last September, he told attendees at a conference in Los Angeles, “It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than paper can move from one desk to another.” He called for the resignation of the head of the FAA, who stepped down as Trump took office.

Other operators have expressed similar frustration, and some members of Congress have signaled support for an overhaul. In February, Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., signed a letter asking the Government Accountability Office to review the process for approving commercial launches and reentries.

In their letter, Babin and Lofgren wrote they wanted to understand whether the rules are “effectively and efficiently accommodating United States commercial launch and reentry operations, especially as the cadence and technological diversity of such operations continues to increase.

The draft executive order directs the secretary of transportation to “reevaluate, amend, or rescind” sections of Part 450 to “enable a diversified set of operators to achieve an increase in commercial space launch cadence and novel space activities by an order of magnitude by 2030.”

The order also directs the Department of Commerce to streamline regulation of novel space activity, which experts say could include things like mining or making repairs in space, that doesn’t fall under other regulations.

Brandon Roberts and Pratheek Rebala contributed data analysis.

by Lexi Churchill and Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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.

Sixteen months had passed since Hurricane Harvey tore through the Texas coast in August 2017, killing more than 80 people and flattening entire neighborhoods. And when Texas lawmakers gathered in Austin for their biennial session, the scale of the storm’s destruction was hard to ignore.

Legislators responded by greenlighting a yearslong statewide initiative to evaluate flood risks and improve preparedness for increasingly frequent and deadly storms. “If we get our planning right on the front end and prevent more damage on the front end, then we have less on the back end,” Charles Perry, a Republican senator from Lubbock who chairs a committee overseeing environmental issues, said at the time.

In the years that followed, hundreds of local officials and volunteers canvassed communities across Texas, mapping out vulnerabilities. The result of their work came in 2024 with the release of Texas’ first-ever state flood plan.

Their findings identified nearly $55 billion in proposed projects and outlined 15 key recommendations, including nine suggestions for legislation. Several were aimed at aiding rural communities like Kerr County, where flash flooding over the Fourth of July weekend killed more than 100 people. Three are still missing.

But this year, lawmakers largely ignored those recommendations.

Instead, the legislative session that ended June 2 was dominated by high-profile battles over school vouchers and lawmakers’ decision to spend $51 billion to maintain and provide new property tax cuts, an amount nearly equal to the funding identified by the Texas Water Development Board, a state agency that has historically overseen water supply and conservation efforts.

Although it had been only seven years since Hurricane Harvey, legislators now prioritized the state’s water and drought crisis over flooding needs.

Legislators allocated more than $1.6 billion in new revenue for water infrastructure projects, only some of which would go toward flood mitigation. They also passed a bill that will ask voters in November to decide whether to approve $1 billion annually over the next two decades that would prioritize water and wastewater over flood mitigation projects. At that pace, water experts said that it could take decades before existing mitigation needs are addressed — even without further floods.

Even if they had been approved by lawmakers this year, many of the plan’s recommendations would not have been implemented before the July 4 disaster. But a ProPublica and Texas Tribune analysis of legislative proposals, along with interviews with lawmakers and flood experts, found that the Legislature has repeatedly failed to enact key measures that would help communities prepare for frequent flooding.

Such inaction often hits rural and economically disadvantaged communities hardest because they lack the tax base to fund major flood prevention projects and often cannot afford to produce the data they need to qualify for state and federal grants, environmental experts and lawmakers said.

Over the years, legislators have declined to pass at least three bills that would create siren or alert systems, tools experts say can be especially helpful in rural communities that lack reliable internet and cell service. A 2019 state-commissioned report estimated flood prevention needs at over $30 billion. Since then, lawmakers have allocated just $1.4 billion. And they ignored the key recommendations from the state’s 2024 flood plan that are meant to help rural areas like Kerr County, which is dubbed “Flash Flood Alley” due to its geography.

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, left, and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, right, look on as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signs an emergency proclamation during a press conference in Kerrville. (Ronaldo Bolaños/The Texas Tribune)

Spokespeople for Gov. Greg Abbott and House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, did not answer questions about why the plan’s recommendations were overlooked but defended the Legislature’s investment in flood mitigation as significant. They pointed to millions more spent on other prevention efforts, including flood control dam construction and maintenance, regional flood projects, and increased floodplain disclosures and drainage requirements for border counties. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick did not respond to questions.

This week, the Legislature will convene for a special session that Abbott called to address a range of priorities, including flood warning systems, natural disaster preparation and relief funding. Patrick promised that the state would purchase warning sirens for counties in flash flood zones. Similar efforts, however, have previously been rejected by the Legislature. Alongside Burrows, Patrick also announced the formation of committees on disaster preparedness and flooding and called the move “just the beginning of the Legislature looking at every aspect of this tragic event.” Burrows said the House is “ready to better fortify our state against future disasters.”

But Rep. Ana-María Rodríguez Ramos, a Democrat from Richardson, near Dallas, said state lawmakers have brushed off dire flood prevention needs for decades.

“The manual was there, and we ignored it, and we've continued to ignore these recommendations,” said Rodríguez Ramos, who has served on the House Natural Resources Committee overseeing water issues for three sessions. “It’s performative to say we’re trying to do something knowing well we’re not doing enough.”

One recommendation from the 2024 flood plan would have cost the state nothing to enact. It called for granting counties the authority to levy drainage fees, including in unincorporated areas, that could fund local flood projects. Only about 150 of 1,450 Texas cities and counties have dedicated drainage fees, according to a study cited in the state assessment.

Kerr, a conservative county of 53,000 people, has struggled to gain support for projects that would raise taxes. About a week after the flooding, some residents protested when county commissioners discussed a property tax increase to help cover the costs of recovery efforts.

The inability to raise such fees is one of the biggest impediments for local governments seeking to fund flood mitigation projects, said Robert R. Puente, a Democrat and former state representative who once chaired the state committee responsible for water issues. Lawmakers’ resistance to such efforts is rooted in fiscal conservatism, said Puente, who now heads the San Antonio Water System.

“It’s mostly because of a philosophy that the leadership in Austin has right now, that under no circumstances are we going to raise taxes, and under most circumstances we’re not even going to allow local governments to have control over how they raise taxes or implement fees,” he said.

Another one of the flood plan’s recommendations called for lawmakers to allocate money for a technical assistance program to help underresourced and rural governments better manage flood prone areas, which requires implementing a slew of standards to ensure safe development in those hazardous zones. Doing this work requires local officials to collect accurate mapping that shows the risk of flooding. Passing this measure could have helped counties like Kerr with that kind of data collection, which the plan recognized is especially challenging for rural and economically disadvantaged communities.

Insufficient information impacts Texas’s ability to fully understand flood risks statewide. The water board’s plan, for example, includes roughly 600 infrastructure projects across Texas in need of completion. But its report acknowledged that antiquated or missing data meant another 3,100 assessments would be required to know whether additional projects are needed.

In the Guadalupe River region, which includes Kerr County, 65% of areas lacked adequate flood mapping. Kerrville, the county seat, was listed among the areas identified as having the “greatest known flood risks and mitigation needs.” Yet of the 19 flood needs specific to the city and county, only three were included in the state plan’s list of 600. They included requests to install backup generators in critical facilities and repair low-water crossings, which are shallow points in streets where rainwater can pool to dangerous levels.

At least 16 other priorities, including the county’s desire for an early warning flood system and potential dam or drainage system repairs, required a follow-up evaluation, according to the state plan. County officials tried to obtain grants for the early warning systems for years, to no avail.

Trees uprooted by floodwaters lie across a field in Hunt in Kerr Country on July 5. (Brenda Bazán for The Texas Tribune)

Gonzales County, an agriculture-rich area of 20,000 people along the Guadalupe River, is among the rural communities struggling to obtain funding, said emergency management director Jimmy Harless, who is also the county’s fire marshal. The county is in desperate need of a siren system and additional gauges to measure the river’s potentially dangerous flood levels, Harless said, but doesn’t have the resources, personnel or expertise to apply for the “burdensome” state grant process.

“It is extremely frustrating for me to know that there’s money there and there’s people that care, but our state agency has become so bureaucratic that it’s just not feasible for us,” Harless said. “Our folks’ lives are more important than what some bureaucrat wants us to do.”

For years, Texas leaders have focused more on cleaning up after disasters than on preparing for them, said Jim Blackburn, a professor at Rice University specializing in environmental law and flooding issues.

“It’s no secret that the Guadalupe is prone to flash flooding. That’s been known for decades,” Blackburn said. “The state has been very negligent about kind of preparing us for, frankly, the worst storms of the future that we are seeing today because of climate change, and what’s changing is that the risks are just greater today and will be even greater tomorrow, because our storms are getting worse and worse.”

At a news conference this month, Abbott said state committees would investigate “ways to address this,” though he declined to offer specifics. When pressed by a reporter about where the blame for the lack of preparedness should fall, Abbott responded that it was “the word choice of losers.”

It shouldn’t have taken the Hill Country flooding for a special session addressing emergency systems and funding needs, said Usman Mahmood, a policy analyst at Bayou City Waterkeeper, a Houston nonprofit that advocates for flood protection measures.

“The worst part pretty much already happened, which is the flooding and the loss of life,” he said. “Now it’s a reaction to that.”

Misty Harris contributed research.

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.

Microsoft says it has stopped using China-based engineers to support Defense Department cloud computing systems after ProPublica revealed the practice in an investigation this week.

“In response to concerns raised earlier this week about US-supervised foreign engineers, Microsoft has made changes to our support for US Government customers to assure that no China-based engineering teams are providing technical assistance for DoD Government cloud and related services,” the company’s chief communications officer, Frank Shaw, announced on X Friday afternoon.

Microsoft’s announcement came hours after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said his agency would look into Microsoft’s use of foreign-based engineers to help maintain the highly sensitive cloud systems.

“Foreign engineers — from any country, including of course China — should NEVER be allowed to maintain or access DoD systems,” Hegseth wrote in a post on X Friday.

In its investigation, ProPublica detailed how Microsoft uses engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking or spying from its leading cyber adversary. The arrangement, which was critical to Microsoft winning the federal government’s cloud computing business a decade ago, relies on U.S. citizens with security clearances to oversee the work and serve as a barrier against espionage and sabotage.

But these workers, known as “digital escorts,” often lack the technical expertise to police the work of foreign engineers with far more advanced skills, ProPublica found.

Earlier Friday, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence, cited ProPublica in a letter to Hegseth asking for details about which DOD contractors use Chinese personnel to maintain the department’s information and computing systems.

China poses “one of the most aggressive and dangerous threats to the United States, as evidenced by its infiltrations of our critical infrastructure, telecommunications networks and supply chains,” Cotton wrote in the letter, which he posted on X. “DOD must guard against all potential threats within its supply chain, including those from subcontractors.”

Since 2011, cloud computing companies like Microsoft that wanted to sell their services to the U.S. government had to establish how they would ensure that personnel working with federal data would have the requisite “access authorizations” and background screenings. Additionally, the Defense Department requires that people handling sensitive data be U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

This presented an issue for Microsoft, which relies on a vast global workforce with significant operations in India, China and the European Union.

So the tech giant enlisted staffing companies to hire U.S.-based digital escorts, who had security clearances that authorized them to access sensitive information, to take direction from the overseas experts. An engineer might briefly describe the job to be completed — for instance, updating a firewall, installing an update to fix a bug or reviewing logs to troubleshoot a problem. Then, with little review, an escort would copy and paste the engineer’s commands into the federal cloud.

“We’re trusting that what they’re doing isn’t malicious, but we really can’t tell,” one escort told ProPublica.

In an earlier statement in response to ProPublica’s investigation, Microsoft said that its personnel and contractors operate in a manner “consistent with US Government requirements and processes.”

The company’s global workers “have no direct access to customer data or customer systems,” the statement said. Escorts “with the appropriate clearances and training provide direct support. These personnel are provided specific training on protecting sensitive data, preventing harm, and use of the specific commands/controls within the environment.”

In addition, Microsoft said it has an internal review process known as “Lockbox” to “make sure the request is deemed safe or has any cause for concern.”

Insight Global — a contractor that provides digital escorts to Microsoft — said it “evaluates the technical capabilities of each resource throughout the interview process to ensure they possess the technical skills required” for the job and provides training.

Doris Burke contributed research.

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.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is preparing to shut down seven major investigations and cases concerning alleged housing discrimination and segregation, including some where the agency already found civil rights violations, according to HUD records obtained by ProPublica.

The high-profile cases involve allegations that state and local governments across the South and Midwest illegally discriminated against people of color by placing industrial plants or low-income housing in their neighborhoods, and by steering similar facilities away from white neighborhoods, among other allegations. HUD has been pursuing these cases — which range from instances where the agency has issued a formal charge of discrimination to newer investigations — for as many as seven years. In three of them, HUD officials had determined that the defendants had violated the Fair Housing Act or related civil rights laws. A HUD staffer familiar with the other four investigations believes civil rights violations occurred in each, the official told ProPublica. Under President Donald Trump, the agency now plans to abruptly end all of them, regardless of prior findings of wrongdoing.

Four HUD officials said they could recall no precedent for the plan, which they said signals an acceleration of the administration’s retreat from fair housing enforcement. “No administration previously has so aggressively rolled back the basic protections that help people who are being harmed in their community,” one of the officials said. “The civil rights protections that HUD enforces are intended to protect the most vulnerable people in society.”

In the short term, closing the cases would allow the local governments in question to continue allegedly mistreating minority communities, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. In the long term, they said, it could embolden local politicians and developers elsewhere to take actions that entrench segregation, without fear of punishment from the federal government.

HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett declined to answer questions, saying “HUD does not comment on active Fair Housing matters or individual personnel.”

Three of the cases involve accusations that local governments clustered polluting industrial facilities in minority neighborhoods.

One concerned a protracted dispute over a scrap metal shredding plant in Chicago. The facility had operated for years in the largely white neighborhood of Lincoln Park. But residents complained ceaselessly of the fumes, debris, noise and, occasionally, smoke emanating from the plant. So the city allegedly pressured the recycling company to close the old facility and open a new one in a minority neighborhood in southeast Chicago. In 2022, HUD found that “relocating the Facility to the Southeast Site will bring environmental benefits to a neighborhood that is 80% White and environmental harms to a neighborhood that is 83% Black and Hispanic.” Chicago’s mayor called allegations of discrimination “preposterous,” then settled the case and agreed to reforms in 2023. (The new plant has not opened; its owner has sued the city.)

In another case, a predominantly white Michigan township allowed an asphalt plant to open on its outskirts, away from its population centers but near subsidized housing complexes in the neighboring poor, mostly Black city of Flint. The township did not respond to a ProPublica inquiry about the case.

Still another case involved a plan pushed by the city of Corpus Christi, Texas, to build a water desalination plant in a historically Black neighborhood already fringed by oil refineries and other industrial facilities. (Rates of cancer and birth defects in the area are disproportionately high, and average life expectancy is 15 years lower than elsewhere in the city, researchers found.) The city denied the allegations. Construction of the plant is expected to conclude in 2028.

Three other cases involve allegations of discrimination in municipal land use decisions. In Memphis, Tennessee, the city and its utility allegedly coerced residents of a poor Black neighborhood to sell their homes so that it could build a new facility there. In Cincinnati, the city has allegedly concentrated low-income housing in poor Black neighborhoods and kept it out of white neighborhoods. And in Chicago, the city has given local politicians veto power over development proposals in their districts, resulting in little new affordable housing in white neighborhoods. (Memphis, its utility and Chicago have disputed the allegations; Cincinnati declined to comment on them.)

The last case involved a Texas state agency allegedly diverting $1 billion in disaster mitigation money away from Houston and other communities of color hit hard by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and toward more rural, white communities less damaged by the storm. The agency has disputed the allegations.

All of the investigations and cases are now slated to be closed. HUD is also planning to stop enforcing the settlement it reached in the Chicago recycling case, the records show.

The move to drop the cases is being directed by Brian Hawkins, a recent Trump administration hire at HUD who serves as a senior adviser in the Fair Housing Office, two agency officials said. Hawkins has no law degree or prior experience in housing, according to his LinkedIn profile. But this month, he circulated a list within HUD of the seven cases that indicated the agency’s plans for them. In the cases that involve Cincinnati, Corpus Christi, Flint and Houston, the agency would “find no cause on [the] merits,” the list reads. In the two Chicago cases and the one involving Memphis, HUD would rescind letters documenting the agency’s prior findings. Hawkins did not respond to a request for comment.

The list does not offer a legal justification for dropping the cases. But Hawkins also circulated a memo that indicates the reasoning behind dropping one — the Chicago recycling case. The memo cites an executive order issued by Trump in April eliminating federal enforcement of “disparate-impact liability,” the doctrine that seemingly neutral policies or practices could have a discriminatory effect. Hawkins’ memo stated that “the Department will not interpret environmental impacts as violations of fair housing law absent a showing of intentional discrimination.” Four HUD officials said such a position would be a stark departure from prior department policy and relevant case law.

The reversal on the Chicago recycling case also follows behind-the-scenes pressure on HUD from Sen. Jim Banks. In June, Banks, a Republican from Indiana, wrote a letter to HUD Secretary Scott Turner and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin in which he criticized the administration of President Joe Biden’s handling of the case as “brazen overreach.” Noting that the Chicago plant would supply metal to Indiana steel mills, Banks asked the Trump appointees to “take any actions you deem necessary to remedy the situation.” Banks did not respond to a request for comment.

That case and others among the seven had also received scrutiny from other federal and state agencies, including the EPA and the U.S. Department of Justice. The EPA declined to say whether it was still pursuing any of the cases. The DOJ did not respond to the same inquiry.

The case closures at HUD would be the latest stage in a broad rollback of fair housing enforcement under the Trump administration, which ProPublica reported on previously. That rollback has continued in other ways as well. The agency recently initiated a plan to transfer more than half of its fair housing attorneys in the office of general counsel into unrelated roles, compounding prior staff losses since the beginning of the year, four HUD officials told ProPublica.

The officials fear long-lasting ramifications from the changes. “Fair housing laws shape our cities, shape where housing gets built, where pollution occurs, where disaster money goes,” one official said. “Without them, we have a different country.”