ProPublica

by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski

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Billionaire political donor Harlan Crow provided at least three previously undisclosed private jet trips to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in recent years, an investigation by Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats has found.

The flights, which were detailed by Crow’s lawyer in response to inquiries from the committee, took the justice to destinations including the region near Glacier National Park in Montana and Thomas’ hometown in Georgia.

The committee launched its investigation in response to ProPublica reporting last year that revealed numerous undisclosed gifts Crow provided to Thomas, including private school tuition for a relative and luxury vacations virtually every year for more than two decades. Democrats on the committee authorized a subpoena for information from Crow last November, but the subpoena was not issued, and the new information came as a result of negotiations between the Senate and Crow’s attorneys.

It’s possible more revelations are yet to come. The office of the panel’s chair, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said that a report detailing the full findings of committee Democrats’ investigation would be released later in the summer.

“As a result of our investigation and subpoena authorization, we are providing the American public greater clarity on the extent of ethical lapses by Supreme Court justices,” Durbin said in a statement. He added that the newly discovered gifts make “crystal clear that the highest court needs an enforceable code of conduct.”

Crow’s office said in a statement that he gave the senators information covering the past seven years and that the committee “agreed to end its probe with respect to Mr. Crow.”

“Despite his serious and continued concerns about the legality and necessity of the inquiry, Mr. Crow engaged in good faith with the Committee,” the statement said.

Thomas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The newly revealed flights add to the picture of Thomas’ frequent use of Crow’s jet for personal travel, allowing the justice to fly in the style of the ultrawealthy. Crow owns a high-end Bombardier Global 5000, a jet that can cost over $10,000 per flight hour to charter, according to charter company estimates. Thomas has repeatedly flown to a destination and back again on the same day.

The relationship between the two men began on Crow’s jet: In 1996, Crow offered to fly the justice to Dallas for a speech and while they were in the air, they hit it off, Crow has said. Crow has since flown Thomas to destinations around the world.

The new details released by the Senate don’t make clear the purpose of the trips, only listing flight dates and locations. They include a May 2017 trip from St. Louis to Kalispell, Montana — the location of Glacier Park International Airport — then from Montana to Dallas two days later. Thomas was scheduled to be in St. Louis at the time for a speech to a local bar association.

In one instance, he flew on June 29, 2021, from the East Coast to San Jose, California, and returned home later that day. In another, the justice took a round-trip flight on March 23, 2019, from Washington, D.C., to Savannah, Georgia.

ProPublica could not immediately find evidence of Thomas making public appearances in Montana, Georgia or California on the dates in question.

Last May, Senate Democrats requested detailed information from Crow about his relationship with Thomas, including an itemized list of all gifts he’d given to Supreme Court justices over the years. In November, Democrats upped the pressure by authorizing a subpoena. That decision met fierce Republican opposition, with GOP senators on the committee walking out of the hearing in protest.

The committee also authorized a subpoena for conservative legal activist Leonard Leo. Leo joined Thomas on at least one trip with Crow and also helped organize a luxury fishing vacation for Justice Samuel Alito, which was paid for by political donors. Leo has said he will not comply with the subpoena.

Last fall, amid public outcry about ethics controversies, the Supreme Court adopted a code of conduct for the first time in its history. The code, however, has no enforcement mechanism.

On Wednesday, Senate Democrats attempted to pass a bill that would tighten the court’s ethics rules and create a process for fielding and investigating complaints of potential misconduct. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called the legislation “unconstitutional overreach” and led a group of Republican senators who blocked the bill from advancing.

Last week, Thomas acknowledged for the first time that he should have told the public about food and lodging he received from Crow on a pair of free vacations, both of which were first uncovered by ProPublica. Thomas said he “inadvertently omitted” the gifts on previous financial disclosure filings. Thomas has not reported the recent private jet trips from Crow, which many legal experts have described as a violation of the federal financial disclosure law. Thomas’ attorney has maintained that the justice did not need to report the free flights.

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

by Renee Dudley, with research by Doris Burke

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

Microsoft hired Andrew Harris for his extraordinary skill in keeping hackers out of the nation’s most sensitive computer networks. In 2016, Harris was hard at work on a mystifying incident in which intruders had somehow penetrated a major U.S. tech company.

The breach troubled Harris for two reasons. First, it involved the company’s cloud — a virtual storehouse typically containing an organization’s most sensitive data. Second, the attackers had pulled it off in a way that left little trace.

He retreated to his home office to “war game” possible scenarios, stress-testing the various software products that could have been compromised.

Early on, he focused on a Microsoft application that ensured users had permission to log on to cloud-based programs, the cyber equivalent of an officer checking passports at a border. It was there, after months of research, that he found something seriously wrong.

The product, which was used by millions of people to log on to their work computers, contained a flaw that could allow attackers to masquerade as legitimate employees and rummage through victims’ “crown jewels” — national security secrets, corporate intellectual property, embarrassing personal emails — all without tripping alarms.

To Harris, who had previously spent nearly seven years working for the Defense Department, it was a security nightmare. Anyone using the software was exposed, regardless of whether they used Microsoft or another cloud provider such as Amazon. But Harris was most concerned about the federal government and the implications of his discovery for national security. He flagged the issue to his colleagues.

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They saw it differently, Harris said. The federal government was preparing to make a massive investment in cloud computing, and Microsoft wanted the business. Acknowledging this security flaw could jeopardize the company’s chances, Harris recalled one product leader telling him. The financial consequences were enormous. Not only could Microsoft lose a multibillion-dollar deal, but it could also lose the race to dominate the market for cloud computing.

Harris said he pleaded with the company for several years to address the flaw in the product, a ProPublica investigation has found. But at every turn, Microsoft dismissed his warnings, telling him they would work on a long-term alternative — leaving cloud services around the globe vulnerable to attack in the meantime.

Harris was certain someone would figure out how to exploit the weakness. He’d come up with a temporary solution, but it required customers to turn off one of Microsoft’s most convenient and popular features: the ability to access nearly every program used at work with a single logon.

He scrambled to alert some of the company’s most sensitive customers about the threat and personally oversaw the fix for the New York Police Department. Frustrated by Microsoft’s inaction, he left the company in August 2020.

Andrew Harris shared his Microsoft employee badge on his LinkedIn page when he announced his departure from the company in 2020. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Within months, his fears became reality. U.S. officials confirmed reports that a state-sponsored team of Russian hackers had carried out SolarWinds, one of the largest cyberattacks in U.S. history. They used the flaw Harris had identified to vacuum up sensitive data from a number of federal agencies, including, ProPublica has learned, the National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the United States’ nuclear weapons stockpile, and the National Institutes of Health, which at the time was engaged in COVID-19 research and vaccine distribution. The Russians also used the weakness to compromise dozens of email accounts in the Treasury Department, including those of its highest-ranking officials. One federal official described the breach as “an espionage campaign designed for long-term intelligence collection.”

Harris’ account, told here for the first time and supported by interviews with former colleagues and associates as well as social media posts, upends the prevailing public understanding of the SolarWinds hack.

From the moment the hack surfaced, Microsoft insisted it was blameless. Microsoft President Brad Smith assured Congress in 2021 that “there was no vulnerability in any Microsoft product or service that was exploited” in SolarWinds.

Get in Touch

We’re still reporting on the cybersecurity industry and cyberspace regulation. If you have specific information to share about these topics, you can contact Renee Dudley by email at renee.dudley@propublica.org or on Signal at 929-317-0748.

He also said customers could have done more to protect themselves.

Harris said they were never given the chance.

“The decisions are not based on what’s best for Microsoft’s customers but on what’s best for Microsoft,” said Harris, who now works for CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company that competes with Microsoft.

Microsoft declined to make Smith and other top officials available for interviews for this story, but it did not dispute ProPublica’s findings. Instead, the company issued a statement in response to written questions. “Protecting customers is always our highest priority,” a spokesperson said. “Our security response team takes all security issues seriously and gives every case due diligence with a thorough manual assessment, as well as cross-confirming with engineering and security partners. Our assessment of this issue received multiple reviews and was aligned with the industry consensus.”

ProPublica’s investigation comes as the Pentagon seeks to expand its use of Microsoft products — a move that has drawn scrutiny from federal lawmakers amid a series of cyberattacks on the government.

Smith is set to testify on Thursday before the House Homeland Security Committee, which is examining Microsoft’s role in a breach perpetrated last year by hackers connected to the Chinese government. Attackers exploited Microsoft security flaws to gain access to top U.S. officials’ emails. In investigating the attack, the federal Cyber Safety Review Board found that Microsoft’s “security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul.”

Microsoft President Brad Smith testifies during a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing about SolarWinds on Feb. 23, 2021. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

For its part, Microsoft has said that work has already begun, declaring that the company’s top priority is security “above all else.” Part of the effort involves adopting the board’s recommendations. “If you’re faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: Do security,” the company’s CEO, Satya Nadella, told employees in the wake of the board’s report, which identified a “corporate culture that deprioritized both enterprise security investments and rigorous risk management.”

ProPublica’s investigation adds new details and pivotal context about that culture, offering an unsettling look into how the world’s largest software provider handles the security of its own ubiquitous products. It also offers crucial insight into just how much the quest for profits can drive those security decisions, especially as tech behemoths push to dominate the newest — and most lucrative — frontiers, including the cloud market.

“This is part of the problem overall with the industry,” said Nick DiCola, who was one of Harris’ bosses at Microsoft and now works at Zero Networks, a network security firm. Publicly-traded tech giants “are beholden to the share price, not to doing what’s right for the customer all the time. That’s just a reality of capitalism. You’re never going to change that in a public company because at the end of the day, they want the shareholder value to go up.”

A “Cloud-First World”

Early this year, Microsoft surpassed Apple to become the world’s most valuable company, worth more than $3 trillion. That triumph was almost unimaginable a decade ago. (The two remain in close competition for the top spot.)

In 2014, the same year that Harris joined Microsoft and Nadella became the CEO, Wall Street and consumers alike viewed the company as stuck in the past, clinging to the “shrink-wrapped” software products like Windows that put it on the map in the 1990s. Microsoft’s long-stagnant share price reflected its status as an also-ran in almost every major technological breakthrough since the turn of the century, from its Bing search engine to its Nokia mobile phone division.

As the new CEO, Nadella was determined to reverse the trend and shake off the company’s fuddy-duddy reputation, so he staked Microsoft’s future on the Azure cloud computing division, which then lagged far behind Amazon. In his earliest all-staff memo, Nadella told employees they would need “to reimagine a lot of what we have done in the past for a … cloud-first world.”

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella promotes the company’s cloud offerings at an event in San Francisco in 2014. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Microsoft salespeople pitched business and government customers on a “hybrid cloud” strategy, where they kept some traditional, on-premises servers (typically stored on racks in customers’ own offices) while shifting most of their computing needs to the cloud (hosted on servers in Microsoft data centers).

Security was a key selling point for the cloud. On-site servers were notoriously vulnerable, in part because organizations’ overburdened IT staff often failed to promptly install the required patches and updates. With the cloud, that crucial work was handled by dedicated employees whose job was security.

The dawn of the cloud era at Microsoft was an exciting time to work in the field of cybersecurity for someone like Harris, whose high school yearbook features a photo of him in front of a desktop computer and monitor with a mess of floppy disks beside him. One hand is on the keyboard, the other on a wired mouse. Caption: “Harris the hacker.”

Harris’ high school yearbook (Classmates.com)

As a sophomore at Pace University in New York, he wrote a white paper titled “How to Hack the Wired Equivalent Protocol,” a network security standard, and was awarded a prestigious Defense Department scholarship, which the government uses to recruit cybersecurity specialists. The National Security Agency paid for three years of his tuition, which included a master’s degree in software engineering, in exchange for a commitment to work for the government for at least that long, he said.

Early in his career, he helped lead the Defense Department’s efforts to protect individual devices. He became an expert in the niche field known as identity and access management, securing how people log in.

As the years wore on, he grew frustrated by the lumbering bureaucracy and craved the innovation of the tech industry. He decided he could make a bigger impact in the private sector, which designed much of the software the government used.

At Microsoft he was assigned to a secretive unit known as the “Ghostbusters” (as in: “Who you gonna call?”), which responded to hacks of the company’s most sensitive customers, especially the federal government. As a member of this team, Harris first investigated the puzzling attack on the tech company and remained obsessed with it, even after switching roles inside Microsoft.

Eventually, he confirmed the weakness within Active Directory Federation Services, or AD FS, a product that allowed users to sign on a single time to access nearly everything they needed. The problem, he discovered, rested in how the application used a computer language known as SAML to authenticate users as they logged in.

To understand how a SAML attack would unfold, let’s imagine a robber who wants to gain access to all of the apartment buildings owned by a landlord.

(Anuj Shrestha, special to ProPublica)

The robber finds an open window in a single apartment and climbs in, similar to how a hacker could use a phishing email to log on to a single user’s account.

(Anuj Shrestha, special to ProPublica)

Once inside, the robber roams the halls looking for the landlord’s office, where keys to all the building’s units are kept. Likewise, a hacker moves through an organization’s on-premises servers. Their first target is Microsoft’s equivalent of the landlord’s office, a directory that stores information such as usernames and passwords.

(Anuj Shrestha, special to ProPublica)

The robber, however, wants to break into all the landlord’s buildings, just as a hacker wants to breach the cloud. The robber unlocks the office safe, which contains a master key. In a cyber break-in, the safe is AD FS, the weak link that Harris identified.

(Anuj Shrestha, special to ProPublica)

The robber makes a copy of the master key, which provides access to all of the landlord’s buildings and apartments. In a SAML attack, a hacker extracts the private key from the AD FS server and forges “tokens” that allow the intruder to masquerade as a user with the highest levels of access.

(Anuj Shrestha, special to ProPublica)

Now the robber can access any apartment in any building with little trace. And because the landlord’s keys are still in the office, no one suspects anything is amiss. Likewise, in a SAML attack, the hacker goes unnoticed because their sign-in information looks legitimate.

This is what makes a SAML attack unique. Typically, hackers leave what cybersecurity specialists call a “noisy” digital trail. Network administrators monitoring the so-called “audit logs” might see unknown or foreign IP addresses attempting to gain access to their cloud services. But SAML attacks are much harder to detect. The forged token is the equivalent of a robber using a copied master key. There was little trail to track, just the activities of what appear to be legitimate users.

Harris and a colleague who consulted for the Department of Defense spent hours in front of both real and virtual whiteboards as they mapped out how such an attack would work, the colleague told ProPublica. The “token theft” risk, as Harris referred to it, became a regular topic of discussion for them.

A Clash With “Won’t Fix” Culture

Before long, Harris alerted his supervisors about his SAML finding. Nick DiCola, his boss at the time, told ProPublica he referred Harris to the Microsoft Security Response Center, which fields reports of security vulnerabilities and determines which need to be addressed. Given its central role in improving Microsoft product security, the team once considered itself the “conscience of the company,” urging colleagues to improve security without regard to profit. In a meeting room, someone hung a framed photo of Winston “the Wolf,” the charismatic fixer in Quentin Tarantino’s movie “Pulp Fiction” who is summoned to clean up the aftermath of bloody hits.

Members of the team were not always popular within the company. Plugging security holes is a cost center, and making new products is a profit center, former employees told ProPublica. In 2002, the company’s founder, Bill Gates, tried to settle the issue, sending a memo that turned out to be eerily prescient. “Flaws in a single Microsoft product, service or policy not only affect the quality of our platform and services overall, but also our customers’ view of us as a company,” Gates wrote, adding: “So now, when we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security.”

At first, Gates’ memo was transformational and the company’s product divisions were more responsive to the center’s concerns. But over time, the center’s influence waned.

Its members were stuck between cultural forces. Security researchers — often characterized as having outsized egos — believed their findings should be immediately addressed, underestimating the business challenges of developing fixes quickly, former MSRC employees told ProPublica.

Product managers had little motivation to act fast, if at all, since compensation was tied to the release of new, revenue-generating products and features. That attitude was particularly pronounced in Azure product groups, former MSRC members said, because they were under pressure from Nadella to catch up to Amazon.

“Azure was the Wild West, just this constant race for features and functionality,” said Nate Warfield, who worked in the MSRC for four years beginning in 2016. “You will get a promotion because you released the next new shiny thing in Azure. You are not going to get a promotion because you fixed a bunch of security bugs.”

Former employees told ProPublica that the center fielded hundreds or even thousands of reports a month, pushing the perennially understaffed group to its limits. The magazine Popular Science noted that volume as one of the reasons why working in the MSRC was one of the 10 “worst jobs in science,” between whale feces researchers and elephant vasectomists.

“They’re trained, because they’re so resource constrained, to think of these cases in terms of: ‘How can I get to ‘won’t fix,’” said Dustin Childs, who worked in the MSRC in the years leading up to Harris’ saga. Staff would often punt on fixes by telling researchers they would be handled in “v-next,” the next product version, he said. Those launches, however, could be years away, leaving customers vulnerable in the interim, he said.

The center also routinely rejected researchers’ reports of weaknesses by saying they didn’t cross what its staff called a “security boundary.” But when Harris discovered the SAML flaw, it was a term with no formal definition, former employees said.

(Jaap Arriens / Sipa USA via AP Images)

By 2017, the lack of clarity had become the “butt of jokes,” Warfield said. Several prominent security researchers who regularly interacted with the MSRC made T-shirts and stickers that said “____ [fill in the blank] is not a security boundary.”

“Any time Microsoft didn’t want to fix something, they’d just say, ‘That’s not a security boundary, we’re not going to fix it,’” Warfield recalled.

Unaware of the inauspicious climate, Harris met virtually with MSRC representatives and sketched out how a hacker could jump from an on-premises server to the cloud without being detected. The MSRC declined to address the problem. Its staff argued that hackers attempting to exploit the SAML flaw would first have to gain access to an on-premises server. As they saw it, Harris said, that was the security boundary — not the subsequent hop to the cloud.

Business Over Security

“WTF,” Harris recalled thinking when he got the news. “This makes no sense.”

Microsoft had told customers the cloud was the safest place to put their most precious data. His discovery proved that, for the millions of users whose systems included AD FS, their cloud was only as secure as their on-premises servers. In other words, all the buildings owned by the landlord are only as secure as the most careless tenant who forgot to lock their window.

Harris pushed back, but he said the MSRC held firm.

Harris had a reputation for going outside the chain of command to air his concerns, and he took his case to the team managing the products that verified user identities.

He had some clout, his former colleagues said. He had already established himself as a known expert in the field, had pioneered a cybersecurity threat detection method and later was listed as the named inventor on a Microsoft patent. Harris said he “went kind of crazy” and fired off an email to product manager Mark Morowczynski and director Alex Simons requesting a meeting.

He understood that developing a long-term fix would take time, but he had an interim solution that could eliminate the threat. One of the main practical functions of AD FS was to allow users to access both on-premises servers and a variety of cloud-based services after entering credentials only once, a Microsoft feature known as “seamless” single sign-on. Harris proposed that Microsoft tell its customers to turn off that function so the SAML weakness would no longer matter.

According to Harris, Morowczynski quickly jumped on a videoconference and said he had discussed the concerns with Simons.

“Everyone violently agreed with me that this is a huge issue,” Harris said. “Everyone violently disagreed with me that we should move quickly to fix it.”

Morowczynski, Harris said, had two primary objections.

First, a public acknowledgement of the SAML flaw would alert adversaries who could then exploit it. Harris waved off the concern, believing it was a risk worth taking so that customers wouldn’t be ignorant to the threat. Plus, he believed Microsoft could warn customers without betraying any specifics that could be co-opted by hackers.

According to Harris, Morowczynski’s second objection revolved around the business fallout for Microsoft. Harris said Morowczynski told him that his proposed fix could alienate one of Microsoft’s largest and most important customers: the federal government, which used AD FS. Disabling seamless SSO would have widespread and unique consequences for government employees, who relied on physical “smart cards” to log onto their devices. Required by federal rules, the cards generated random passwords each time employees signed on. Due to the configuration of the underlying technology, though, removing seamless SSO would mean users could not access the cloud through their smart cards. To access services or data on the cloud, they would have to sign in a second time and would not be able to use the mandated smart cards.

Harris said Morowczynski rejected his idea, saying it wasn’t a viable option.

Morowczynski told Harris that his approach could also undermine the company’s chances of getting one of the largest government computing contracts in U.S. history, which would be formally announced the next year. Internally, Nadella had made clear that Microsoft needed a piece of this multibillion-dollar deal with the Pentagon if it wanted to have a future in selling cloud services, Harris and other former employees said.

Killing the Competition

By Harris’ account, the team was also concerned about the potential business impact on the products sold by Microsoft to sign into the cloud. At the time, Microsoft was in a fierce rivalry with a company called Okta.

Microsoft customers had been sold on seamless SSO, which was one of the competitive advantages — or, in Microsoft parlance, “kill points” — that the company then had over Okta, whose users had to sign on twice, Harris said.

Harris’ proposed fix would undermine the company’s strategy to marginalize Okta and would “add friction” to the user experience, whereas the “No. 1 priority was to remove friction,” Harris recalled Morowczynski telling him. Moreover, it would have cascading consequences for the cloud business because the sale of identity products often led to demand for other cloud services.

“That little speed bump of you authenticating twice was unacceptable by Microsoft’s standards,” Harris said. He recalled Morowczynski telling him that the product group’s call “was a business decision, not a technical one.”

“What they were telling me was counterintuitive to everything I’d heard at Microsoft about ‘customer first,’” Harris said. “Now they’re telling me it’s not ‘customer first,’ it’s actually ‘business first.’”

DiCola, Harris’ then-supervisor, told ProPublica the race to dominate the market for new and high-growth areas like the cloud drove the decisions of Microsoft’s product teams. “That is always like, ‘Do whatever it frickin’ takes to win because you have to win.’ Because if you don’t win, it’s much harder to win it back in the future. Customers tend to buy that product forever.”

According to Harris, Morowczynski said his team had “on the road map” a product that could replace AD FS altogether. But it was unclear when it would be available to customers.

In the months that followed, Harris vented to his colleagues about the product group’s decision. ProPublica talked to three people who worked with Harris at the time and recalled these conversations. All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared professional repercussions. The three said Harris was enraged and frustrated over what he described to them as the product group’s unwillingness to address the weakness.

Neither Morowczynski nor Simons returned calls seeking comment, and Microsoft declined to make them available for interviews. The company did not dispute the details of Harris’ account. In its statement, Microsoft said it weighs a number of factors when it evaluates potential threats. “We prioritize our security response work by considering potential customer disruption, exploitability, and available mitigations,” the spokesperson said. “We continue to listen to the security research community and evolve our approach to ensure we are meeting customer expectations and protecting them from emerging threats.”

Another Major Warning

Following the conversation with Morowczynski, Harris wrote a reminder to himself on the whiteboard in his home office: “SAML follow-up.” He wanted to keep the pressure on the product team.

Soon after, the Massachusetts- and Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity firm CyberArk published a blog post describing the flaw, which it dubbed “Golden SAML,” along with a proof of concept, essentially a road map that showed how hackers could exploit the weakness.

Years later, in his written testimony for the Senate Intelligence Committee, Microsoft’s Brad Smith said this was the moment the company learned of the issue. “The Golden SAML theory became known to cybersecurity professionals at Microsoft and across the U.S. government and the tech sector at precisely the same time, when it was published in a public paper in 2017,” Smith wrote.

Lavi Lazarovitz of CyberArk said the firm mentioned the weakness — before the post was published — in a private WhatsApp chat of about 10 security researchers from various companies, a forum members used to compare notes on emerging threats. When they raised the discovery to the group, which included at least one researcher from Microsoft, the other members were dismissive, Lazarovitz said.

“Many in the security research community — I don’t want to say mocked — but asked, ‘Well, what’s the big deal?’” Lazarovitz said.

The CyberArk headquarters in Newton, Massachusetts (Sipa via AP Images)

Nevertheless, CyberArk believed it was worth taking seriously, given that AD FS represented the gateway to users’ most sensitive information, including email. “Threat actors operate in between the cracks,” Lazarovitz said. “So obviously, we understood the feedback that we got, but we still believed that this technique will be eventually leveled by threat actors.”

The Israel-based team also reached out to contacts at Microsoft’s Israeli headquarters and were met with a response similar to the one they got in the WhatsApp group, Lazarovitz said.

The published report was CyberArk’s way of warning the public about the threat. Disclosing the weakness also had a business benefit for the company. In the blog post, it pitched its own security product, which it said “will be extremely beneficial in blocking attackers from getting their hands on important assets like the token-signing certificate in the first place.”

The report initially received little attention. Harris, however, seized on it. He said he alerted Morowczynski and Simons from the product group as well as the MSRC. The situation was more urgent than before, Harris argued to them, because CyberArk included the proof of concept that could be used by hackers to carry out a real attack. For Harris, it harkened back to Morowczynski’s worry that flagging the weakness could give hackers an advantage.

“I was more energetic than ever to have us actually finally figure out what we’re going to do about this,” Harris said.

But the MSRC reiterated its “security boundary” stance, while Morowczynski reaffirmed the product group’s earlier decision, Harris said.

Harris said he then returned to his supervisors, including Hayden Hainsworth and Bharat Shah, who, as corporate vice president of the Azure cloud security division, also oversaw the MSRC. “I said, ‘Can you guys please listen to me,’” Harris recalled. “‘This is probably the most important thing I’ve ever done in my career.’”

Harris said they were unmoved and told him to take the problem back to the MSRC.

Microsoft did not publicly comment on the CyberArk blog post at the time. Years later, in written responses to Congress, Smith said the company’s security researchers reviewed the information but decided to focus on other priorities. Neither Hainsworth nor Shah returned calls seeking comment.

Defusing a Ticking Bomb

Harris said he was deeply frustrated. On a personal level, his ego was bruised. Identifying major weaknesses is considered an achievement for cybersecurity professionals, and, despite his internal discovery, CyberArk had claimed Golden SAML.

More broadly, he said he was more worried than ever, believing the weakness was a ticking bomb. “It’s out in the open now,” he said.

Publicly, Microsoft continued to promote the safety of its products, even boasting of its relationship with the federal government in sales pitches. “To protect your organization, Azure embeds security, privacy, and compliance into its development methodology,” the company said in late 2017, “and has been recognized as the most trusted cloud for U.S. government institutions.”

Attendees walk through the exhibition floor during the Microsoft Developers Build Conference in Seattle in 2017. (David Ryder/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Internally, Harris complained to colleagues that customers were being left vulnerable.

“He was definitely having issues” with the product team, said Harris’ former Microsoft colleague who consulted for the Defense Department. “He vented that it was a problem that they just wanted to ignore.”

Harris typically pivoted from venting to discussing how to protect customers, the former colleague said. “I asked him to show me what I’m going to have to do to make sure the customers were aware and could take corrective action to mitigate the risk,” he said.

Harris also took his message to LinkedIn, where he posted a discreet warning and an offer.

“I hope all my friends and followers on here realize by now the security relationship” involved in authenticating users in AD FS, he wrote in 2019. “If not, reach out and let’s fix that!”

In 2019, Harris posted a discreet warning and an offer on LinkedIn. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Separately, he realized he could help customers with whom he had existing relationships, including the NYPD, the nation’s largest police force.

“Knowing this exploit is actually possible, why would I not architect around it, especially for my critical customers?” Harris said.

On a visit to the NYPD, Harris told a top IT official, Matthew Fraser, about the AD FS weakness and recommended disabling seamless SSO. Fraser was in disbelief at the severity of the issue, Harris recalled, and he agreed to disable seamless SSO.

In an interview, Fraser confirmed the meeting.

“This was identified as one of those areas that was prime, ripe,” Fraser said of the SAML weakness. “From there, we figured out what’s the best path to insulate and secure.”

More Troubling Revelations

It was over beers at a conference in Orlando in 2018 that Harris learned the weakness was even worse than he’d initially realized. A colleague sketched out on a napkin how hackers could also bypass a common security feature called multifactor authentication, which requires users to perform one or more additional steps to verify their identity, such as entering a code sent via text message.

They realized that, no matter how many additional security steps a company puts in place, a hacker with a forged token can bypass them all. When they brought the new information to the MSRC, “it was a nonstarter,” Harris said. While the center had published a formal definition of “security boundary” by that point, Harris’ issues still didn’t meet it.

Nadella delivers the keynote address at a 2018 conference in Seattle for software developers. (Elaine Thompson/AP)

By March 2019, concerns over Golden SAML were spilling out into the wider tech world. That month, at a conference in Germany, two researchers from the cybersecurity company Mandiant delivered a presentation demonstrating how hackers could infiltrate AD FS to gain access to organizations’ cloud accounts and applications. They also released the tools they used to do so.

Mandiant said it notified Microsoft before the presentation, making it the second time in roughly 16 months that an outside firm had flagged the SAML issue to the company.

In August 2020, Harris left Microsoft to work for CrowdStrike. In his exit interview with Shah, Harris said he raised the SAML weakness one last time. Shah listened but offered no feedback, he said.

“There is no inspector general-type thing” within Microsoft, Harris said. “If something egregious is happening, where the hell do you go? There’s no place to go.”

SolarWinds Breaks

Four months later, news of the SolarWinds attack broke. Federal officials soon announced that beginning in 2019 Russian hackers had breached and exploited the network management software offered by a Texas-based company called SolarWinds, which had the misfortune of lending its name to the attack. The hackers covertly inserted malware into the firm’s software updates, gaining “backdoor” access to the networks of companies and government agencies that installed them. The ongoing access allowed hackers to take advantage of “post-exploit” vulnerabilities, including Golden SAML, to steal sensitive data and emails from the cloud.

Despite the name, nearly a third of victims of the attack never used SolarWinds software at all, Brandon Wales, then acting director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in the aftermath. In March 2021, Wales told a Senate panel that hackers were able to “gain broad access to data stores that they wanted, largely in Microsoft Office 365 Cloud … and it was all because they compromised those systems that manage trust and identity on networks.”

Microsoft itself was also breached.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Microsoft advised customers of Microsoft 365 to disable seamless SSO in AD FS and similar products — the solution that Harris proposed three years earlier.

As the world dealt with the consequences, Harris took his long simmering frustration public in a series of posts on social media and on his personal blog. Challenging Brad Smith by name, and criticizing the MSRC’s decisions — which he referred to as “utter BS” — Harris lambasted Microsoft for failing to publicly warn customers about Golden SAML.

Microsoft “was not transparent about these risks, forced customers to use ADFS knowing these risks, and put many customers and especially US Gov’t in a bad place,” Harris wrote on LinkedIn in December 2020. A long-term fix was “never a priority” for the company, he wrote. “Customers are boned and sadly it’s been that way for years (which again, sickens me),” Harris said in the post.

In the months and years following the SolarWinds attack, Microsoft took a number of actions to mitigate the SAML risk. One of them was a way to efficiently detect fallout from such a hack. The advancement, however, was available only as part of a paid add-on product known as Sentinel.

The lack of such a detection, the company said in a blog post, had been a “blind spot.”

“Microsoft Is Back on Top”

In early 2021, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence called Brad Smith to testify about SolarWinds.

Although Microsoft’s product had played a central role in the attack, Smith seemed unflappable, his easy and conversational tone a reflection of the relationships he had spent decades building on Capitol Hill. Without referencing notes or reading from a script, as some of his counterparts did, he confidently deflected questions about Microsoft’s role. Laying the responsibility with the government, he said that in the lead-up to the attack, the authentication flaw “was not prioritized by the intelligence community as a risk, nor was it flagged by civilian agencies or other entities in the security community as a risk that should be elevated” over other cybersecurity priorities.

Smith also downplayed the significance of the Golden SAML weakness, saying it was used in just 15% of the 60 cases that Microsoft had identified by that point. At the same time, he acknowledged that, “without question, these are not the only victims who had data observed or taken.”

When Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida pointedly asked him what Microsoft had done to address Golden SAML in the years before the attack, Smith responded by listing a handful of steps that customers could have taken to protect themselves. His suggestions included purchasing an antivirus product like Microsoft Defender and securing devices with another Microsoft product called Intune.

“The reality is any organization that did all five of those things, if it was breached, it in all likelihood suffered almost no damage,” Smith said.

Neither Rubio nor any other senator pressed further.

Ultimately, Microsoft won a piece of the Defense Department’s multibillion-dollar cloud business, sharing it with Amazon, Google and Oracle.

Since December 2020, when the SolarWinds attack was made public, Microsoft’s stock has soared 106%, largely on the runaway success of Azure and artificial intelligence products like ChatGPT, where the company is the largest investor. “Microsoft Is Back on Top,” proclaimed Fortune, which featured Nadella on the cover of its most recent issue.

In September 2021, just 10 months after the discovery of SolarWinds, the paperback edition of Smith’s book, “Tools and Weapons,” was published. In it, Smith praised Microsoft’s response to the attack. The MSRC, Smith wrote, “quickly activated its incident response plan” and the company at large “mobilized more than 500 employees to work full time on every aspect of the attack.”

In the new edition, Smith also reflected on his congressional testimony on SolarWinds. The hearings, he wrote, “examined not only what had happened but also what steps needed to be taken to prevent such attacks in the future.” He didn’t mention it in the book, but that certainly would include the long-term alternative that Morowczynski first promised to Harris in 2017. The company began offering it in 2022.

Development by Lucas Waldron.

by Duaa Eldeib

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The Senate on Tuesday passed legislation that, for the first time, expressly permits states to spend millions of federal dollars on stillbirth prevention.

The Maternal and Child Health Stillbirth Prevention Act, which passed the House in mid-May, now goes to President Joe Biden, who is expected to sign the measure into law.

ProPublica has spent the past two years reporting on the crisis around stillbirth, the death of an expected child at 20 weeks of pregnancy or more. Every year in the U.S., more than 20,000 pregnancies end in stillbirth. Research shows as many as 1 in 4 stillbirths may be preventable.

The bipartisan bill, which does not allocate any new money, amends the Social Security Act to add stillbirth prevention and research to the programs that can use existing Title V funds dedicated to improving the health of mothers and children.

“This bill is the first step to preventing stillbirths across America, and I will keep pushing to deliver the federal resources needed to bring down the shockingly high rate of stillbirths and maternal mortality in the United States,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., who credited ProPublica for keeping a spotlight on the stillbirth crisis.

Merkley introduced the bill with Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., and U.S. Reps. Ashley Hinson, R-Iowa, and Alma Adams, D-N.C., introduced the measure in the House.

For decades, Adams said, Congress has underinvested in addressing stillbirths, despite having tremendous power to direct money and resources toward research, awareness and effective interventions.

“This does not have to be a silent crisis anymore,” she said, adding that several thousand lives can be saved every year.

“I’m very thankful to ProPublica,” Adams said. “They’ve raised this issue to the forefront of U.S. politics.”

The U.S. has long lagged behind other wealthy countries in reducing stillbirths, but Adams said she hopes that will change.

The bill, which was first introduced in 2022 but never voted on, was reintroduced last July. The Senate passed the measure unanimously, but it was sent back to the Senate because of minor changes made in the House.

Emily Price, CEO of the Iowa-based nonprofit Healthy Birth Day, which has championed the measure, said when Title V was written in the 1930s, stillbirth was left out because of the outdated belief that stillbirths just happen. The bill’s passage, she said, means stillbirth “is finally being recognized for the crisis that it is in America.”

“Now we know better, and we must do better,” she said. “The impact will affect families immediately and for generations to come.”

She said that after ProPublica’s stillbirth series was published, more people opened up about their experiences, and members of Congress and their staffs began sharing how stillbirth had affected their own families and friends.

“It was in these moments that we saw change coming,” Price said.

Fewer than 20 state health departments use money allocated under Title V Maternal and Child Health block grants for stillbirth prevention, Price said.

The new legislation includes examples of services that states can implement, many of which have been adopted in other countries. Programs include tracking fetal movement, improving the timing of birth when risk factors are present, encouraging safe sleep positions during pregnancy, supporting pregnant patients to stop smoking and monitoring for signs that the fetus is not growing as expected.

Without a federal law in place, states have had to look for local solutions. Minnesota mother Amanda Duffy, who was at the center of a November 2022 ProPublica story, enlisted the help of Minnesota lawmakers, including newly elected state Sen. Susan Pha, who was pregnant. Pha tested Healthy Birth Day’s Count the Kicks app, which encourages expectant parents to track their baby’s movement in the womb, during her third trimester. She was convinced.

“This needs to be in the hands of every single expectant mom who is pregnant because it is such a powerful tool,” Pha said.

She was lead author of the Minnesota bill to establish a stillbirth prevention pilot program that incorporates Count the Kicks. The Minnesota Legislature passed the bill last month.

North Carolina doesn’t have a state stillbirth prevention law in place, which is part of the reason Tomeka James Isaac had been advocating for the Maternal and Child Health Stillbirth Prevention Act.

In 2018, the North Carolina mother was rushed into emergency surgery. She delivered her stillborn son, Jace, and then nearly died herself. Isaac, a Black woman, is now executive director of the nonprofit Jace’s Journey, which addresses disparities in maternal and infant health. Black women are more than twice as likely to have a stillbirth than white women, and they face an increased risk of dying during or soon after pregnancy.

Isaac traveled to Washington, D.C., last month with Price and other stillbirth families to advocate for the bill’s passage and a second bipartisan stillbirth bill pending in Congress. That bill, the Stillbirth Health Improvement and Education (SHINE) for Autumn Act, proposes $45 million over the next five years for improving data collection, stillbirth research, awareness and education, as well as supporting training for fetal autopsies.

Jessica Brady Reader, a former congressional aide, is now pushing for SHINE. After Reader gave birth to her stillborn daughter, Francesca, in 2021, she and her husband parked in front of the funeral home to read their daughter a nightly bedtime story until her body was cremated and they could bring her remains home.

“I view this as the beginning, not the end,” she said. “Passing SHINE is a necessary next step. We can’t stop.”

by Ken Schwencke

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We updated our “Supreme Connections” database on Wednesday with new entries from recently released financial disclosures from Supreme Court justices, as well as five filings from 2003 to 2007 we had previously been missing.

“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 data from eight disclosures made public last Friday, covering the 2023 calendar year. It does not include data for Justice Samuel Alito, who received a 90-day extension.

The latest update includes two 2019 vacations retroactively added by Justice Clarence Thomas, which were paid for by billionaire Harlan Crow and which the justice had previously failed to disclose. ProPublica was the first to reveal those and an array of other significant gifts from several billionaires. Thomas previously argued he did not need to disclose such gifts.

We have also added information from a 2003 filing from Alito and information from Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2004-07 filings that were previously obtained by JudicialWatch and archived by the Internet Archive. While federal ethics law requires judges to file these disclosures each year, the law requires most of them to be destroyed after six years, making many disclosures from earlier years hard to find.

In total, the update adds $50,000 worth of gifts disclosed (including concert tickets given to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson by Beyoncé herself), 18 new organizations and individuals, and more than 200 new connections, such as book deals, trips and reimbursements.

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 Justin Elliott

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A few hours after we published a story on the luxury travel a billionaire provided to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the email arrived in my inbox.

A reader had tapped out a single sentence on their iPhone and hit send: We should look, it said, at a relative Thomas had taken in and raised as a son. The reader informed me that Harlan Crow, the same politically connected billionaire who had bankrolled the justice’s travels around the globe, had also paid private school tuition for the relative.

My colleagues and I chased down the tip; a key break came when we found direct evidence of the billionaire’s tuition payments in some bankruptcy filings for one of the private schools in question. As we reported in the resulting story a few weeks later, the billionaire had paid roughly $100,000 for private school tuition, essentially a gift of cash to a sitting Supreme Court justice.

Crow’s office told us that he “has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate.” Thomas didn’t respond to questions for the story. On Friday, the justice acknowledged for the first time in a new financial disclosure filing that he should have publicly reported two free vacations he received from Crow.

At ProPublica, we often discuss the concept of the “maximum story.” It comes up when we’re deciding whether it’s worth spending a chunk of time reporting on a given topic. In gambler’s terms, it translates to what’s the biggest potential payoff of making this bet? What’s the best story, the one most vital to the public, that we might land?

It’s a useful idea, but the truth is the maximum story is often one we can’t even imagine. That was the case with the private school tuition tip. My co-workers and I had spent the previous four months piecing together the luxury travel provided to Thomas, but we had not dreamed that a billionaire was also secretly paying basic living expenses for a justice.

And we never would have thought to look if not for the reader who made the decision to write in with that tip. I’ve been a reporter here at ProPublica for more than 12 years covering politics and business, and every major story I’ve worked on has been propelled forward by tips.

I spent years reporting on how Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, has worked against making tax preparation easier and less costly. When I wrote about misleading marketing tactics by Intuit that cost Americans tax filers billions of dollars, I relied on tips from employees at all levels of the company. Sometimes we heard from executives who attended strategy meetings; other times we heard from customer service reps who were unsettled by what they were being asked to do.

After we published, we heard from hundreds of readers who’d experienced deceptive tactics, and we wrote about that, too. In the end, those stories directly led to a legal settlement that delivered $141 million back to consumers.

Many of my sources need to be anonymous, so I’m somewhat limited in what I can tell you about them. In the past, they’ve included company insiders like the Intuit employees or whistleblowers who have seen something that troubled them. But I’m constantly surprised by what I think of as the hydraulics of information: something heard in a restaurant, seen on the street or mentioned by a relative. Those, too, are often important leads for our reporting.

The team behind the award-winning Supreme Court series: from left, Brett Murphy, Alex Mierjeski, Justin Elliott, Kirsten Berg and Joshua Kaplan (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

Going from a tip or rumor to a confirmed story can take weeks or months of reporting, of course. That’s especially true because I focus on the rich and powerful: people, companies and organizations that use money and influence to shield themselves from scrutiny. My ability to home in on those important stories relies on hearing from people like you.

Right now I’m reporting on the election. There’s no shortage of political coverage, but I’m still convinced there are important stories about wrongdoing that haven’t been told yet. I’m interested in the world of Donald Trump — his campaign, businesses and the people around him — as well as the broader 2024 political scene. Tips about other candidates, Democrats and Republicans, are also welcome.

I’m also always looking for under-covered stories about business and politics more broadly, no matter the specific subject.

If you know something you think I should know — a rumor, an observation, something you’ve noticed that’s unusual or concerning — please get in touch. Even if it seems small or you heard it second hand, what you know may be hugely important.

How to Reach Me

My email is justin@propublica.org. You can call or text me at 774-826-6240. If you use the secure messaging apps Signal or WhatsApp, I’m also at that number.

My Mailing Address

Justin Elliott ProPublica 155 Ave. of the Americas 13th Floor New York, NY 10013

Here’s What to Expect if You Reach Out

I’ll read whatever you send. I check my texts and email often. You can also leave a voicemail or even send a physical letter.

Many of my stories rely on people who need to be anonymous, and I take privacy very seriously.

If you have an idea but you think it’s a better fit for another reporter, you can find instructions for how to share information with us securely on our general tips page.

by Stephannie Stokes, WABE

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

Malik Johnson thought he was doing well after he turned 21 and left foster care, working two jobs to afford his apartment south of Atlanta.

But last fall, everything started to fall apart: His car transmission failed, so he couldn’t reach his second job. He fell behind on rent.

He didn’t know about a federal housing program that could have reduced his housing costs. It’s open to foster youth in all states as long as local government agencies put in an application for the funding. But in Georgia, they didn’t make that request for Johnson — or for almost anyone else.

Instead, at 23, he was on his own. As he faced his mounting bills, the stress got to be overwhelming.

“I was to the point where I was so behind on everything, I just almost stopped caring,” Johnson said.

In Georgia’s foster care system, about 500 young people become adults each year and, sometime between age 18 and 21, they’ll have to make it on their own. Without the safety net the foster care system provides, they’re especially vulnerable to becoming homeless.

That risk is why, in 2019, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development created the Foster Youth to Independence program, which offers between three and five years of rental assistance to young adults who have moved on from foster care. The program is the only long-term federal housing assistance targeted at former foster youth as they navigate adulthood, and advocates hoped it would help prevent situations like Johnson’s from ever happening.

But there’s a catch: The money comes not directly through the federal government, but through the states, which have to apply for and coordinate the funding. WABE and ProPublica found Georgia has barely done that.

Through the program, each local housing authority can request up to 25 FYI vouchers each year. In Georgia, where 20 housing authorities are eligible, that means as many as 500 vouchers could be available, bringing in as much as $5 million in rent money from the federal government each year.

According to HUD’s latest data from last fall, housing authorities in Georgia have received only eight FYI vouchers total since the program began. By contrast, a third of states have each received at least 75 of these vouchers in the program’s first several years. Texas, Florida and Washington have received more than 400 each; California has upwards of 800, helping hundreds of young people afford stable housing. Only five states, all significantly smaller than Georgia, had requested fewer vouchers.

The failure to tap federal vouchers for foster youth in Georgia is a symptom of a child welfare system that has paid little attention to the housing needs of families and children, WABE and ProPublica have found. Previous reporting showed how the state Division of Family and Children Services had put few of its resources toward housing assistance for families in recent years, even as it cited “inadequate housing” among its reasons for removing 20% of children from their parents.

In the case of the FYI vouchers, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has instructed state welfare agencies to work with local housing authorities to ensure the program is used, and in states that have received the most vouchers, child welfare agencies have actively promoted the program and sometimes hired new staff.

But in Georgia, staffers at roughly half of the state’s eligible housing authorities said they hadn’t heard from the state agency about the vouchers in the program’s first five years. A couple of housing authorities said they struggled to get in touch with DFCS to complete the application, while others said they were not eligible to apply because the agency had not helped them to use up other housing funds they needed to distribute before they could tap the program.

DFCS spokesperson Ellen Brown said the staff overseeing services for older foster youth had recently changed and she couldn’t speak to what had happened previously. But she said the agency is now working to strengthen partnerships with housing authorities — efforts that have taken place as WABE and ProPublica started reporting on the issue in recent months and after a local volunteer began pushing the state to expand its use of the FYI program.

Brown also said DFCS staff meet regularly with young people before they exit foster care to “discuss their future plans,” which includes figuring out their housing. “Our team works tirelessly to help them plan and prepare for a safe, stable and successful transition out of care and into adulthood,” she said.

Still, Ruth White, who directs the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare and was central to getting the federal program created, questioned why DFCS wasn’t more aggressive in bringing the vouchers to the state.

“Imagine being an entity that goes in and removes a kid from their house,” White said, “and then not being the agency that’s chomping at the bit to make sure you get a housing voucher for that young person.”

Study after study has shown the high risk of homelessness among young adults who age out of foster care. A 2021 national survey of 21-year-olds who had been in foster care across the country showed that a little more than a quarter of them had been homeless during the previous two years. The same survey also showed similar numbers in Georgia.

For years, child welfare advocates and former foster youth pushed Congress to address this housing crisis.

“We have the numbers, and we have the data,” said Lisa Dickson of the foster youth alumni organization ACTION Ohio in her 2018 testimony to Congress. “What our nation needs is a sense of urgency about this problem.”

HUD already had its Family Unification Program, which provides housing funds to families and youth who’ve been affected by the foster care system. But HUD found that, in the competition for those limited resources, young people were losing out: They received just 5% of those vouchers in 2019, with the rest going to families.

So HUD created the Foster Youth to Independence program, earmarking some vouchers exclusively for young people. As with any Section 8 housing voucher, young people contribute a third of their income toward rent; the federal government covers the rest.

But unlike other voucher programs, FYI requires significant buy-in from child welfare agencies, which must identify eligible young adults and also offer them other support, like job training and financial counseling. That’s why housing authorities and child welfare agencies have to work together to take advantage of the program.

That didn’t happen in Georgia. In Cobb County, northwest of Atlanta, the chief operations officer of the Marietta Housing Authority tried to pursue vouchers in 2020. Mark Wright reached out to the local DCFS director, but he didn’t get the signed agreement from the agency that the program requires. After that, Wright said, “I kind of felt like we were not going to get the kind of buy-in from other agencies to make it successful.” He gave up.

Housing authorities in Atlanta and neighboring DeKalb County already had partnerships with DFCS because they offered the Family Unification Program. But they still had a hard time accessing the FYI funding. In recent years, they said, DFCS hadn’t identified enough young adults or families for the Family Unification Program, and this prevented them from qualifying for the FYI vouchers under HUD’s rules.

In Texas, by contrast, the child welfare agency took the lead in making sure the vouchers reached young people. The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services hired Jim Currier as housing specialist. He, in turn, designated liaisons in each of the child welfare system’s regions, trained them in the rules of the program and incorporated information about the vouchers in the manuals for foster youth aging out of care. The child welfare agency now has 40 partnerships, and DFPS initiated 38 of them.

Currier said vouchers have transformed the lives of some of the young people they’ve gone to. “They now have a safe, permanent home; they can begin to work on their well-being; they can work on their education,” he said.

Recently, in Georgia, DFCS and housing authorities began talking about how to serve more of those former foster youth — thanks in part to the work of one persistent volunteer.

Anne Carelli got to know teenagers in foster care when she volunteered at a group home in Atlanta. As they aged out of the system, she saw some of those teenagers end up homeless. So when she learned about the FYI vouchers a few months ago, she couldn’t believe Georgia wasn’t using them.

“To have housing vouchers for youth aging out of care — that is an incredible opportunity for all of us to come together and figure this out,” said Carelli, who has founded a nonprofit called Up3 to help connect young adults with the resources they need.

Carelli said she has sent more than 60 emails to housing authorities, public officials and DFCS to kickstart meetings about getting vouchers to young people she knows who qualify.

“I was to the point where I was so behind on everything, I just almost stopped caring,” Johnson said about his financial problems. (Matthew Pearson/WABE)

She’s hoping one of them will be Johnson, who she met through the group home. He’s still spending nearly four hours every day on buses and trains to get to work. The assistance would help him save for another car.

Johnson knows the value of a little outside support. Last fall, Carelli loaned him the money that allowed him to make up his rent until his income was stable again. As much as he’s tried to be responsible for himself — keeping his apartment vacuumed and clear of clutter, earning an employee of the month plaque from his job — he faced a crisis he couldn’t handle on his own.

“But I had help,” Johnson said. “And that was the best part about it too — being able to receive help when you need it.”

by Connor Goodwin

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Last week, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to curb immigration, effectively blocking most asylum claims when border crossings spike to a certain level. The move comes amid mounting concerns from across the political spectrum over immigration, which has emerged as a major voter issue this election year.

Some Democrats and human rights advocates have warned the Biden administration that the executive order could exacerbate the humanitarian crisis at the border, putting immigrants at greater risk as they wait on the Mexican side of the border. A recent analysis by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found lawmakers, advocates and government officials previously issued similar warnings that went unheeded before a fire in a Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, detention center killed 40 men in March 2023.

Two weeks before the fire, which was one of the deadliest incidents involving immigrants in Mexico’s history, the Congressional Research Service published a report saying that the Mexican government did not have adequate resources to handle the influx of U.S.-bound migrants. “As a result, migrants remain vulnerable to crime and other abuses,” the report concluded.

The ProPublica and Tribune examination, which was accompanied by an 18-minute documentary titled “The Right Way,” unpacks the deadly consequences of policies such as Title 42, an emergency health code used by former President Donald Trump to slow immigration and continued under Biden. Even though the pandemic-era policy, which enabled the quick expulsion of 2.8 million immigrants, ended in May 2023, migrants continued to be stranded in Mexican cities because of other U.S. policies.

The week before Biden’s executive order, ProPublica and the Tribune hosted a virtual panel with experts to discuss U.S. policies that contributed to the fire, changes to the U.S. asylum system and why immigration has become a leading concern among voters as they prepare for this year’s presidential election. Speakers included:

• Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute
• Maureen Meyer, vice president for programs at the Washington Office on Latin America
• Victor Manjarrez, director of the Center for Law and Human Behavior at the University of Texas at El Paso and a former chief patrol agent for the U.S. Border Patrol
• Perla Trevizo, reporter for the ProPublica-Texas Tribune investigative unit

Below are excerpts from the panel’s discussion, which have been edited for clarity and concision.

Perla Trevizo: We’ve been hearing a lot about a crisis — Biden’s crisis, the border crisis. Is there really a crisis, and what do we mean by that?

Andrew Selee: The American public overwhelmingly thinks it’s a crisis. At least four polls that came out recently tell the same story, which is that Americans are quite pro-immigration, but they’re also really worried about the border. This cuts across party lines now. Yes, Republicans are more concerned about the border than Democrats, but Democrats have moved on this issue as have independents.

When you have a system that can’t make decisions about who should come into the country, that undermines the credibility of your immigration system. It makes people more worried about immigration in general and less willing to support things like legal pathways that would actually help.

We don’t have a crisis in terms of our well-being as a society, but we do have a crisis in terms of being able to make decisions about who comes in and keep some sort of control over immigration policy. I’m worried if we don’t figure this part out, we’re going to see a backlash against immigration that will hurt all of us.

Maureen Meyer: As the administration looks to reduce numbers at the border so that it doesn’t seem like a crisis, what you end up having is a humanitarian crisis on the Mexican side of the border. As numbers have dropped here, especially since last December, Mexico is encountering over 120,000 migrants a month. So what you have is a crisis that you’re exporting farther south.

Trevizo: We’ve recently seen a significant drop in border apprehensions or encounters, which is not common for this time of the year. We’re hearing a lot about numbers going up or down and Mexico’s role in it. What do these numbers tell us?

Victor Manjarrez: Normally, I would say that that’s pretty significant, but that 50% drop is compared to December, when we had historically large numbers in terms of arrests along the southwest border.

Even with that drop, it’s estimated that there is going to be between 1.6 to 1.7 million arrests. The high-water mark was 1.6 million in 2000 for the longest time. When the numbers went up in 2022 and 2023 to 2.2 million, it was crushing because it does a number of things. You have to collapse your operations, and you have to vacate areas to handle the flows that come in.

The dynamic used to be that most people try to evade early detection. Now, people surrender to claim asylum. That doesn’t take away from the fact that it takes a large number of resources, from transportation to the logistics of processing.

Watch the Panel Discussion Trevizo: What would a more orderly process look like?

Selee: I think you want three elements. You want people to be able to come on legal pathways to take available jobs. Right now, we have 8 to 10 million jobs a month that are open, and it’s a very tight labor market. You want a way of connecting employers with willing workers. We don’t have that right now. We have a system built in 1990 that has numbers set in stone by Congress 34 years ago in a different economy. That’s one element you have to update.

Secondly, you need a refugee system where people who are fleeing things that would put their lives in danger can get into the United States through asylum, either by applying at the border or ideally earlier. Ideally, we want a humanitarian protection system that starts in the region, particularly since we know most people are coming from somewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, but then has a fail-safe at the border.

You have to be able to return people who don’t meet those two characteristics: who aren’t coming on a legal pathway and aren’t granted asylum. You have to make decisions on protection fairly quickly, by the way. If it takes four or five years, which is what it takes right now to get a decision, you’re not giving protection to people who need it. But you’re also creating a pull factor for people who might not have otherwise applied for protection. We don’t tend to remove a lot of people who’ve been in the country that long. People know that if they make it to the U.S. border, they are likely to get in.

That’s a system that doesn’t make sense for people who need protection, but it also doesn’t make sense from a migration protection standpoint. We then turn to Mexico and other countries along the way and say, let’s make it harder for people to get here. We would be much better off with a system that gave protection that had legal pathways but also returned people who don’t come through those ways. But we’ve ended up with a system that simply tries to slow people down.

Trevizo: When you talk to the administration or when you hear Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas talk, they do point to legal pathways: the CBP One App, humanitarian parole, more guest worker visas. The administration was moving in that direction, but we’re still seeing record numbers. What happened?

Selee: They’ve really stretched the limits of what they can do with the executive branch to create legal pathways. They’ve tried to increase employer interest. They created quite a large pathway for Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans, groups of people where there are displacement crises. It made sense to stretch what they call humanitarian parole powers to allow people to enter the country and have a work permit for two years. They’ve tried to speed up asylum and create incentives for people to go to ports of entry to apply for asylum rather than going between ports of entry. But without resources, without authorities, without Congress, it’s hard to create legal pathways. Unless Congress gets involved, appropriates money and provides some authorities, particularly on the legal pathway side, it becomes very hard to get done.

We saw an attempt by Republicans and Democrats, but that fell apart so we’re back to where we were

Trevizo: The Senate recently revived a failed immigration bill, but once again, Congress tanked the bill. If it had passed, what would it have done?

Selee: It would have codified some of the things they did to restrict asylum. For decisions on asylum, it would’ve put more money into the Border Patrol and into ICE, for processing people and for returns. It’s a Band-Aid, but sometimes Band-Aids are important too. It would have at least created a more virtuous cycle for people who have strong asylum claims to present themselves at the border and a disincentive for people who know they don’t have strong claims.

On the flip side, Mexico came out for the first time ever with a national strategy on migration. How does Mexico relate to its own diaspora, i.e., the 12 million Mexicans that live in the U.S.? How does Mexico deal with asylum-seekers? Like with the U.S., it’s a question of resources and authorities and how you actually do it.

Trevizo: Immigration is a top issue for voters. On the one hand, Biden has tightened his position on immigration. On the other hand, you have Trump saying that he would call for mass deportations. Heading into November, what do you expect to see around immigration?

Meyer: In terms of the Biden administration, we will continue to see a harder-line policy. President Biden and Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador spoke a few weeks ago and talked about how they’re going to increase enforcement to reduce the number of migrants reaching the borders.

If it is a Biden second term, we will hopefully see a shift back to expanding legal pathways, improving the system, adding more resources and a continuation of these programs, especially the regional programs.

With Trump’s first term, we saw canceling refugee resettlement numbers or dramatically lowering them, canceling programs that Biden restarted like the Central America’s Minors Program, building more wall and, as you said, increased mass deportation. It’s a very contrasting view of the situation at the border that will have stark differences come January 2025.

by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

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Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas acknowledged for the first time in a new financial disclosure filing that he should have publicly reported two free vacations he received from billionaire Harlan Crow.

The pair of 2019 trips, one to Indonesia and the other to the Bohemian Grove, an all-male retreat in northern California, were first revealed by ProPublica. Last year, Thomas argued that he did not need to disclose such gifts. “Justice Thomas’s critics allege that he failed to report gifts from wealthy friends,” his lawyer previously said in a statement issued on the justice’s behalf. “Untrue.”

In the new filing released Friday, however, Thomas amended his financial disclosure for 2019, writing that he “inadvertently omitted” the trips on his previous reports.

Last year, ProPublica documented an array of undisclosed luxury vacations and other gifts Thomas has received over the years from several billionaires, including Crow. ProPublica revealed Crow had treated Thomas to numerous private jet flights and international yacht cruises, covered private school tuition for Thomas’ relative, and paid Thomas money in an undisclosed 2014 real estate deal.

Legal ethics experts said that Thomas appeared to have violated the law by failing to disclose the trips and gifts.

The Thomas revelations helped plunge the Supreme Court into its biggest ethical crisis in the modern era. Justice Samuel Alito also failed to disclose a luxury fishing trip that was paid for by wealthy political donors, one of whom had cases before the court. In recent weeks, Alito has faced criticism for politicized flags that flew at two of his homes. The public’s approval of the court has plummeted in the last few years, polls show.

In response, the court last year adopted a code of conduct for the first time in its history. The code, however, has no enforcement mechanism.

This is not the first time that Thomas has responded to public controversy about his disclosure practices by amending an old form. The forms are required by a federal law passed after Watergate that says justices must annually report income, assets and most gifts. At least twice before, Thomas has similarly defended his failure to make required disclosures as an unintentional error or a misunderstanding of the rules.

Last summer, Thomas amended his 2014 disclosure to include the real estate deal with Crow after ProPublica reported on the transaction. At the time, he wrote that he “inadvertently failed to realize” that the deal needed to be publicly reported and said he “continues to work” with judiciary staff to determine “whether he should further amend his reports from any prior years.”

Thomas engaged an outside lawyer last year to review his past filings. The new filing does not make clear whether that review is finished. The justice and his attorney did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In a statement last year, Thomas’ attorney, Elliot Berke, said that “after reviewing Justice Thomas’s records, I am confident there has been no willful ethics transgression.”

A committee of judges of the Judicial Conference, the principal policymaking body for federal courts, also said last year it had launched a review of the allegations against Thomas. By law, if there is “reasonable cause” to believe a justice intentionally omitted information from a report, the conference is supposed to refer the matter to the attorney general. Such a referral would be unprecedented. A judiciary spokesperson told ProPublica on Friday there is no update on that review.

Even after the new amendments, there are many gifts Thomas received that he has still not disclosed.

As ProPublica previously reported, in 2019, Thomas flew to Indonesia on Crow’s private jet for an extended island cruise on Crow’s superyacht. If Thomas had chartered the plane and the yacht himself, it could have cost more than half a million dollars. Seven ethics-law experts said that Thomas appeared to have violated federal law by failing to disclose the free travel.

Thomas did not mention the flight to Indonesia or the yacht trip in his new filing. However, he disclosed a previously unknown detail about the trip: that Crow and his wife paid for Thomas’ stay at a hotel in Bali. Thomas acknowledged that he should have reported that.

ProPublica also reported that Thomas had taken at least six undisclosed trips with Crow to the Bohemian Grove. Thomas’ amendments to his reports include only one of those trips. Members typically must pay thousands of dollars to bring a guest to the retreat.

In his new filing, Thomas disclosed receiving one gift last year: photo albums that he valued at $2,000 from Terrence and Barbara Giroux. Terrence Giroux was the executive director of the Horatio Alger Association, a nonprofit that provides college scholarships to low-income students. Thomas is an honorary board member of the nonprofit.

Thomas reported no free trips last year, which would make 2023 an anomaly. Thomas received undisclosed vacations from Crow and other wealthy benefactors virtually every year for more than two decades.

In the disclosure forms released Friday, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only other Supreme Court justice to report receiving a gift in 2023. Jackson said she received $12,500 worth of artwork for her chambers at the court, as well as a gift from Beyoncé of four concert tickets, which she valued at $3,711.84.

Alito, who has said he did not need to disclose his fishing trip, received a 90-day extension for filing his disclosure form for last year.

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 Anna Clark, photography by Sarahbeth Maney

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When Gretchen Whitmer campaigned for Michigan governor in 2018, she took aim at Michigan’s bottled water industry — and the state policy that gave it unfettered access to free water.

Nestle was extracting hundreds of millions of gallons of groundwater a year, which it bottled and sold under the Ice Mountain brand. The only cost: a $200 yearly fee per site. The company asked the state for a 60% boost in how much it could take from a well that draws from the source of two cold-water trout streams. At the time, the Flint water crisis was still in the spotlight, contributing to broad pushback. Nearly 81,000 public comments opposed the permit request; 75 supported it.

In April of that year, state officials said they didn’t have any grounds to deny the request and gave Nestle the go-ahead. The same week, the state said it would stop providing bottled water to Flint.

The contrast seemed clear: Nestle gets free water, Flint families don’t. And one of the staunchest critics of the arrangement was Whitmer, a rising Democratic leader who had served 14 years in the Legislature.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer at a 2022 campaign rally (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

“When it comes to Nestle, I don’t believe that they should be taking the water out of our ground and selling it, and I want to stop that,” Whitmer said in a gubernatorial debate.

She told a news outlet that Nestle “is abusing our water here in Michigan.”

And her campaign water plan emphasized the disparities that set off the controversy in the first place, noting that some Michiganders struggled to pay bills for water of questionable quality. The state should be preserving freshwater, the plan said, “not selling it at a nominal price.”

Whitmer vowed to do things differently.

But six years later, well into her second term and with a Legislature controlled by fellow Democrats, little has changed.

Whitmer’s X account posted photos from an event where she helped distribute bottled water in Flint while running for governor in 2018. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Most of Nestle’s North American water brands were bought in 2021 by a private equity firm and an investment firm in a $4.3 billion deal. The company, now called BlueTriton Brands, gave up the controversial permit, but it still pumps groundwater from the same wells at minimal cost.

Since Whitmer was elected, at least nine bills proposing changes — from new groundwater protections to closing oversight gaps — were left to languish in the Legislature. Bottled water faded as a talking point. The administration and lawmakers turned to other priorities: reproductive rights, economic development, education, infrastructure.

Peggy Case remembers meeting Whitmer when she was running for governor. “I have a picture of me with her,” said the board president of Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation, a nonprofit that twice challenged Nestle in court. “And yes, she was very strong. She was going to really help us out.”

But, Case added: “She’s basically kind of ignored us for the last six years. Which is sad. I mean, she didn’t ignore us before the election.”

Peggy Case, board president of Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation, stands outside a former township hall in Osceola County, where the community has debated the public benefit of having water bottling operations in the area.

Whitmer’s office didn’t provide a response to questions from ProPublica.

Rep. Rachel Hood, a Democrat who sponsored bills to protect Michigan’s water, said the governor is a “remarkable leader” who “has been diverted from the fundamentals” by crises that include the pandemic and flooding that followed massive dam failures. “She’s done some good work, but there’s just so much to do,” Hood said.

The Whitmer administration has overseen significant investment in water infrastructure, including lead pipe replacement, and signed a new law requiring filtered faucets in schools and child care centers.

But in Whitmer’s first four years as governor, the Legislature was still under Republican control, and leaders refused to consider bills aimed at groundwater withdrawals and bottled water, said Rep. Laurie Pohutsky, another Democrat who sponsored water bills.

Her party took over both the state House and the Senate in 2023, the first time it controlled the Legislature and the governor’s office in nearly four decades. Now, Pohutsky is speaker pro tempore and chair of the environmental committee. She’s hopeful for future bills, she said, but there’s no timetable for them. First, she said, the Legislature needs to undo the limits put in place almost two decades ago on the ability of the state’s environmental agency to update water quality rules and standards.

BlueTriton said in a statement that it’s committed to collaborating with policymakers and others to strengthen water quality and stewardship policies. It carefully monitors its water sources for sustainability, the company said. Its Ice Mountain brand also “has a long history of supporting communities in times of need,” such as delivering bottled water weekly to Flint for about four years after the state program ceased, the company said. (This effort was featured in a company video.)

The bottling of Michigan water has tested leaders from both parties over the years. In 2001, when a New York town advertised its willingness to sell “crystal clear well water,” Republican Gov. John Engler wrote the mayor to remind him that the water was likely connected to Lake Ontario. Per an informal agreement signed in the 1980s, he said, any such sale would require the approval of all Great Lakes governors. The town dropped the plan.

Months later, after public resistance killed Perrier’s efforts to locate in Wisconsin, Engler welcomed the Nestle-owned business to Michigan. It began pumping water from rural Mecosta County, about 110 miles northwest of Lansing.

“Perrier should be thankful that the raw material is free,” wrote an Engler adviser in a memo, according to Dave Dempsey’s book, “Great Lakes for Sale.” “If it was trees, natural gas, minerals, oil, or even sand, they would compensate the state.”

Around the same time, a Canadian company proposed shipping water from Lake Superior to Asia. In 2007, Bill Richardson, a presidential candidate from New Mexico, floated the idea of piping Great Lakes water to the thirsty Southwest. Unnerved at the prospect of losing a precious resource, Michigan and neighboring states implemented policies to keep the water in its natural basin: the watershed where it flows back toward the lakes.

They established the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact in 2008 to coordinate efforts. The landmark agreement by eight states, along with a parallel agreement that includes two Canadian provinces, bans nearly all water diversions — a stronger version of the policy Engler referenced. And in 2009, Michigan introduced its first system for assessing and permitting large withdrawals.

But bottled water remained a tripwire, even though other industries, like agriculture, use significantly more. Officials who called for new protections ran up against established water law and intersecting economic concerns.

BlueTriton’s water pipeline facility operates not far from Chippewa Creek, one of two creeks in the area that environmentalists are monitoring for signs of reduced flow.

Americans spent about $49 billion last year on bottled water, even though most can access water safely in their homes. The Beverage Marketing Corporation, a research and consulting firm, called it the largest beverage category by volume in the United States. The group has said that water bottlers’ revenues are growing “largely due to higher prices.”

What’s happening in Michigan with bottled water is also happening elsewhere. BlueTriton sued California regulators last fall when they drastically limited how much water it can draw from the source of springs that flow through a national forest, which has been bottled and sold under the Arrowhead brand for more than 100 years.

Dempsey, the author who’s also a senior adviser to the Michigan-based nonprofit For Love of Water, believes there’s a difference between the bottled water industry and other commercial water users, such as farms and breweries. It’s one thing to use the water and another thing to take it and sell it, he told ProPublica.

The industry “gets the water almost for free” and “sells it at a huge markup,” Dempsey said. “And that’s just not fair to the public interest.”

FLOW developed model legislation under which Michigan would license companies for small container withdrawals, like those used by Ice Mountain, and subject them to royalties. This could raise at least $250 million a year, said executive director Liz Kirkwood, which could go toward other priorities, such as eliminating lead pipes or establishing an emergency fund so communities in crisis “never have to pay for bottled water.”

Peter Lucido, then a Republican representative, introduced a bill in 2017 that would levy a 5-cent-per-gallon tax on water bottling companies, which, he told ProPublica, could go toward fixing Michigan’s out-of-date stormwater infrastructure. His bill died without a hearing in the GOP-led Legislature. A similar bill met the same fate in 2018.

Lucido, now a prosecutor, blames industry influence. He said he remembers four Nestle lobbyists in his office after he introduced his bill.

“When you’re making billions of dollars on bottled water, it doesn’t take much to get a team of lawyers and lobbyists to go ahead and put the fire out,” he said. And anyway, Lucido added, “not everybody has the guts to stand up.”

The company is also a major source of jobs in a rural part of the state, employing 285 people in Mecosta County in 2021, according to a study commissioned by BlueTriton. It contributed more than $76 million to the regional economy that year, the report estimated, and over $179 million to the state economy. The company pays the city of Evart, in Osceola County, for water from two wells owned by the municipality; that water is used for its Ice Mountain brand.

But bottlers have avoided additional fees for removing groundwater, even though Whitmer promoted the idea as a candidate. Her 2018 water plan noted that the state charges companies a “severance tax” for mining other types of natural resources, or “severing” them from the soil. A similar fee for water, the plan said, could “control the siphoning of water for water bottling and my administration will work to see it done.”

Some environmentalists are skeptical. Collecting money for withdrawn water contributes to its commodification, they say, and might even motivate the state to expand the bottled water industry. It could also add to consumer costs, burdening people who don’t have safe water at home.

A locked gate leads to land leased by BlueTriton to draw water for bottling.

Instead of grappling with water royalties or taxes in the years since Whitmer was elected, Democratic lawmakers have proposed broad policy changes that could limit how much groundwater companies can extract, bottle and sell.

They introduced at least three bills to eliminate a measure that allows water to leave the basin if it’s in a small container — the so-called bottled water loophole. And they introduced at least six bills that would give the state more authority to weigh whether a withdrawal request is in the public interest, giving it greater grounds for a potential denial.

Eight of those nine bills, including one that had 28 sponsors, died without a hearing in a GOP-led Legislature. Hood said they were “largely messaging bills” — unlikely to become law, but meant to signal concern and ignite a conversation. Only one was introduced after Democrats took control of the Legislature: a public trust measure with a single sponsor, introduced last September. It hasn’t had a hearing.

On top of a “crowded agenda” pushing withdrawals off the priority list, there’s a lack of unanimity, said Sen. Jeff Irwin, sponsor of two earlier water bills. “Do you really have the votes on some of these environmental concerns that end up having an effect on commerce and industry?”

Hood is trying a different tack. She recently introduced a proposal to amend the state constitution to establish a right to a clean environment. Similar to the public trust bills, it would compel the state to act as a trustee for its natural resources. Hood said it’s modeled on an amendment in Pennsylvania’s constitution. Montana and New York have similar amendments.

The proposal was referred to the environmental committee chaired by Pohutsky in April. Changing Michigan’s constitution through the Legislature requires a two-thirds majority in both chambers, a formidable challenge.

The ongoing budget debate in Lansing is also an opportunity for lawmakers to fund a state council’s recommendations to improve how Michigan monitors and calculates water withdrawals. Pending since 2022, they echo concerns raised last month by the auditor general. “We were told, ‘We’ll get to you,’” a member of the Water Use Advisory Council said at a February meeting. She urged others to reach out to their legislators. “Every contact does help.”

For now, the environmentalists who have long worried about the bottled water industry’s effect on the cold creeks of Northern Michigan aren’t expecting much. Groundwater is easy for government officials to overlook, said Dempsey. Case, the board president of Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation, said she and her colleagues are ready to testify if a bill ever has a hearing.

And Steve Petoskey, an MCWC board member who lives in the area where BlueTriton pumps water, said he wishes that decision-makers considered the interests of regular people, not just businesses.

“They’re getting all the breaks,” he said of companies like BlueTriton. “Our concerns don’t seem to be heard.”

A volunteer with the Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation goes to observe water levels in Osceola County.

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Correction

June 7, 2024: This story originally misstated where water from the city of Evart, in Osceola County, ends up after being purchased by BlueTriton Brands. It is used for its Ice Mountain brand, not Pure Life.

by Molly Parker and Beth Hundsdorfer, Capitol News Illinois

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

It was on L.J.’s 11th birthday, in December 2022, that child welfare workers finally took him away. They arrived at his central Illinois home to investigate an abuse allegation and decided on the spot to remove the boy along with his baby brother and sister — the “Irish twins,” as their parents called them.

His mother begged to keep the children while her boyfriend told child welfare workers and the police called to the scene that they could take L.J.: “You wanna take someone? Take that little motherfucker down there or wherever the fuck he is at. I’ve been trying to get him out of here for a long time.”

By that time, L.J. told authorities he hadn’t been in a classroom for years, according to police records. First came COVID-19. Then, in August 2021 when he was going to have to repeat the third grade, his mother and her boyfriend decided that L.J. would be homeschooled and that they would be his teachers. In an instant, his world shrank to the confines of a one-bedroom apartment in the small Illinois college town of Charleston — no teachers, counselors or classmates.

In that apartment, L.J. would later tell police, he was beaten and denied food: Getting leftovers from the refrigerator was punishable by a whipping with a belt; sass was met with a slap in the face.

L.J. told police he got no lessons or schoolwork at home. Asked if he had learned much, L.J. replied, “Not really.”

L.J. told police that he was sometimes left alone to care for his baby siblings and punished for eating food without permission, according to Charleston Police Department records. (Obtained by Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica. Highlighted and redacted by ProPublica.)

Reporters are using the first and middle initials of the boy, who is now 12 and remains in state custody, to protect his identity.

While each state has different regulations for homeschooling — and most of them are relatively weak — Illinois is among a small minority that places virtually no rules on parents who homeschool their children: The parents aren’t required to register with any governmental agency, and no tests are required. Under Illinois law, they must provide an education equivalent to what is offered in public schools, covering core subjects like math, language arts, science and health. But parents don’t have to have a high school diploma or GED, and state authorities cannot compel them to demonstrate their teaching methods or prove attendance, curriculum or testing outcomes.

The Illinois State Board of Education said in a statement that regional education offices are empowered by Illinois law to request evidence that a family that homeschools is providing an adequate course of instruction. But, the spokesperson said, their “ability to intervene can be limited.”

Educational officials say this lack of regulation allows parents to pull vulnerable children like L.J. from public schools then not provide any education for them. They call them “no schoolers.”

No oversight also means children schooled at home lose the protections schools provide, including teachers, counselors, coaches and bus drivers — school personnel legally bound to report suspected child abuse and neglect. Under Illinois law, parents may homeschool even if they would be disqualified from working with youth in any other setting; this includes parents with violent criminal records or pending child abuse investigations, or those found to have abused children in the past.

The number of students from preschool to 12th grade enrolled in the state’s public schools has dropped by about 127,000 since the pandemic began. Enrollment losses have outpaced declines in population, according to a report by Advance Illinois, a nonprofit education policy and advocacy organization. And, despite conventional wisdom, the drop was also not the result of wealthier families moving their children to private schools: After the pandemic, private school enrollment declined too, according to the same report.

In the face of this historic exodus from public schools, Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica set out to examine the lack of oversight by education and child welfare systems when some of those children disappear into families later accused of no-schooling and, sometimes, abuse and neglect.

Reporters found no centralized system for investigating homeschooling concerns. Educational officials said they were ill equipped to handle cases where parents are accused of neglecting their children’s education. They also said the state’s laws made it all but impossible to intervene in cases where parents claim they are homeschooling. Reporters also found that under the current structure, concerns about homeschooling bounce between child welfare and education authorities, with no entity fully prepared to step in.

“Although we have parents that do a great job of homeschooling, we have many ‘no schoolers’” said Angie Zarvell, superintendent of a regional education office about 100 miles southwest of Chicago that covers three counties and 23 school districts. “The damage this is doing to small rural areas is great. These children will not have the basic skills needed to be contributing members of society.”

Regional education offices, like the one Zarvell oversees, are required by law to identify children who are truant and try to help get them back into school.

We have many ‘no schoolers.’ The damage this is doing to small rural areas is great. These children will not have the basic skills needed to be contributing members of society.

—Angie Zarvell, superintendent of a regional education office that covers 23 school districts

But once parents claim they are homeschooling, “our hands are tied,” said Superintendent Michelle Mueller, whose regional office is located about 60 miles north of St. Louis.

Even the state’s child welfare agency can do little: Reports to its child abuse hotline alleging that parents are depriving their children of an education have multiplied, but the Department of Children and Family Services doesn’t investigate schooling matters. Instead, it passes reports to regional education offices.

Todd Vilardo, who since 2017 has been superintendent of the school district where L.J. was enrolled, said he is seeing more and more children outside of school during the day. He wonders, “‘Aren’t they supposed to be in school?’ But I’m reminded that maybe they’re homeschooled,” said Vilardo, who has worked in the Charleston school district for 33 years. “Then I’m reminded that there are very few effective checks and balances on home schools.”

“A Huge Crack in Our System”

There’s no way to determine the precise number of children who are homeschooled. In 2022, 4,493 children were recorded as withdrawn to homeschool, a number that is likely much higher because Illinois doesn’t require parents to register homeschooled children. That is a little more than double the number a decade before.

In late fall of 2020, L.J. was one of the kids who slipped out of school. After a roughly five-month hiatus from the classroom during the pandemic, L.J.’s school resumed in-person classes. The third grader, however, was frequently absent.

At home, tensions ran high. In the 640-square-foot apartment, L.J.’s mother, Ashley White, and her boyfriend, Brian Anderson, juggled the demands of three children including two born just about 10 months apart.

White, now 31, worked at a local fast-food restaurant. Anderson, now 51, who uses a wheelchair, had applied for disability payments. Anderson doesn’t have a valid driver’s license. The family lived in a subsidized housing complex for low-income seniors and people with disabilities.

In an interview with reporters in late February, 14 months after L.J. had been taken into custody by the state, the couple offered a range of explanations for why he hadn’t been in school. L.J. had been suspended and barred from returning, they said, though school records show no expulsion. They also said they had tried to put L.J. in an alternative school for children with special needs, but he didn’t have a diagnosis that qualified him to attend.

The couple made clear they believed that L.J. was a problem child who could get them in trouble; they said they thought he could get them sued. In the interview, Anderson called L.J. a pathological liar, a thief and a bad kid.

“I have 11 kids, never had a problem with any of them, never,” Anderson said. “I’ve never had a problem like this,” he said of L.J. The boy, he said, lacked discipline and continued to get “worse and worse and worse every year” he’d known him.

To support the idea that L.J. was combative, White provided a copy of a screenshot taken from a school chat forum in which the boy cursed at his schoolmates.

At the end of the school year, in spring 2021, the principal told White and Anderson that the boy would have to repeat the third grade. Rather than have L.J. held back, the couple pulled him out of school to homeschool. They didn’t have to fill out any paperwork or give a reason.

On any given day in Illinois, a parent can make that same decision. That’s due to a series of court and legislative decisions that strengthened parents’ rights against state interference in how they educate their children.

In 1950, the Illinois Supreme Court heard a case involving college-educated parents who kept their 7-year-old daughter at home. Those parents, Seventh-day Adventists, argued that a public school education produced a “pugnacious character” and believed the mother was the best teacher and nature was the best textbook. The judges ruled in their favor, finding that, in many respects under the law, homeschools are essentially like private schools: not required to register kids with the state and not subject to testing or curriculum mandates.

In 1989, the legislature voted to change how educational neglect cases are handled. Before the vote, DCFS was allowed to investigate parents who failed to ensure their child’s education just as it does other types of neglect. In a bipartisan vote, the General Assembly changed that, in part to reduce caseloads on DCFS — which has been overburdened and inadequately staffed for decades — and also in response to concerns about state interference from families who homeschool.

Since then, DCFS has referred complaints about schooling that come in to its child abuse hotline over to regional offices of education. The letter accompanying the educational neglect referral form ends with: “This notice is for your information and pursuit only. No response to this office is required.”

The Department of Children and Family Services forwards educational neglect claims made to its hotline to regional offices of education handling truancy, stating educational officials need not report findings back. (Obtained by Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Tierney Stutz, executive deputy director at DCFS, said that regional education officials are welcome to report back findings, but that “DCFS does not have statutory authority to act on this information.”

“Unfortunately, this is a huge crack in our system,” said Amber Quirk, regional superintendent of the office of education that covers densely populated DuPage County in the Chicago suburbs.

To see how this system is working, reporters obtained more than 450 of these educational neglect reports, representing over a third of the more than 1,200 forwarded by DCFS over three years ending in 2023. About 10% of them specifically cited substandard homeschooling claims. But officials said that in many of the other reported cases of kids out of school, they found that families also claimed they were homeschooling.

Faced with cases of truancy or educational neglect, county prosecutors can press charges against parents. But if they do, parents can lean on Illinois’ parental protections when they defend themselves in court from a truancy charge.

That’s been the experience of Dirk Muffler, who oversees truancy intervention at a regional office of education covering five counties in west-central Illinois. “We’ve gone through an entire truancy process, literally standing on the courthouse steps getting ready to walk in to screen a kid into court and the parents say, ‘We are homeschooling.’ I have to just walk away then.”

More recently, the ISBE made one more decision to loosen the monitoring of parents who homeschool: For years, school districts and regional offices distributed voluntary registration forms to families who homeschool, some of whom returned them. Then last year, the state agency told those regional offices that they no longer had to send those forms to ISBE.

All we want is to be left alone. And Illinois has been so good. We have probably the best state in the nation to homeschool.

—Kirk Smith, executive director of Illinois Christian Home Educators

“The homeschool registration form was being misinterpreted in some instances that ISBE was reviewing or approving homeschool programs, which it does not have statutory authority to do,” an ISBE spokesperson told the news organizations.

Over the years, the legislature has taken up proposals to strengthen the state’s oversight of homeschooling. In 2011, lawmakers considered requiring parents to notify their local school districts of their intent to homeschool, and in 2019 they considered calling for DCFS to inspect all homeschools and have ISBE approve their curriculum.

Each time, however, the state’s strong homeschooling lobby, mostly made up of religious-based organizations, stepped in.

This March, under sponsorship of the Illinois Christian Home Educators, homeschoolers massed at the state Capitol as they have for decades for Cherry Pie Day, bringing pies to each of the state’s 177 lawmakers.

Families who homeschool and their supporters assembled at the Illinois Capitol in March to give lawmakers cherry pies, a gesture of gratitude for maintaining regulation-free homeschooling. (Dominique Martinez-Powell/Saluki Local Reporting Lab, for Capitol News Illinois)

Kirk Smith, the organization’s executive director and former public school teacher, summed up his group’s appeal to lawmakers: “All we want is to be left alone. And Illinois has been so good. We have probably the best state in the nation to homeschool.”

“Nobody Knows. He’s Not in School.”

Just days after child protection workers took 11-year-old L.J. into protective custody on his birthday, a 9-year-old homeschooled boy, 240 miles away, disappeared and was missing for months before police went looking for him.

Though the case of Zion Staples was covered in the media, it has not been previously reported that his homeschooling status delayed the discovery of his death.

Zion had been living in Rock Island, in the northwest part of the state, with his mother, Sushi Staples. The family had a long history of abuse and neglect investigations by DCFS, and Staples had lost two kids to foster care in Illinois nearly two decades before because she mistreated them; the children were not returned to her. The most recent investigation by DCFS was in 2021. The department did not find enough evidence to find mistreatment and the case was closed.

Despite her past involvement with child welfare services, no Illinois laws restricted her from homeschooling the children who remained in her care, including Zion and five others who were then ages 8 to 14.

When reporters asked DCFS for his schooling status, the agency’s responses revealed considerable confusion about where he was being educated. DCFS originally told the news organizations that Zion was enrolled in an online school program, but the company that DCFS said had been providing his schooling told reporters that Zion had never been enrolled. DCFS later clarified that his mother said he was leaving public school in August 2021 to attend an online program, but no one was required to verify this information.

On a December morning in 2022, Staples told police she returned home from running errands and found Zion dead. A coroner would later find that he died from an accidental, self-inflicted shot fired from a gun the children found in the house. His mother hid the body and later confided to her friend, Laterrica Wilson, that she did it because she did not want to risk losing her other children.

“She said: ‘Nobody knows. He’s not in school. He’s homeschooled. I’ve got this figured out,’” Wilson recalled in an interview with a reporter about a conversation she had with Staples a few months after the child had died. “She said she had too much to lose.”

Wilson, who lives in Florida, said it was one of several calls she had with Staples over the course of months as she tried to figure out what had happened and what to do about it. Police records indicate that in July, in response to a call from Wilson, they visited the home. Staples denied the child even existed. Later, when police executed a search warrant, officers found Zion’s body in a metal trash can in the garage; he was still wearing his Spiderman pajama bottoms. He’d been dead for seven months, an autopsy revealed.

Staples was charged with concealing a death, failure to report the death of a child within 24 hours and obstructing justice. Staples pleaded guilty to felony endangering the health of a child in February and was sentenced to two years in prison in April.

Staples did not respond to a letter sent to her in prison seeking comment on this case.

DCFS and its university partners study all sorts of risks to children involved with the child welfare system, but they’ve never examined homeschooling and do not track the number of children the agency comes in contact with who are homeschooled. While the agency’s inspector general is required to file reports on every child who dies in foster care or whose family the agency had investigated within the preceding year of the child’s death, the children’s schooling status is rarely noted in them.

For L.J., homeschooling rules also blinded school officials to abuse he suffered, although their administrative office is within sight of his apartment complex. About five months passed from when he was withdrawn to homeschool in the summer of 2021 before the first signs of help arrived. Following a call to its hotline in January 2022, DCFS found White and Anderson neglectful, citing inadequate supervision, but that did not result in L.J. returning to school. DCFS offered services, but Anderson and White declined.

DCFS received more calls to its hotline in June 2022 and again that September, alleging that Anderson and White had mistreated L.J. In both of those cases, DCFS investigators did not find enough evidence to support those allegations and closed the cases.

The caller in September told DCFS the boy appeared malnourished. L.J. hadn’t been in school since 2019, the caller reported. But DCFS said they did not pursue an investigation into his schooling matters because it wasn’t in their policies to do so.

It did send an educational neglect report to Kyle Thompson, the superintendent of schools overseeing the regional office of education in Charleston. The form didn’t mention physical abuse, but it did say that L.J. had begged for food from neighbors, that doctors were concerned about his weight and that a DCFS caseworker had recently visited the home but no one had answered the door.

DCFS fielded a complaint about L.J. to its hotline in September 2022 that included concerns about his eating and weight; it also said he hadn’t been in school for years. The department forwarded these details on an educational neglect report to the regional office of education in Charleston. (Obtained by Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Thompson was in his office when the educational neglect report ended up on his desk on an October afternoon. Alarmed when he read the allegations, Thompson went to the apartment that same day. White and Anderson came to the door, Thompson recalled, and eventually agreed to meet with school officials.

“I really feel like we may have saved that kid’s life that day,” Thompson said.

But Anderson and White continued to keep L.J. at home.

In November, a grocery store manager found L.J. in the parking lot begging for quarters and called police, who took L.J. home and later issued a ticket to White and Anderson for violating a city truancy ordinance. L.J. hadn’t been to school the whole year — 70 days.

Anderson said he didn’t know why he was cited, since he was homeschooling. “Apparently, it wasn’t good enough for the school system,” he told reporters.

A few days later, police and child welfare services again visited the home and found welts and bruises on L.J.’s back. L.J. said Anderson had beaten him with a belt as punishment for eating leftover Salisbury steak and potatoes without permission. The boy also told child welfare workers he had not showered for two weeks.

Anderson and White would later tell reporters L.J. was on a diet of fruits and vegetables because he was too fat and prediabetic, but L.J. told police he ate mostly cereal. Though DCFS found credible evidence of both neglect and abuse in its November and December investigations, the couple said they did not abuse L.J. or deny him an education. They are still trying to get the two younger children back, but they say they don’t want L.J. In an April court custody hearing, a judge in their child welfare case admonished them for not accepting responsibility for their treatment of L.J., including keeping him from school.

For its part, the state did ultimately take responsibility for L.J.’s schooling: Caseworkers took the children into custody on a Friday. The following Monday, L.J. returned to public school.

Help ProPublica Report on Education

Have a news tip regarding homeschooling, chronic truancy or educational neglect? Email them to Molly Parker or Beth Hundsdorfer at investigations@capitolnewsillinois.com.

Mollie Simon of ProPublica contributed research. Andrew Adams of Capitol News Illinois contributed data reporting.

by Andrea Bernstein

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There’s a tape that both the defense and the prosecution played in summations in former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial. In it, you can hear the chaos of Trump’s office at Trump Tower in September of 2016: Trump seems to be having multiple conversations almost simultaneously. He talks to an unidentified person on the phone. He discusses polls with Michael Cohen, his executive vice-president at the time. Trump and Cohen talk about a diversity initiative and stopping the media from unsealing the records of Trump’s first divorce. His executive assistant pops in with word of a call from a developer. Trump calls for a Coke.

And then, very clearly, you can hear Cohen saying, “I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend, David, you know, so that — I’m going to do that right away. I’ve actually come up and I’ve spoken … I’ve spoken to Allen Weisselberg” — then the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer — “about how to set the whole thing up.”

Trump interrupts and says, “So, what do we got to pay for this, 150?” Then he says, “Cash?”

“No, no, no, no no,” Cohen says. “I got it.”

On the most literal level, the tape showed Trump discussing the logistics of paying off a woman who said she had an affair with him. This was key evidence for the jury’s ultimate finding that he had intended to alter the outcome of the 2016 election by making unlawful hush money payments.

When this tape was first made public, in 2018, it was hard to pin down exactly what it all meant. But as Trump’s seven-week trial proceeded, the broader meaning of the tape emerged in sharp relief: Everything is connected in Trump world, ethical borders are easily crossed and Trump is on top of every detail.

The verdict in the criminal trial provided answers to a narrow series of questions, not least of which was whether a presidential candidate had used illicit means to prevent voters from learning about a payoff to conceal a sexual encounter. (Trump has vowed to appeal.) But the trial also unveiled a broad array of evidence that went far beyond the charges. It revealed a lot about how Trump went about running his company and the presidency — and provided hints of how that might play out in a second Trump administration.

For most of Trump’s presidential term, I co-hosted the ProPublica/WNYC podcast “Trump, Inc.,” whose mission was to delve into the conflicts of interest between Trump’s business and his presidency. Because there was so much that journalists didn’t — and couldn’t — understand about a privately held company that clung tightly to its secrets, “Trump, Inc.” billed itself as “an open investigation.” We were candid about what we did and did not know because we lived in a world of doubt.

“Trump, Inc.” uncovered a lot, including unearthing Cohen’s dubious connections in 2018 and outlining how his role as Trump’s lawyer (then still intact) created a cloak of legal privilege that hid their interactions.

But we saw just tiny glimpses of the documents that have now been revealed in their entirety in the criminal trial; we had no access to the many Trump employees, current and former, who have now described, under oath, the inner workings of the Trump Organization.

That testimony confirmed what that tape seemed to show: that Trump pays close, close attention to all his business affairs, and always has. This, in turn, suggests that the mixing of Trump’s presidency and business that “Trump, Inc.” and others documented occurred under that same watchful eye. And if voters elect Trump a second time — this time knowing that he was convicted of a crime, one where key acts were committed in the Oval Office, on top of his two impeachments — Trump can conclude that America’s voters have blessed his way of doing business. There’s every reason to believe his conflicts of interest will only be more open and more unapologetic.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump employees testified to his intense level of control in three trials against Trump or his company over the past two years. These were among five trials since 2022, each of which I covered in person, including the criminal trial of his company for tax fraud, two defamation suits brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll and the New York attorney general’s civil fraud trial. Each trial ended badly for Trump or his company (and each is being appealed).

Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York offered one sharp revelation after the next. The disclosures came not just from the talked-about witnesses, such as former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, Stormy Daniels and Cohen himself, but also from Trump’s former comptroller, his executive assistant and the aide who sat closest to the Oval Office. Some of these individuals, including a junior bookkeeper for the Trump Organization and the head of the company’s accounts payable department, work in Trump Tower to this day.

The picture that emerges from their testimony is of a boss — “The Boss” is what they nearly uniformly call him — who manages the tiniest of details but leaves the faintest of traces of all that management. Up until the throes of the 2016 campaign, Trump had to approve every payment over $2,500, an extraordinarily tiny sum for a mogul with assets around the globe. (For the duration of the campaign, until he became president, that amount inched up, to $10,000.) Trump would reject checks he didn’t want to pay and send them back to his underlings, with the word “VOID” scrawled on them in Sharpie.

Trump watched every expense in this way, his comptroller Jeff McConney testified. Trump once told him, early in his time at the company, “You’re fired,” because McConney hadn’t made an effort to reduce Trump’s bills before presenting Trump with payment documents. “It was a teaching moment,” McConney said on the stand. This close attention and tight-fistedness extended company wide: When it came to Trump University, Cohen testified, it was part of his job to offer a vendor 20% of what they were owed, or to pay them nothing at all.

Trump brought this ethos to the White House, where, as his lawyers liked to point out, he was the “leader of the free world.” He took time to write “PAY” on a $6,974 invoice sent by Trump Organization executive assistant Rhona Graff for an annual membership and “food minimum” at the Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, New York.

Trump, of course, handed over control of the Trump Organization, including the oversight of its payments, to his older sons and Weisselberg at the outset of his administration. But he never gave up ownership of his company. He always made money from it, and does to this day.

And Trump, while president, went to extraordinary lengths to keep control of his “personal” checking account. That account actually belonged to a Trump Organization business entity, which underscored the lack of separation between Trump and the company he had ostensibly separated himself from. Trump’s personal checks were approved by Weisselberg; generated by Deborah Tarasoff, the head of Trump’s accounts payable department; stapled to the approved invoice; and sent via FedEx by Trump’s junior bookkeeper, Rebecca Manochio, to the Washington home of Trump’s bodyguard-turned-White House aide, Keith Schiller, who would bring them over for Trump to sign. That’s how the checks that Trump signed to Cohen made their way to the Oval Office.

“Checks came in a FedEx envelope” that Schiller delivered, testified Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s director of Oval Office operations. “I opened the envelope. And inside was a manila folder with a stack of checks. And I brought the manila folder in to the president for him to sign.”

Money wasn’t the only thing Trump paid close attention to. He wrote all of his social media posts, save for a few written by an aide, Dan Scavino. Sometimes, Trump would dictate tweets to Westerhout. She would type them up, print them out and show them to Trump so the president of the United States could take time to scrutinize, and adjust, the punctuation. “He liked to use the Oxford comma,” Westerhout testified.

Trump did not send emails or text messages. This aversion has long been known, but the trial testimony laid out a whole series of ways in which Trump communicated without leaving precise documentation.

He was on the phone beginning at 6 in the morning and “late into the night after I went to bed, so I always felt guilty about that,” Westerhout testified. He’d often use Schiller’s cellphone to make calls, and employees would use that number to reach Trump. There were no Trump memos, no notepads, no Post-it notes, just an occasional Sharpie scrawl. And largely, except for Cohen’s, no testimony that what these employees did, they did “at the direction of” and “for the benefit of” Donald Trump. (This was an essential part of the judge’s charge to the jury: that Trump “personally, or by acting in concert with another person or persons, made or caused a false entry in the business records of an enterprise.”)

This is the backdrop for the conflicts “Trump, Inc.” and other news media covered while Trump was president. To recap some of them (at a moment when polls show many Americans have forgotten much of what transpired during his administration): Trump’s hotel in Washington became a must stop-by for foreign officials, earning his company millions. He caused the U.S. Treasury to spend more than $1 million to house Secret Service agents in rooms with top-of-the-market rates at Mar-a-Lago and had the government pick up the tab for $1,005.60 in cocktails apparently enjoyed by administration officials and friends at his resort’s bar.

During Trump’s presidency, the response to questions about all this went something like this: As a global businessman, he or his allies would say, how could he possibly pay attention to whether the presidential seal was used on his golf courses? Or whether his son, Don Jr., was trading on the name “Donald Trump” to sell condos in India. Or whether businesspeople with foreign ties were trying to make a buck, or millions, from his presidency?

Indeed, this was part of Trump’s defense in the criminal trial, and in the civil fraud trial at which Trump was ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to New York state for what a judge found was a yearslong practice of lying about the value of his assets. When he testified at that civil trial, Trump distanced himself from the fraud: “All I did was authorize and tell people to give whatever is necessary for the accountants to do the statements,” he said. And the false statements of financial condition? “I would look at them, I would see them and maybe on some occasions, I would have some suggestions.”

As is his right, Trump chose not to testify at his criminal trial, but his lawyer Todd Blanche argued on his behalf that Trump “had nothing to do, had nothing to do with the invoice, with the check being generated, or with the entry on the ledger” and that he was so busy being president he maybe didn’t even look at the checks he signed. “Sometimes he would sign checks even when he was meeting with people, while he was on the phone, and even without reviewing them,” Blanche said during closing arguments.

The jury did not buy that defense.

Trump is currently leading in the polls. It’s entirely possible he will be elected president. Yet he’s continuing to aggressively pursue business deals in countries that will have a long list of issues on which they will be seeking U.S. support.

The Trump Organization entered a full-on partnership with LIV Golf, an entity majority-owned by the government of Saudi Arabia, for tournaments at his golf courses. And last year, a New York Times reporter and photographer visited what the reporter called a “multibillion-dollar project backed by Oman’s oil-rich government that has an unusual partner: former President Donald J. Trump.” The project was launched and is being built while Trump is the front-runner for a second presidency. But neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign tried to defend or separate the project from the candidate who, while not running the company, still makes money from it.

“It’s like the Hamptons of the Middle East,” Eric Trump, who now runs the Trump Organization, told the Times. The paper wrote: “Oman, in fact, is nothing like the Hamptons. It is a Muslim nation and absolute monarchy, ruled by a sultan, who plays a sensitive role in the Middle East: Oman maintains close ties with Saudi Arabia and its allies, but also with Iran, with which it has considerable trade.”

It isn’t just the foreign deals. In April, right around the time Trump was about to be criminally tried in New York, he offered oil executives gathered at Mar-a-Lago “a deal,” the Washington Post reported. The publication summarized his message as: “You all are wealthy enough that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House.” In exchange, the Post said, Trump promised to reverse President Joe Biden’s initiatives to slow climate change, vowing to roll back some of them “on Day 1.”

And, as has been widely reported, with Truth Social going public, Trump has set up what Vox called “a perfect avenue for potential corruption.” As Vox noted, it’s “a way for Trump’s supporters to personally offer him financial support at a time when he desperately needs it.” By propping up the share price of the stock of the cash-hemorrhaging social media company, shareholders have potentially put billions of dollars in Donald Trump’s pocket.

It’s clear that Trump plays favorites and rewards loyalty; nearly eight years after he was inaugurated in 2017, it’s hard to imagine that any savvy businessperson or foreign leader fails to recognize this.

Certainly, those who were once in Trump’s orbit, if only briefly, testified to the dark side of that equation. Both Cohen and Daniels described the torrent of retribution they’ve experienced. Trump is unapologetic about his quest for vengeance. As he put it in one social media post last summer, “IF YOU GO AFTER ME I’M COMING AFTER YOU.”

Merely having been once employed by Trump seems to have taken a toll, on even relatively minor figures. In the civil fraud trial, Trump’s former comptroller, McConney, started weeping when he was asked why he no longer worked at the Trump Organization. He said he could no longer “deal with” the legal scrutiny he’d suffered. In the criminal trial, both former communications director Hope Hicks and Westerhout burst into tears on the stand, reflecting on their work history with Trump. Both said they remained loyal, but both had been banished from Trump’s graces.

And as for Weisselberg, he was not called to testify in this trial. His previous testimony in the trial of Trump’s company resulted in felony convictions on 17 counts and a five-month jail sentence. He is now serving a second jail sentence, in Rikers Island, for committing perjury in Trump’s civil fraud trial.

In the courthouse, Trump spent long stretches of time in an uncomfortable room with the shades always drawn, the fluorescent lighting unforgiving. He was required to listen to weeks of unflattering testimony, including, several times, to his own voice on that tape Cohen made of him, utterly cognizant of the tawdry deal he was striking. Saying, “So, what do we got to pay for this, 150?” After all the testimony in his criminal trial, this no longer seems like a random moment. It sounds like who Trump is: his attention to detail, his willingness to subvert the rules, the way he wields money to enhance his power, and vice versa, and is utterly unashamed.

The public knows all this now. In a second Trump presidency, it’s exactly what we’d get. Except this time, it will be all out before us, not in a secretly recorded tape.

by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen

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.

Two national civil rights groups accused Illinois’ third-largest school district on Tuesday of relying on police to handle school discipline, unlawfully targeting Black students with tickets, arrests and other discipline.

In a 25-page complaint against Rockford Public Schools, filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the National Center for Youth Law and the MacArthur Justice Center said that Rockford police officers have been “addressing minor behaviors that should be handled as an educational matter by parents, teachers, and school leaders — and not as a law enforcement matter by police officers.”

The complaint adds: “Black students bear the brunt of this harm.”

The groups, which shared a copy of the complaint with ProPublica, asked the Education Department to find that the district violated federal law prohibiting discrimination and to order it to change its discipline practices and reliance on police. Using data obtained from the Rockford district and the Rockford Police Department, the groups argue that the district’s partnership with police funnels Black students — but not their white peers — into the justice system, even for the same infractions at school.

A spokesperson for Rockford schools declined to answer questions from ProPublica, saying the district had not been told by the Office for Civil Rights that a complaint had been filed and that it “will respond accordingly” if an investigation is opened.

The two national groups have won civil rights claims in school districts previously and also prompted change on criminal justice issues, such as solitary confinement in prisons. The groups began to investigate school-based ticketing in Rockford after a 2022 investigation by ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune into the practice in Illinois that included a database of thousands of student tickets issued across the state, including in Rockford.

“The Price Kids Pay” investigation found that even though Illinois law bans school officials from fining students directly, districts skirt the law by cooperating with police. It also found that Black students were twice as likely to be ticketed at school than their white peers.

The municipal tickets — for violating ordinances including those against vaping, truancy and disorderly conduct — can include fines of as much as $750 in Rockford and are difficult to fight. They’ve left some families with debt and other serious financial consequences. Unlike in juvenile court, students in local ticket hearings cannot get a public defender.

Rockford is the second large district in Illinois to face a civil rights investigation for racial disparities in ticketing since “The Price Kids Pay” was published. An investigation by the Illinois attorney general’s office into Township High School District 211, the state’s biggest high school district, was opened in May 2022 and is still ongoing, the office said Monday. The district has denied that students’ race plays a role in discipline there.

The Rockford district has about 28,000 students: 26% white, 31% Black and 32% Latino. The district oversees 41 schools for students in kindergarten through high school. According to the complaint, Black students were more than three times as likely as their white peers to be sent to a school police officer during the past three school years up until March.

As a result of disproportionate police involvement, the complaint alleges, Black students are then more likely to get ticketed. For example, at least nine Black students received police tickets for “trespassing,” or being on campus without permission this year. While 27 white students were accused of trespassing during the same period, none were referred to police or ticketed.

Representatives from the two legal groups said they attended about a dozen administrative ticket hearings, as recently as May, held at Rockford City Hall during the school day. They found that ticketed students were almost exclusively students of color.

“I have seen parents and families in the City Hall very confused and distraught that they were being ticketed for these things,” Zoe Li, an attorney with the MacArthur Justice Center, said in an interview with ProPublica. “The fact that I have not seen a single white kid at a ticket hearing in Rockford is a little surprising.”

Illinois lawmakers and advocates twice have introduced bills that would curb school-based ticketing in Illinois, including this spring, but both efforts fizzled. Even though the state schools superintendent and governor have said they support an end to the practice, some legislators and school leaders worry that banning student ticketing might unintentionally limit when police can get involved in more serious incidents.

But ordinance violations are by definition not criminal; students who bring weapons to school, for example, typically would be arrested, not ticketed. Rockford is a good example of the harm caused by ticketing and the need for a change in state law, said Angie Jimenez, an attorney focused on justice and equity at the National Center for Youth Law, which has pushed for reforms in Illinois law.

“The plan is to still move forward with the legislative advocacy to stop the practice of school ticketing,” Jimenez said. “We are hopeful that this complaint will help to support those efforts overall.”

The complaint also highlights racial disparities in discipline overall in Rockford. Black students are more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers, the groups found, even if the district’s code of conduct prescribed a lesser consequence such as detention.

The Rockford district has been the subject of discrimination complaints before. In 1993, a federal judge ruled that the district was illegally segregating students, including by steering Black and Latino students into lower-level classes. As a result of its disparate treatment of students, the district remained under a federal desegregation order until 2001.

by Audrey Dutton

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.

For years, Idaho has been at the vanguard of the culture wars that are playing out in conservative states across the country.

It was the first state to attempt to restrict transgender girls and women from competing on women’s athletic teams, passing legislation that became a model for states across the country. It was among the first to explicitly ban “critical race theory” from public schools and target diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in public institutions. And the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a far-right Idaho political group, took an early lead in a nationwide campaign to remove books from libraries based on their content.

But Idaho Republicans have increasingly disagreed over how far to take these efforts. Capitol police in Boise had to intervene in a 2022 fight over proposed “parental freedom” legislation that, among other things, would have created a $1,000 fine if a school didn’t give parents what they want. This year, two prominent far-right Republicans were recorded quarreling over the party’s direction — an exchange that InvestigateWest said illustrates “a fracture among key far-right figures in Idaho politics, in a state where many races turn on contests of conservative purity.”

The Idaho Republican primary on May 21 continued the Legislature’s march to the right. Candidates who were aligned with the highly conservative Idaho Freedom Foundation picked up a net of eight seats, according to the group’s own tally. And in a state with so few Democrats, GOP primary winners are typically all but a lock to win in November’s general.

Yet these GOP purists fell short of one important milestone: enough members to outright control the legislative agenda. Some moderates fended off challengers from the right. Some incumbent hard-liners lost their seats.

The primary results were the latest reminder that Idaho Republicans remain far from united. And there are signs that the rift is leading frustrated Idaho voters to reject incumbents in general — conservative and moderate alike.

Here are some takeaways, based on local news reports and ProPublica’s interviews with experts in Idaho politics.

Incumbents Are at Risk

A surprising number of incumbents were knocked out of office in May. Almost all of the 87 Republicans in office were on the ballot. Of the 47 who faced challengers, 15 lost their seats.

It wasn’t the largest-ever purge, but it included the historic takedown of the GOP Senate leader by a newcomer to Idaho with no legislative experience.

Ron Nate, president of the Idaho Freedom Foundation, wrote in a blog post that the primary was “a good night for friends of liberty and a bad night for establishment good-old-boys.”

He noted that 11 of the ousted GOP incumbents had F grades on the group’s “Freedom Index,” while three of the losing incumbents had an A grade going into the election.

But this apparently resounding victory for the group’s ideas seems less so considering that prior to the election, the Freedom Foundation gave F’s to 47 Republicans who were on the ballot and A’s to only 10. In other words, about 23% of the foundation’s least-favorite lawmakers lost reelection races, while 30% of its favorites lost.

At least some of this housecleaning may reflect voter disgust with both warring camps in the Legislature.

“There’s a lot of people who are just frustrated, and so some of it kind of went into an anti-incumbent” wave, said Jaclyn Kettler, associate professor of political science at Boise State University.

Jaclyn Kettler, a political science associate professor at Boise State University, has studied Idaho elections for years. After last month’s GOP primary, she says, “things will shift more conservative, but there were some high-profile defeats and wins in both factions” of the Republican Party. (Sarah A. Miller for ProPublica)

Kettler pointed to a recent survey of about 1,000 Idahoans. Although it found that a majority of Republicans thought Idaho was headed in the right direction, a substantial minority — 30% — said it was on the wrong track.

Urban Conservatism Is Real

Some of the most important losses for moderates happened in the populous Treasure Valley region, home to Boise and its fast-growing suburbs.

It’s one of few parts of Idaho where Democrats and middle-of-the-road Republicans have traditionally held power, but its electorate has changed with the arrival of more and more right-leaning voters from California.

Sen. Chuck Winder, R-Boise, the highest-ranking Republican in the Senate with eight terms of service, lost his seat to Josh Keyser, who was raised in Southern California and moved to Boise in 2018. Keyser’s website said he was vice principal at a Christian school.

Winder had clashed with legislators to his right and was a critic of the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which has pushed to slash government spending across the board, worked to repeal the Idaho Medicaid expansion that was enacted by voters, claimed that Idaho’s schools are indoctrinating children into leftist politics, and more.

Stephanie Witt, professor of public policy, administration and political science at Boise State University, told ProPublica the upset for Winder and other Boise-area incumbents illustrated a stark new reality.

“It’s hard to overstate the number of California relocations and their interest,” Witt said.

"We’ve had people that were good legislators, very conservative, in the Treasure Valley,” she said, “but they’re being painted like they’re Bernie Sanders acolytes.”

Winder noted the changing politics of Idaho in an interview with the Idaho Press after the election.

“I think we’ve had a huge influence from out-of-state people moving here,” he told the publication. “All in all, Idaho is going to be fine, but good mainline Idaho people are going to have to get more involved in the party.”

Some Less-Populated Areas Snub the Far Right

In contrast to the wins for right-wing candidates in the capital city and its suburbs, several legislators far from Boise won reelection by wide margins, despite attacks from their county GOP committee claiming they failed to support the Republican platform.

East Idaho, known for agriculture, a national nuclear laboratory and a large membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also narrowly voted to oust a hard-line conservative incumbent. Julianne Young, an East Idaho Republican who introduced legislation to make “gender” and “sex” synonymous in state law, trailed her opponent by two votes, though she says she will request a recount.

In rural North Idaho, voters kicked out Sen. Scott Herndon, a conservative firebrand whose legislative agenda included making abortion illegal for rape victims. Herndon lost to former legislator Jim Woodward, who said he wants to see some health-related exceptions to the state’s abortion ban, according to Politico.

This year’s results revealed that some conservative Idahoans went into the voting booth with a “traditional Idaho trait: that you don’t like to be pushed around,” said Jim Jones, a Republican who previously served as attorney general and chief justice of the Idaho Supreme Court.

Jones, an outspoken critic of polarized Republican politics, is pushing for a ballot initiative this fall that would replace party primaries with a single, nonpartisan primary. The top vote-getters would then face off in a ranked-choice vote in the general election. Jones says the initiative would take power away from the fringes and put a premium on appealing to all voters.

Jim Jones, a former chief justice of the Idaho State Supreme Court, speaks to volunteers working in support of a Idaho open primaries ballot initiative. (Kyle Green/AP) Attacking Libraries Can Backfire

The outcomes also offered a partial verdict on one of the most explosive issues in America’s culture wars.

Idaho’s GOP last year held a no-confidence vote against 14 legislators statewide who in 2023 failed to support letting parents sue libraries over books considered “harmful to minors.” (The no-confidence vote also swept in Idaho’s Republican governor.) Nine of the 14 survived the GOP primary.

Kettler said the state and local Republican Party members who condemned incumbents over the library issue might be “more ideologically extreme” than most voters.

Idaho GOP Chair Dorothy Moon did not respond to interview requests from ProPublica. According to the Idaho Statesman, Moon said in her election night speech, “I think we’re fighting for the heart and soul of the party and the heart and soul of Idaho."

The Idaho Public Policy Survey — the survey of about 1,000 residents conducted in November — found overwhelming support for libraries. About 62% of the 374 self-identified Republicans who responded said they trust the choices of libraries and librarians.

Of the lawmakers who survived the primary despite their party’s censure of their library vote, about half were from East Idaho.

“My view is that, in eastern Idaho, the voters were sick and tired of all of the culture war fighting,” said Jones.

The Jury on Public Education Is Still Out

One of the highest-profile losses for incumbents was a Boise-area Republican who thwarted tax-funded vouchers that would allow parents to send their children to private school using public funds — a central policy goal of right-wing purists who describe it as “school choice.”

Julie Yamamoto led Idaho’s House Education Committee when it rejected voucher legislation. Challenger Kent Marmon, who embraces school choice, painted Yamamoto as a liberal.

A Virginia-based political action committee called Make Liberty Win produced fliers saying Yamamoto voted to support “porn in school libraries being shown to minors,” Idaho Education News reported, a claim she called “garbage.”

The losses for voucher foes like Yamamoto weren’t uniform. The Senate’s education chair, who has questioned the benefits of voucher proposals, retained his seat. And the Senate lost a key voucher supporter in Herndon, the North Idaho Republican; his challenger has spoken out against public support for private education, according to Idaho Education News.

It is unclear what the outcome portends for Republicans when they take up school spending issues next year.

Idahoans regularly list public education as a top priority. In sparsely populated parts of Idaho, which often lack private schools, the public schoolhouse is a gathering place for football games or performing arts — the “heart of the community,” as Jones says.

But advocates for “school choice” in Idaho appear to be finding an audience.

The recent state policy survey found that 60% of Republicans favored letting Idaho parents use $8,000 of public school money to enroll their student in private or religious school. About twice as many Republicans said they “strongly favor” that idea as “strongly oppose” it.

Kettler said national conservative groups seized on that sentiment and spent heavily on Idaho’s primary races this year, seeing Idaho as a place to advance conservative school policies such as vouchers.

These groups decided, Kettler said, that “it’s worth investing.”

by Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

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

Nine witnesses in the criminal cases against former President Donald Trump have received significant financial benefits, including large raises from his campaign, severance packages, new jobs, and a grant of shares and cash from Trump’s media company.

The benefits have flowed from Trump’s businesses and campaign committees, according to a ProPublica analysis of public disclosures, court records and securities filings. One campaign aide had his average monthly pay double, from $26,000 to $53,500. Another employee got a $2 million severance package barring him from voluntarily cooperating with law enforcement. And one of the campaign’s top officials had her daughter hired onto the campaign staff, where she is now the fourth-highest-paid employee.

These pay increases and other benefits often came at delicate moments in the legal proceedings against Trump. One aide who was given a plum position on the board of Trump’s social media company, for example, got the seat after he was subpoenaed but before he testified.

Significant changes to a staffer’s work situation, such as bonuses, pay raises, firings or promotions, can be evidence of a crime if they come outside the normal course of business. To prove witness tampering, prosecutors would need to show that perks or punishments were intended to influence testimony.

White-collar defense lawyers say the situation Trump finds himself in — in the dual role of defendant and boss of many of the people who are the primary witnesses to his alleged crimes — is not uncommon. Their standard advice is not to provide any unusual benefits or penalties to such employees. Ideally, decisions about employees slated to give evidence should be made by an independent body such as a board, not the boss who is under investigation.

Get in Touch

Do you have any information about Trump’s campaign or his businesses that we should know? Robert Faturechi can be reached by email at robert.faturechi@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 213-271-7217. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

Even if the perks were not intended to influence witnesses, they could prove troublesome for Trump in any future trials. Prosecutors could point to the benefits to undermine the credibility of those aides on the witness stand.

“It feels very shady, especially as you detect a pattern. … I would worry about it having a corrupt influence,” Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said after hearing from ProPublica about benefits provided to potential Trump witnesses.

But McQuade said these cases are difficult to prove, even if the intent were actually to influence testimony, because savvy defendants don’t explicitly attach strings to the benefits and would more likely be “all wink and a nod, ‘You’re a great, loyal employee, here’s a raise.’”

In response to questions from ProPublica, a Trump campaign official said that any raises or other benefits provided to witnesses were the result of their taking on more work due to the campaign or his legal cases heating up, or because they took on new duties.

The official added that Trump himself isn’t involved in determining how much campaign staffers are paid, and that compensation is entirely delegated to the campaign’s top leaders. “The president is not involved in the decision-making process,” the official said. “I would argue Trump doesn’t know what we’re paid.”

Campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement that “the 2024 Trump campaign is the most well-run and professional operation in political history. Any false assertion that we’re engaging in any type of behavior that may be regarded as tampering is absurd and completely fake.”

Trump’s attorney, David Warrington, sent ProPublica a cease-and-desist letter demanding this article not be published. The letter warned that if the outlet and its reporters “continue their reckless campaign of defamation, President Trump will evaluate all legal remedies.”

It’s possible the benefits are more widespread. Payments from Trump campaign committees are disclosed publicly, but the finances of his businesses are mostly private, so raises, bonuses and other payments from those entities are not typically disclosed.

ProPublica did not find evidence that Trump personally approved the pay increases or other benefits. But Trump famously keeps close watch over his operations and prides himself on penny-pinching. One former aide compared working for the Trump Organization, his large company, to “a small family business” where every employee “in some sense reports to Mr. Trump.” Former aides have said Trump demands unwavering loyalty from subordinates, even when their duties require independence. After his Attorney General Jeff Sessions decided to recuse himself against then-President Trump’s wishes, paving the way for a special counsel to investigate his campaign’s ties to Russia, Trump fumed about being crossed. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump asked, referring to the notorious former aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy who later served as Trump’s faithful fixer long before Trump became president.

Some Noteworthy Witnesses Who Received Benefits

Boris Epshteyn

Trump campaign adviser Benefit: Pay more than doubled

Susie Wiles

Head of Trump campaign Benefit: Payments to firm spiked, campaign hired her daughter

Margo Martin

Trump aide Benefit: Received a roughly 20% raise

Dan Scavino

Trump aide Benefit: Appointed to board of Trump Media

Jennifer Little

Trump attorney Benefit: Payments to her law firm dramatically increased

Evan Corcoran

Trump lawyer Benefit: Payments to his law firm dramatically increased

Allen Weisselberg

Trump Organization executive Benefit: Lucrative severance package

In addition to the New York case in which Trump was convicted last week, stemming from hidden payments to a porn star, Trump is facing separate charges federally and in Georgia for election interference and in another federal case for mishandling classified documents.

Attempts to exert undue influence on witnesses have been a repeated theme of Trump-related investigations and criminal cases over the years.

Trump’s former campaign manager and former campaign adviser were convicted on federal witness tampering charges in 2018 and 2019. The campaign adviser had told a witness to “do a ‘Frank Pentangeli,’” referencing a character in “The Godfather Part II” who lies to a Senate committee investigating organized crime. Trump later pardoned both men in the waning days of his presidency. (He did not pardon a co-defendant of the campaign manager who had cooperated with the government.)

During the congressional investigation into the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a former White House staffer testified that she got a call from a colleague the night before an interview with investigators. The colleague told her Trump’s chief of staff “wants me to let you know that he knows you’re loyal and he knows you’ll do the right thing tomorrow and that you’re going to protect him and the boss.” (A spokesperson for the chief of staff denied that he tried to influence testimony.)

Last year, Trump himself publicly discouraged a witness from testifying in the Georgia case. Trump posted on social media that he had read about a Georgia politician who “will be testifying before the Fulton County Grand Jury. He shouldn’t.”

One witness has said publicly that, when he quit working for Trump in the midst of the classified documents criminal investigation, he was offered golf tournament tickets, a lawyer paid for by Trump and a new job that would have come with a raise. The witness, a valet and manager at Mar-a-Lago, had direct knowledge of the handling of the government documents at the club, the focus of one of the criminal cases against the former president. “I’m sure the boss would love to see you,” the employee, Brian Butler, recalled Trump’s property manager telling him. (The episode was first reported by CNN.)

In an interview with ProPublica, Butler, who declined the offers, said he looked at them “innocently for a while.” But when he added up the benefits plus the timing, he thought “it could be them trying to get me back in the circle.”

One Trump aide who plays a key role in multiple cases is a lawyer named Boris Epshteyn, who became an important figure in Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

A college classmate of one of Trump’s sons who worked on the 2016 campaign and briefly in the White House, Epshteyn was involved in assembling sets of false electors around the country after Trump lost the 2020 election, and Epshteyn’s emails and texts have come up repeatedly in investigations.

In 2022, he testified before the Georgia grand jury that later indicted Trump on charges related to attempts to overturn the election. The FBI seized his phone, and in April 2023 he was interviewed by the federal special counsel.

In early August 2023, the special counsel charged Trump with conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding as part of an effort to overturn the 2020 election. A couple weeks later, the Georgia grand jury handed down an indictment accusing Trump of racketeering as part of a plot to overturn the election results in the state. From November 2022 to August 2023, the Trump campaign had paid Epshteyn’s company an average of $26,000 per month. The month after the indictments, his pay hit a new high, $50,000, and climbed in October to $53,500 per month, where it has remained ever since.

Epshteyn is a contractor with the campaign and the payments go to his company, Georgetown Advisory, which is based at a residential home in New Jersey. The company does not appear to have an office or other employees. Campaign filings say the payments are for “communications & legal consulting.”

Kenneth Notter, an attorney at MoloLamken who specializes in white-collar defense, said that a defendant should have a good explanation for a major increase in pay like Epshteyn’s. “Any change in treatment of a witness is something that gets my heart rate up as a lawyer.”

Boris Epshteyn, second from right, appeared at a Manhattan criminal court where former President Donald Trump, left, was facing charges. (Todd Heisler/The New York Times/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Already in early 2023, months before the pay bump, a Trump campaign spokesperson described Epshteyn to The New York Times as “a deeply valued member of the team” who had “done a terrific job shepherding the legal efforts fighting” the investigations of Trump. The Times reported then that Epshteyn spoke to Trump multiple times per day.

Timothy Parlatore, an attorney who left Trump’s defense team last year citing infighting, found Epshteyn’s large raise baffling. He questioned Epshteyn’s fitness to handle high-stakes criminal defense given his scant experience in the area. “He tries to coordinate all the legal efforts, which is a role he’s uniquely unqualified for,” Parlatore said.

The Trump campaign official told ProPublica that Epshteyn got a pay raise because Trump’s legal cases intensified and, as a result, Epshteyn had more legal work to coordinate. The official declined to say if he started working more hours: “All of us are working 24/7, ... every second of the day.” Epshteyn declined to comment on the record.

Even after the major pay increase, Epshteyn has not devoted all of his working time to the Trump campaign. He has continued to consult for other campaigns in recent months, disclosure filings show. And in November, he got a new role as managing director of a financial services firm in New York called Kenmar Securities, regulatory filings show.

Payments to Boris Epshteyn’s Company Jump Note: Payments are to Epshteyn’s company, Georgetown Advisory. Apparent travel reimbursements were removed from two 2023 payments.

Other employees in Trump’s political orbit have followed a similar pattern — including his top aide.

Trump campaign head Susie Wiles, a Florida political consultant, was present when Trump allegedly went beyond improperly holding onto classified documents and showed them to people lacking proper security clearances.

When Trump was indicted on June 8, 2023, over his handling of the documents, the indictment described Wiles as a “PAC representative.” It described Trump allegedly showing her a classified map related to a military operation, acknowledging “that he should not be showing it” and warning her to “not get too close.”

That June, Right Coast Strategies, the political consulting firm Wiles founded, received its highest-ever monthly payment from the Trump campaign: $75,000, an amount the firm has equaled only once since.

Wiles had been a grand jury witness before the indictment. News reports indicated Wiles had told others that she continued to be loyal to Trump and only testified because she was forced to. (And, according to Wiles, Trump was told she was a witness sometime before the indictment’s June release.)

The Trump campaign official told ProPublica that the spike in payments was largely because Wiles was billing for previous months.

She also got a 20% raise that May, from $25,000 to $30,000 per month. “She went back and redid her contract,” the official said, adding that her role as a witness was not a factor in that raise.

A few months later, the Wiles family got more good news. Wiles’ daughter Caroline, who had done some work for Trump’s first campaign and in the White House, where she reportedly left one job because she didn’t pass a background check, was hired by his campaign. Her salary: $222,000, making her currently the fourth-highest-paid staffer. (The Trump campaign official said her salary included a monthly housing stipend.)

Susie Wiles said she and another campaign official were responsible for hiring her daughter, who she said has an expertise in logistics and was brought on to handle arrangements for surrogates taking Trump’s place at events he couldn’t attend. Wiles said Trump wasn’t involved in the hire.

Caroline Wiles told ProPublica her mother’s position in the campaign played no role in her getting a job, but she declined to describe the circumstances around the job offer. “How did I get the job? Because I have earned it,” she said. “I don’t think it has anything to do with Susie.”

The indictment suggests Susie Wiles herself has been aware of efforts to keep potential witnesses in the fold. Soon after the FBI found classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, a Trump employee was asked in a group text chat that included Wiles to confirm that the club’s property manager “was loyal.”

Wiles told ProPublica she couldn’t talk about the details of the case, but she called the text message exchange “a nothing.”

More generally, she said she was unaware of the need to ensure employees who are witnesses do not appear to be receiving special treatment. “It’s the first time I’ve heard that’s best practice,” she said. “I don’t mind telling you I conduct myself in such a way that I don’t worry about any of that.” Trump, she said, had never talked to her about her role as a witness.

Less powerful aides who are witnesses have also enjoyed career advances.

Margo Martin, a Trump aide who, like Wiles, allegedly witnessed Trump showing off what he described as a secret military document, got a significant raise not long after the classified documents case heated up with the search at Mar-a-Lago.

According to the indictment, Trump told Martin and others the military plan was “secret” and “highly confidential.” “As president I could have declassified it,” he allegedly told the group. “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”

A few months before her grand jury appearance, she moved from the payroll of a Trump political committee to a job with the campaign as it was launching. Martin was given a roughly 20% pay raise, from $155,000 to $185,000 per year, according to the Trump campaign. Campaign finance filings show a much larger pay increase for Martin, but the Trump campaign said the filings are misleading because of a difference in how payroll taxes and withholdings are reported by the two committees.

Because of that quirk, it’s impossible to know who else got raises and how big they were. The campaign official said that at least one other witness also got a pay raise but did not provide details about how much and when.

Dan Scavino is a longtime communications aide who Trump once called the “most powerful man in politics” because he could post for Trump on the president’s social media accounts. Scavino was among the small group of staff who had an up-close view of Trump during the final weeks of his presidency — a focus of the congressional inquiry into the Jan. 6 insurrection and the criminal probe into election interference.

In August 2021, a month after the congressional investigation began, securities filings show that the parent company behind Truth Social, Trump’s social media company, gave Scavino a consulting deal that ultimately paid out $240,000 a year.

The next month, lawmakers issued a subpoena to Scavino to ask him what the White House knew about the potential for violence before the attacks and what actions Trump took to try to overturn the election results. The panel gave Scavino a half-dozen extensions while negotiating with him, but he ultimately refused to testify or turn over documents and was held in contempt.

In September 2022, Scavino received a subpoena to testify before the criminal grand jury in the federal election interference probe. This time, he wasn’t able to get out of it and was seen leaving the Washington, D.C., courthouse in May 2023.

Bits of Scavino’s testimony were reported by ABC News, citing unnamed sources. Though his recollections of Trump from Jan. 6 painted the former president unfavorably, his reported testimony didn’t include significant new information. He testified Trump was “very angry” that day, and, despite pleas from aides to calm the Capitol rioters, Trump for hours “was just not interested” in taking action to stop it. When the testimony was reported, Trump’s spokesperson said Scavino is one of the former president’s “most loyal allies, and his actual testimony shows just how strong President Trump is positioned in this case.”

Between getting the subpoena and testifying, Scavino was given a seat on the board of the Trump social media company.

Scavino was also granted a $600,000 retention bonus and a $4 million “executive promissory note” paid in shares, according to SEC filings. The company’s public filings do not make clear when these deals were put in place.

As one of the few aides who Trump was with on Jan. 6, Scavino is likely to be called if Trump’s election interference cases go to trial.

Reached by ProPublica, Scavino declined to answer questions about how he got the board seat and other benefits from the Trump media company. “It has nothing to do,” he said, “with any investigation.”

A Trump Media spokesperson declined to answer questions about who made the decision to give Scavino the benefits and why, but said, “It appears this article will comprise utterly false insinuations.”

When Atlanta attorney Jennifer Little was hired to represent Trump in his Georgia election interference case, it marked the high point of her career.

A former local prosecutor who started her own practice, she had previously taken on far more modest cases. Highlights on her website include a biker who fell because of a pothole, a child investigated for insensitive social media comments and drunk drivers with “DUI’s as high as .19.” Little had made headlines for some higher profile cases, like a candidate for lieutenant governor accused of sexual harassment, but everything on her resume paled in comparison to representing a former president accused of plotting to reverse the outcome of an election.

Then in May 2022, her job got even more complicated when Trump pulled her into his brewing showdown with the Justice Department over classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Despite multiple requests, Trump had not returned all of the documents he had brought with him from the White House to his Florida club. The Justice Department had just elevated the matter by subpoenaing Trump for the records, and Trump wanted her advice.

Little told him, according to news reports, that unlike the government’s prior requests, a subpoena meant he could face criminal charges if he didn’t comply.

When Trump ultimately did not turn over the records and the criminal investigation intensified, Little’s involvement in that pivotal meeting got her called before a grand jury by federal prosecutors.

Some of her testimony before that grand jury, which determines whether someone will be indicted, may have been favorable for Trump. In one reported instance, Little’s recollections undermined contemporaneous documentary evidence that was damaging to Trump. Investigators had obtained notes from another lawyer at the May 2022 meeting indicating Trump suggested they not “play ball” with federal authorities: “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?”

Little told the grand jury she remembered the question more benignly, according to an ABC News story that cited anonymous sources, and said she couldn’t recall Trump recommending they not “play ball.”

Trump has since been indicted over his handling of the classified documents. If the case goes to trial, Little’s testimony could prove crucial as the two sides try to make their case about Trump's consciousness of guilt and whether he purposely withheld documents. (Trump has pleaded not guilty in that case and has said he did nothing wrong.)

Just after Little was forced to testify before the grand jury in March 2023, a Trump political action committee paid her $218,000, by far the largest payment she’d received while working for Trump. In the year after she became a witness, she has made at least $1.3 million from the Trump political committee, more than twice as much as she had during the year prior.

Little told ProPublica the large payment she received soon after she was compelled to testify was due to a lengthy motion she filed around then to block the release of the Georgia grand jury’s findings and prevent Trump from being indicted. Her hourly rate did not change, she said, the workload increased. The elevated payments in the year after she became a witness did coincide with the Georgia case heating up and Trump getting indicted.

The Trump campaign official said the spike in payments to Little after she became a witness was the result of her billing for multiple time periods at once.

Payments to Jennifer Little’s Law Firm Increase After She Becomes a Witness

A similar pattern played out for the other Trump lawyer present at the Mar-a-Lago meeting about the subpoena.

Evan Corcoran, a former federal prosecutor who specializes in white-collar criminal defense, was new to the team at the time. And it was his notes, obtained by investigators, that memorialized Trump suggesting they not “play ball.” His notes also included a description of Trump seeming to instruct him to withhold some sensitive documents from authorities when the former president made a “plucking motion.”

“He made a funny motion as though — well okay why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out,” Corcoran’s notes read, according to the indictment.

Like Little, Corcoran tried to fight being forced to testify before a grand jury, asserting that as Trump’s lawyer, their communications were protected. But prosecutors were able to convince a judge that the protection didn’t apply because their legal advice was used to commit crimes.

Corcoran’s notes from his conversations with Trump formed the backbone of the eventual indictment, and his descriptions of those meetings are expected to be a critical component at trial. The lawyer made an initial appearance before the grand jury in January 2023 and appeared again in another session in March.

Around the time he was forced to be a witness, Corcoran recused himself from the classified documents case, but he continued to represent Trump on other matters. Nevertheless his firm’s compensation shot up for a few months.

Just days after his March grand jury testimony, the Trump campaign sent two payments to his firm totaling $786,000, the largest amount paid in a single day in his almost two years working for Trump. The firm brought in a total of $1.4 million in that four-week span, more than double its payments from any other comparable period during Corcoran’s time working for Trump.

Corcoran did not respond to questions from ProPublica. The Trump campaign official said the spike in payments came because the firm was billing for more hours of work as Trump’s cases ramped up. The official added that the number of lawyers from the firm working on the case may have increased but could not provide specifics.

The issue of witnesses who have received financial rewards from Trump has already come up at both of the former president’s New York trials.

In the civil fraud case last year, prosecutors questioned the Trump Organization’s former controller about the $500,000 in severance he had been promised after retiring earlier in the year. During his testimony, the former controller broke down in tears as he complained about allegations against an employer he loved and defended the valuations at the center of the case as “justified.” At the time of the testimony, he was still receiving his severance in installments.

Former chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg got a $2 million severance agreement in January 2023, four months after the New York attorney general sued Trump for financial fraud in his real estate business. The agreement contains a nondisparagement clause and language barring Weisselberg from voluntarily cooperating with investigators.

It came up in Trump’s hush money trial last month when prosecutors told the judge that the severance agreement was one of the reasons they would not call Weisselberg . He was still due several payments.

“The agreement seems to preclude us from talking to him or him talking to us at the risk of losing $750,000 of outstanding severance pay,” one prosecutor said.

In last year’s fraud trial, the judge wrote of the severance agreement, “The Trump Organization keeps Weisselberg on a short leash, and it shows.”

A Trump Organization spokesperson said in a statement that after Weisselberg and the controller announced their retirement plans, “the company agreed to pay them severance based on the number of years they worked at the company. President Trump played no role in that decision.” Weisselberg’s severance agreement was signed by Trump’s son Eric.

Another witness from the civil trial last year, longtime Trump friend and real estate executive Steve Witkoff, was called as an expert witness by Trump’s defense team, and he defended the Trump Organization real estate valuations at the heart of the case.

Two months after Witkoff’s testimony, Trump’s campaign for the first time started paying his company, the Witkoff Group, for air travel. The payments continued over several weeks, ultimately totalling more than $370,000.

The Trump campaign official confirmed the campaign used Witkoff’s private jet for multiple trips, including Trump’s visit to a stretch of the Texas border in February, saying it “appropriately reimbursed” him for the flights. The official said it sometimes used commercial charter jet services but opted for Witkoff’s plane because of “availability, space, and convenience.”

Witkoff and The Witkoff Group did not respond to requests for comment.

Do you have any information about Trump’s campaign or his businesses that we should know? Robert Faturechi can be reached by email at robert.faturechi@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 213-271-7217. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

Headshot photos of Allen Weisselberg by Curtis Means/Daily Mail/Bloomberg/Getty Images; Evan Corcoran by Nathan Howard/Bloomberg/Getty Images; Dan Scavino by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images; Susie Wiles by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images; Jennifer Little by Dennis Byron-Pool/Getty Images; Boris Epshteyn by Mandek Ngan/AFP/Getty Images; and Margo Martin by Curtis Means-Pool/Getty Images.

Agnel Philip contributed data analysis.

Graphics by Lena Groeger.

by Maryam Jameel and Melissa Sanchez, Illustrations by Edel Rodriguez, special to ProPublica

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This guide will be released in Spanish in several formats to make this information more widely accessible. If you want to receive printed booklets that you or your organization can share with dairy workers in Wisconsin, or if you want to be notified when we post related videos on TikTok and YouTube, sign up here.

We are reporters at ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative news organization. Over the past two years, we have reported on the lives of dairy workers in Wisconsin and the dangers they face on the job.

Dairy workers are excluded from many state and federal legal protections that help other workers. As a result, if they are injured on the job, they often face obstacles to getting medical care or the time needed to recover.

Many dairy workers have seen relatives or co-workers lose their jobs and get kicked out of farm housing after an injury. Others have ended up with disfigured bodies and massive medical debt.

Many are undocumented. They worry about being deported if they speak up about an injury.

We heard these concerns repeatedly in our interviews with more than 100 immigrant workers. We know people often feel hopeless.

But while there are real challenges, our reporting has shown us that for some workers, there can be a path toward getting treatment after an injury. Here is some of what we found:

• Workers who are injured on larger farms have more protections. This is because of an insurance system called workers’ compensation. You can benefit even if you are undocumented.
• The workers’ compensation system is complex and difficult to navigate. Employers sometimes discourage workers from filing claims. Getting a lawyer can be critical, especially if you have a permanent disability.
• Workers who are injured on smaller farms usually can’t access workers’ compensation. The only way to compel an employer to cover medical costs is to file a lawsuit. These lawsuits can be extremely difficult to win. Because of that, attorneys may not want to take your case.
• You may be able to access free or low-cost medical care. Ask about hospital charity, free clinics and a Wisconsin insurance plan called BadgerCare Plus.

Few of the workers we’ve interviewed understood their rights after an injury. This guide is our attempt to explain your options, as limited as they are. We also want to answer questions that many workers have asked based on situations they’ve found themselves in. It is based on conversations with workers, attorneys, health care providers, community advocates, interpreters, researchers and farmers. It covers what you can do before you get to a farm, how to navigate the workers’ compensation system, and your options if you get injured on a farm that doesn’t have workers’ compensation.

The guide is especially focused on the workers’ compensation system because it is one of the few areas where injured dairy workers have a right to medical care. We know this system has limitations and isn’t available to everybody. However many workers have found it to be useful, particularly if they get help from an attorney.

This guide does not provide legal or medical advice. We strongly encourage you to talk to a lawyer or a doctor about your situation. We’ll point you to some resources in the last section.

We welcome your thoughts and questions. Please feel free to write us an email or call us by phone or WhatsApp. Thank you.

Maryam Jameel: Maryam.Jameel@propublica.org or 630-885-6883

Melissa Sanchez: Melissa.Sanchez@propublica.org or 872-444-0011

What to Know Before You Start Working on Dairy Farms

Farming in general has one of the highest fatality rates of industries in the U.S. Almost every year in Wisconsin, dairy farmers or their employees die on the job, crushed under tractors or drowned in manure lagoons or trampled by cows.

Injuries are even more common. But they are not always reported. That makes it impossible to accurately compare the dangers on dairy farms with other types of jobs. In our reporting, however, most workers told us they had been injured on the job. “If you haven’t been injured,” one former worker said, “then you haven’t really worked on a farm.” Cows can be unpredictable; workers told us they’d been kicked, stepped on and smashed against barn walls by the 1,500-pound animals.

We have spoken to several workers who lost fingers inside of machinery, a man whose legs were crushed by heavy metal gates and a woman who got trampled and thrown over a fence by a bull. Other workers have chronic pain from the repetitive motions of attaching tubes to cow teats hundreds of times a day.

In the winter, temperatures in Wisconsin can drop below zero, with high winds, snow and ice. Many workers have suffered serious injuries after they slipped on ice-covered concrete floors. Others have suffered frostbite.

Medical and public health officials said some workers develop infections and other issues from their exposure to animal feces and other harmful substances common on farms.

How can you find out whether a particular farm is a safe place to work?

No government agency rates dairy farms on safety. In fact, even when workers die or are injured, dairy farms are not always inspected.

There is no guarantee that you will be safe on any farm. But farms can take steps to protect their workers and make sure they receive the medical treatment they need after an injury. One of the best ways to learn about safety issues on a farm is by talking to current or former employees.

Some questions you can ask:

• What kind of training do workers get when they are hired?

• Did you feel that the training was enough to help you do your job safely?

• What is the pace of work? Are there enough workers to do the job?

• Can cows easily kick you as you milk them?

• Can you describe a recent injury that happened to you or a coworker and how the supervisor responded? Did that worker get medical care or time off to heal?

• Do you know whether the farm has workers’ compensation insurance?

• How do the supervisors treat you? Do they speak to you respectfully?

We have also found that local Latino grocery stores can be good places to learn more about specific farms. Workers cash their checks at these businesses and often share information about work conditions with the clerks and owners. Ask them about a farm’s reputation and if there is anything they think you should know.

One sign that a farm may be a good place to work is if workers stay there for a long time.

Are farms required to help pay for a worker’s medical care after an injury?

The answer depends on how many workers the farm employs.

In general, if the farm has six or more employees, it should have a type of insurance called workers’ compensation that is supposed to cover these costs. Workers’ compensation is different from medical insurance. (If you are counting how many workers a farm has, don’t count the farm owners and their close relatives who work on the farm.)

If a farm has fewer than six employees, it does not have to have workers’ compensation under state rules. Workers who are hurt at these farms have only one legal avenue to get help paying for medical care. They may be able to file a lawsuit. (See the “Resources other than workers’ compensation” section for more information.)

How can I learn if a farm has workers’ compensation insurance?

You can ask your employer or look it up yourself online. If the farm has workers’ compensation insurance, it should be listed here: https://www.wcrb.org/coverage-lookup/. But the site, run by the Wisconsin Compensation Rating Bureau, is only available in English.

You’ll need to know the farm’s name or its address to do a search. If you don’t find the farm listed, you can email the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, which oversees the workers’ compensation system, at WCINS@dwd.wisconsin.gov, or call 608-266-3046. If you speak Spanish, you can ask for an interpreter.

I don’t know the name of my employer. How do I find that?

You may know a farm by a nickname. To find out a farm’s official name, look at the upper left-hand corner of your paycheck, above the address. Or you can check the main entrance, where many farms have signs with their name.

I Was Injured on a Large Farm That Has Workers’ Compensation. What Do I Need to Know?

State officials and lawyers say you should tell your employer right away that you got hurt and get the medical treatment you need. The Department of Workforce Development said any delays may hurt your workers’ compensation case.

Gabriel Manzano Nieves, a workers’ compensation attorney in Madison, said many people he works with don’t want to report what seems like a minor injury. He said he’s had clients who thought at first that they had a sore shoulder or a sprain. Weeks later a doctor told them that they had a permanent injury. He added: “Later their employer might say, ‘How do I know this didn’t happen at home?’ Reporting time is really important for proving it happened at work.”

How is workers’ compensation supposed to work?

1. After you report your injury, your employer is supposed to file a claim with their insurance company within seven days. (Your employer can be fined if they delay filing a claim on purpose.) Your medical provider — usually that’s your doctor — can also file a claim for you.
2. Then the insurer is supposed to report this information to the state.
3. Once the claim is filed, the insurer will usually send you a letter or call and ask for your permission to get your medical records related to the injury.
4. The insurer will look at your records to decide whether to accept the claim and pay the medical costs. The company may also send you to an independent doctor or nurse who may make a different decision about your injury and treatment.
5. You may be entitled to some of your pay if you need days off work to recover from your injury. You should get a check from your employer’s insurance carrier, usually 14 days after your injury or illness, though lawyers say it can take longer.

What should I tell medical providers?

Explain how you got injured and that it happened at work. Otherwise you may not get workers’ compensation. State officials recommend that you say this before you get treated. Give the name of the farm and the workers’ compensation insurer, if you know it, so that the hospital or doctor’s office can bill the insurer. Attorneys suggested that if you get any medical bills, you send them to the insurer.

Be open and detailed about your pain so your doctor can accurately assess your health. We know some workers sometimes don’t tell their doctors everything because they are embarrassed, they want to seem strong, they fear the cost of treatment, or for other reasons. Many other workers say their employers have told them not to tell the hospital that their injury was work-related in order to avoid filing a workers’ compensation claim. In some cases, employers promise to pay the medical bills out of pocket.

You have the right to choose your own doctor and to be alone with them during your visits; that means your employer does not have a right to be in the room if you do not want them there. Several attorneys said you can also ask your doctor if they would recommend any restrictions on how or how much you work, such as limiting how much weight you carry or how many hours a day you work.

I’m being told by my doctor that I can return to work, but I don’t think I have completely healed. What can I do?

The Department of Workforce Development encourages workers to try to return to work anyway. “You will be in a stronger position to obtain additional benefits if you attempted to return than if you refused an offer of work,” state officials said. But if you have work restrictions, tell your employer you are willing to work within them, attorneys said. And if you feel any pain, tell your supervisor. Your employer should report it to their insurance company. Also, see a doctor to reassess your health, attorneys said.

I’m undocumented. Does my immigration status affect my eligibility for workers’ compensation?

No. In Wisconsin, your immigration status does not affect your eligibility. Nearly every part of the Wisconsin Workers’ Compensation Act applies to workers regardless of their immigration status.

“Whether you’re in the country legally or not, it’s not relevant,” said Douglas Phebus, an employment attorney who has represented dozens of dairy workers in Wisconsin.

However, he said workers have told him their bosses threatened to get them deported after they asked about workers’ compensation. “That’s ridiculous but it’s scary,” Phebus said.

Deporting undocumented immigrants who are not a threat to national security or public safety is not a priority for the Biden administration, according to official guidance.

The state’s Department of Workforce Development said it does not share information with federal immigration authorities.

Many undocumented immigrants work under fake names and Social Security numbers. Martha Burke, a workers’ compensation attorney, said that when she fills out workers’ compensation paperwork, she often includes both names that workers use. State officials said workers don’t have to provide a Social Security number.

Does workers’ compensation help pay for my lost wages after an injury?

If you need less than three days to recover, you won’t be paid for that time off of work. State law only allows payment to start on the fourth day off from work. You could get paid two-thirds of your wages.

What happens if the insurance company denies my claim?

At this stage — as medical bills may be piling up — many workers and advocates suggest talking to an attorney.

You can also call the Department of Workforce Development’s workers’ compensation division to discuss problems with a claim. (See the resources page at the end of this guide to find this contact information.) You can ask state officials to review your claim and try to resolve your dispute with the insurance company, or ask for a formal hearing. The vast majority of workers who ask for hearings have attorneys, state officials said.

Am I entitled to compensation if my injury leads to a permanent disability?

You may qualify for other benefits. How much depends in part on how much a doctor thinks your injury will affect your ability to work and earn money in the future.

Doctors might not try to determine if your injury is permanent or note that in your file unless you ask them to. You have to be your own advocate, said Marisol González Castillo, a personal injury attorney who used to specialize in workers’ compensation.

To get permanent disability benefits, you may need help from an attorney. We spoke to two workers whose fingers were amputated in farm accidents. Both got their initial medical bills paid but didn’t get any permanent disability compensation. Years later, each of them wondered if they should have looked for an attorney to help them make a claim.

State law gives workers six years after their injury or most recent workers’ compensation payment to file for permanent disability benefits. (If your injury happened before March 2, 2016, you have 12 years after the date of injury to file a claim.)

Somebody I know died at work. Is their family entitled to any benefits?

The dead worker’s dependents, usually their spouse or children, may be able to qualify for death benefits and burial expenses from the workers’ compensation insurer. Employers are supposed to report deaths to the state within one day.

What if the farm where I work has six or more employees but doesn’t have workers’ compensation insurance?

You can file a claim to request benefits through the state’s Uninsured Employers Fund (UEF). You must call (608) 266-3046 to ask for an application. There is an option for Spanish speakers. You will be asked to give them certain documentation, such as copies of check stubs and medical records.

Some attorneys said you may want to collect information to help the state confirm the actual number of workers on the farm; this could include the names of your coworkers or copies of work schedules.

What You Can Do Outside of the Workers’ Compensation System

Thousands of farm workers are excluded from the state’s workers’ compensation system because the farms where they work are too small to be required to have insurance. In addition, many workers who get injured on large farms told us their employers refused to file a claim for them. The workers said they didn’t get medical care because they were afraid their employer would retaliate against them.

Given this reality, we wanted to explain what your options are, even though there aren’t very many, and point you to resources that could help you.

What should I know if I get injured on a small farm?

You are not automatically entitled to get help from your employer. This means you could end up with thousands of dollars in medical bills. Hospitals can sue you over unpaid medical debt, which could lead to a court-ordered garnishment of your wages. Garnishment is when money is automatically taken out of your paycheck to pay down your debt.

We know of several farmers who have paid out of pocket for their workers’ medical costs. So you should ask for help, several workers and attorneys said. But the only legal avenue to get your employer to pay your medical bills is to file a personal injury lawsuit.

Given their limited protections, workers who get injured on small farms are in a difficult situation, said Matthew Keifer, a doctor who specializes in occupational safety and is the former director of the National Farm Medicine Center. He said workers should think about finding a job on a larger farm where they would have workers’ compensation. “I know a lot of small farmers who are just wonderful people and would bend over backwards for their employees,” he said. “But there’s a lot that are not.”

What is a personal injury lawsuit?

These are lawsuits against the employer that ask for money for an injury that a worker thinks was the employers’ fault. Workers can also ask for more money for their pain and suffering.

But unlike in workers’ compensation cases, you have to prove that your employer was to blame for your injury. For example, you may have to show that your employer knew about a workplace hazard but did not fix it.

It can be hard to prove that someone was negligent, said Phebus, the employment attorney. He said he turns away about two-thirds of the dairy workers who call his office asking about personal injury lawsuits.

“People come to see us and they got hurt, but it wasn’t any particular act of negligence,” he said. “It’s just that farming is very dangerous.”

One worker who was injured by a bull on a small farm said she spoke to several attorneys before she found one who took her case.

Brian Laule, a personal injury attorney in River Falls, agreed that these cases can be difficult. But he said workers should not feel hopeless. Instead he encouraged workers to do their research and call several attorneys. “Run the situation by them,” he said. “You can reach out to attorneys for free and find out if you have any recourse.”

How can I find affordable medical care?

You may have to pay your own medical bills. Here are some programs that may help you:

• Charity care: Many hospitals offer charity care programs that cover some or all medical bills for uninsured, low-income patients. You will likely need to fill out an application and share information about your income to find out if you qualify. Ask hospital staff if this is an option.
• Payment plans: Several medical professionals and attorneys also recommended that workers ask about payment plans to avoid having their bills sent to collections. (This is when debt collectors try to make you pay and sometimes charge fees or interest that can make your debt bigger.) Many hospitals have “patient navigators” on staff who can help you apply for charity care or get on a payment plan.
• BadgerCare Plus: This is a state public health insurance program for low-income residents. Undocumented immigrants who have children can get coverage in medical emergencies. (You can also qualify if you are pregnant.) You can call your local health agency to find out if you qualify. Visit this page and click on your county to find the phone number. If you speak Spanish, you can ask for an interpreter.
• Free and low-cost clinics: We also know many workers have long-term pain from repetitive motion injuries, which is damage caused by doing the same actions, such as milking cows, over and over. You may be able to get medical care for these and other nonemergency injuries from “safety net” clinics for free or at a low cost. Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services maintains a page with the names, addresses and phone numbers of these clinics across the state. These facilities are not where you should go if you have serious or life-threatening injuries.
• Urgent care clinics: Hospital emergency room visits can be extremely expensive, warned Aida Bise, the director of migrant and seasonal agricultural worker services for Family Health La Clinica, a community health clinic in Wautoma. For minor injuries, Bise says that workers should think about going to an urgent care clinic. “These are way cheaper,” she said.

One worker whose shoulder was injured when a cow slammed him against a wall on a small farm in 2022 said his employer refused to pay his hospital bills. As a result, the man, an undocumented and uninsured immigrant from Mexico, didn’t initially get the treatment he needed.

“It’s an immense, intolerable pain that’s hard to describe,” he said. “I just want to get the bills paid and recover.” More than five months passed before he got treatment; a community advocate helped him get surgery and other treatment covered by the hospital’s charity care.

Where can I report unsafe workplace conditions?

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is in charge of enforcing workplace safety laws in Wisconsin. It investigates deaths and injuries that happen on the job. You can file a confidential complaint online or call 1-800-321-6742.

Not every complaint will lead to an on-site inspection, which is when an OSHA official comes to the farm and checks for safety hazards. Once again, workers on small farms have fewer protections. If a farm has fewer than 11 employees, federal law may ban OSHA from investigating deaths, injuries or complaints. (Read our story about inconsistencies in OSHA's work on small farms.)

What to know about retaliation after an injury

We have talked to many workers who were fired, kicked out of farm housing or threatened with deportation after an injury.

It can be hard for workers to challenge these actions. Each case is different, so you may want to talk to an attorney.

If you lose your housing: Your rights depend on whether you’re considered a tenant under Wisconsin law. You may be a tenant if you pay rent or if your landlord takes rent out of your wages.

• If you are a tenant: You cannot be forcibly removed from housing without a court order. You have a very short amount of time when you can defend against an eviction in court; several attorneys said you should call an attorney quickly if you want to challenge the process or if you have been forced out without a court order.
• Legal Action of Wisconsin has this explainer about tenants’ rights.
• If you are not a tenant: Your rights are more limited. Some attorneys said they have negotiated more time for their clients to move out of farm housing. Again, call an attorney early to explore your options.

If you got fired: If you believe that you were fired because an injury left you with a disability, you may be able to file a discrimination complaint with the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development’s equal rights division. Call 608-266-6860 to learn more; if you speak Spanish, you can request an interpreter. If you work on a farm with at least 15 employees, you may be able to file a discrimination charge with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Call 1-800-669-4000 to learn more; there is an option for Spanish speakers.

Separately, your employer can be penalized for refusing to hire you back after an injury because you filed a workers’ compensation claim.

We’ve talked to many workers who were not paid for their last week of work before getting fired. You can file a complaint with the Department of Workforce Development’s equal rights division to try to get your wages back. You can do that online here, though that form is not in Spanish. Or you can call 608-266-6860 and ask to speak to somebody in Spanish and have a complaint form mailed to you.

If you are worried about being deported: If you are in a dispute with your employer over unpaid wages or another workplace issue, or if you are cooperating with a labor-related investigation at your job, you may qualify for deferred action. This is a temporary protection from deportation. An OSHA investigation can count as a labor dispute. The agency would have to write a letter on your behalf to request deferred action. The U.S. Department of Labor has information about how this program works.

How to report retaliation: You have the right to file a whistleblower complaint with OSHA if you believe your employer retaliated against you for exercising certain rights, such as expressing concern over a workplace safety issue. You can file a complaint online or call 1-800-321-6742. These complaints are not confidential, which means your employer will know you filed one.

If two or more workers have come together to discuss collective concerns about their workplace — including safety or injuries — they have another protection against retaliation. They can file a complaint under the Wisconsin Employment Peace Act with the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission. Call 608-243-2424 to learn more; Spanish speakers need to request an interpreter. This process can be complex, even for people who don’t have a language barrier, several attorneys said; you may want to get an attorney or somebody who can help you file the complaint.

Other resources

There is no single place where you can get information about what to do if you get injured on a Wisconsin dairy farm. But we wanted to share a list of some of the resources we learned about that can be helpful.

Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development: This is the agency that oversees the state’s workers’ compensation system. You can call 608-266-1340 to speak to a specialist about problems with a claim, discuss late payments, ask for a hearing application, or talk about any other related issues. Spanish speakers can request an interpreter when they call.

Farmworker Project: This is part of the Legal Action of Wisconsin, a nonprofit organization that provides legal services to low-income residents. Attorneys can’t take every case but may be able to provide a consultation. They can also refer workers to bilingual private attorneys. You can call or text 920-279-7025 with questions. This phone number is also available on WhatsApp.

State Bar of Wisconsin: This organization has a search tool on its website that lets you look for attorneys by county and learn whether they speak a language besides English. The site is only available in English.

211 Wisconsin: If you are in Wisconsin, you can dial 2-1-1 and get connected to a free phone-based information service. It is available in Spanish. This program can connect you to specialists who can get you referrals for thousands of programs and services across the state. It is available 24 hours a day. The nonprofit United Way of Wisconsin manages this program.

Voces de la Frontera: This is the state’s largest immigrant rights organization. Voces offers workers’ rights training and has a network of advocates across the state who may be able to connect you to resources in your area. You can contact Voces at 414-643-1620.

by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen

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.

In a strongly worded rebuke, a New York judge has ordered the state Education Department to cooperate with an investigation into abuse and neglect at a pricey residential school that draws students with autism from across the country.

The judge ruled that the New York State Education Department must turn over documents it has about incidents at Shrub Oak International School to the watchdog group Disability Rights New York within seven days of the decision. The Education Department for months has refused to give DRNY records it has received about the private school, which is not approved or monitored by the state.

State Supreme Court Judge Andra Ackerman wrote in her decision, issued last week, that the department had violated state and federal law when it refused to provide records related to incidents as well as the school’s business applications to the state. She called the agency’s actions “arbitrary and capricious” and “an abuse of discretion.”

The Education Department has acknowledged it has “documents relevant to an investigation of abuse and neglect inflicted on the students at the school,” Ackerman wrote. “It claims, however, that it is entitled to keep that documentation for itself — apparently doing nothing with it — and to refuse DRNY access simply because NYSED is not responsible for these particular students,” Ackerman added.

The judge’s ruling also follows a ProPublica investigation published this month that documented multiple allegations of abuse and neglect at Shrub Oak, a residential school for students with autism and other challenges. It revealed how would-be whistleblowers could not get state authorities to intervene at the school.

DRNY, which receives federal funding to conduct investigations on behalf of people with disabilities, petitioned the New York Supreme Court in Albany County in April to force the department’s hand. (In New York, the Supreme Court is a lower court, not the state’s high court.)

David Hutt, the legal director at the National Disability Rights Network, said interfering with watchdog groups’ investigations undermines their authority and is “frankly wasting federal money.” He said it’s important for DRNY to challenge the Education Department so that concerns about people with disabilities don’t “stay in the shadows.”

Even though Shrub Oak is a school, it is allowed under New York law to operate without approval from the state and has never sought such approval. As a result, the Education Department has no oversight responsibility though the school enrolls mostly publicly funded students from New York and about a dozen other states.

Shrub Oak opened in 2018 in a former seminary in Mohegan Lake and has about 85 students this year. Though it is a private, for-profit school, most students’ tuition is paid by their public school districts. Many students require round-the-clock care and have a dedicated aide for most of the day, bringing the cost of their tuition to $573,200.

David Bloomfield, an education law professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, said the Education Department’s unwillingness to cooperate with DRNY’s abuse investigation “is an example of the state being highly deferential to private institutions.”

An Education Department spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment. But the New York attorney general, which represents the department, argued in legal filings that because the state does not oversee Shrub Oak, it has no duty to investigate allegations of abuse and neglect of students there and should be allowed to keep its records secret.

A DRNY spokesperson said she could not comment. The organization does not have enforcement authority, meaning it cannot sanction Shrub Oak, but could issue a public report of its findings or try to force change at Shrub Oak through a lawsuit.

The disability rights group has been investigating the school for about a year and said in court filings that it has received complaints that students were left to sleep on urine-soaked mattresses, had unexplained black eyes and were denied medical care. The group also has been investigating whether school workers were discouraged from calling 911 in emergencies. Investigators “observed conditions that were consistent with the allegations in the complaints,” according to the judge’s decision.

Shrub Oak did not respond to requests for comment for this story. But the school has been critical of the investigations by DRNY and a sister group in Connecticut. In a letter last month from a Shrub Oak attorney to the watchdog organizations, the school said investigators were unqualified to observe or understand autistic students. The letter criticized the groups for having made more than 17 requests for documents and information and more than nine unannounced visits but not sharing their findings.

The attorney wrote that the school is concerned that even though it is cooperating, the organizations “are not focused on a complete and balanced understanding of the services and environment SOIS provides to its students. Accordingly, the resulting reports of their investigations are likely to unfairly portray SOIS in a negative light.”

Shrub Oak has said it provides a critical need for a student population that lacks options, often enrolling students who have been rejected from other schools. It has said that the staff is qualified, caring and encouraged to call 911 in emergencies, and that it investigates allegations of misconduct by staff members. School leaders would not comment about individual incidents involving student injuries or neglect allegations, but they said Shrub Oak caters to students who injure themselves and are learning toileting skills or intentionally urinate as part of their behavioral challenges.

Through its spokesperson, Shrub Oak said it plans to seek state approval as a special-education school.

ProPublica also has sought public records from the state Education Department about Shrub Oak, including complaints against the school. The department has denied access to some records and has delayed releasing others after Shrub Oak requested that it keep the records confidential. Shrub Oak general counsel Brian Koffler said in a letter to the Education Department that releasing the records could hurt the school’s competitive position and that they should be kept “away from individuals who seek nothing more than to create problems for our staff and our students.”

Help ProPublica Report on Education

by Vianna Davila

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This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has repeatedly used the state’s powerful consumer protection laws to investigate organizations whose work conflicts in some way with his political views or the views of his conservative base, an analysis by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found.

Paxton has been particularly aggressive among an increasing number of attorneys general who are using consumer protection statutes to investigate not only predatory lenders or unscrupulous car dealers but also political targets, experts say. ProPublica and the Tribune identified more than a dozen instances in the past two years in which Paxton has used the state’s consumer protection office to demand records from organizations with which he disagrees politically.

It’s unclear how many similar cases might be underway in Texas. The attorney general’s office told the news organizations it hasn’t consistently maintained a list of the division’s demands to examine records. The agency is also fighting to withhold certain records, citing state public information law exceptions.

The attorney general’s office did not respond to detailed questions about the investigations, including how many remained open.

AbbVie Inc. and Endo Pharmaceuticals Inc.

Date investigations began: February 2022

Stated basis for the investigation: In August 2021, then-state Rep. Matt Krause, a Republican who the same year launched an investigation into school library books that dealt with topics like sexuality and race, requested an opinion from the attorney general’s office about whether certain gender-affirming treatments, including puberty-blocking drugs, were akin to child abuse. After Paxton agreed that they were in a February 2022 nonbinding legal opinion, Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate parents who authorized such medical care for their children. The next month, the attorney general demanded to review two pharmaceutical companies’ records, including a list of all hormone blockers they sold and notes from meetings with Texas health care providers discussing those products. Paxton said he wanted to determine if the drug manufacturers had “deceptively advertised and promoted” those hormone blockers without disclosing the potential risks to children and their parents.

Response: AbbVie and Endo Pharmaceuticals declined to comment for this story. In 2022, however, an Endo spokesperson told the Tribune that the company was cooperating with the attorney general’s investigation and did not promote its medications for off-label reasons, which can mean the drug is used for a medical condition it’s not approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat.

Status: Paxton’s office did not answer questions about the status of the investigations.

GoFundMe

Date investigation began: February 2022

Stated basis for the investigation: The attorney general’s office launched an investigation of GoFundMe days after the company took down a $10 million fundraising campaign launched by Canadian truckers who were protesting vaccine mandates for drivers crossing the U.S. border. GoFundMe said it removed the campaign, which was raising money for truckers’ fuel costs, food and lodging, in response to law enforcement reports of violence connected to the protests. GoFundMe initially posted a statement in 2022 saying the company would refund donations upon request and donate any remaining funds to charities chosen by the event organizers. The company then decided to refund all donations in response to donor feedback. Paxton said in a news release he would investigate GoFundMe for initially planning to shift the funds to other charities.

Response: A GoFundMe spokesperson recently told ProPublica and the Tribune in an email that the company has “clear terms of service that outline acceptable use, and when a fundraiser violates those terms it is removed from our platform.” The spokesperson said the company cooperated with Paxton’s inquiry but did not elaborate on what that entailed.

Status: Paxton’s office did not answer questions about the investigation’s status.

Texas Bar Foundation, American Gateways, Equal Justice Center and Tahirih Justice Center

Date investigations began: May 2022 and November 2022

Stated basis for the investigation: Paxton’s Consumer Protection Division launched a probe into the nonprofit Texas Bar Foundation in May 2022, following allegations by Republican U.S. Rep. Troy Nehls, from Richmond, that the organization was donating to entities that encourage and fund illegal immigration. The foundation issues grants to nonprofits that work on legal issues, including those that provide assistance to underserved people, according to its website. Months later, Paxton launched investigations into three organizations that had received funding from the foundation: American Gateways, Equal Justice Center and Tahirih Justice Center. Paxton said his office was looking into whether the money the organizations received was “being used to exacerbate the current crisis at the border.”

Response: A spokesperson for American Gateways said the organization provides legal services for immigrants, refugees and victims of torture, including human trafficking survivors. The organization provided the attorney general’s office the records the state requested as part of its investigation, including correspondence with the Texas Bar Foundation, “which demonstrates our compliance under all laws,” the spokesperson wrote. A spokesperson for the Tahirih Justice Center declined to comment. The Texas Bar Foundation and Equal Justice Center did not respond to requests for comment.

Status: Paxton’s office did not answer questions about the status of the investigations.

Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson

Date investigations began: May 2023

Stated basis for the investigation: Paxton demanded records that included any documents related to the marketing of COVID-19 vaccines in Texas from three pharmaceutical companies: Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson. The attorney general wanted information related to their vaccine research, saying that he was investigating whether they misled the public about vaccine effectiveness and alleging that they potentially manipulated drug trial data. In a May 2023 news release explaining the investigations, Paxton raised questions about the money the companies stood to make from the vaccine as well as concerns about side effects. Months later, Paxton’s office sued Pfizer, accusing the company in a news release of “unlawfully misrepresenting the effectiveness of the company’s COVID-19 vaccine and attempting to censor public discussion of the product.” Pfizer’s lawyers filed a motion this March to dismiss the case in federal court, arguing in part that the attorney general can’t bring a claim under Texas’ consumer protection law because the consumers in this case got the vaccines from the federal government, not the state. “Congress has tasked FDA, not state officials, with deciding whether Pfizer’s vaccine is sufficiently safe and effective,” the lawsuit said.

Response: In a statement to the news organizations about the attorney general’s investigation, Pfizer said the company “is deeply committed to the well-being of the patients it serves and has no higher priority than ensuring the safety and effectiveness of its treatments and vaccines.” Moderna and Johnson & Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.

Status: Paxton’s office did not answer questions about the status of the investigations. A Pfizer spokesperson said the motion to dismiss Paxton’s lawsuit is pending.

Dell Children’s Medical Center

Date investigation began: May 2023

Stated basis for the investigation: In April 2023, right-wing activist group Project Veritas published a video that purported to show a social worker at Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin saying the hospital provided gender-affirming treatment for children as young as 8. In a statement posted on social media at the time, Dell Children’s said hospital officials were reviewing the allegations and would take appropriate action “to the extent that care provided at our clinic may have been inconsistent with our organization’s position on this important issue.” Two weeks later, the attorney general’s Consumer Protection Division sent investigative demands to Dell Children’s, requesting a range of documents related to gender-affirming care, including information about the hospital’s use of puberty blockers for minors. The demand letter also asked the medical center to identify any people or organizations that hospital staff referred minor children to for counseling or treatment related to gender reassignment or gender transitioning. At the time, the treatment was still legal, but a proposed Texas law limiting the age when someone could receive gender-affirming care was making its way through the state Legislature. A week after Paxton launched his investigation, families of teenagers receiving gender-affirming care at the hospital said Dell Children’s had stopped offering those services. The hospital said in a statement that while its adolescent medicine clinic remained open, “the physicians who previously staffed the clinic will be departing.”

Response: Dell Children’s did not respond to an interview request.

Status: Paxton’s office did not answer questions about the investigation’s status or whether it remains open.

Texas Children’s Hospital

Date investigation began: May 2023

Stated basis for the investigation: Houston-based Texas Children’s Hospital said it would stop providing hormone therapy to transgender children after Abbott told the state’s child welfare agency in February 2022 to open investigations into parents who authorize gender-affirming care for their children. But City Journal, a magazine published by the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, reported in May 2023 that the hospital was providing those treatments. Paxton’s office then sent a demand letter to Texas Children’s Hospital for documents related to its gender-affirming care for minors. That care was still legal at the time, but state lawmakers passed legislation banning such treatment and sent it to the governor for final approval the same week Paxton launched his investigation. In anticipation of the measure going into effect on Sept. 1, 2023, Texas Children’s CEO told employees that the hospital would discontinue certain services, including hormone therapy. “As the largest pediatric healthcare provider in the nation, being unable to serve and support these children and families the way we have in the past is painful,” the message said.

Response: Texas Children’s Hospital declined to comment. At the time Paxton launched the investigation, a spokesperson for the hospital said in a statement that Texas Children’s “healthcare professionals have always and will continue to prioritize the care of our patients within the bounds of the law.”

Status: Paxton’s office did not answer questions about the investigation’s status.

Yelp

Date investigation began: September 2023

Stated basis for the investigation: Paxton was one of 24 attorneys general who sent a letter to the business search and review site Yelp in February 2023 alleging that the company misled customers. At issue was that Yelp had appended notices to pages for crisis pregnancy centers, which counsel clients against abortion, stating that the sites provided limited medical care. In response to the letter from the attorneys general, Yelp changed the notices to say the centers do not provide abortion or abortion services. On Sept. 26, 2023, however, Paxton’s office notified Yelp that it had launched an investigation and planned to sue the company for allegedly violating state consumer protection law because of the initial notices that were posted. (Paxton is the only attorney general who has investigated the company or filed a lawsuit over the crisis pregnancy center notices.) On Sept. 27, Yelp filed a preemptive lawsuit in federal court in California, where it’s headquartered, asking the court to prevent Paxton’s office from prosecuting the company. Yelp argued allowing the state to pursue a lawsuit would violate the First Amendment. The next day, Paxton filed the state’s lawsuit in Bastrop County in Texas.

Response: In a statement to the news organizations, a Yelp spokesperson said Paxton’s action against the company “sets a dangerous precedent by using the office and powers of a government official to politicize and punish speech on issues that he disagrees with, which in this case harms consumers looking for accurate information about reproductive healthcare.”

Status: The case continues to play out in the two states. In February, a state district court judge in Bastrop County Texas granted Yelp’s motion to toss the lawsuit. Paxton has appealed. Meanwhile, a federal judge in the California case denied Yelp’s request for an injunction and dismissed the company’s lawsuit. Yelp appealed, and the case is now pending in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Paxton’s office did not answer questions about the status of its investigation.

Media Matters for America

Date investigation began: November 2023

Stated basis for the investigation: Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog nonprofit whose mission includes “correcting conservative misinformation,” published a report in November that found ads for major brands like Apple and IBM on the social media platform X were appearing alongside posts promoting antisemitic and white supremacist views. On Nov. 20, X owner Elon Musk filed a lawsuit in federal court in Texas against the nonprofit, arguing its report had disparaged the company. The lawsuit accused Media Matters of using filters on X to produce ad and content combinations it wanted to see. Paxton launched an investigation into Media Matters the same day, saying in a press release that his office was troubled by allegations that the nonprofit had “fraudulently manipulated data.” Within days of announcing his investigation, Paxton appeared on a conservative podcast and encouraged other attorneys general to pursue similar inquiries against the nonprofit. On Dec. 11, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, opened a consumer protection investigation into the organization. He did not mention Paxton in a letter informing the nonprofit of the inquiry. On Dec. 12, Media Matters filed a lawsuit against Paxton in federal court, arguing the attorney general’s investigation violated the nonprofit’s First, Fourth and 14th amendment rights.

Response: Representatives from X did not respond to requests for comment, and spokespeople for Media Matters and Bailey declined to comment.

Status: The Missouri attorney general filed a lawsuit that is ongoing against Media Matters. On April 12, the federal judge in Media Matters’ case against the Texas attorney general granted the nonprofit’s request for a preliminary injunction, preventing Paxton from forcing it to turn over its documents. Paxton’s office did not answer questions about the status of the investigation, but his office has appealed the judge’s decision.

Seattle Children’s Hospital

Date investigation began: November 2023

Stated basis for the investigation: Paxton did not publicize that he’d requested records related to the hospital’s gender-affirming treatment of children who reside or used to reside in Texas as part of an investigation into the Washington-based hospital. The probe came to light after the hospital sued the attorney general in early December to block the release of patient records, arguing that handing them over would violate federal and state health care privacy laws. The hospital has said in legal filings that it had no staff members who treated transgender children in Texas or remotely.

Response: Neither the hospital nor Paxton’s office answered questions about the case.

Status: The hospital and Paxton’s office reached a settlement in April. As part of the settlement, the hospital agreed to withdraw its Texas business license. Paxton, in turn, agreed to drop the request for records.

QueerMed

Date investigation began: November 2023

Stated basis for the investigation: Paxton launched an investigation into the Georgia-based telehealth clinic related to its medical treatment of transgender minors. The attorney general’s office sent the clinic a demand for records on Nov. 17, the same day Paxton opened an inquiry into Seattle Children’s Hospital, according to a report published by the Houston Chronicle. The attorney general is fighting the release of the demand letter it sent seeking records from the telehealth clinic, citing exceptions when information is related to anticipated litigation. QueerMed founder Dr. Izzy Lowell told the Chronicle in January that the clinic served patients in nearly all 50 states but declined to discuss how the clinic worked with Texas patients specifically. She later told The Washington Post that the clinic stopped treating minors in Texas after the state banned gender-affirming care. The state demanded records dating back to January 2022, more than a year before the Texas law was in place.

Response: Lowell declined to comment for this story but told the Post in January that Paxton’s demand for transgender youths’ medical records was “a clear attempt to intimidate providers of gender-affirming care and parents and families that seek that care outside of Texas and other states with bans.”

Status: Paxton’s office did not answer questions about the investigation’s status or whether it remains open.

PFLAG Inc.

Date investigation began: February 2024

Stated basis for the investigation: PFLAG Inc., a national nonprofit that supports LGBTQ+ people and their families, was one of several organizations that, in July 2023, filed a lawsuit challenging Texas’ ban on gender-affirming care for minors. In an affidavit taken as part of the lawsuit, the nonprofit’s chief executive said that families with transgender and nonbinary adolescents were sharing their “contingency plans” at PFLAG chapter meetings in anticipation of the ban. “Those with the resources to move or seek care out of state have begun firming up their plans to do so, while the vast majority without those resources have been asking chapters for alternative avenues to maintain care in Texas,” the chief said. Paxton sent a letter to PFLAG in February asking for records related to those statements and alleging that the nonprofit had information about medical providers in the state who may have been committing insurance fraud. The attorney general accused health care professionals of providing gender-affirming care but disguising it as treatment for an endocrine disorder. PFLAG sued the attorney general’s office in state district court in Travis County on Feb. 28, asking a judge to determine the legality of his demands and for an injunction in order to withhold records. The following day, Paxton’s office issued a news release accusing the organization of hiding “incriminating documents.”

Response: Karen Loewy, a lawyer with Lambda Legal representing PFLAG, told the news organizations that the attorney general’s demand to review the nonprofit’s records was “an unlawful fishing expedition.”

Status: In March, a district court judge temporarily blocked the state from forcing PFLAG to turn over the records. The judge wrote in her order that PFLAG and its members could suffer harm, including limitations on their First Amendment rights to free speech and association and their Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. Paxton appealed the ruling. The 3rd Court of Appeals, which is hearing the case, has issued a temporary order protecting PFLAG from Paxton’s demands for records. Paxton’s office did not answer questions about the status of the investigation.

Annunciation House

Date investigation began: February 2024

Stated basis for the investigation: Paxton demanded records from El Paso-based Annunciation House related to the nonprofit’s work with immigrants, alleging the organization operated as a stash house. Among the materials the attorney general requested were logs identifying immigrants who received services at the nonprofit going back more than two years. Annunciation House sued in state district court in order to get a ruling on which documents the nonprofit actually had to turn over. In response to the lawsuit, the attorney general’s office argued that the nonprofit forfeited its right to operate by failing to immediately allow access to all of its records. Annunciation House primarily serves people who turn themselves in to U.S. immigration officials and are then processed and released while they await their court hearings.

Response: Jerome Wesevich, an attorney representing Annunciation House, called Paxton’s claims about the nonprofit unfounded. He said Paxton’s ultimate goal with the investigation is to find “an excuse to harass and close Annunciation House.”

Status: In March, an El Paso state district judge temporarily blocked the attorney general’s efforts to obtain Annunciation House’s records and said the state must go through the court system to continue the investigation. On May 8, Paxton announced that he had filed a motion for a temporary injunction in El Paso County district court to stop Annunciation House’s “systemic criminal conduct” and again called for the 46-year-old charity to be shut down. On Friday, Annunciation House’s lawyers filed a motion to throw out the attorney general’s case. The nonprofit said in the legal filings that the probe has caused harm that is “not only imminent, it is ongoing.”

Spirit AeroSystems Holdings Inc.

Date investigation began: March 2024

Stated basis for the investigation: On March 28, the attorney general’s Consumer Protection Division contacted Spirit AeroSystems, a Boeing parts supplier, seeking documents and communications related to airplane product defects. The office’s request for records was part of an investigation after a door plug came off a Boeing 737 Max 9 plane in January, an event that forced an emergency landing. (Spirit makes fuselages and installs door plugs like the one that came off the plane.) The attorney general’s investigative letter also demanded records “that Spirit relies on to substantiate its claim that a diverse workplace improves product quality,” enhances performance and spurs the company to make better decisions. In a news release, Paxton’s office said his office was investigating “whether those commitments are unlawful or are compromising the company’s manufacturing processes.”

Response: A spokesperson for Spirit AeroSystems said the company does not comment on investigations but “is wholly focused on providing the highest quality products to all our customers, to include the Boeing Company.”

Status: Paxton’s office did not answer questions about the investigation’s status or whether it remains open.

by Vianna Davila

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The men knocked on the door of a two-story, red-brick building in downtown El Paso one chilly morning in February. When a volunteer answered, they handed her a document they said gave them the right to go inside and review records kept by Annunciation House, a nonprofit that for decades has served immigrants and refugees seeking shelter.

An employee phoned Ruben Garcia, the nonprofit’s director and founder, who was at one of the organization’s other properties. Feeling a calling to do more to help immigrants and other people experiencing poverty, Garcia was part of a small group that formed the nonprofit in the 1970s. He’s since become an unofficial historian of the migration patterns and political response to immigration and immigrants.

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But in his nearly five decades helming the nonprofit, Garcia had never encountered a situation like this. Standing on the organization’s doorstep were officials sent there by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Consumer Protection Division. They were demanding to come inside and search the nonprofit’s records, including all logs identifying immigrants who received services at Annunciation House going back more than two years.

“Is this a warrant?” Garcia recalls asking the group, which included an assistant attorney general and a law enforcement officer from the state agency.

It wasn’t. Still, the letter the men presented stated that the attorney general’s office had the power to immediately enter the building without one.

Consumer protection laws give attorneys general broad legal authority to request a wide range of records when investigating businesses or charities for allegations of deceptive or fraudulent practices, such as gas stations that hike up fuel prices during hurricanes, companies that run robocalling phone scams and unscrupulous contractors who take advantage of homeowners.

But attorneys general have increasingly used their powers to also pursue investigations targeting organizations whose work conflicts with their political views. And Paxton, a Republican, is among the most aggressive. “He’s laying out kind of like the blueprint about how to do this,” said Paul Nolette, an expert in attorneys general and director of the Les Aspin Center for Government at Marquette University.

An analysis by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune shows that in the past two years, Paxton has used consumer protection law more than a dozen times to investigate a range of entities for activities like offering shelter to immigrants, providing health care to transgender teens or trying to foster a diverse workplace.

Not a single one of the investigations was prompted by a consumer complaint, Paxton’s office confirmed. A complaint is not necessary to launch a probe.

The analysis is possibly an undercount. The attorney general’s office said it has not consistently maintained a list of the Consumer Protection Division’s demands to examine records and would need to review individual case files to determine how many requests had been sent. The agency also fought the release of certain records requested under Texas’ Public Information Act, citing exceptions for anticipated litigation.

Paxton’s office did not respond to requests for comment or to detailed questions. It also did not reply to a request to speak with the Consumer Protection Division’s chief.

Two attorneys representing nonprofits that Paxton recently targeted said they believe he launched the investigations simply to harass their clients and to cause a chilling effect among organizations doing similar work. Both said the attorney general’s demands violate the First Amendment, which guarantees the right to free speech, association and religion, and the Fourth Amendment, which offers protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

The political weaponization of consumer protection divisions by Paxton and other attorneys general appears to be “a core violation” of constitutional laws that runs counter to what these divisions were established to do, said Georgetown Law professor Michele Goodwin.

The offices were intended to protect the public, Goodwin said. “Instead,” she added, “what is taking place in these times are efforts that undermine the civil liberties and the civil rights of people who are the public in those states and the people who are in those states who are seeking to aid and assist the public.”

In the Annunciation House case, the attorney general’s office went even further by showing up at the nonprofit’s door and demanding to immediately review documents rather than sending its requests for records by mail and giving organizations weeks to respond, as it often has in other cases ProPublica and the Tribune examined.

Paxton’s office then denied the nonprofit’s request for additional time to determine what information it was legally required to turn over, prompting Annunciation House to sue. In response, the attorney general’s office argued in court documents that the nonprofit had forfeited its right to operate and publicly accused it of acting as a stash house for immigrants he alleges are in the country illegally.

The attorney general’s move to shutter Annunciation House drew swift rebuke from political and religious leaders, who said his characterizations of the nonprofit were a dangerous misrepresentation of the charity. Paxton’s actions also sparked concern as far away as the Vatican. In a recent interview with CBS News, Pope Francis called Paxton’s efforts “madness, sheer madness.”

“The migrant has to be received,” the pope said on the television news program “60 Minutes.” “Thereafter you see how you’re going to deal with them. Maybe you have to send them back. I don’t know. But each case ought to be considered humanely, right?”

Annunciation House primarily serves people who are processed and released into the U.S. by immigration officials. Garcia communicates daily with Border Patrol and other federal agencies that regularly ask for help finding shelter for people who turn themselves in to authorities or are apprehended but have nowhere to go while their cases are processed.

In March, an El Paso state district judge temporarily blocked the attorney general’s efforts to obtain Annunciation House’s records and said the state must go through the court system to continue the investigation. “There is a real and credible concern that the attempt to prevent Annunciation House from conducting business in Texas was predetermined,” the judge wrote in his order.

Even when Paxton doesn’t get speedy access to the documents he wants, he often publicizes these typically confidential cases, putting out news releases that draw headlines and build support among his base of hard-line conservatives.

The simple act of publicizing that he is pursuing an organization can cause irreparable harm, said Jerome Wesevich, an attorney who represents Annunciation House.

“Someone has to say what is the line between a legitimate investigation and harassment,” Wesevich said.

As the Annunciation House case progresses through the courts, Paxton has continued his public attacks on the nonprofit. On May 8, Paxton announced in a press release that he had filed a court injunction to stop what he called Annunciation House’s “systemic criminal conduct.” He then issued a warning to other nonprofits that assist immigrants, saying that those that are “complicit in Joe Biden’s illegal immigration catastrophe and think they are above the law should consider themselves on notice.”

He again called for the charity to be shut down.

Evolving Power

The consumer protection cases that Paxton and like-minded attorneys general are pursuing today are virtually unrecognizable from the historically bipartisan and apolitical ones their counterparts undertook even 20 or 30 years ago, said James Tierney, a former Maine attorney general.

“The people that the laws were designed for were working-class people who were getting ripped off when they bought a used car,” said Tierney, who directs the attorney general clinic at Harvard Law School. While many attorneys general still do that work, consumer protection laws are also increasingly “being used to obviously move social agendas.”

The push to protect consumers was among numerous social movements that began to materialize in the 1960s and 1970s as Americans demanded more government action in areas like civil rights and environmental justice. As a result, states began to adopt laws that gave attorneys general the ability to investigate potential fraudulent activity by businesses.

Federal and state institutions also started encouraging attorneys general to think of themselves as representing not only the state but also the people who lived there. “This shift was significant because by serving as the representatives of individuals and groups allegedly harmed by corporate conduct, AGs essentially became a form of class-action litigator,” Nolette, the Marquette professor, wrote in his book, “Federalism on Trial.”

Initially, attorneys general focused consumer protection investigations in their own states. By the 1980s, however, the scope of the investigations began to change as the attorneys general offices started to work across state lines to target large industries.

Perhaps the most notable example is the decision by all 50 state attorneys general to sue tobacco companies in the 1990s. They successfully argued the industry misled consumers about the dangers of cigarettes and other tobacco products and intentionally marketed them to children. The lawsuits resulted in billions of dollars in settlement money. More recently, attorneys general across the country pursued similar multistate suits against the opioid industry and pharmaceutical supply chain.

The power of attorneys general continued to grow through the decades as Congress passed measures that empowered states to enforce federal law and the courts interpreted ambiguities in the law in such a way that made it easier for states to sue under federal statutes.

A number of other court decisions unrelated to consumer protection further changed the role of attorneys general. As states found it easier to bring cases that are similar to class-action suits, the Supreme Court issued rulings in the early 2010s that made it harder for private litigants to do so. The decisions essentially drove those cases to attorneys general, Tierney said.

A 2014 Supreme Court decision that lifted limits on individual campaign contributions raised the stakes of attorneys general campaigns and created “a funnel for dark money to flow into every AG race,” Tierney said.

“The machine is up and running,” Tierney said, “and will continue to run unless someone figures out how to stop it.”

Stretching the Boundaries

Although Paxton has used consumer protection law to investigate a wide range of organizations with which he disagrees politically, he has perhaps most aggressively pursued those that provide or support gender-affirming care for minors.

Over the past two years, his office has launched at least six investigations into hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and an LGBTQ+ advocacy and support group, often demanding records that include sensitive patient information.

These investigations came amid a growing wave of conservative initiatives in Texas and across the country that have worked to chip away at the rights of transgender people. At least 25 states ban gender-affirming care for minors in some way, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

Texas was not among those states when, in August 2021, then-state Rep. Matt Krause, a Republican who the same year launched an investigation into school library books that dealt with topics like sexuality and race, wrote to Paxton asking for an opinion on whether gender-affirming care for children amounted to child abuse. In February 2022, Paxton issued a nonbinding legal opinion that said it did.

Days later, Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate parents who authorized such treatment for their children, a move that spurred both condemnation — including from families, medical professionals and the White House — and fear across the state and country. These investigations are on hold following several court rulings.

As Abbott ordered the state agency to go after parents, Paxton began launching investigations into organizations that provide or support gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

One of those targeted entities was Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin. In May 2023, one of Paxton’s Consumer Protection lawyers sent a letter to the hospital demanding documents related to the use of puberty blockers and counseling for transgender youth. Three weeks later, the same lawyer sent a letter seeking similar records from Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. In a news release announcing the investigation, Paxton said his office was examining whether the facility was “unlawfully” providing gender transition care.

At the time that the letters were sent to the hospitals, a law preventing transgender minors from getting puberty blockers and hormone therapies was working its way through the Legislature. The law ultimately passed, but it did not go into effect until Sept. 1.

Dell Children’s did not respond to an interview request. Texas Children’s Hospital declined to comment for this story.

In the months that followed, Paxton went even further. He began to investigate organizations outside of Texas for their connections to gender-affirming care: Seattle Children’s Hospital in Washington state; QueerMed, a telehealth clinic based in Georgia; and PFLAG Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based national nonprofit that supports LGBTQ+ people and their families.

Seattle Children’s Hospital sued the attorney general in December to block the release of any patient records, arguing that handing them over would violate federal and state health care privacy laws. The hospital said in legal filings it had no staff that treated transgender children in Texas or remotely.

Paxton has not answered questions about why he decided to investigate out-of-state facilities, but in court filings in the Seattle case, the attorney general’s office argued it has the right to investigate the hospital and other organizations registered to do business in Texas. The demand letter sent to the hospital asked for records related to the facility’s gender-affirming treatment of children who reside or used to reside in Texas. (The news organizations filed a public information request for the investigative letter Paxton sent to QueerMed, but the attorney general’s office is fighting its release, citing exceptions when information is related to pending or anticipated litigation.)

What seems to unite all three cases is that the attorney general’s office under Paxton “is going to use consumer protection law to stretch the boundaries of what they can do to try to make transgender care as minimal as possible in Texas,” said Colin Provost, an associate professor of public policy at University College London whose research has included how attorneys general in the U.S. work together to enforce consumer protection laws.

Paxton and Seattle Children’s reached a settlement in April. As part of the deal, the hospital agreed to withdraw its Texas business license. In exchange, Paxton dropped his demand for records.

QueerMed founder Dr. Izzy Lowell declined to comment for this story. But the doctor said in an interview with The Washington Post that Paxton’s push to access transgender youths’ medical records was “a clear attempt to intimidate providers of gender-affirming care and parents and families that seek that care outside of Texas and other states with bans.”

PFLAG sued Paxton’s office in February after the attorney general demanded its records. In court filings, Paxton alleged that the nonprofit had information about medical providers in the state that may have been committing insurance fraud. The attorney general accused health care professionals of providing gender-affirming care but disguising it as treatment for an endocrine disorder.

A Travis County district court judge issued an injunction in March that temporarily blocked the state’s access to the records. In her ruling, she wrote that failing to stop the attorney general from getting these records could result in PFLAG and its members suffering harm, including limitations on their First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights. Paxton appealed her ruling. The 3rd Court of Appeals, which is hearing the case, has issued a temporary order protecting PFLAG from Paxton’s demands for records.

Karen Loewy, a lawyer with Lambda Legal, which is representing PFLAG, said she remains baffled by the attorney general’s decision to use the state’s consumer protection law to investigate organizations like PFLAG, which provides resources to chapter support groups in the state.

“There's no consumer fraud happening here at PFLAG’s hands,” Loewy said.

Yet, she said, the attorney general appears to believe that he can send these demands to anyone his office thinks has information related to an investigation. In a court filing in response to PFLAG's lawsuit, Paxton’s office admitted it does not believe the nonprofit is violating the state’s consumer protection law, known as the Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The attorney general, however, argued in the filing that it can demand records of anyone, “not just those suspected of a violation.”

"The way in which the AG’s office has argued this already shows that they think that their power is unlimited,” Loewy said.

Sending a Message

Just as Paxton’s campaign against transgender care for minors has sent a chill through the network of people who provide this medical care, the impacts of the attorney general’s investigation of Annunciation House are reverberating throughout the community of people who work with migrants.

On Friday, Annunciation House’s lawyers filed a motion to throw out the attorney general’s case. Aside from arguing that Paxton’s claims about the organization are unfounded, the nonprofit said in the legal filings that the probe has caused harm that is “not only imminent, it is ongoing.”

Immediately after the attorney general officials showed up at the nonprofit’s offices in February, three Annunciation House volunteers quit, including the woman who answered the door. They worried the situation was “more unpredictable” than they could handle, Garcia said.

According to court records filed by Annunciation House attorneys, some volunteers have received threatening phone calls. The filings also state that the city of El Paso started stationing security guards at all of the nonprofit’s shelters “around the clock” to protect the people who are staying there.

“It’s scaring people from wanting to volunteer with us,” Garcia said. “It’s scaring people from wanting to work with the refugees.”

Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, an El Paso-based nonprofit that works with Annunciation House and provides legal services to immigrants and refugees on both sides of the border, has not lost volunteers, but the organization’s executive director, Marisa Limón Garza, said people were rattled by the fact that employees from Paxton’s office showed up at a fellow nonprofit’s door demanding access.

“If it’s a letter in the mail, that’s one thing,” Limón Garza said. “But coming and trying to access the space, that’s a different level of state intervention that definitely sends a chilling effect. It sends a message.”

That message changed how Las Americas operates. It updated its security and technology systems at a cost of $25,000, money the nonprofit’s leadership hadn’t planned to spend, Limón Garza said. The organization also better secured its internal files, got new cellphones and laptops, and added new intercom and doorbell screening systems.

It no longer allows walk-ins.

by Jennifer Berry Hawes

I recently traveled to rural Wilcox County, in Alabama’s Black Belt, to understand the origins of the local “segregation academy” and how it still divides the broader community. It was the first story in our series about segregation academies, private schools that opened across the Deep South after the U.S Supreme Court released its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. White Southerners opened hundreds — perhaps thousands — of these schools, which allowed white children to flee just as Black children arrived in the public schools. Now, 70 years later, ProPublica has found that hundreds of these academies still operate. Where they do, schools often remain segregated — and as a result, so do entire communities.

While I was in Wilcox County, I wondered: How would things be different if the segregation academy didn’t exist? Locals I met in the county seat of Camden mentioned another small town just a short drive over the county line where people had chosen a different path.

So I headed to Thomasville, Alabama, to meet current school leaders and a group of Black former students who were on the front lines during desegregation. They described the critical turning points when Black and white residents alike made decisions that resulted in integrated public schools and a very different future for the town’s schoolchildren.

When Jim Emerson arrived in rural Alabama’s Wilcox County to work as a paper mill executive, he saw opportunities for development in its rolling hills, lush riverbanks and charming small-town county seat of Camden.

He tried to steer new hires toward moving there.

Join us on June 5 for a virtual discussion of how private schools known as “segregation academies” in the Deep South continue to preserve divisions within communities even 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education.

But he hit an obstacle: The local schools were sharply divided by race. Virtually all of the public school students were Black, and most white students attended Wilcox Academy, one of the hundreds of private schools in the Deep South that researchers call “segregation academies.”

Many of the paper mill’s new employees instead moved to Thomasville, a small town in a neighboring county.

In Thomasville, Emerson sees what Camden could have been.

Trophy cases at A.L. Martin High School celebrated its students’ achievements. (Lt. R.C. Brooks of the Alabama Highway Patrol/Alabama Department of Archives and History)

The two small towns’ futures diverged, in many ways, starting in 1970. That year, the fairly new Thomasville City Schools came up with a court-ordered desegregation plan that called for shuttering A.L. Martin, the high school for Black students, and sending its students to Thomasville High, the school for whites. A segregation academy also opened in Thomasville that year.

Several former A.L. Martin students recalled that when they arrived at Thomasville High, they were sent to separate classrooms from the white students. Gone were their Black coaches. Their principal was relegated to a job as the superintendent’s clerk.

“It destroyed the fabric of the community. This was the nucleus of the Black community,” said G.B. Quinney, a student then who’s now director of a museum in the A.L. Martin building.

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By fall 1971, they’d had enough. Every Black student got up and walked out of school together in protest. A large majority stayed out for nearly the entire school year, organizing protests and a boycott that cost local white businesses money. Their demands included eliminating segregated classes, hiring a Black administrator and more Black teachers’ aides, and increasing the participation of Black teachers in planning school activities.

What happened next separates Thomasville from Camden and many other Black Belt areas.

White leaders eventually invited Black protestors to negotiate a return to school — and to their businesses. Many white parents also either never left the public schools or did so but soon returned.

Some students also transferred from Wilcox County to Thomasville “to escape the almost all-black Wilcox County public schools and to avoid the cost of tuition at private academies,” according to a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report issued in 1983.

In the 1970s, the chair of the Thomasville school board also stood firm: The district would not hire teachers who sent their children to private schools, nor would it beg students who left to return.

The superintendent agreed: “If they leave, I don’t want them back.”

In 1987, the segregation academy in town closed. Today, Thomasville High School’s students are about 60% Black and 40% white, far more integrated than many schools in Alabama’s Black Belt.

Annette Davis was in 10th grade when the district moved her class from A.L. Martin to the white high school in 1969, the year before the entire school was merged. She was among the student protesters who were arrested.

Today, when she returns to Thomasville High for football games and other events, she is proud to see white and Black students in class together — and a Black principal at the helm. “When I walk into that school now, I feel good,” Davis said.

Many families who can afford private school tuition still choose the city’s public schools. They use their resources to help other students with everything from transportation to winter coats and wrestling uniforms. They become alumni who support the school through fundraisers involving their businesses, Thomasville Superintendent Vickie Morris said.

In downtown Thomasville, a sign in a storefront reads, “Let’s Go Tigers!” — the public high school mascot.

In contrast, a sign in the window of a downtown Camden business reads, “Proud Supporters of the Wilcox Wildcats” — the local private academy.

A.L. Martin High School was built on a hill overlooking Thomasville. Today, a museum dedicated to the city’s Black history operates in the space. (Lt. R.C. Brooks of the Alabama Highway Patrol/Alabama Department of Archives and History)

“We’ve got the whole city’s support,” said Thomas E. Jackson, who graduated in one of A.L. Martin’s final classes and now is a longtime Democratic state legislator. In 1966, when he was a junior, he and three other Black students fled gunfire after entering an ice cream store through the front door, which was reserved for white patrons.

Morris, the current superintendent, described parents from surrounding districts, who pay $400 a year to transfer students in, tearfully begging her to admit their children when classes are full. “We are the choice,” she said.

Among those transfers are 71 students from Wilcox County.

“It shows you what can happen when the community makes up its mind not to be divided,” said Emerson, the paper mill executive who’s now retired. Wilcox County’s white citizens chose another path in the 1970s, “which, in retrospect, was a very, very bad decision.”

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by Isabelle Taft, Mississippi Today

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Mississippi Today and co-published with the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, the Sun Herald and MLK50. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

When Sandy Jones’ 26-year-old daughter started writing on the walls of her home in Hernando, Mississippi, last year and talking angrily to the television, Sandy said, she knew two things: Her daughter Sydney needed help, and Sandy didn’t want her to be held in jail again to get it.

A year and a half earlier, during Sydney Jones’ first psychotic episode, her mother filed paperwork to have her involuntarily committed, a legal process in which a judge can order someone to receive mental health treatment. After DeSoto County sheriff’s deputies showed up at Sydney’s home and explained that they were detaining her for a mental evaluation, Sydney panicked and ran inside. Following a struggle, deputies cuffed and shackled her and drove her to the county jail, where people going through the commitment process are usually held as they await mental health treatment elsewhere.

Over nine days in jail, Sydney Jones said, she believed her tattoos were portals for spiritual forces and felt like she had been abandoned by her family. In an interview, she said that the experience was so traumatic that she became anxious when she drove, afraid she could be arrested at any moment.

The second time Sydney Jones experienced delusions, in 2023, a family member contacted the local community mental health center for help. Police officers with mental health training came and called an ambulance to take Jones to Baptist Memorial Hospital-DeSoto, part of a large, religiously affiliated nonprofit hospital system. But because the hospital doesn’t have a psychiatric unit, after a few days it sent her to the jail to wait for eventual treatment in a publicly funded facility. Like the first time, she hadn’t been charged with a crime.

Sydney Jones (Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today)

Roughly 200 people in DeSoto County were jailed annually during the civil commitment process, most without criminal charges, between 2021 and 2023. About a fifth of them were picked up at local hospitals, according to an estimate based on a review of Sheriff’s Department records by Mississippi Today and ProPublica. The overwhelming majority of those patients, according to our analysis, were at Baptist Memorial Hospital-DeSoto, the largest in this prosperous, suburban county near Memphis.

“That would just be unthinkable here,” said Dr. Grayson Norquist, the chief of psychiatry at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, a professor at Emory University and the former chair of psychiatry at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi.

Norquist was one of 17 physicians specializing in emergency medicine or psychiatry, including leaders in their fields, who said they had never heard of a hospital sending patients to jail solely to wait for mental health treatment. Several said it violates doctors’ Hippocratic oath: to do no harm.

If you or someone you know needs help:

• Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988
• Text the Crisis Text Line from anywhere in the U.S. to reach a crisis counselor: 741741

The practice appears to be unusual even in Mississippi, where lawmakers recently acted to limit when people can be jailed as they go through the civil commitment process. Sheriff’s departments in about a third of the state’s counties, including those that appear to jail such people most frequently, responded to questions from Mississippi Today and ProPublica about how they handle involuntary commitment. They said they seldom, if ever, take people who need mental health treatment from a hospital to jail. At most, said sheriffs in a few rural counties, they do it once or twice a month.

But in DeSoto County, hospital patients were jailed about 50 times a year from 2021 to 2023, according to the news outlets’ estimate, which was based on a review of Sheriff’s Department dispatch logs, incident reports and jail dockets.

At least two people have died soon after being taken from Baptist-DeSoto to a county jail during the commitment process, according to documents submitted for lawsuits filed over their deaths. One person died by suicide hours after arriving at the DeSoto County jail in 2021; the other died of multisystem organ failure after being jailed for three days in neighboring Marshall County in 2011. James Franks, an attorney who handles commitments for DeSoto County, said officials had no reason to believe that the woman who killed herself was suicidal. DeSoto County made a similar argument in a court filing in an ongoing lawsuit over that death, which didn’t name the hospital as a defendant. In lawsuits over the other death, a judge dismissed Marshall County and the sheriff as defendants, and a jury found that Baptist-DeSoto wasn’t liable.

Baptist-DeSoto officials said the hospital hands some patients over to deputies to take them to jail because those patients need dedicated treatment that the hospital can’t provide and nearby inpatient facilities are full. Most people who need inpatient treatment agree to be transferred to a behavioral health facility, according to Kim Alexander, director of public relations for Baptist Memorial Health Care Corp. But in a relatively small number of cases, she wrote in an email, patients are deemed dangerous to themselves or others and don’t agree to treatment, so they need to be committed. When that happens, she said, it’s the county’s responsibility to decide where to house them.

“We discharge mental health patients with the hope they will be transferred to a mental health facility that can provide the specialized care they need,” Alexander wrote in a statement. Jailing people who need mental health care is “not the ideal option,” she wrote. “Our hearts go out to anyone who cannot access the mental health care they need because behavioral health services are not available in the area.”

But doctors elsewhere said even if psychiatric facilities are full, Baptist-DeSoto doesn’t have to send patients to jail. They said the hospital could do what hospitals elsewhere in the country do: keep patients until a treatment bed is available.

“This is a principle of emergency medicine: You care for all people, under all circumstances, at any time," said Dr. Lewis Goldfrank, who spent 50 years working in emergency medicine, including at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Sending patients to jail because of their illness, he said, "is just unethical and irresponsible."

Sandy Jones said she was in disbelief when it happened to her daughter. If Sydney has another psychotic episode, Sandy Jones said she won’t try to get help in DeSoto County. “I will tie her up until it’s over.”

Baptist Memorial Hospital-DeSoto (Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today) Headed to Jail in a Hospital Gown and Handcuffs

Baptist, the largest and oldest hospital in DeSoto County, sits right off the interstate amid big-box stores and chain hotels in Southaven, Mississippi. It’s the first place many residents think of when they need medical help. Since 2017, it has served as the drop-off point for the county’s crisis intervention team, which was established to give law enforcement a way to help people with mental illness without bringing them to jail.

But when people show up in the emergency department needing inpatient psychiatric treatment, they don’t get it at Baptist-DeSoto. Instead, a crisis coordinator sets about finding some other place for them. If patients agree to treatment, they may be able to go to a publicly funded crisis unit, the closest of which is 50 miles away, or to a private psychiatric hospital. If they don’t, the crisis coordinator pursues commitment, which means turning patients over to the Sheriff’s Department. And because the Sheriff’s Department usually won’t transport patients over a long distance multiple times for a court hearing and eventual treatment, those patients usually go to jail.

That was the case with Sydney Jones. After she arrived at the hospital in April 2023, a psychiatrist contracted by the hospital evaluated her and concluded that she needed inpatient treatment. Jones was prescribed antipsychotic medication, admitted to the hospital, placed in her own room and monitored by a security guard.

Meanwhile, a staffer for Region IV, the local nonprofit community mental health center that works with Baptist-DeSoto to place patients who need treatment, was trying to find someplace for Jones other than the hospital. Catherine Davis, the crisis coordinator, concluded that Jones would need to be committed.

After Sydney Jones was taken to Baptist Memorial Hospital-DeSoto in the midst of a psychotic episode, a staffer for Region IV, the local community mental health center, filed paperwork to have Jones committed. Catherine Davis, the staffer, wrote that she did so because of Jones’ psychosis and because she wouldn’t comply with treatment recommendations. (Obtained by Mississippi Today and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

The next day, Davis contacted Jones’ cousin, who had tried to get Jones help, and asked the cousin to initiate commitment proceedings. (Region IV’s contract with Baptist-DeSoto requires it to try to get a patient’s family member or friend to file commitment paperwork before doing so itself.) The cousin refused because she knew Jones would be jailed until a bed opened up, according to Sandy Jones. (The cousin declined an interview request.)

So Davis filed the commitment paperwork herself, writing that Sydney Jones “should be taken to DeSoto County jail” while awaiting further evaluations, a court hearing and eventual treatment.

On Sydney Jones’ fourth day at Baptist-DeSoto, two sheriff’s deputies arrived. They received discharge papers from a nurse and wheeled Jones out of the hospital, according to her and an incident report. Jones, who said her delusions at the time were “like if Satan made goggles and put them on you,” was terrified that the deputies would drive her to a field, rape her and kill her.

Sandy Jones said she didn’t understand why she had no say in what was happening to her daughter, although that’s typical during the commitment process. “I felt like she was kidnapped from me,” Sandy Jones said. Her daughter spent nine days in jail before being admitted to a crisis unit, where she was treated for about two weeks.

Mississippi Today and ProPublica interviewed five other people who were discharged from Baptist to jail, including two who had been taken to the hospital because they had attempted suicide. One said that when deputies came to his room, he wondered if he had somehow committed a crime after trying to kill himself by overdosing on prescription medication. Another said he felt humiliated to be wheeled through the hospital wearing just a hospital gown. Three of the five said they were handcuffed before being taken away.

Hospital officials noted that all patients are medically stabilized before being released and that some patients are committed by family members. Dr. H. F. Mason, Baptist-DeSoto’s chief medical officer, said in an interview that he didn’t know how often patients who need behavioral health treatment might be discharged to jail, but he has no concerns about the practice. When hospital staff hand patients over to local authorities, Mason said, “we feel that they’re going to take the appropriate care of that patient.”

The jail, however, offers minimal psychiatric treatment, if any. Region IV staff members visit the jail primarily to evaluate people going through the commitment process or to check on people on suicide watch, Region IV Director Jason Ramey said. Jail officials said medical staff try to make sure inmates have access to their prescription drugs, although some people jailed during commitment proceedings have said they didn’t consistently get their medications.

Davis and county officials involved in the commitment process said sending patients to jail as they await treatment is better than allowing them to go home, which they see as the only other option. Jail is “not ideal, but we’ve got to make sure these people are safe so they’re not going to harm themselves or somebody else,” Davis said. “If they’ve had a serious suicide attempt, and they’re just adamant they’re going home, I mean — I can’t ethically let them go home. ... We do try to explore all the options before we send them there.”

Once in jail, many patients wait days or weeks to be evaluated further, to go before a judge and to be taken somewhere for treatment, according to a review of jail dockets. One 37-year-old man picked up at Baptist-DeSoto in 2022 was jailed for nearly two months, which according to jail dockets was one of the longest detentions between 2021 and 2023.

Desoto County Detention Center (Eric J. Shelton/Mississippi Today)

The husband of a 64-year-old woman said that during the evaluation process he was encouraged by someone at Baptist-DeSoto — he doesn’t remember who — to pursue commitment proceedings after his wife stopped taking her bipolar disorder medication and overdosed on prescription drugs and alcohol. She was jailed for 28 days.

“I’m a Jehovah’s Witness,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified because she doesn’t want people to know she was jailed for mental illness. “I never known anything like that in my life. Never been arrested. All my rights just stripped from me. To do that to an old woman, because I was having mental troubles!”

She said the experience left her terrified to seek mental health care in DeSoto County. “I’d rather die than go back in there,” she said of the jail.

DeSoto County Struggles with a Problem Other Communities Have Addressed

Although DeSoto County has long relied on its jail to house people awaiting treatment, some communities elsewhere in the state have found other options. They rely on nearby crisis units to provide short-term treatment and in many cases have arrangements with local hospitals to treat patients if a publicly funded bed isn’t available.

On the Gulf Coast, people who come to hospitals in Ocean Springs or Pascagoula can be admitted to an eight-bed psychiatric unit, said Kim Henderson, director of emergency services for Singing River Health System, which operates those facilities.

Henderson said the psychiatric unit loses money because many patients lack insurance and can’t pay. “It would be so much easier to say we’re not going to do this anymore and shut it down,” she said. “But we don’t believe that’s the right thing to do.”

Over the years, DeSoto County officials have expressed frustration with how many people are jailed during the commitment process, but they’ve made little progress in coming up with an alternative.

In 2007, Baptist-DeSoto initiated 152 commitments, according to board meeting minutes and a news story in the DeSoto Times-Tribune; many of those patients went to jail. The hospital sends people “as quickly as they can to the Sheriff's Department. They want them out of there,” Michael Garriga, then the county administrator, said at the time, according to another Times-Tribune article. (The news stories didn’t include a comment from the hospital; Alexander, Baptist’s spokesperson, said she couldn’t comment on practices from years ago because no one who was part of the leadership team then is still around.)

A contractor working for Baptist-DeSoto filed this affidavit in 2009 initiating commitment proceedings against a patient, who was then taken to jail to await treatment. Mississippi Today and ProPublica reviewed about 200 court files from around that time in which someone working on behalf of the hospital filed paperwork to commit a patient; in most of those cases, the patient was taken to jail. (Obtained by Mississippi Today and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

In 2008, the CEO of Parkwood Behavioral Health System, which operates a psychiatric facility in the county, offered to treat people going through the commitment process for $465 per patient per day — many times more than the $25 a day it cost back then to house someone in jail. No contract was ever signed.

Two years later, again aiming to reduce how often people awaiting mental health treatment were jailed, DeSoto County started working with a different community mental health center, Region IV. The number of people held in jail during commitment proceedings fell sharply, but within several years it had risen.

In 2021, the state Department of Mental Health said it would give Region IV money to create a crisis unit in DeSoto, the largest county in the state without one. But the county must provide the building, and it has taken about two years just to move forward with a location, according to meeting minutes.

County officials considered putting the crisis unit in a building a few miles from the hospital and even got an architect to scope out a renovation, according to meeting minutes. By 2023, those plans had been scuttled amid concerns about the cost of renovations and opposition from neighbors, according to Mark Gardner, a county supervisor, and board meeting minutes.

Former Sheriff Bill Rasco said he was told by an alderman for the city of Southaven that residents didn’t want people with mental illness in their neighborhood. Rasco, who served from 2008 through 2023, said he believes the rapidly growing county has had the means to build a facility, but supervisors prioritize paving roads and keeping taxes low. “We build agricultural arenas, walking trails and ballfields, and we let our mental health suffer,” he said.

The county Board of Supervisors inched forward again in February, voting to hire an architect to draw up plans to renovate a different county building. But construction on the 16-bed facility won’t start until spring 2025 at the earliest.

Gardner, who was first elected in 2011, said he has always believed that people with mental illness shouldn’t be jailed, but the Sheriff’s Department and Region IV didn’t propose an alternative until recently. “We need it today,” he said. “I hate that we haven’t been able to find a suitable place till now to put this.”

A year after Sydney Jones’ second psychotic episode, she’s doing better. She hasn’t experienced another mental health crisis. The sight of a police cruiser no longer triggers a panic attack, though she does get anxious when she sees one in her neighborhood.

But she wants to remind herself of what she survived to get here, so she keeps mementos. The composition book where she wrote notes during group therapy at the crisis unit. The Bible she read in jail. The planner where she wrote “Hospital” in one square and “Jail” in the next. And two plastic wristbands: The white one identified her as a hospital patient; the yellow one, with her mug shot and booking number, identified her as a prisoner.

In her planner and Bible, Jones kept track of the time she spent at Baptist-DeSoto, in jail and at a crisis stabilization unit in Corinth, Mississippi, where she eventually received treatment. (Courtesy of Sydney Jones) How We Reported This Story

To report this story, we obtained DeSoto County Sheriff’s Department logs from 2021 through 2023 that showed when deputies were called to two local hospitals to take people into custody for involuntary commitment proceedings to receive treatment for mental illness or substance abuse. Those logs included nearly 200 calls, mostly to Baptist Memorial Hospital-DeSoto.

To determine which calls resulted in jail detentions, we needed to cross-reference the logs with incident reports and county jail dockets. We requested incident reports for about half of calls from 2021 through 2023. Although this sample wasn’t collected at random, we requested records from a range of months to account for possible variations throughout the year. Patients’ names were redacted from incident reports, but by using other identifying information in those reports, we matched 76% of the call logs in our sample to an entry in jail dockets. The remaining calls included not just those for which we couldn’t match an incident report to a jail docket entry, but also those for which there was no incident report or the patient was taken to a crisis unit or a private psychiatric hospital.

Based on that percentage and the volume of calls during the three-year period, we estimated that about 23% of the roughly 650 people jailed during the civil commitment process in DeSoto County had been picked up at a local hospital. Again, the overwhelming majority were taken from Baptist-DeSoto. To ensure that our estimate was conservative and accounted for any variation due to our sample, we characterized this as about one-fifth of civil commitment jail detentions. We shared our preliminary findings with hospital and county officials; no one disputed them.

To determine how the number of people jailed during commitment proceedings in DeSoto County has changed over time, we obtained jail dockets dating back to 2007. We don’t have data for 2009 and 2010 because of a file storage issue at the Sheriff’s Department.

Agnel Philip contributed reporting. Mollie Simon contributed research.