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by Kavitha Surana, photography by Stacy Kranitz, special to ProPublica

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This story graphically describes serious complications in pregnancies and births, and it mentions suicide.

One day late last summer, Dr. Barry Grimm called a fellow obstetrician at Vanderbilt University Medical Center to consult about a patient who was 10 weeks pregnant. Her embryo had become implanted in scar tissue from a recent cesarean section, and she was in serious danger. At any moment, the pregnancy could rupture, blowing open her uterus.

Dr. Mack Goldberg, who was trained in abortion care for life-threatening pregnancy complications, pulled up the patient’s charts. He did not like the look of them. The muscle separating her pregnancy from her bladder was as thin as tissue paper; her placenta threatened to eventually invade her organs like a tumor. Even with the best medical care in the world, some patients bleed out in less than 10 minutes on the operating table. Goldberg had seen it happen.

Mayron Michelle Hollis stood to lose her bladder, her uterus and her life. She was desperate to end the pregnancy. On the phone, the two doctors agreed this was the best path forward, guided by recommendations from the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, an association of 5,500 experts on high-risk pregnancy. The longer they waited, the more complicated the procedure would be.

But it was Aug. 24, and performing an abortion was hours away from becoming a felony in Tennessee. There were no explicit exceptions. Prosecutors could choose to charge any doctor who terminated any pregnancy with a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison. If charged, the doctor would have the burden of proving in front of a judge or jury that the procedure was necessary to save the patient’s life, similar to claiming self-defense in a homicide case.

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The doctors didn’t know where to turn to for guidance. There was no institutional process to help them make a final call. Hospitals have malpractice lawyers but do not typically employ criminal lawyers. Even local criminal lawyers weren’t sure what to say — they had no precedent to draw on, and the attorney general and the governor weren’t issuing any clarifications. Under the law, it was possible a prosecutor could argue Hollis’ case wasn’t an immediate emergency, just a potential risk in the future.

Goldberg was only a month into his first job as a full-fledged staff doctor, launching his career in one of the most hostile states for reproductive health care in America, yet he was confident he could stand in a courtroom and attest that Hollis’ condition was life-threatening. But to perform an abortion safely, he would need a team of other providers to agree to take on the same legal risks. Hollis wanted to keep her uterus so she could one day get pregnant again. That made the operation more complicated, because a pregnant uterus draws extra blood to it, increasing the risk of hemorrhage.

Goldberg spent the next two days trying to rally support from his colleagues for a procedure that would previously have been routine.

Vanderbilt declined to comment for this article, but Hollis’ doctors spoke to ProPublica in their personal capacity, with her permission, risking backlash in order to give the public a rare view into the dangers created when lawmakers interfere with high-stakes medical care.

First, Goldberg and a colleague tried the interventional radiology department. To lower Hollis’ chance of bleeding, Goldberg wanted doctors to insert a special gel into the artery that supplied blood to her uterus to reduce its flow. But that department’s leadership didn’t feel comfortable participating.

Next, they approached a maternal-fetal medicine specialist who a week earlier had said he would be able to provide an injection to stop the fetus from growing and decrease blood flow. But once the law went into effect, that specialist grew uneasy, he told ProPublica. He asked that his name not be used because of the sensitivity of the issue.

The specialist would have to do the procedure in a room of nurses and scrub techs with an ultrasound image projected on the wall — all potential evidence that could be used against him in a trial. He thought about his family, what it would mean to go to prison. “I’m so disappointed in myself,” he told Goldberg and his colleague as he refused to participate.

That night, Goldberg went home and buried his face into the soft fur of his 100-pound Bernedoodle dog, Louie. He believed strongly that knowing how to perform an abortion was a necessary part of health care; he’d spent two years training in Pittsburgh to have the skills to help people like Hollis. Now he felt like everyone was leaving him alone with the responsibility. He worried about being able to manage that massive bleed alone.

He felt sick when he told Grimm his decision: “It’s too dangerous,” he said.

Dr. Mack Goldberg, shown here with his dog, had training in complex abortion care and wanted to help Mayron Hollis, but his colleagues feared they could be prosecuted under the new law.

Grimm felt a mix of anger, fear and sadness burning beneath his ribs. He could scarcely believe the situation. Raised Christian in the deep South, he had never agreed with abortion as a moral choice. But as an OB-GYN whose patient was in mortal peril, he couldn’t begin to comprehend what politicians were thinking. He had told Hollis an abortion ban was coming, but had thought there would be an exception for cases like hers that came with high risks.

He knew Hollis would have difficulty traveling. It began to sink in: The families who would most starkly bear the consequences of the law would be those with little means, whose fragile stability could be disrupted by any unexpected hurdle.

He collected himself as he dialed Hollis. It was Aug. 26, the day after the ban went into effect.

It was also Hollis’ 32nd birthday. She was at her job as an insulator apprentice, monitoring her co-workers as they wrapped rolls of fiberglass around pipes, when she saw Grimm’s name flash on her phone. She headed outside, her long hair coiled under a hard hat, her stomach churning.

The past month had been a dizzying, sickening whirlwind of thrill, then worry, then stubborn hope, then all-consuming terror. She didn’t want to lose her pregnancy, but she didn’t want to die. She had anguished over the decision, prayed about it with her husband, gotten a second opinion and gone around and around with Grimm.

Now, as she stepped outside to take the call, all she wanted to hear was her doctor’s usual calm reassurance and the plan for her care.

But Grimm’s voice was heavy as he began:

“I’m so, so sorry.”

Hollis and her OB-GYN, Dr. Barry Grimm, had to navigate a life-threatening pregnancy under Tennessee’s new abortion ban.

Few Tennessee lawmakers stopped to consider the ramifications when they gathered in 2019 to pass what would wind up being one of the nation’s most severe abortion bans.

It was a trigger law, just words on paper as long as federal abortion rights granted by a 1973 Supreme Court ruling remained in place. “It wasn’t like Roe v. Wade was on the verge of being overturned,” said state Sen. Richard Briggs, a heart surgeon who co-sponsored the bill. “It was theoretical at that point.”

To many, the ban seemed like a publicity stunt. It didn’t even get much pushback from doctors or abortion-rights advocates.

But the influential anti-abortion group National Right to Life was following a strategy.

For decades, the group’s leaders have written and lobbied for model legislation aimed at injecting their particular vision of morality into abortion regulations around the country. In many conservative states, they exert a stranglehold on politics, publishing annual scorecards to track lawmakers’ votes on anti-abortion legislation and funding primary challengers against candidates they don’t consider committed enough.

Invigorated by President Trump’s conservative Supreme Court nominations starting in 2018, they pushed so-called “trigger bans,” designed to go into effect in a future where Roe was overturned. It’s an approach Bob Ramsey, a Republican legislator in Tennessee at the time, likened to throwing spaghetti at the wall “to see what sticks.”

Republican lawmakers knew that voting against the abortion ban bill could spell political peril.

“Unfortunately, it's all about the next election,” Ramsey said. “We didn’t get together and debate the morality of pro-choice or the confusion for medical providers. It was pretty much a foregone conclusion.” In the end, he abstained, and lost his next primary to an opponent who castigated him for not being anti-abortion enough.

But the law sailed through without Ramsey, on party lines.

Roe v. Wade was still in effect when Republican lawmakers voted for Tennessee's abortion ban.

The Supreme Court’s decision came on June 24, 2022. Tennessee’s abortion ban kicked in two months later. Overnight, procedures that had not been considered “abortion” by many, but simply part of reproductive health care, were a crime. That included offering dilation and evacuation procedures to patients whose water broke too early or who started bleeding heavily in their first trimester. Terminating dangerous pregnancies that never result in a viable birth, like those that settle inside a fallopian tube or develop into a tumor, was also technically an abortion. Each case now presents doctors with an ethical dilemma: Provide the patient the standard of care accepted by the medical community and face a potential felony charge, or try to comply with the broadest interpretation of the law and risk a malpractice case.

National Right to Life considers Tennessee’s abortion ban its “strongest” law, and the group’s Tennessee lobbyist has said the law should only permit abortions that are urgently necessary, such as for someone bleeding out, and not allow those “to prevent a future medical emergency.”

Gov. Bill Lee has defended the law as providing “maximum protection possible for both mother and child.” But some who voted in favor of the bill have since acknowledged they didn’t read it closely or understand how completely it tied the hands of doctors. Briggs, the bill’s co-sponsor, has advocated for changes and lost the endorsement of Tennessee Right to Life.

Tennessee’s ban and others triggered across the country are already unleashing havoc. The uncertainty over how the vague standards will be treated in the courts has created a chilling effect on patient care, doctors and other experts say. Though most bans contain exceptions for abortions necessary to prevent a patient’s death or “a serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function,” data suggests few people have been able to access abortions under those exceptions.

ProPublica reviewed news articles, medical journal studies and lawsuits and found at least 70 examples across 12 states of women with pregnancy complications who were denied abortion care or had the treatment delayed since Roe was overturned. Doctors say the true number is much higher.

Some of the women reported being forced to wait until they were septic or had filled diapers with blood before getting help for their imminent miscarriages. Others were made to continue high-risk pregnancies and give birth to babies that had virtually no chance of survival. Some pregnant patients rushed across state lines to get treated for a condition that was rapidly deteriorating.

Dr. Leilah Zahedi-Spung, a maternal-fetal specialist who left Tennessee in January because of the trigger ban, said that after the law went into effect, she referred an average of three to four patients out of state every week for abortion care to address high-risk conditions she could no longer help with.

But, she said, not everyone has the resources or ability to leave the state for an abortion.

Hollis said she was distraught when Grimm told her the abortion ban would limit her options.

Raised in the depths of Tennessee’s opioid epidemic in a family haunted by addiction, Hollis’ earliest memory is of clutching her baby brother when she was 5 years old, as her alcoholic father flipped tables. When she was 9, she said, her mother’s boyfriend gave her drugs and read her the Bible before he molested her. By 12, she was living with a teenage boyfriend and babysitting his brothers in exchange for hydrocodone pills.

At 21, Hollis began having children: first a son and then two daughters. At 27, when she had her third child, she was trying to stay sober. But the father of that child, Chris Hollis, showed up to the hospital high on opioids. The Department of Children’s Services drug tested him and took custody of all of Hollis’ children.

If her life with her kids had been chaotic, hustling to survive in the pill mill economy and dealing with multiple arrests, her life without them was a black hole of shame and self-hatred. She gave in to drugs and fights and ended up living on the street; one day, in September 2019, she landed in the hospital after an attempted suicide. Three days later, she was a passenger in a car crash that killed a close friend. It was at that moment that she decided she wanted to live. She went from the hospital to rehab.

When Grimm met her in 2021, at a clinic for mothers with opioid use disorder, she was pregnant with her fourth child and sober. He believed Hollis could stay that way; she was sufficiently exhausted by her cycles of addiction. He often used her progress forging a new path for her family to inspire other mothers in the program. He liked her fast-talking boldness and how she owned her past. She liked the way he listened and didn’t judge.

After baby Zooey arrived in February 2022, it seemed to Hollis like life was finally gathering momentum. She had reconnected with Chris Hollis, who she first befriended working at Wendy’s as a teenager. She had always known he held a flame for her, from the time he offered to take her duties cleaning the Frosty machine. Over the years they broke up and reconnected multiple times.

Now both in recovery, they had gotten married, rented a house in Clarksville, a small town near a military base, and joined a church. Together, they ran a small vinyl siding business. Hollis managed the accounting and worked a factory job for extra income. She began to study for her peer recovery specialist certification, imagining a day when she would help other mothers climb out of addiction. She hoped to save enough money to buy a house and eventually pay lawyers to get her other children back.

But three months after Zooey’s birth, Hollis faced a major setback.

Someone accused her of leaving her daughter unsupervised in a car outside a vape shop, records show. Hollis disputed it, but the Department of Children’s Services put Zooey in the custody of her cousin while they investigated the allegation of child endangerment. Hollis and her husband moved out so the cousin could live at their family home.

Hollis was introduced to drugs at a young age. She reconnected with a longtime friend, Chris Hollis, once they both got sober. Hollis was afraid the Department of Children’s Services might take custody of her 5-month-old daughter Zooey at the same time she learned she was pregnant again.

Then, in July, Hollis was shocked to learn she was pregnant again; she’d just begun taking birth control pills, but it might have been too recent for them to be effective. Her first call was to Grimm, who worried that a pregnancy this soon, on top of four previous C-sections, put her at risk of developing a cesarean scar ectopic pregnancy. By Hollis’ eight-week ultrasound in early August, Grimm’s worst fears were confirmed.

Her life was at risk, he told her. Her pregnancy could rupture and cause a hemorrhage in the first trimester. It was almost certain to eventually develop into a life-threatening placenta disorder. There was little data to predict whether the baby would make it. If it survived, it was sure to be born extremely early, spend months in critical care and face developmental challenges. He offered to schedule an abortion for two days later. If they moved quickly, the procedure would be relatively straightforward. But Hollis needed time to think.

She’d felt a faint thrill when she learned about the tiny life inside of her. Building a family with her husband in their fragile new stability had felt like a chance to redeem herself. Abortion went against her beliefs. What if this was her last chance to have another child?

Grimm gave her his cell phone number. “Want you to know this is so difficult,” he texted. “With you, no matter what you decide.”

It was the second opinion, two weeks later, that convinced her. Doctors at another hospital confirmed her condition was, indeed, life-threatening and already worsening. One of the only places in Tennessee equipped to handle a pregnancy as complicated as hers was Vanderbilt.

“Honey,” her husband told her, “I can’t lose you.”

Mayron and Chris Hollis wanted another child but had to weigh the risks to Mayron’s health.

On Aug. 24, about two weeks after learning the diagnosis, she messaged her doctor:

“Dr. Grimm, me and my husband need to talk to you. We have really thought about everything and we need you to call us.”

But two days later, Hollis paced outside her workplace listening to Grimm break the news that the other doctors had backed out “due to the current legal climate.”

The only thought Hollis could muster was no. No no no no no. This could not be happening. Not now.

She squeezed her thumb in her fist as Grimm explained that Vanderbilt couldn’t offer an abortion that would try to preserve her uterus — only a hysterectomy that would end the pregnancy and extinguish any chances she could ever get pregnant again. Grimm told ProPublica it was his understanding that ending the pregnancy this way would comply with the law’s provision for avoiding irreversible impairment to a major bodily function. Other doctors involved in her care confirmed they felt their only option for providing an abortion was to sterilize her.

Grimm told Hollis they could help her arrange to travel out of state, where doctors could perform an abortion and possibly save her uterus. Each day that passed would make that more difficult. Going to Pittsburgh, where Goldberg had connections, was her best option, but would require days of travel to complete paperwork and comply with Pennsylvania’s state-mandated waiting period.

Hollis felt trapped in a different kind of risk calculation: At the same time the state was trying to force her to keep her pregnancy, it was also threatening to take away her daughter.

Already, she and her husband hovered over their phones in case Zooey’s case workers needed their attention. She worried she might be accused of abandonment if she left. She also feared losing her job. Her bosses at the factory had laid her off for “personal reasons” after learning she was pregnant for a second time in less than a year, she said. She had just started a new job and relied on it to help pay two rents and $9,000 for a lawyer to fight to keep Zooey. She didn’t know where she would get money for a sudden trip anyway.

She hung up with Grimm, went back inside and cried for the rest of her shift.

An ultrasound confirmed a high-risk cesarean scar ectopic pregnancy, but Hollis couldn’t afford to travel out of state for abortion care. She feared losing the job that paid for lawyers to fight her child welfare case.

As the months passed, Tennessee’s medical community grappled with the real world implications of the new legal landscape.

Vanderbilt, the largest hospital in the state and a private institution, promised its doctors it would pay to defend against any criminal charges and was able to resume offering limited medically indicated abortion care, according to multiple doctors. Vanderbilt declined to comment.

Goldberg and his colleagues’ approach evolved. They began to admit nearly every patient and make each specialist individually assess them. It was costly and time-consuming, but Goldberg believed it made a difference for medical providers to have to look a patient in the eye before refusing to participate in their care. If they agreed an abortion was appropriate, he wrote up long defenses of the patient’s condition and had three other doctors sign off.

Still, almost weekly, Goldberg found himself having to turn away patients he believed should qualify for medically indicated abortion care. He and his colleagues also noticed that doctors at smaller hospitals, who had far less support, seemed to be treating complex cases as hot potatoes and sending them to Vanderbilt. That delayed care for patients. Goldberg worried about those who might not get transferred in time.

ProPublica spoke with 20 Tennessee medical providers about life under the ban, on condition of anonymity because they feared professional and personal repercussions; some said that they had witnessed a new trepidation in their ranks. “I’ve seen colleagues delay or sit on assessing the clinical data longer when they know the diagnosis is probably ectopic,” one said, referring to pregnancies that implant outside the uterine cavity, which are always life-threatening. “People were like, 'I don’t want to be involved because I don’t want to go to prison,'” said another. “It’s crazy — even assessing the patient or having a role in their care makes people scared.”

Meanwhile, Goldberg’s wife, a therapist who asked that her name not be published to protect their family’s privacy, was hearing from a number of pregnant patients who had bled for weeks, but didn’t understand why. Their providers hadn’t mentioned the word “miscarriage” or offered dilation and evacuation procedures. Instead they were told, “Let your body do what it’s going to do.”

Once the ban went into effect, Hollis felt doctors in Tennessee were afraid to touch her. A few days after her conversation with Grimm, overwhelmed, she texted him: “Schedule a hysterectomy.” He asked her to call him, but before she could, she began to feel an intense pain that made her double over.

She went to an emergency room near her home, but left after an hour without being seen. She drove to Vanderbilt and told workers she was at risk for a placenta disorder, the complication Grimm had told her she was showing signs of developing, hoping to get seen more urgently. “Nobody even looked at me after that,” she said. She remembered waiting for hours in triage, crying and incontinent, until she gave up and headed to a third hospital, which gave her antibiotics for a urinary tract infection. Doctors had spent weeks explaining her condition was life-threatening; she didn’t understand how she could be left to sit in a waiting room.

She never brought up the hysterectomy again. “I thought the law meant I couldn’t have one,” she said. Grimm didn’t follow up about the text and said he always remembered Hollis emphatically saying she wanted to try to preserve her fertility.

As friends and coworkers began to ask her about her visible pregnancy, Hollis acted excited. But there was nothing happy about the experience. She constantly worried about what her husband and Zooey would do if she died, and called up the Social Security Administration and her union to find out what kind of survivor benefits existed. She moved through her days trying to pretend she wasn’t pregnant. It was the only way to keep the overwhelming fear at bay and continue working. Then, in mid-November, her employer laid her off, saying it couldn’t accommodate the work restrictions required by her doctor.

At regular appointments, Grimm watched in horror as her placenta began to bulge and threaten her bladder, an expected consequence of a cesarean scar ectopic pregnancy. She was exhibiting all the signs of developing placenta percreta, the worst form of a placenta disorder, a condition that makes high-risk specialists shudder. Delivery requires massive blood transfusions, often necessitates removal of the bladder and carries a 7% chance of death.

Grimm didn’t know what to do for Hollis other than to lower his boundaries and try to support her whenever she needed him. Her texts came at all hours — about her problems sleeping, her concerns about paying rent, her worries about the baby’s movement and the pains she felt. She had not been at her company long enough to qualify for disability leave and begged him to help her appeal: “I’m not sure what else to do, I am running out of time and I’m scared.”

In the end, he couldn’t offer much more than directing her to social workers and sharing earnest platitudes: “You’re the bravest person I know,” he told her.

After Hollis was unable to get abortion care, Grimm, her OB-GYN, watched her condition progress into a dangerous placenta disorder.

Grimm’s wife noticed the weight he carried home. He found it difficult to be present, zoning out at his kids’ sports games and leaving the dinner table to respond to calls. The culture of medicine assumed that doctors always had the answers and could never make mistakes. But Grimm felt helpless and wrestled with feelings of shame. In his darkest moments, he wondered if a different doctor would have somehow done better by her.

Grimm had always stayed out of politics. But in conversations with family and friends, he began to share more about his work for the first time. Many in his circle abhorred abortion and thought they supported the idea of a ban. He tried to explain that it was more complex. “If this was your wife or my wife in these really intense situations, they'd be fine, because you have the resources,” he told them. “But some people don’t. And they’re going to be forced into these impossible situations where they could die.”

He knew of doctors who had left the profession after losing a pregnant patient. He wondered if this would be his quitting moment.

On Dec. 8, Hollis started bleeding. She was nearly 26 weeks pregnant. She insisted on driving herself to Vanderbilt, an hour away from her home; her husband joined her in the passenger seat and panicked when she started to pass out. They called 911, and an ambulance drove her the rest of the way.

Dr. Sarah Osmundson, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist, was on call that day. She worked exclusively with the most difficult pregnancies, where every decision was a calculation between a pregnant patient’s health and the chances of delivering a healthy baby. It was her job to help patients make an informed decision. Over the years, she said, she had seen some women choose to accept the risks of a dangerous diagnosis and die as a result. But since the law went into effect, patients were arriving at her office asking why they were being counseled all: “It doesn’t matter,” they told her. “I don’t have a choice.”

She could tell Hollis was scared; she felt afraid as well. While she and her colleagues worked to help patients go out of state, she knew of some with cancer, heart conditions, preeclampsia or fatal fetal anomalies who felt forced to continue their pregnancies under the law. She feared it was only a matter of time until one of them died from the complications. She hoped it would not be Hollis.

She wanted Hollis to stay in the hospital for monitoring, but Hollis begged to go home. Zooey’s child welfare case had been closed in October, and she didn’t want to be away from her baby any longer than necessary. She had Christmas presents to wrap, bills to pay and a nursery to set up before her new baby arrived. On top of everything, her fridge was empty and her washer and dryer had stopped working.

Osmundson gave Hollis her phone number, and the hospital released her after three days, planning for her to return in two weeks, when her pregnancy had reached seven months.

Dr. Sarah Osmundson, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist, worries it’s a matter of time until a patient dies of pregnancy complications because of the law.

But less than two days later, in the early morning hours of Dec. 13, Hollis’ husband woke to screaming. He ran to her and slipped in her blood, which was pooling on the ground. Hollis had bled through her pants, soaking her socks and the rug by the front door. She and her husband texted photos to Osmundson, who became convinced an emergency cesarean needed to happen as soon as possible.

As soon as Grimm’s phone rang, he was wide awake. He lay in bed in the dark, calling the hospital and refreshing his phone for updates. At any moment, he knew, Hollis could bleed to death.

Hollis’ husband called an ambulance, and they took her to a local hospital to be stabilized and airlifted. But bad weather meant the helicopter couldn’t fly. Finally, two hours later, they returned to the ambulance, which drove her to Vanderbilt.

Hollis was relieved to see Grimm waiting in his scrubs. He held her hand as they wheeled her into the operating room, which was filled with a surgery team of nearly 20 doctors. She looked pale and petrified. “We will be right there with you the whole time,” he told her.

To Hollis, the doctors around her looked as scared as she was. The anesthesiologist told Hollis to count backwards from 10, but instead she prayed.

Once Hollis was under, Grimm helped make the incision. Typically, patients emerge from a C-section with a small, horizontal cut below their bikini line. But this delivery called for a vertical gash that stretched up past her navel so doctors could have full exposure to her uterus. It allowed them to see where the bleeding was coming from and gave them the best chance to control it.

Careful not to disrupt the placenta, which was attached to the bladder and ballooning outward, Grimm gently removed a baby girl. She emerged weighing one pound and 15 ounces, limp and unable to breathe on her own. Doctors dried and intubated her, wrapped her and placed her under a radiant warmer to try to keep her organs from shutting down. No one knew if she would survive.

Then, Dr. Marta Crispens, a gynecological oncologist trained to deal with big tumors, began work on removing the uterus. The placenta started gushing blood again. This was what made the condition so frightening: There was no predicting the level of bleeding and whether it could be contained in time. The intensity in the room ratcheted up. It seemed to Grimm like hours passed as he helped Crispens stanch the bleeding, though it was only minutes.

Hollis was given a blood transfusion. Finally, the operation ended. Hollis and her daughter had made it through alive.

As the doctors cleaned up, there were the usual back pats and shared congratulations between a team that had united to make it through a life-saving surgery. But they could all recall similar cases where things didn’t end as well.

“I’m glad she’s OK,” Osmundson recalled saying in the moment. “But it’s a tragedy that this happened — this is not a win.”

Crispens felt everyone in the room was traumatized. “This is going to drive people out of the medical profession,” she thought. “We took an oath — we have to be able to take care of these women before they get to this point.”

Grimm left the room, peeled off his scrubs and wept.

When Hollis awoke from surgery, he was holding her hand.

Baby Elayna spent the first week of her life in the neonatal intensive care unit, enclosed in a plastic crib that resembled an aquarium. Nurses bustled in and out to the sound of beeping that monitored the baby’s fluctuating breathing and heart rates.

Elayna, born at 26 weeks and two days, in the second week of her life.

Her skin was pink and translucent, wires and patches poked out from all over her body, and her tiny face was covered with a breathing machine. Nurses told Hollis that Elayna was too fragile to be held. Hollis could only stick a latex-gloved hand through a hole in the crib to feel Elayna’s penny-sized grip on the tip of her finger. Over that first week, doctors monitored Elayna’s brain for bleeding and poured a protein into her breathing tube to help her lungs open and close.

Though Elayna's survival seemed assured, she faced significant hurdles. About 80% to 90% of babies born at 26 weeks survive. Of those, about 40% end up with brain injuries. Over the first two years of life, 12% may develop cerebral palsy, and some have vision, hearing and intellectual development issues. Elayna would be particularly vulnerable to flu and other respiratory illnesses. About half of babies born prematurely get readmitted to the hospital within the first two years. The cost of her care, which included more than two months in the NICU, would come out of the taxpayer-funded state Medicaid program.

After four days, Hollis had to leave Elayna in the hospital and go home. There was no availability in charity housing for parents of NICU babies, and she needed to take care of Zooey.

Then, three days later, sheriff’s deputies showed up at Hollis’ door and took her to jail.

Though the child welfare case had been closed, now prosecutors were charging her with a felony over the same allegation that she left Zooey unattended in a car. She faced eight to 30 years in prison. She paid $6,000 in bail, erasing the savings she and her husband had hoped to use for parental leave. A judge’s order prohibited her from having any contact with Zooey, so her husband took over child care. With nowhere to go, Hollis spent the night in her car outside the hospital, going inside for Elayna’s feedings.

A week after giving birth, Hollis was arrested and prohibited from returning to her home. She slept in her car in the parking garage of Vanderbilt University Medical Center and placed a video call to her psychiatrist.

As Elayna’s lungs developed, her breathing improved. Every time Hollis managed to hold her daughter to her skin, her heart practically burst. She marveled at the fight inside such a small being and scribbled notes in a NICU progress book.

But her unrelenting challenges kept pulling her away. She and her husband quickly maxed out their $400 credit card limit on new legal fees and were down to a few dollars to pay for gas. Hollis knew she needed to get back to work.

Three weeks after Elayna’s birth, she returned to her job as an insulator apprentice and a punishing new routine: waking up at 4 a.m. to drive to the construction site an hour away, where she worked a 10-hour day for $16 an hour. Some evenings she went to school for her apprenticeship. Other nights she led an online Alcoholics Anonymous meeting to bolster her application for a peer recovery specialist certificate. She had finally been approved for housing near the hospital. Every chance she could, she ended the day with Elayna, but often she just had to catch up on sleep.

Then she got a call from the Department of Children’s Services. They were opening a new case because THC had been detected in Elayna’s umbilical cord. Hollis believed it was due to delta-8, a synthetic THC legal in Tennessee that doctors recommend avoiding during pregnancy. Hollis said she took it after the stress of her first hospitalization to help her sleep; she considered it less dangerous than the heavy antidepressant drugs her doctors had prescribed. Grimm wrote a letter to the department in her defense; he saw THC as a minor issue and emphasized her consistent negative tests for deadly drugs.

Sometimes, Hollis felt gripped with anger over her situation. The way she saw it, the same system that had forced her to risk her life offered little support to help her family stabilize in the aftermath. She wasn’t sure where to direct the blame, letting it spill out on her husband, other relatives and sometimes Grimm. She resented that she hadn’t understood enough about the law early enough to make a different decision. If she had been able to get an abortion, she thought, “my life could be so different right now.”

Hollis visited her daughter in the hospital as often as she could.

She heard that lawmakers were considering a change to the abortion law, to make it clear it was not a crime for doctors to provide abortion care in order to prevent life-threatening emergencies. “I’m so glad I have my baby,” she wished she could tell them. “But this was a risk I didn’t have any choice in taking.” She knew others wouldn’t be as lucky. On Tuesday, the state legislature is scheduled to consider bills aimed at creating clear medical exceptions. Tennessee Right to Life has strongly opposed it.

Elayna grew bigger and passed new milestones: Doctors found no bleeding in her brain. She began to breathe on her own and take in small amounts of milk. She was moved to a private room, where Hollis could sleep on a cot.

One night in early February, Hollis kissed Elayna, stretched out on the cot and tried to sleep amid the beeping, whirring and cries of babies in other rooms. Her mind was filled with worries about what life would look like once they left the safety net of the hospital, with its around-the-clock care and endless supply of formula and miniature diapers. She worried about managing it all, and about what could happen if she made another small mistake. She couldn’t bear losing either of her daughters and hadn’t even had a moment to process the loss of her uterus.

She drifted off and slept as the nurse fed the baby at midnight. Her iPhone alarm barely roused her at 3:30 a.m., time to get up for work.

On Feb. 23, the hospital told Hollis she could take her daughter home.

Elayna weighed four pounds and 12 ounces, still the size of one of Zooey’s dolls. Nurses removed all the wires attached to her and tested her to make sure she could keep her head up in her car seat. A nurse handed Hollis a stack of papers that contained instructions on feeding and bathing a premature baby and appointments for eye doctors, heart and liver specialists and neurological providers.

Hollis gently placed Elayna in her car seat and buckled her in. She tried to focus on today. It was Zooey’s first birthday, and the court had allowed them to live together again. Her husband was bringing home a cake and Hollis was desperate to have a moment to celebrate with her family. That night, relatives stopped by to greet the baby.

Hollis brought Elayna home after more than two months in the neonatal intensive care unit, on Zooey’s first birthday.

But about a week later, Elayna began showing signs of respiratory distress. One night, she suddenly stopped breathing. Hollis performed CPR until police officers arrived and saved Elayna’s life.

Two ambulance rides later, Elayna was airlifted to Vanderbilt. Over the following days, doctors found she had rhinovirus and outfitted her with a breathing machine. They told Hollis it was possible Elayna could have a bacterial infection, such as meningitis, in the fluid around her brain. To find out, they would need to do a spinal tap, but they worried it would destabilize her further. As Elayna’s condition worsened, Hollis wasn’t able to hold her because it might deplete her energy.

Hollis stayed as long as she could, but too much was waiting for her back home and she hated seeing her baby suffering. She whispered a quiet blessing and left Elayna in the pediatric intensive care unit, cocooned under the glow of a warming lamp.

Two weeks after coming home, Elayna was back in the hospital due to breathing problems.

How we reported this story:

Mayron Michelle Hollis shared her medical records with ProPublica and authorized doctors to speak about her and her daughter’s medical care. ProPublica spent months following her in the aftermath of her pregnancy and spoke to family members who are mentioned in this story. Doctors involved in her care chose to go on the record or share background information in their personal capacity, not as representatives of Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt declined to comment on the case. ProPublica also interviewed 20 medical providers in Tennessee and spoke with five maternal-fetal medicine specialists not involved in Hollis’ case about cesarean scar ectopic pregnancies and two neonatologists about babies born preterm.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

Photo editing by Andrea Wise.

by Megan O’Matz

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

The nonpartisan League of Women Voters has been facing a nationwide backlash after decades of going about its business of surveying candidates, registering voters, hosting debates and lobbying for its causes with little fuss.

ProPublica reported in August how the volatile political climate has caught up with the league, with conservatives increasingly portraying it as a decidedly liberal entity. Since that story was published, we’ve seen candidates reject invitations to debate and try to undermine the league’s work in registering new voters. In September in Illinois, then-Lake County Board member Dick Barr, a Republican, publicly apologized for a Facebook post in which he called the league “partisan hags.”

This week, the group found itself once again in the middle of a political controversy. This time it was in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has sought to reshape a wide range of discourse, including by making it easier for public officials to sue for defamation and restricting discussions of systemic racism in workplace trainings. The league revealed that it had been denied permission by the Florida Department of Management Services to hold an outdoor rally on the steps of the Old Capitol in Tallahassee under a new DeSantis administration rule requiring groups to first get sponsorship from a sympathetic state agency.

The rule took effect March 1 and says the requested use of the space must be “consistent with the Agency’s official purposes.” Its stated purpose is to ensure that demonstrations are “conducted in a manner that protects public health and safety and ensures that state employees and officials can fulfill their responsibilities.”

A department spokesperson did not answer specific questions about the matter, saying in an email to ProPublica: “DMS routinely examines all of its rules in accordance with Florida Law. This rule was updated as part of the DMS annual regulatory plan to clarify procedures and requirements for public use of the Capitol.”

Capitalizing on a loophole that allows for news conferences, the league on Wednesday set up a podium in a nearby plaza, where it publicly addressed what it sees as the state’s crackdown on civil rights, including free speech. At one point, league members applied red tape over their mouths, symbolizing what they say is the muzzling of people whose opinions are at odds with the government. (DeSantis’ office did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.)

ProPublica talked to the league’s Florida president, attorney Cecile Scoon, about the increasingly difficult environment the 103-year-old group faces in Florida in trying to promote civic discourse, freedom of academic thought and ready access to the ballot box. Scoon called the rule limiting rallies a “radical change” and said she is aware that some First Amendment groups are considering litigation. The league is already embroiled in an ongoing suit against the DeSantis administration over a 2021 voting law. A federal judge struck down several provisions that he ruled were designed to discriminate against Black people to reduce turnout for Democrats. The state has appealed.

The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Cecile Scoon (Courtesy of League of Women Voters Florida) You and your members were in Tallahassee for two days to meet with lawmakers and attend committee hearings and witness the government in action. What was the goal of the rally you planned to hold and what happened?

We have a lot of new members, and we want to expose them to all the different tools that we have — holding up signs and getting excited and being informed by my statements as president and our allies. That’s what we like to do.

We were told the rally space was already taken up. And then we asked for any other space and we were told that we had to get an agency to sponsor the paperwork and basically authenticate whatever we were trying to do, and our statement needed to be in accord with that agency’s policies. And that didn’t make any sense because sometimes you want to complain about the government itself, you want to say, “Hey you can do better here, please consider this and that.”

Do you feel this is part of a larger backlash against the league?

It’s hard to judge what’s in their minds. But when you say you’ve got to get permission from a state agency and we’ve been known to criticize and sue the governor and state agencies, you have to think that they were looking at us and other like-minded civic groups. You have to believe that. Because why would they require you to get someone to agree with you first?

What does this mean for your organization?

Oh, it’s very damaging. The league doesn’t expect everybody to agree with us. We are very capable and open and welcome debate and different points of view. That is not a problem. Let the citizens make up their minds of what they want to do and believe and who they want to vote for, but when you also take books off library shelves, when you also threaten teachers if they want to have academic freedom — K-12 and now the universities — that looks a lot like some of the other governmental regimes that wanted to stop the citizens from even being informed about what is going on.

How is the league changing? I understand you recently had a successful community forum in Sarasota about school choice that included views from across the political spectrum.

We got a lot of positive feedback from all sides. We’re going to have additional community conversations. We, again, are not going to be silenced. We’re not going to be muzzled. We’re going to create opportunities. We are continuing to double down on our outreach with many organizations that want more free speech and support these foundational American values. This morning nine of my members attended a conference and prayer breakfast set up by Pastors for Florida Children. … There were representatives from the Islamic faith, Christian representatives of different denominations, there were Jewish representatives there and many civic organizations. And we all plan to work together to make sure everybody feels safe and everybody can be heard. People are outraged, they’re upset and they just want fundamental American values returned to us. So it’s not just voting rights organizations.

Do you see a link between the rule regarding demonstrations and the DeSantis administration’s more well-known efforts, such as the so-called “Don’t say gay” law (which restricts classroom discussions about sexual orientation and gender identity)?

It involves very similar treatment, basically, with regards to what a lot of organizations are saying — “You don’t have a right to say X or Y in your classrooms, you don’t have a right to have these books in your library for anybody.” So there’s a lot of consternation and a lot of fear.

by Sharon Lerner

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

Last month, Brenda Foster stood on the railroad tracks at the edge of her yard in East Palestine, Ohio, and watched a smoky inferno billow from the wreckage of a derailed train. The chemicals it was carrying — and the fire that consumed them — were so toxic that the entire area had to evacuate. Foster packed up her 87-year-old mother, and they fled to stay with relatives.

With a headache, sore throat, burning eyes and a cough, Foster returned home five days later — as soon as authorities allowed. So when she saw on TV that there was a hotline for residents with health concerns, she dialed as soon as the number popped up on the screen.

The people who arrived offered to test the air inside her home for free. She was so eager to learn the results, she didn’t look closely at the paper they asked her to sign. Within minutes of taking measurements with a hand-held machine, one of them told her they hadn’t detected any harmful chemicals. Foster moved her mother back the same day.

What she didn’t realize is that the page of test results that put her mind at ease didn’t come from the government or an independent watchdog. CTEH, the contractor that provided them, was hired by Norfolk Southern, the operator of the freight train that derailed.

And, according to several independent experts consulted by ProPublica in collaboration with the Guardian, the air testing results did not prove their homes were truly safe. Erin Haynes, a professor of environmental health at the University of Kentucky, said the air tests were inadequate in two ways: They were not designed to detect the full range of dangerous chemicals the derailment may have unleashed, and they did not sample the air long enough to accurately capture the levels of chemicals they were testing for.

“It’s almost like if you want to find nothing, you run in and run out,” Haynes said.

First image: Market Street in East Palestine in March. Second image: A warning sign along Sulphur Run in East Palestine. (Justin Merriman for ProPublica)

About a quarter century ago, the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health was founded by four scientists who all had done consulting work for tobacco companies or lawyers defending them. Now known by its acronym, CTEH quickly became a go-to contractor for corporations responsible for industrial disasters. Its bread and butter is train crashes and derailments. The company has been accused repeatedly of downplaying health risks.

In since-deleted marketing on its website, CTEH once explained how the data it gathers about toxic chemicals can be used later to shield its clients from liability in cases brought by people who say they were harmed: “A carrier of chemicals may be subjected to legal claims as a result of a real or imagined release. Should this happen, appropriate meteorological and chemical data, recorded and saved ... may be presented as powerful evidence to assist in the litigation or potentially preclude litigation.”

Despite this track record, this company has been put in charge of allaying residents’ concerns about health risks and has publicly presented a rosy assessment.

It was CTEH, not the Environmental Protection Agency, that designed the testing protocol for the indoor air tests.

And it is CTEH, not the government, that runs the hotline residents are directed to call with concerns about odors, fumes or health problems. Local and federal officials, including the EPA, funnel the scared and sick to company representatives.

First image: A train passing through East Palestine in March. Second image: A marquee in East Palestine advertises a hotline that is run by CTEH. (Justin Merriman for ProPublica)

In a statement, Paul Nony, CTEH’s principal toxicologist and senior vice president, said the company has responded to thousands of incidents, and its environmental monitoring and sampling follows plans approved and directed by the incident commanders of each response. “Our highly skilled, certified specialists include Ph.D. toxicologists, masters in public health, industrial hygienists and safety professionals, as well as hazardous materials and registered environmental managers,” he wrote.

He added that CTEH has been “working side-by-side” with the EPA in East Palestine “and comparing data collected in the community and in people’s homes to ensure that we are all working with the most accurate data.” Hotline callers receive information, Nony wrote, that is “based on the latest data collected by CTEH and EPA, vetted together to ensure the accuracy of the public health information provided.”

The circumstances of the testing are unclear. The EPA said its representatives have, indeed, accompanied CTEH to residents’ homes, overseen the company’s indoor air tests and performed side-by-side testing with their own equipment. But some residents told ProPublica that even though multiple people came to their doors, only one person had measuring equipment. An agency spokesperson said CTEH’s testing protocol “was reviewed and commented on by EPA and state and federal health agencies.”

Stephen Lester, a toxicologist who has helped communities respond to environmental crises since the Love Canal disaster in upstate New York in the 1970s, said he was concerned about Norfolk Southern’s role in deciding how environmental testing is done in East Palestine. “The company is responsible for the costs of cleaning up this accident,” Lester said. “And if they limit the extent of how we understand its impact, their liability will be less.”

A Norfolk Southern contractor works in Sulphur Run in March. (Justin Merriman for ProPublica)

An EPA spokesperson said that the federal blueprint for responding to such emergencies requires responsible parties, in this case Norfolk Southern, to do the work — not just pay for it. But the agency has the authority to perform or require its own testing.

The relationship between CTEH and Norfolk Southern wasn’t clear to several residents ProPublica interviewed. Before testing begins, people are asked to sign a form authorizing the “Monitoring Team,” which the document says includes Norfolk Southern, “its contractors, environmental professionals, including CTEH LLC, and assisting local, state, and federal agencies.” An earlier version of the form included a confusing sentence that suggested that whoever signed was waiving their right to sue. Norfolk Southern said that was a mistake and pulled those forms.

In a written response to questions, Norfolk Southern said it “has been transparent about representing CTEH as a contractor for Norfolk Southern from day one of our response to the incident.” The company also pointed to a map on its website displaying CTEH’s outdoor air-monitoring results that says “Client: Norfolk Southern” in tiny type in the corner. “We are committed to working with the community and the EPA to do what is right for the residents of East Palestine,” a Norfolk Southern spokesperson wrote in an email.

When told by a reporter that the contractor, CTEH, was hired by the rail company, Foster’s face fell. “I had no clue,” she said. Looking back, she said, the people who came to her door never said anything about Norfolk Southern. They didn’t give her a copy of the paper that she had signed.

Before the derailment, East Palestine offered its 4,700 residents some of the best in small-town life. Its streets are lined with trees and charming houses. After school, kids played in the street, in the well-maintained park or in its affordable swimming pool. At Sprinklz on Top, a diner in the center of town, you can get a full dinner for less than $10.

Everything changed after the Feb. 3 derailment and the subsequent decision to purposefully ignite the chemicals, sending a toxic mushroom cloud over the town. Dead fish floated in local waterways, and “Pray for EP” signs appeared in many windows. Furniture is piled up on the curbs. Foster said some of her neighbors are replacing theirs because of concerns about contamination. But the 57-year-old, who works shifts painting firebrick, says she doesn’t have the money to do that. So she has come up with a solution she hopes will reduce her exposure: She sits in a single chair.

A black plume rises over East Palestine after chemicals were purposefully ignited on Feb. 6. (Gene J. Puskar/AP Photo) Tests May Miss Some Dangers

From the earliest days of the disaster, CTEH’s work has been at the center of the rail company’s reassuring messages about safety. Norfolk Southern’s “Making it Right” website cites CTEH data when stating that local air and drinking water are safe. (An EPA spokesperson said the agency has not “signed off” on any of Norfolk Southern’s statements “with regard to health risks based on results of sampling.”)

A video posted on Norfolk Southern’s YouTube account shows footage of a man in a CTEH baseball cap looking carefully at testing machinery. “All of our air monitoring and sampling data collectively do not indicate any short- or long-term risks,” a CTEH toxicologist says.

According to the EPA, CTEH’s indoor air testing in East Palestine consists of a one-time measurement of what is known as volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. These airborne chemicals can cause dizziness and nausea, and, over the long term, some VOCs can cause cancer. Vinyl chloride, a VOC that was carried by the derailed train and later ignited, can cause dizziness and headaches and increase the incidence of a rare form of liver cancer, according to the EPA. The machine that CTEH uses in East Palestine captures VOCs if they’re above 0.1 parts per million, but it doesn’t say which specific compounds are present.

CTEH said that when VOCs are detected, the company then tests for vinyl chloride. According to the EPA, the indoor testing has detected VOCs in 108 buildings before Feb. 21 and 12 buildings after that. Follow-up tests found no vinyl chloride, according to CTEH and the EPA. CTEH’s Nony said, “CTEH has not considered conducting long-term VOC air sampling in the homes because real-time air monitoring results do not indicate a significant impact of VOCs related to the derailment in the homes.”

But five experts on the health effects of chemicals consulted for this story said that the failure to detect VOCs should not be interpreted to mean that people’s homes are necessarily safe.

“VOCs are not the only chemicals that could have been in the air,” said Haynes, the environmental health professor. Haynes also said that because the testing was a snapshot — as opposed to an assessment made over several days — it would not be expected to detect VOCs at most household levels.

Many of the toxic chemicals that were airborne in the early days after the derailment, including pollutants that can cause cancer and other serious problems, may have settled out of the air and onto furniture and into crevices in houses, Haynes said. So she also recommended testing surfaces for compounds that could have been created by the burning of vinyl chloride, such as aromatic hydrocarbons, including the carcinogen benzene. Young children who play on the floor are especially vulnerable, Haynes added.

Two couches were left outside of an apartment in March in East Palestine. (Courtesy of Justin Merriman)

Even a week after the derailment, Haynes said VOCs likely would have dissipated. “To keep the focus on the air is almost smoke and mirrors,” she said. “Like, ‘Hey, the air is fine!’ Of course it’s going to be fine. Now you should be looking for where those chemicals went. They did not disappear. They are still in the environment.”

In addition, Dr. Ted Schettler, science director at the Science and Environmental Health Network, noted that some VOCs can cause symptoms at levels below 0.1 parts per million, which CTEH’s tests wouldn’t capture. Schettler gave the example of butyl acrylate, one of the chemicals that was carried by the derailed train. “The symptoms are irritation of the eyes and throats, headaches and nausea,” he said.

In its statement, Nony acknowledged that some homes in East Palestine had the odor of butyl acrylate, but he said that “current testing results do not indicate levels that would be associated with health effects.”

Health experts are particularly concerned about dioxins in East Palestine because the compounds can cause health problems, including cancer. The combustion of vinyl chloride and polyvinyl chloride, two of the chemicals that were on the train and burned after it derailed, have been known to produce dioxins.

But, in his statement, Nony dismissed the idea that the incident could have created dioxins “at a significant concentration” and said testing for the compounds was unwarranted. The company based that assessment on air monitoring it did with the EPA when the chemicals were purposefully set on fire; they were looking for two other chemicals that are produced by burning vinyl chloride.

Last week, the EPA said it would require Norfolk Southern to test for dioxins in the soil in East Palestine. And the agency has since released a plan for soil sampling to be carried out by another Norfolk Southern contractor. But some are arguing that the EPA should do the testing itself — and should have done it much earlier.

Results Used to Deny Relief

The results of CTEH’s tests in East Palestine were used at one point to deny a family’s reimbursement for hotel and relocation costs. Zsuzsa Gyenes, who lives about a mile from the derailment site, said she began to feel ill a few hours after the accident. “It felt like my brain was smacking into my skull. I got very disoriented, nauseous. And my skin started tingling,” she said. Her 9-year-old son also became sick. “He was projectile puking and shaking violently,” said Gyenes, who was especially concerned about his breathing because he has been hospitalized several times for asthma. “He was gasping for air.”

Zsuzsa Gyenes and her partner, Brian Crossmon. Behind them are containers used to haul away debris in East Palestine in February. (Courtesy of Justin Merriman)

Gyenes, her partner and son left for a hotel. At first, Norfolk Southern reimbursed the family for the stay, food and other expenses. The company even covered the cost of a remote-controlled car that Gyenes bought to cheer up her son, who was devastated because he was unable to attend school and missed the Valentine’s Day party.

But the reimbursements stopped after Gyenes got her air tested by CTEH. Gyenes was handed a piece of paper with a CTEH logo showing that the company did not detect any VOCs.

The next time Gyenes brought her receipts to the emergency assistance center, she said she was told that no expenses incurred after her air had been tested would be reimbursed because the air was safe.

A post office clerk, Gyenes described her financial situation as “bleeding out.” Nevertheless, she continued to foot the hotel bill. “I still feel sick every time I go back into town,” she said.

When she called the hotline, she got upset when she said a CTEH toxicologist told her that there was no way her headache, chest pain, tingling or nausea could be related to the derailment.

ProPublica asked Norfolk Southern about Gyenes’ situation. A spokesperson said the company reimbursed her $5,000, including some lodging and food expenses, after the initial air tests even though the company said her home is outside the evacuation zone. It noted that Gyenes used “abusive language” when questioning the toxicologist. (Gyenes acknowledged that she called her a “liar.”)

Norfolk Southern said it is working with local and federal authorities to arrange another test of the air in her home. “We’ll continue to work with every affected community member toward being comfortable back in their homes, including this resident,” a Norfolk Southern spokesperson said in an email.

After ProPublica asked about the family, Norfolk Southern restarted payments.

On Wednesday, when Gyenes returned to the emergency assistance center, she said that she was given $1,000 on a prepaid card to cover lodging, food and gas.

Do Blocked Railroad Crossings Endanger Your Community? Tell Us More.

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

by Brittany Freeman, Rocky Mountain PBS, data analysis by Sophie Chou, ProPublica

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

Last year, when the Colorado legislature passed a bill aimed at protecting residents in disputes with their homeowners associations, lawmakers had one key goal in mind: reducing the number of foreclosures filed by HOAs.

So far, the reform appears to have had its intended effect. An analysis of state court data by Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica shows that HOAs filed 47 foreclosure cases in the nearly six months between Aug. 10, when the law took effect, and the end of January. That’s a significant drop from the same period for the previous four years, when an average of 281 cases per year were filed.

During the 10 weeks between the reform bill’s signing and its implementation, HOAs appear to have been in a rush to start foreclosure motions, filing 151 cases, compared to an average of 98 cases per year in the same 10-week period for the previous four years.

“We see that this is working. It’s preventing people from being foreclosed on, and people are being able to stay in their homes,” said Rep. Naquetta Ricks, an Aurora Democrat who cosponsored the bill.

But advocates and some lawmakers say more needs to be done to address lingering problems with how HOAs are run in Colorado. For one thing, the drop in foreclosure filings might be only temporary. HOA attorneys told Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica that the drop may be due to HOAs restarting their collection efforts — the law requires most HOAs to update their collection policies, provide homeowners with several notifications about delinquencies and offer longer payment plans. Once they’ve complied with the new rules, HOAs may decide to restart their foreclosure efforts.

Ricks said she plans to introduce a number of fixes during the current legislative session aimed at undoing some “unintended consequences” of last year’s reform bill. She said the changes would primarily be focused on the aspects of the law that dictated how HOAs can enforce violations of their community rules with fines. The law, for instance, required HOAs to give homeowners more time to fix violations before fining them, but Ricks is considering a proposal that allows HOAs to impose more immediate penalties for acute problems, such as noise nuisances.

“I think the covenant violation side of [the new law] was mangled. … It didn’t appreciate the many different types of violations that could exist,” HOA attorney David Graf said. “I think we need to streamline some of the procedural aspects of it while trying to retain as much owner protection as we can.”

To study if other HOA reforms may be needed, Rep. Brianna Titone, an Arvada Democrat, cosponsored a bill to create an HOA task force that would take a deeper look at issues like foreclosure, fines and communications practices, taking into account the perspective of homeowners. Titone said she hopes the task force can also explore ways to keep HOA disputes out of court.

“What we’re really after here is just trying to figure out the fairest way of keeping efficiency in the process of HOAs, but giving people who are in HOAs relief when they need it,” Titone said. “I think this is something we should have done a long time ago.”

by Brittany Freeman, Rocky Mountain PBS, data analysis by Sophie Chou, ProPublica

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

Karl Paymah was on the clock.

A certified letter from the Rock Ridge Condominium Association in the Denver suburb of Aurora said he had 30 days to pay $1,515.45 in unpaid homeowners association dues and penalties — or face foreclosure.

After receiving the letter on Dec. 23, 2021, Paymah said he tried to pay the balance through the HOA’s website, as he had done in the past. But his account had been locked because it was turned over to the HOA’s collections attorney, Tammy Alcock. Next, he called Rock Ridge’s management company, which he said told him to discuss the matter with Alcock. But there was no answer when he called her office three times that afternoon. The office of Alcock Law Group was closed for the holiday.

“I can’t pay. I can’t pay through the portal. I can’t pay with the management company. I can’t pay with this attorney that they’re telling me to go through,” Paymah, a retired NFL cornerback, recalled thinking. “So I’m just sitting there.”

Watch Rocky Mountain PBS’s Report (Jeremy Moore/Rocky Mountain PBS)

Turning the account over to Alcock meant that the association was asserting its right under Colorado law to charge him for the attorney fees it was incurring, causing his debt to grow rapidly.

By early February, when Rock Ridge began moving forward with foreclosure, the legal process of taking the home from its owner, Paymah’s debt had more than tripled to about $5,000, mostly because of legal costs.

Paymah’s experience is a case study in how even a small dispute can quickly escalate into an expensive legal fight in Colorado, where state law empowers HOAs to initiate foreclosure proceedings against homeowners who owe money to them. As Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica have reported, HOAs have filed thousands of foreclosure cases in recent years, in disputes stemming from as little as a $308 lien.

To file foreclosure cases, HOAs in Colorado often turn to the expertise of seven law firms that specialize in handling disputes with homeowners. From January 2018 through February 2022, each of the law firms filed at least 100 foreclosure cases on behalf of HOAs in Colorado, according to an analysis of state court data by Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica. One of the law firms with the highest number of filings is the Alcock Law Group.

Seven Law Firms Each Filed More Than 100 Foreclosure Cases on Behalf of Colorado HOAs Over Four Years

Cases filed between January 2018 and the end of February 2022

Note: Foreclosure cases filed by HOAs were identified using a list of all relevant foreclosure cases in the state, which the news organizations searched for plaintiff names containing HOA-related keywords before manually reviewing the results. For more details, see our methodology. (Source: Analysis of state court data by Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica)

Foreclosure litigation can be a lucrative business for law firms, which can reap thousands of dollars in attorney fees from each foreclosure case they help file. Critics say this system creates a perverse incentive for attorneys to advise the HOAs to file more foreclosure cases, rather than to find less expensive solutions.

Alcock Law Group said in a court filing that it represented about 50 HOAs and that a typical uncontested HOA foreclosure case generates between $4,000 and $6,000 in attorney fees. Alcock has filed more than 300 foreclosure cases since 2018, the analysis shows. Rock Ridge’s financial documents obtained by Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica show that the HOA has billed more than $76,000 in attorney fees and legal costs to delinquent residents — including Paymah — since January 2021.

State Rep. Brianna Titone, an Arvada Democrat, has long argued that the state needs to do more to keep HOA disputes out of court, pointing out that, in these cases, attorneys always win.

“Whatever dispute happens, the HOA attorneys are the ones that are always reaping the benefit,” Titone said. “They get paid by both parties, basically.”

Representatives from four of the seven law firms that collectively filed hundreds of foreclosure cases told Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica that foreclosure is typically a remedy of last resort and represents just a fraction of debt-related matters that they handle on behalf of HOAs.

The Rock Ridge Condominium Association has filed five foreclosure cases since the summer of 2021. (Jeremy Moore/Rocky Mountain PBS)

Jeffrey B. Smith of Altitude Community Law said his firm, which represents about 3,000 HOAs, doesn’t “push associations towards foreclosures except in those few cases where other options have proved futile.”

Hal Kyles of Orten Cavanagh Holmes & Hunt said profit motives do not play a part in how his firm handles HOA-related cases. “Issues of monetary return are no factor in recommendations to foreclose and would be a violation of my ethical obligation to act in the best interests of my client,” he said.

Two other law firms, Alcock Law Group and Vial Fotheringham, did not respond to questions for this story. Tobey & Johnston declined to comment.

Meanwhile, Paymah, who has lived in Colorado since being drafted by the Denver Broncos in 2005, decided to do what other homeowners facing foreclosure rarely do: fight the HOA.

Paymah’s legal strategy centered on challenging attorney fees that he considered exorbitant and unjustifiable. “I felt bamboozled,” Paymah said, noting how quickly his debt grew. “I felt like somebody was trying to take advantage of me.”

When the case went to trial in August, the HOA defended its action, casting the whole dispute as being of Paymah’s own making.

“The facts here are absolutely undisputed that Mr. Paymah was delinquent in payment of assessments,” said Alcock, who presented the mounds of correspondence that the HOA’s management company had sent to Paymah notifying him of his delinquencies.

Alcock also noted that, if a series of unpaid dues like Paymah’s were allowed to go uncollected, it could ultimately lead to serious harm to the neighborhood.

“There are many, many … examples where associations have large delinquencies, don’t collect assessments, and aren’t able to properly take care of the community and ensure safety of the residents,” Alcock said.

In his testimony, Paymah, whose company bought the Rock Ridge condo in 2018 as an investment and has since rented it out, admitted that he had not been as attentive to property-related matters as he should have been for several years, as he dealt with a custody dispute over his son.

But Paymah said he had already caught up on his unpaid dues and penalties before trial, paying about $3,600. What was keeping the case from being resolved, he said, was attorney fees.

In the end, Judge Paul King ruled in favor of Paymah’s main argument, agreeing that the court should review the reasonableness of attorney fees, which ballooned to about $50,000 after the trial concluded.

But it was a pyrrhic victory for Paymah. After reviewing attorney fees and legal costs, King ordered Paymah to pay $25,774 to avoid foreclosure — far more than he would have paid had he never mounted a legal challenge in the first place.

Paymah said homeowners like him face a “lose-lose situation” in a dispute with their HOA. “It’s almost like you have to lay down … and just let them do whatever they want. I can’t really advise anybody to do that,” he said. “And then your latter alternative is what? Get a lawyer and spend a bunch of money.”

When Nicole Plybon moved to Rock Ridge in 2004, the community was brand new. Then came what she called a “slow dilapidation.”

“Shingles were blowing off the roofs, the stone was falling down, the sidewalks were all cracked up, the gutters are pretty much smashed,” Plybon said. “Just a lot of problems starting to accumulate on one another.”

This common infrastructure is the responsibility of the HOA, and its upkeep is funded by the monthly dues paid by every owner in the community.

When the pandemic hit in 2020 and residents were staying home more, they began asking questions to the management company, which had run the community for more than 13 years, and to the HOA board, which they said rarely held meetings.

A group of residents decided to organize and eventually voted out the board and brought in a new group, which included Plybon. The new board quickly replaced its management company and started taking on projects to improve the community.

Soon Plybon and other board members realized that their predecessors hadn’t built up enough savings to cover future maintenance needs. This led to their decision to raise the community’s monthly dues by 48% last year, making payments that used to be as little as $178 to jump to $264.

“Unfortunately, we had to be the bad guys on the board,” Plybon said. “We had to start thinking about a five-, 10-, 15-year plan, where that was never done in the past.”

Nicole Plybon, a former member of the Rock Ridge HOA board, said the community needed to build up enough savings to cover future maintenance needs. (Jeremy Moore/Rocky Mountain PBS)

In addition to raising dues, the HOA began cracking down on delinquent homeowners, filing five foreclosure cases starting in the summer of 2021.

All five cases reached resolutions that allowed homeowners to avoid foreclosure, and they were resolved without much delay — except for one: Paymah’s case.

That legal contest stretched on for about a year, and all the while the HOA’s board members assumed that Paymah would eventually be held responsible for paying attorney fees and legal costs.

But King reduced what Paymah owed the HOA in attorney fees and legal costs by more than $30,000 on several grounds, finding that Alcock had charged for some tasks that could have been handled by a paralegal and billed more time than was likely necessary for certain tasks. He also struck some of the fees resulting from Alcock’s work on the HOA’s allegation that Paymah had put his property under his business’ name in an attempt to defraud the association, ruling that the association did not prove its case.

The attorney fees that Paymah didn’t have to pay are now being shouldered by Rock Ridge residents. Current and former HOA board members told Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica that they felt caught off guard by King’s ruling.

“You get people who just want to help their community on a board. But most of the time, we’re not educated about bylaws and all that stuff, much less the implications of laws,” current board member Trish Westin said.

Former board member Erik Elisary said he found it frustrating that the HOAs have few options. “What other avenues does the HOA have to get the homeowner to pay?” he said. “Any time the homeowner is causing the HOA to have to spend attorney’s fees, they should be the responsibility of the homeowner.”

For his part, Paymah pointed out during the trial that there was another way to solve a dispute like this, citing a lawsuit filed against him by a different HOA for $1,438.85 in unpaid dues and late fees.

In that case, court records show that attorney fees and legal costs were kept to a minimum — about $815 — in part because the other HOA had opted for the less expensive tactic of seeking a judgment in county court, rather than seeking foreclosure in district court.

Paymah testified he was able to work with the HOA to keep the dispute from escalating. “I called and explained it,” he said. “So I made it current. … [A] similar situation, but that was just handled a different way.”

Rock Ridge’s HOA has billed more than $76,000 in attorney fees and legal costs to delinquent residents since January 2021, according to financial documents obtained by Rocky Mountain PBS and ProPublica. (Jeremy Moore/Rocky Mountain PBS)

Advocates for homeowners in HOAs have also been backing a number of other ideas for keeping housing disputes from resulting in exorbitant legal bills.

During last year’s legislative session, lawmakers considered one such idea as part of an HOA foreclosure reform measure. The measure, which prevents certain types of HOA foreclosures and requires more notification and longer payment plan before initiating a case, passed in May.

But a provision that would have limited the amount of attorney fees that HOAs could recover was dropped before the measure’s approval.

State Rep. Naquetta Ricks, an Aurora Democrat, said the move was a concession made during negotiations with HOA industry representatives. She acknowledged that unchecked attorney fees remain a problem for homeowners but has not offered any bill during the current legislative session to address the issue.

“It is like a blank check, in my mind, that’s been given to these HOA lawyers,” Ricks said. “There’s no dispute resolution process for homeowners. The only way to do this is to go to court.”

HOA homeowner advocate Stan Hrincevich, who runs Colorado HOA Forum, an online resource for homeowners, said his top priority for many years has been to empower a state agency to resolve disputes between homeowners and their associations, with a goal of keeping them from going to the court in the first place.

“Folks, don’t go to court. It’s not a great place for justice,” Hrincevich said. “Can you imagine how much this is costing homeowners every year?”

Titone, the state representative, said an out-of-court dispute resolution process is also one of her top priorities, but she has no current proposals to create such a process. She said the HOA industry’s lobbying has prevented such efforts from moving forward in the past.

“You need to have somebody be able to say, ‘Why do we need to go to expensive court here? You owe $2,000,’” Titone said. “There should be a more civil way to do it than doing it this way.”

HOA attorney David Graf said he supports the intent of Hrincevich and Titone’s proposal, but he is concerned about the costs that HOAs could still incur in such a process.

“I love the idea of having someone who can resolve these complaints without having to go to court, but I'm not sure if substituting a state officer as the judge of this issue is any better than where we are now,” Graf said.

Rock Ridge board members said they think a dispute resolution process would be helpful in avoiding what they’ve experienced — both in their efforts to catch up on overdue maintenance in 2020 and their efforts to collect delinquent debts since.

“There have to be other states we can model something better around to protect the homeowners,” Rock Ridge board member Nick Losito said.

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

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ProPublica is committed to increasing the diversity of our workplace as well as the journalism community more broadly, and each year we publish a report on those efforts. This is the report for 2023; here are all our past reports.

Our Commitment

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

ProPublica has continued to expand, growing from 160 full-time employees at the start of 2022 to 172 in 2023, due in part to the launch of our global public health team and additions to our visuals, audience, development, finance and talent teams. In addition to recruiting talent and awarding financial stipends for students to attend journalism conferences, ProPublica’s diversity efforts last year included our largest presence yet at journalism affinity conferences and the development of an investigative editor training program.

We also worked to formalize some of our previously volunteer-run diversity efforts and have included some of our broader diversity goals in ProPublica’s first strategic plan.

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

Breakdown of Our Staff

As with last year, we tracked candidates through the application and interview process. Out of 30 positions filled in 2022, 55% of the candidates we interviewed identified as women and 42% identified as being part of a racial/ethnic group other than solely non-Hispanic white. Of those we hired, 40% identified as women and 47% as being part of a racial/ethnic group other than solely non-Hispanic white.

The percentage of all ProPublica staff members who identified as solely non-Hispanic white was 59%, the same as last year. In editorial positions, the percentage of staff members who identified as solely non-Hispanic white was 59%, the same as in the two prior years.

For the fifth year in a row, more women than men work at ProPublica. In editorial positions, women represented 49% of the staff.

Last year we began collecting demographic information about our board of directors. Half of the 14 people on the board identified as women, and 71% of the directors identified as non-Hispanic white.

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

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

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

New Initiatives

Investigative editor training: ProPublica in December announced its new Investigative Editor Training Program for applicants who want to learn how to manage, edit and elevate investigative projects that expose harm and create impact. This initiative, led by Talia Buford and Ginger Thompson, was designed to increase diversity in the next generation of investigative editors. The program will launch this spring with an internal training for ProPublica staffers interested in becoming editors. In June 2023, we will welcome the first external cohort of the yearlong program with an in-person editor training in New York. After that, participants will be paired with ProPublica senior staff as mentors and receive additional virtual training for the rest of the year. (Apply here.)

Sensitivity subcommittee: Led by Andrea Wise, Colleen Barry and Maya Eliahou, this group formed in 2022 after numerous internal conversations about concerns that regularly surfaced when reporters were working on stories touching on sensitive topics, particularly suicide and sexual assault. Volunteers created a standing Slack channel to create a space for the staff to leverage and share its collective knowledge and experience on these and other topics that require a careful and thoughtful approach.

Strategic plan: Leading the journalism industry on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts is one of the priorities ProPublica staffers and leaders are including in our five-year (2023-2027) strategic plan. The plan outlines the organization’s progress and initiatives over the past 15 years while acknowledging that there is more work to do. We plan to dedicate more resources to making investigative journalism careers accessible and sustainable for journalists from underrepresented backgrounds.

Our Ongoing Efforts

We think about our efforts in the following ways: building the pipeline (for us and for all of investigative journalism); recruiting talent and improving our hiring process; and inclusion and retention. Last year, as travel and in-person diversity initiatives became more feasible after the initial years of the coronavirus pandemic, ProPublica increased its presence at conferences and continued to offer virtual training and development opportunities.

Building the Pipeline

Conference stipends: ProPublica offers funding to help student journalists attend conferences. This effort is coordinated by Mollie Simon, Ash Ngu and Adriana Gallardo. In the seventh year of the program, we teamed up with The Pudding to award 25 stipends of $750 each. Because of the pandemic, we gave students the option to use the money for either journalism-related expenses or conference expenses. This year, following feedback from our 2022 stipend cohort, we are working to focus this initiative on supporting journalists from diverse backgrounds who have a distinct desire to pursue investigative journalism.

Emerging Reporters Program: The program provides financial assistance and mentorship to eight students for whom investigative journalism might otherwise be inaccessible so they can pursue early career opportunities in the field. The program includes a $9,000 stipend, virtual programming and admission to a journalism conference. This is the program’s eighth year, and it is coordinated by Talia Buford. Check out our most recent class and find out more about the program.

ONA (Online News Association) Diversity Breakfast: A breakfast at the ONA conference, facilitated by Ruth Baron and Steve Myers, paired managing editors, executive editors and other leading professionals in the industry with journalists from historically underrepresented communities. Nearly 40 journalists participated in the event. We have hosted both virtual and in-person breakfasts at the conference since 2015. In 2023, we will be shifting our efforts to other investigative mentorship opportunities.

Chicago external mentorships: Mentorship sessions with Free Spirit Media, which provides teens and young adults in communities of color on Chicago’s West and South sides with media literacy and media production opportunities. Led by Duaa Eldeib, workshops include sessions on the art of pitching stories and conceptualizing data.

Data Institute: ProPublica, in partnership with The Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting and OpenNews, held a workshop for journalists on how to use data, design and code. Twelve journalism students, professors and working journalists participated in the weeklong online training last summer. The Data Institute started in 2016, founded by ProPublica journalists to make high-quality technical training accessible to more journalists.

Mentorship: Working with the Journalism Mentors program, a group of ProPublica journalists had one-on-one mentoring sessions with 17 people last year. This mentorship opportunity, which can include general advice or portfolio reviews, can be arranged as an in-person session during affinity conferences. The sessions can also be arranged outside of the traditional conference season. Melissa Sanchez, Rui Kaneya and Max Blau coordinated these efforts last year. (Interested? Sign up for a session.)

Recruiting and Hiring

Affinity conferences: Newsroom staff and masthead members from ProPublica and three other nonprofit newsrooms (The Marshall Project, The Texas Tribune and The Trace) came together at the Asian American Journalists Association and the joint National Association of Black Journalists/National Association of Hispanic Journalists conference to host mixers and other professional development opportunities. ProPublica staff also attended the Native American Journalists Association conference and conducted resume reviews. This work was led by Maya Miller and Irena Hwang.

Salary transparency: Starting last fall, in advance of a new law that affects postings for jobs based in New York City, ProPublica began publishing salary ranges for all posted job openings, regardless of geography. Management also shared salary ranges internally for positions in which four or more people hold that job. This was done to ensure transparency about pay among staff and potential applicants in an effort to achieve equity in the newsroom.

Salary equity: ProPublica management annually analyzes salaries in job categories where there are at least four employees and, when necessary, adjusts those salaries to ensure equity by race and gender in each job and location group, while taking into account years of experience. This analysis started in 2021. We do this because we want to try to eliminate the effects of any unconscious bias in setting salaries.

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

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

LRN candidate outreach: Editors with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network started offering office hours to potential applicants. They also offered more intensive mentoring to a select number of applicants who weren’t accepted in order to develop promising proposals over time. Finally, LRN editors were present at affinity journalism conferences, where they met with interested applicants in an effort to help them with the project-development and application process.

Inclusion and Retention

Unconscious bias training: In 2021, ProPublica hired Paradigm Reach to conduct ongoing diversity, equity and inclusion training with staff. The training is required of all new managers.

ProPublica Peer Partnership Program: This is an internal program organized by Jodi Cohen and Lisa Song that matches ProPublicans with a mentor or peer partner to meet each other, develop new skills and have someone to turn to for help navigating workplace or career questions.

Welcoming new hires and focusing on internal culture: A subcommittee led by Michael Grabell and Ariana Tobin continued to meet last year to consider ways to make the newsroom more inclusive and equitable, including how to prevent burnout, how to build community while working remotely and ways to make the organization’s expense policy welcoming to people who come from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

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

Interested in Working Here?

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by Eli Hager

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

The New Mexico Corrections Department has lost track of nearly two dozen prisoners in its custody who are serving life sentences for crimes they committed as children, an error that could keep these “juvenile lifers” from getting a chance at freedom under a bill likely to be passed by the state Legislature within days.

As the legislation was being drafted, ProPublica asked the department for a list of all state prisoners who were sentenced to life as juveniles. Using court records, the news organization then identified at least 21 such individuals not on the state’s list. Many of them had been locked up for decades.

Denali Wilson, a staff attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico who helped discover the problem, said such carelessness on the part of the state government makes it plain that “when you throw away kids in adult prison, they are lost.”

Or as one of the forgotten prisoners, Sigmundr Odhinnson, told ProPublica in an email from behind bars, “We are, quite literally, missing children.”

This is not just a philosophical issue. The New Mexico Legislature is on the cusp of passing a bill that would give a new shot at parole to all state prisoners serving life or lengthy sentences for crimes they committed when they were juveniles, provided that they have served at least 15 to 25 years of their time, depending on their offense.

But to do that, the corrections department will first need to identify all of these individuals to help schedule their parole hearings.

“When the entity that is imprisoning people isn’t a reliable source for who it is imprisoning, how do we know the people exist?” said Wilson.

Wilson started advocating for juveniles serving decadeslong sentences in adult prison when she was still in law school. (Minesh Bacrania, special to ProPublica)

The New Mexico legislation is premised on multiple recent Supreme Court decisions and studies of brain science finding that kids are impulsive, prone to risk-taking, bad at understanding the consequences of their actions and highly susceptible to peer pressure (often committing their offenses among groups of friends), all of which make them less culpable than adults when they commit crimes. They are also, according to the high court, more capable of redemption.

The brain doesn’t fully develop until around age 25, extensive research shows, and most people are likely to “age out” of criminality.

The bill wouldn’t guarantee freedom to juvenile lifers in New Mexico, but it would provide them a chance to articulate to the state parole board how they have changed, including whether they’ve taken accountability for their actions, followed prison rules and completed educational programming.

Prosecutors opposed the legislation in previous years but dropped their opposition after changes were made to account for the seriousness of certain offenses.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s office has indicated that she will likely sign the legislation, if it is passed, by early April; it would go into effect this summer. In the meantime, officials in her administration could not answer basic questions about the number of prisoners affected and were unclear about which office is responsible for maintaining that information.

Carmelina Hart, spokesperson for the corrections department, initially sent ProPublica the names of 13 people in New Mexico’s prison system who were sentenced to life as children, which she said was the extent of the cohort.

But a disclaimer below the list read, “Due to inconsistencies and mistakes over decades of data entry, as well as ensuing attempts of varying success to fix previous inaccuracies over that time, it is virtually impossible to conclude that all of these data are entirely correct.”

When challenged about whether there are in fact many more New Mexico juvenile lifers, Hart said there possibly had been a miscommunication with her information technology team. She added that some people who had committed their crimes as kids (thus making them eligible for relief under the new legislation) might have turned 18 before they entered NMCD custody from local jails or juvenile detention facilities, causing the record-keeping confusion.

Asked for the names of all prisoners who would be affected by the bill, Hart said that only the state court system could provide such a list.

That caught Barry Massey, spokesperson for the New Mexico administrative office of the courts, off guard. “I am surprised that the Corrections Department claims it has no such records, given that the agency has to know the sentences imposed on someone in order to track their incarceration,” he said.

Massey said the courts do not maintain a database of individuals in prison, nor any records his team is capable of searching by prisoners’ ages at the time of their offenses. “Only the Corrections Department would have that,” he said.

Because these kids were prosecuted as adults, he added, their cases can look the same as adult ones in court data.

To that, Hart, the corrections department spokesperson, emailed back, “LOL! Now I’m confused too!”

She later said on a phone call, “Come on now, people don’t just fall out of our dataset.”

Then she said the department doesn’t need to identify those affected by the legislation until the governor signs it. “We’re not going to look for people who are not defined in the law,” she said. “You can’t put the cart before the horse.”

Hart emphasized that the agency does have records of every person serving in its facilities, and that if the bill becomes law, NMCD will take the appropriate steps to ensure that it is in compliance.

“There Are People We Still Don’t Know About”

The problem of the missing juvenile lifers would not have come to light if not for the efforts of Wilson, the ACLU of New Mexico’s lead attorney on the issue of children sentenced to decades in adult prison.

Back when she was still a law student at the University of New Mexico in 2017, Wilson and a group of colleagues started asking the corrections department for information on everyone in its custody serving long sentences for crimes they committed as juveniles. It was alarming, she said, to learn of the prisoners’ ages at the time they went in — 15, 16, 17 — and then see their ages now — 40, 45, 50.

She knew these people had been responsible for real harm: in many cases, a loss of life.

But, she said, she still felt a sense of indignation that hasn’t left her.

According to a 2012 Sentencing Project survey, Wilson learned, 79% of those serving life sentences for crimes committed as juveniles nationally had witnessed regular violence in their homes growing up, and 47% were victims of physical abuse. In many cases, they had committed their offenses while caught up in gang activity that they’d long since renounced, or had been getaway drivers during armed robberies gone wrong.

Meanwhile, just 1% of former juvenile lifers who are given a second chance at a free life end up committing another crime, according to a 2020 study in Philadelphia.

Wilson also learned that New Mexico, despite having banned the death penalty for children three decades before the Supreme Court did, had not yet addressed extreme juvenile sentencing. (Twenty-six other states and Washington, D.C., have done so.)

Using the list of juvenile lifers identified for her by the corrections department, she and the incarcerated people’s family members started sending them a regular newsletter, sharing updates from her team’s advocacy at the state Capitol for legislation just then starting to be considered. She also relied on the names provided by NMCD to find individuals she might be able to help in court, in some cases challenging their decadeslong prison terms as cruel and unusual punishment.

Several years into this work, Wilson got a call from the father of one juvenile lifer who hadn’t been named in the department’s data. But she had already learned of the case on her own, so she didn’t think much of it.

What came as a shock to Wilson was when, last spring, she clicked on an email listserv for New Mexico attorneys and read about a case involving a middle-aged prisoner who’d been behind bars since he was a teenager.

She had never heard of this man.

“I had the initial thought, ‘Oh shit, what have I been doing wrong?’” she said. “I just couldn’t figure out how I didn’t know about him.”

Still a relatively young attorney, Wilson experienced a bout of impostor syndrome, she said, noting that the people she advocates for “have been in prison longer than I’ve been alive.”

She had to scramble, given that by this point she was considered a legislative expert on extreme youth sentencing — and one of the main questions she always got from lawmakers assessing the proposed legislation that she was working on was “How many people will this impact?” Still using the list provided by the corrections department, she had been repeating a specific number of prisoners she believed would become eligible for parole under the bill.

But now she was realizing that there might be more who the department had never identified to her.

Sometimes prison systems misspell prisoners’ names on paperwork and in other contexts, so Wilson searched NMCD data using alternate spellings. “But they’re just not there,” she said.

The most disconcerting part, she said, is that she discovered the problem by chance.

“I feel certain that there are people we still don’t know about,” she said. “I don’t know, and I don’t know how to know.”

“I Want to Do Something Good Instead of Bad”

One subset of New Mexico’s juvenile lifers who seem to have been disproportionately forgotten are those serving their time in out-of-state prisons.

Jerry Torres and Juan Meraz, for example, are both in the custody of the New Mexico Corrections Department for crimes they committed as juveniles in the state, yet they are locked up in Arizona — in a for-profit prison operated by the company CoreCivic.

Neither has appeared on the department’s lists of juvenile lifers, even though they too should be getting a parole hearing (by Zoom, that is) under the upcoming legislation.

Torres is serving a life sentence for a murder he went to jail for as a 17-year-old in 1996. He emphasized in a phone interview that he didn’t want to cause additional pain to his victim’s family by speaking about the legislative issue.

Torres said that because he is not in New Mexico, he feels even more unknown than the other juvenile lifers.

“I’m not surrounded by as many people possibly affected by this,” he said, given that he is watching the bill’s progress from a state away.

If he is located by the department and given the parole hearing that the law should provide, and if he is then actually paroled, Torres said, he just wants to do “everything I missed out on because of the decisions I made,” like simply going to a store, playing baseball at the park with his family and getting a commercial driver’s license to be a truck driver. “It’s as simple as that,” he said. “I want to be productive. I want to do something good instead of bad.”

Meraz, also in his mid-40s, shot someone when he was 15.

While insisting on not minimizing the harm he caused, he said he has done nearly every educational program there is to do while locked up, including parenting classes even though he doesn’t have any kids.

Meraz recently had major colon surgery. “Fifteen or 20 years of good health out there, I can’t ask for anything more,” he said of what he dreams of if he gets this parole opportunity.

Wilson, the lawyer, said that if the law is passed, she will be specifically asking the department to review all out-of-state prisoners for their ages at the time of their offenses.

Her one solace is that whenever a juvenile lifer materializes whom she hadn’t known about — which continues to happen — they often know about her and about the legislation, sometimes down to which New Mexico state representatives are and are not voting for it.

“And I’m like, oh right, this is people’s lives — they are paying attention,” Wilson said. “We will find them.”

Help Us Identify New Mexico Juvenile Lifers Who May Qualify for Parole Hearings

If you are aware of someone who committed a crime as a juvenile (under the age of 18) in New Mexico and who has since served more than 15 years in prison for that offense, please let us know. As we continue to cover this issue, we will routinely ask the New Mexico Corrections Department if they are aware of the individuals we learn of who may be eligible for a parole hearing if proposed legislation passes. Please enter their information below. If you would prefer to talk to a reporter before you share, please email Eli Hager at Eli.Hager@propublica.org. We appreciate you sharing your story and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering this information for the purposes of our reporting and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of what you tell us.

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by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel

Leer en español.

Learn how to help us investigate the dairy industry. Haz click aquí para aprender cómo ayudarnos a investigar la industria lechera.

State and local officials in Wisconsin said they were horrified to learn of the conditions leading up to the 2019 death of an 8-year-old Nicaraguan boy on a dairy farm, as well as the flawed law enforcement investigation that followed. Now they say they want to address some of the issues highlighted by a ProPublica investigation, published last month, into Jefferson Rodríguez’s death.

“What happened should never have happened,” said state Rep. Sylvia Ortiz-Velez, a Milwaukee Democrat whose mother’s family worked as migrant farm laborers in Wisconsin in the 1960s.

Jefferson was run over late one summer night in 2019 by a worker operating a skid steer on a farm in rural Dane County, about a half-hour north of Madison, the state capital. It was the worker’s first day on the job, and he told us that he had received only a few hours of training. Our investigation showed how the authorities who investigated Jefferson’s death wrongly concluded that his father had run him over.

The failure was due in large part to a language barrier between the boy’s father, José María Rodríguez Uriarte, and the Dane County sheriff’s deputy who interviewed him. Rodríguez does not speak English; the deputy considered herself proficient in Spanish, but not fluent. When we interviewed the deputy, we learned that when she questioned Rodríguez in Spanish about what happened, her words didn’t mean what she thought and would likely be confusing to a Spanish speaker.

Jefferson’s death was ruled an accident. Nobody was charged criminally.

“Proficiency in a crisis isn’t good enough,” said Dana Pellebon, who sits on the Dane County Board of Supervisors. “Unfortunately, until a situation like this happens, sometimes we don’t see the gaps in service.”

Pellebon and several other supervisors told ProPublica they were looking into measures that could improve language access for non-English speakers who interact with the sheriff’s office. According to estimates from the U.S. census, more than 10% of Dane County residents speak a language other than English at home.

“This theme of language barriers for people to exercise and enforce their rights — from law enforcement to human services to our court system — it is widespread,” said county Supervisor Heidi Wegleitner. “There really needs to be a thorough examination countywide into these barriers, because it’s not fair.”

The Board of Supervisors sets the budget for and can make recommendations to the sheriff’s office. But it is limited in its ability to set policy.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office said the agency has a skilled and diverse staff that’s equipped with the tools it needs, including “unfettered access” to language translation services. The department “is always looking for ways to improve the services provided to the community which include the evaluation of current practices and consideration [of] received recommendations,” the spokesperson said.

At the state level, Ortiz-Velez pointed to a bill that would allow DACA recipients to become police officers or sheriff’s deputies. (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals is a federal program that gives some undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children temporary protections from deportation.) Currently, only U.S. citizens can work as police officers or sheriff’s deputies in Wisconsin. “For us to have officers that are fluent, that were born in other countries and can speak the language, I think that could be a great help,” Ortiz-Velez said.

Our story on Jefferson’s death is the first in our series, America’s Dairyland, that intends to explore work, housing and other conditions for immigrant dairy workers in Wisconsin and across the Midwest. Here are three takeaways from our reporting efforts so far:

1. Across Wisconsin, law enforcement officials face language barriers when responding to incidents on dairy farms.

Under the Civil Rights Act, agencies that receive federal funding are required to ensure that their services are accessible to people who speak limited English. The Department of Justice, which drafted guidelines for law enforcement agencies on this issue nearly two decades ago, occasionally investigates departments that fail to meet this requirement.

Last year, we began requesting records of law enforcement agencies’ responses to incidents ranging from work-related injuries to assaults on dairy farms across Wisconsin. What those records show us is that officials routinely encounter language barriers when interacting with dairy workers. Frequently they rely on farm supervisors or employees to serve as interpreters; sometimes they turn to Google Translate or to children.

The Dane County Sheriff’s Office has no written policy about how deputies should respond to incidents involving people who do not speak English, or on when to bring in an interpreter. The department does not assess the language skills of employees, who instead self-report their proficiency. But as a general practice, department officials have said, when deputies need to communicate with residents who speak a language other than English, they are supposed to put out a call to ask if any of their colleagues speak that language and, if none are available, ask for help from other nearby agencies.

2. It is an open secret that Wisconsin’s dairy industry relies on undocumented immigrant labor.

Because workers are undocumented, they often have a harder time speaking up about unfair or unsafe conditions.

Rodríguez and his son immigrated to the U.S. from Nicaragua in early 2019 in search of economic opportunity. As an asylum-seeker, Rodríguez did not have a work permit. He used fake papers to get a job at D&K Dairy. (In a deposition, the farm’s owner said he was not aware of Rodríguez’s citizenship status.)

Rodríguez earned $9.50 an hour and, like other workers, routinely worked 70 to 80 hours a week. Agricultural work is excluded from many of America’s labor protections, so there was no overtime pay for working more than 40 hours. Like many Wisconsin dairy farms, D&K Dairy provided free housing. But the housing Rodríguez and his son used was not in a house; they lived in an apartment above the milking parlor, the barn where hundreds of cows were brought day and night to be milked by heavy, loud machinery.

For years the dairy industry, complaining of labor shortages, has lobbied unsuccessfully to access the federal H-2A guest worker program, which allows employers to temporarily bring in foreign employees when they can’t find local workers. Currently, the program is limited to seasonal agricultural work; dairy is a year-round job.

Critics say the guest-worker program lends itself to abuse and exploitation, as immigrants’ ability to remain in the U.S. is tied to a single employer, which has led to several high-profile cases of forced labor, wage theft, substandard housing and high recruitment fees, among other problems.

3. Small farms don’t always get a safety inspection after a death or injury.

When Jefferson died, an investigator with the Dane County Medical Examiner’s Office alerted the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is responsible for workplace safety. But OSHA did not investigate because the boy was not a farm employee.

Even when workers die or are injured on small farms, OSHA is limited in its ability to respond. Farms with fewer than 11 workers are often exempt from oversight. (Some states with their own OSHA plans do more, but Wisconsin isn’t one of them.) And the federal agency has few safety standards for agricultural work sites.

In recent years, OSHA has attempted to inspect fewer than a dozen of the thousands of dairy farms in Wisconsin each year. The year Jefferson died, six of the nine inspections that OSHA initiated ultimately were not done because the farms were too small to fall under the agency’s jurisdiction; three of those six involved fatalities.

“Dairy operations these days are big factories, basically,” said Michael Engelberger, a Dane County supervisor. “They should not be exempt from any OSHA regulations or special agriculture labor laws. To me that’s just wrong.”

Wegleitner said she hopes to convene a group of supervisors, community advocates, county staff and others to talk about next steps in the coming weeks.

“Language access is one piece,” she said. “We have unsafe housing, lack of inspections and oversight, and all those things may not be things the county can legislate. But if we are talking to and advocating with state and federal policymakers and groups and working in coalition, I think this needs to be addressed on multiple levels.”

We plan to keep reporting on issues affecting immigrant dairy workers across the Midwest. Among those issues: traffic stops of undocumented immigrants who drive without a license; access to medical care or workers’ compensation after injuries on the job; and employer-provided housing.

Do you have ideas or tips for us to look into? Please reach out using this form.

And if you know a Spanish speaker who might be interested in this topic, please share with them a translated version of the story about Jefferson’s death — which also includes an audio version — or this note about how to get in touch with us.

Aquí está nuestra investigación — y una versión en audio — en español, así como una carta explicando cómo usted se puede comunicar con nosotros si quiere compartir información sobre la industria lechera de Wisconsin y estados cercanos.

Help ProPublica Journalists Investigate the Dairy Industry

by Kristen Doerer for ProPublica

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

You’ve figured out your deductions or credits, calculated how much you owed in taxes and successfully filed your return. If you’re sitting around wondering where your money is, you’re not alone. Lucky for you, the IRS offers several ways to track your tax return.

How Do I Track My Tax Return?

Once you have filed your tax return, there are three options for tracking your refund:

• Online: You can check your refund status on the IRS website. See below for the information you’ll need to have handy.
• App: The IRS2Go app is available for both iPhone (iOS) and Android users. You can download it using:
  • Google Play
  • Apple App Store
  • Amazon for Android
• Phone: The IRS refund hotline is 800-829-1954. This option is especially useful for those who do not have internet access.

What information do I need to track my tax return?

To track your tax return, there are three things you need:

1. Your Social Security number or Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN).
2. Your filing status: single filer, married filing jointly, married filing separately, head of household or qualifying widow or widower. Find out what these mean here.
3. Your exact refund amount.

When Can I Check on My Tax Refund?

If you e-filed: You can check on your refund after 24 hours, unless you applied for the earned income tax credit before mid-February. The IRS recommends getting in touch if you haven’t received your tax refund after 21 days.

If you filed by mail: You usually aren’t able to check your status for four weeks if you mailed in your taxes, but you may have already received your refund by that time. The IRS is warning of weekslong and even monthslong delays in 2023 for mailed-in taxes. If you mailed in your taxes and are waiting for your refund, the IRS says not to file a second time and not to call.

What is the tax refund schedule?

The IRS refuses to guarantee a day you’ll get your refund. Timing also depends on how you file and whether you get your return via direct deposit or check. For most people who file electronically though, the IRS issues refunds within 21 days of filing.

What are the tax return statuses?

When you check on your return, there are three statuses you might get:

• Your return has been received.
• Your refund has been approved.
• Your refund has been sent.

Why Am I Not Getting My Tax Refund?

There are a number of reasons why your refund may be held up. There might be a delay if:

• You filed by snail mail. Due to the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the IRS has a severe paperwork backlog.
• Your return includes any errors or is incomplete.
• You filed for the earned income tax credit or the additional child tax credit. By law, the IRS cannot issue your refund before mid-February.
• You’ve been the victim of identity theft, fraud or a scam.
• You’ve been audited.
• You owe back taxes, state taxes, student loan payments or child support. In some cases, the Treasury Department will put your refund toward the money you owe. You will receive a letter from the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service explaining if your refund was used to pay another debt you owe.
• Your return includes Form 8379, Injured Spouse Allocation, which can take as many as 14 weeks to process.

Can I Get My Tax Refund Early?

Short answer: No.

No one can give you immediate access to your tax refund — not the IRS, a bank or anyone else. That said, some tax-preparation companies do offer options to effectively give you access to money sooner, either through a refund anticipation check or a refund advance loan.

I need money now. What are refund advance loans and refund anticipation checks?

Some tax preparation services offer ways to get you money before your refund is issued.

With a refund advance loan — also referred to as a refund anticipation loan or RAL — your tax preparer will give you a loan that will be repaid with your tax refund. The loan amount is usually a portion of your estimated tax refund minus tax preparation service charges and other fees. Sometimes, the money will be deposited on a prepaid card that comes with additional fees. When the IRS issues your refund, your tax preparer will take money out of your tax refund as repayment for the loan.

These days, there are two types of RALs:

• “No Fee” or “Advance” RALs are often called a “refund advance” and claim to have “no fees.” However, in order to apply for and receive the loan, you have to use the company's tax-prep service, which may have significant costs. This can route eligible people away from free tax filing alternatives with no guarantee that a loan of any amount will be approved by the bank. There may also be hidden fees for these loans.

• Interest-bearing RALs are another option where lenders offer much larger loans. The catch? You pay more in interest and fees.

A refund anticipation check, or RAC, lets you put off paying for the tax-preparation service you use to file your taxes. Typically, you’ll agree to pay an additional fee to have the cost of tax preparation deducted from your refund amount. Once the IRS issues your refund, the preparer deducts this fee and the cost of preparing your taxes and then gives the rest of the money to you.

Keep in mind that if you don’t have the money to use a paid tax service, you may be able to file completely for free without worrying about any of these fees.

It’s not always clearly explained, but both refund advance loans and refund anticipation checks usually involve a temporary bank account being set up in your name, which is how the preparer takes out their portion of your refund.

Before agreeing to use a tax-preparation service in exchange for an advance, read the terms carefully and make sure you understand the total cost to you.

About this guide: ProPublica has reported on the IRS, the Free File program and other tax topics for years. ProPublica’s tax guide is not personalized tax advice. Speak to a tax professional about your specific tax situation.

Kristen Doerer is a reporter in Washington, D.C. Her writing has appeared in PBS NewsHour, The Guardian and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. Follow her on Twitter at @k2doe.

by Andy Kroll and Andrea Bernstein, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented

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

A few months ago, Leonard Leo laid out his next audacious project.

Ever since the longtime Federalist Society leader helped create a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, and then received more than a billion dollars from a wealthy Chicago business owner to disburse to conservative causes, Leo’s next moves had been the subject of speculation.

Now, Leo declared in a slick but private video to potential donors, he planned to “crush liberal dominance” across American life. The country was plagued by “woke-ism” in corporations and education, “one-sided journalism” and “entertainment that’s really corrupting our youth,” said Leo amid snippets of cheery music and shots of sunsets and American flags.

Sitting tucked into a couch, with wire-rimmed glasses and hair gone to gray, Leo conveyed his inspiration and intentions: “I just said to myself, ‘Well, if this can work for law, why can’t it work for lots of other areas of American culture and American life where things are really messed up right now?’”

Leo revealed his latest battle plan in the previously unreported video for the Teneo Network, a little-known group he called “a tremendously important resource for the future of our country.”

Teneo is building what Leo called in the video “networks of conservatives that can roll back” liberal influence in Wall Street and Silicon Valley, among authors and academics, with pro athletes and Hollywood producers. A Federalist Society for everything.

Despite its linchpin role in Leo’s plans, Teneo (which is not the similarly named consulting firm associated with former officials in the Bill Clinton administration) has kept a low public profile. Its one-page website includes bland slogans — “Timeless ideas. Fresh approach” — and scant details. Its co-founder described Teneo as “private and confidential” in one presentation, and the group doesn’t disclose the vast majority of its members or its funders.

But ProPublica and Documented have obtained more than 50 hours of internal Teneo videos and hundreds of pages of documents that reveal the organization’s ambitious agenda, influential membership and burgeoning clout. We have also interviewed Teneo members and people familiar with the group’s activities. The videos, documents and interviews provide an unfiltered look at the lens through which the group views the power of the left — and how it plans to combat it.

In response to questions for this story, Leo said in a statement: “Teneo’s young membership proves that the conservative movement is poised to be even more talented, driven, and successful in the future. This is a group that knows how to build winning teams.”

The records show Teneo’s members have included a host of prominent names from the conservative vanguard, including such elected officials as U.S. Sens. J.D. Vance of Ohio and Missouri’s Josh Hawley, a co-founder of the group. Other members have included Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, now the fourth-ranking House Republican, as well as Nebraska’s attorney general and Virginia’s solicitor general. Three senior aides to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, are members. Another is the federal judge who struck down a Biden administration mask mandate. The heads of the Republican Attorneys General Association, Republican State Leadership Committee and Turning Point USA — all key cogs in the world of national conservative politics — have been listed as Teneo members.

Conservative media figures like Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire, several pro athletes and dozens of executives and senior figures in the worlds of finance, energy and beyond have also been members.

Leo joined Teneo’s board of directors as chairman in 2021 and has since become a driving force.

Watch Leonard Leo Talk About Teneo (Teneo)

Watch video ➜

Teneo co-founder Evan Baehr, a tech entrepreneur and veteran of conservative activism, said in a 2019 video for new members that Teneo had “many, many, many dozens” of members working in the Trump administration, including in the White House, State Department, Justice Department and Pentagon. “They’re everywhere.”

The goal, Baehr said in another video, was “a world in which Teneans serve in the House and the Senate, as governors — one might be elected president.”

Teneo Has Ambitious Plans (Teneo)

Watch video ➜

Here’s how “the Left” works in America, according to Baehr.

“Imagine a group of four people sitting at the Harvard Club for lunch in midtown Manhattan,” he said in a 2020 Teneo video: “a billionaire hedge funder,” “a film producer,” “a Harvard professor” and “a New York Times writer.”

“The billionaire says: ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if middle school kids had free access to sex-change therapy paid for by the federal government?’” Baehr continued. “Well, the filmmaker says, ‘I’d love to do a documentary on that; it will be a major motion film.’ The Harvard professor says, ‘We can do studies on that to say that’s absolutely biologically sound and safe.’ And the New York Times person says, ‘I’ll profile people who feel trapped in the wrong gender.’ ”

After a single lunch, Baehr concluded, elite liberals can “put different kinds of capital together” and “go out into the world” and “basically wreck shop."

In a recorded video “town hall” held for incoming members, Baehr, a graduate of three Ivy League universities and a serial entrepreneur fluent in tech startup lingo, recalled the moment when he had the epiphany to create a conservative counter-effort.

It happened a decade earlier when he was eating lunch at a “fairly uninviting” Baja Fresh in Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., with his then-boss Peter Thiel, the iconoclastic venture capitalist.

Baehr explained in the video that he had become frustrated as he kicked around right-of-center politics and activism for a few years, working on Capitol Hill, in the George W. Bush White House and for right-of-center groups including the American Enterprise Institute and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

Evan Baehr Explains Teneo’s Origin (Teneo)

Watch video ➜

Baehr and Thiel lamented what they saw as the fragmented state of conservative networks, with their hidebound think tanks and intellectual centers that hold sway over right-of-center politics. A rare bright spot on their side, Baehr and Thiel agreed, was the Federalist Society. Thiel had, in fact, served as president of the Stanford Federalist Society. What if there were a group similar to the Federalist Society for venture capitalists or corporate CEOs or members of the media? (Thiel did not respond to a request for comment.)

In 2008, Baehr, Hawley and others launched Teneo — Latin for “I grasp" or “I endure.” Hawley, then an associate lawyer in private practice, authored Teneo’s founding principles, according to the new member talk hosted by Baehr, and served on the group’s board. Its core beliefs align with the broader conservative establishment’s: limited government, individual liberty, free enterprise, strong national defense and civil society and belief in a “transcendent order” that is “founded in tradition, philosophy, or theology.”

For a long time, the group didn’t live up to expectations. In its first year, Teneo raised a paltry $77,000, according to its tax filing. From 2009 to 2017, the group, based first in Washington, D.C., and later in Austin, Texas, never raised more than $750,000 in a single year, tax records show. One member described in an interview Teneo’s early days as little more than a run-of-the-mill dinner club with partisan overtones: “Instead of being an organization about ideas, it was all about being a Republican.”

Enter Leo. In the early years of the Trump administration, he and the Federalist Society had remarkable influence within the new government. The Federalist Society had brought the legal doctrines of originalism and textualism — close readings of laws and the Constitution to adhere to the intent and words of the authors — into the mainstream. Leo had taken a leave of absence from the group to advise President Trump on judicial appointments, helping shepherd the appointments of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court and helping to fill more than 200 other positions in federal district and appellate courts. By the time Trump left office, he had put on the bench 28% of all federal judges in America.

In the town hall video, Baehr explained how he modeled Teneo on the Federalist Society. Leo’s “secret sauce,” he said, was to identify an “inner core” group of people within the Federalist Society’s 60,000 members. Leo was “identifying them and recruiting them for either specific roles to serve as judges or to spin up and launch critical projects often which you would have no idea about.”

Soon after Leo took an interest in Teneo, the group’s finances soared. Annual revenue reached $2.3 million in 2020 and nearly $5 million in 2021, according to tax records. In 2021, the bulk of Teneo’s income — more than $3 million — came from one source: DonorsTrust, a clearinghouse for conservative, libertarian and other charitable gifts that masks the original source of the money. In 2020, the Leo-run group that received the Chicago business owner’s $1.6 billion donation gave $41 million to DonorsTrust, which had $1.5 billion in assets as of 2021.

Teneo’s other funders have included marquee conservative donors: hedge fund investor Paul Singer, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the DeVos family, according to Baehr.

As the group’s finances improved, its videos became much more professionally produced, and its website underwent a dramatic upgrade from previous iterations. All of this was part of what Baehr called “Teneo 2.0,” a major leap forward for the group, driven in part by Leo’s guidance and involvement.

Baehr declined an interview request. He said in a statement: “Since Teneo began, I've been building hundreds of friendships among diverse leaders who have a deep love for this country and are working on innovative solutions to drive human flourishing for all. Teneo has made me a better husband, father, and leader.”

Teneo aims to help members find jobs, write books, meet spouses, secure start-up financing or nonprofit donors and learn about public service. As described in a “Community Vision” report from 2019, Teneo seeks to distinguish itself by acting as “the Silicon Valley of Conservatism — a powerful network of communities where the most influential young leaders, the biggest ideas, and the most leveraged resources come together to launch key projects that advance our shared belief that the conservative worldview drives human flourishing.”

Many of the connections happen at Teneo’s annual retreat, which brings together hundreds of members and their spouses, plus allies including politicians like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and DeSantis as well as business leaders and prominent academics. Speakers at past Teneo retreats have included luminaries spanning politics, culture, business and the law: New York Times columnist David Brooks, federal judge Trevor McFadden, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, “Woke, Inc.” author and 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, former Trump cabinet official and 2024 presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, ultrawealthy donors and activists Dick and Betsy DeVos, and Chick-fil-A board chair Dan Cathy.

But the group’s internal documents and videos also show the widening sprawl of its other activities. Teneo currently has 20 regional chapters nationwide, plus industry working groups focused, most recently, on media, corporate America, finance and law. In April, the group is hosting a “finance summit” in South Beach that its invitation says will “convene rising conservative talent from major financial institutions, funds, and family offices to connect and discuss key industry issues fundamental to the future of our country.”

Teneo members represent different facets of the conservative movement writ large. Some Teneo members were “very strong Trump defenders,” Baehr said in the 2019 town hall video, while others have opposed Trump vehemently. Baehr said there were clear divisions within the group’s members about immigration and trade policy. “Hopefully other ones, maybe Green New Deal, I hope that’s more like 99 to 1” in opposition, he said.

It’s in the town hall video that Baehr assured new members that Teneo “is private and confidential.” He said the group will never reveal the names of its members without their permission, though they are free to disclose their membership if they want to. Members must be in their 40s or younger to join.

Baehr said Teneo’s website is crafted so as not to pique the interest of Senate staffers who might look up the group if one of its members mentions Teneo during a confirmation process for a judgeship or a cabinet position. “We think a lot about that to protect your current and future leadership opportunities,” Baehr explained.

This strategy appears to have worked. A spokesperson for Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a critic of Leo’s who has spoken extensively about dark money and the courts, said the senator’s staff was “not familiar with Teneo.” During the confirmation process of Ryan Holte, a Trump appointee to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, Holte was asked several written questions by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Cal., about his membership in Teneo, but Feinstein spelled the group’s name wrong each time. (Asked what the mission of the group was, Holte responded that Teneo was a “nonpartisan, and nonprofit, organization that gathers members from a variety of professional backgrounds for dinners and social activities to discuss current events.”)

A recent Teneo fundraising email laid out how the group can bring its members' influence together in service of a cause.

To “confront” what he dubbed “woke capitalism,” Jonathan Bunch, a longtime Leo deputy and now Teneo board member, wrote that the group had brought together a coalition of Teneans “working with (or serving as) state attorneys general, state financial officers, state legislators, journalists, media executives and best-in-class public affairs professionals” to launch investigations, hold hearings, pull state investment funds and publish op-eds and news stories in response to so-called environmental, social and governance, or ESG, policies at the corporate level.

“Our members were in the rooms where it happened,” Bunch wrote.

Another project underway, Baehr explained in a 2020 presentation, was a “surreptitious and exciting” effort to map key institutions in major cities — private schools, country clubs, newspapers, Rotary and so on — and find ways to get Teneo members inside those institutions and help members connect with each other. The initiative has begun by mapping Atlanta and several cities in Texas.

For those Teneo members who run for elected office, the network offers easy access to a large pool of donors and allies. A Leo acolyte and member of Teneo’s Midwest membership committee, Will Scharf, is now running for Missouri attorney general. Campaign finance records show that dozens of Teneo members made substantial early contributions to Scharf’s campaign, including Leo, Baehr and other members of Teneo’s leadership, who last year each gave the maximum allowable donation of $2,650.

In an email, Scharf said many of his “dearest friends are members of Teneo, and it has been a privilege to be involved with such an extraordinarily talented and committed group of young conservatives.”

Leo’s own statements about Teneo suggest that his plan for the group extends well beyond achieving near-term political victories.

“When you’re fighting a battle for the heart and soul of our culture, you want to know you’re in the trenches with someone you can trust, someone you know, and someone who will have your back,” Teneo’s “Community Vision” report quotes Leo as saying. “We don’t win unless we build friendship and fellowship with other people — and that’s what you’re doing here with Teneo.”

Help ProPublica Investigate Threats to U.S. Democracy

Do you have information about Leonard Leo or the Teneo Network that we should know? Reporter Andy Kroll can be reached via email at andy.kroll@propublica.org or via Signal at 202-215-6203.

Clarification, March 9, 2023: The subheadline with this story was updated to clarify that Leonard Leo is now the chairman of Teneo Network.

by J. David McSwane and Ryan Gabrielson

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

Joe Guarino rescued an entire industry with help from what some called “divine” intervention.

A little-known lobbyist from Virginia, Guarino was hired in 2007 by the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries, the trade association for nonprofit alternatives to medical insurance founded on Christian principles. Health care sharing ministries take fees from members, which are then used to pay other members’ health bills.

At the time, the industry had been tainted by a scandal involving one of the largest ministries in the country, the Christian Brotherhood Newsletter, based outside Canton, Ohio. State authorities won $14 million in civil judgments against two of its top leaders for enriching themselves instead of paying the medical bills of its members. A ProPublica investigation last month revealed that many of the Brotherhood’s executives, including Daniel J. Beers, were involved years later in the launch of a second scandal-plagued ministry, Liberty HealthShare.

The Washington-based alliance was looking to Guarino to repair the industry’s reputation and pass laws to fend off a looming movement to regulate the business. The lobbying effort is an example of how the ministries have quietly worked over the years to shield themselves from consumer protection laws and preempt government oversight.

Guarino decided to launch a state-by-state campaign to pass so-called safe harbor laws that exempt health care sharing ministries from insurance regulation. The carve-outs were justified, the alliance argued, because ministries don’t set prices and coverage based on risk calculations or pool people’s money, as insurance companies do. In the United States, many of the rules for health insurance are set by the states in which companies operate.

Guarino met with lawmakers in Virginia, Arkansas and Idaho. “Most of the time I was hiring local lobbyists, training them, and then they got the bill passed for us,” Guarino explained.

Although it did not attract much attention, the campaign was a remarkable success. By 2008, 15 states had passed safe harbor laws. Then, a new threat emerged. In 2009, President Barack Obama proposed his sweeping reform of the health care system. Central to the law was a provision referred to as the “individual mandate,” which required that every American obtain health insurance or face a fine. The mandate presented a direct threat to health care sharing ministries: If members were forced to buy insurance, they would likely leave en masse.

Although Guarino was embarrassingly outgunned by the health insurance lobby, he was determined to slip some version of a safe harbor carve-out into whatever the Democratic-controlled Congress handed the president. “I went and saw 150 congressional staffers during that time,” Guarino said.

The turning point came when Guarino reached out to a GOP state legislator he knew in Iowa and asked if she could put him in touch with Republican Chuck Grassley, the state’s longtime senator who wielded power as a member of the Senate Finance Committee. The lawmaker had known Grassley’s family since childhood and agreed to set up a meeting. “Lo and behold, that happened,” Guarino said. “As a Christian, I look at this and say, ‘Oh, this is God’s way of orchestrating things.’”

Guarino told ProPublica that he and his clients got on the phone with Grassley. Together they crafted an amendment to Obamacare that exempted members of sharing ministries from having to obtain health insurance on religious grounds. Behind the scenes, Grassley got that carve-out into the Senate version of the bill, Guarino said. (Grassley did not return a request for comment.)

The passage of the Affordable Care Act was chaotic and, for ministries, that was fortuitous. The House version, which many Democrats preferred, didn’t include Guarino’s exemption. If the House bill prevailed in negotiations between the two chambers, ministries would be extinct.

But with the sudden death of Sen. Ted Kennedy, Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and could not pass the House version. They were forced to go with the Senate bill that included the carve-out.

The exemption — just 200 words in a 900-page bill — survived tense negotiations between the chambers, going virtually unnoticed. Obama signed the ACA into law in March 2010.

“That’s our language right in the bill,” Guarino told ProPublica.

One friend told him that he’d just saved an entire industry. The larger Christian health share community hailed it as a miracle. “If you’re a person of faith, some of us might say it was kind of divine,” said Tony Meggs, then CEO of Medi-Share, one of the groups that formed the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries.

Meggs estimates membership grew tenfold after 2014, when the individual mandate went into effect. Four years later, the alliance announced that about a million Americans belonged to its member ministries. Some bought into the ministries because they disliked Obama and associated him with the law. Others did it for economic reasons. The ministries offered cheaper plans than insurance sold on the ACA marketplace, which were expensive for anyone who did not qualify for subsidies or Medicaid. Many self-employed people and small business owners fell into this category.

“All of a sudden people started getting religion because they could save $700, $800 a month,” Meggs said.

Both Meggs and Guarino say they believe that most health care sharing ministries do right by their members and the insurance alternative can work when it’s under ethical management. But both acknowledge the industry has been vulnerable to abuse. “Obviously, that kind of growth is going to attract bad actors and people who look for opportunity to enrich themselves,” Meggs said.

One of the people who took advantage of the opportunity is Beers, the patriarch of the family that started Liberty HealthShare just as Obamacare’s individual mandate drove thousands of people to health care sharing ministries. The ProPublica investigation found that Beers acts as a shadow lord over an empire built with money from Liberty HealthShare. Some of the family grew rich while Liberty’s members were left with tens of millions of dollars in unpaid health bills.

Beers’ name does not appear on any official documents related to Liberty, and he denied involvement in family businesses that profited from the ministry. Attorneys representing Beers and members of his family also disputed ProPublica’s finding that they controlled or influenced the sharing ministry or did anything wrong. Liberty is now under new management that does not include Beers or his relatives.

For those in the ministry industry, however, Beers’ involvement has been an open secret for years.

Meggs told of a surprise encounter he had around 2014 with Liberty’s then-CEO, its vice president and Beers, all key figures in the Brotherhood. The group wanted to propose a partnership between Meggs’ ministry and Liberty, which was experiencing explosive growth

At the meeting, Beers was clearly in charge, Meggs remembers, so no matter what they were selling, he wasn’t buying.

Liberty, he said, looked too much like the Brotherhood.

by Doug Bock Clark

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

A week and a half after last November’s vote, members of the Board of Elections in Surry County, North Carolina, gathered in a windowless room to certify the results. It was supposed to be a routine task, marking the end of a controversial season during which election deniers harassed and retaliated against the county’s elections director. Not long into the meeting, however, a staffer distributed a letter from two board members stating that they were refusing to certify.

According to the letter, the two members had decided — “with regard for the sacred blood shed of both my Redeemer and His servants” and “past Patriots who made the ultimate sacrifice”— that they “must not call these election results credible and bow to the perversion of truth.”

In their view, a federal judge who’d struck down a North Carolina voter ID law for discriminating against minorities had transformed the state’s election laws into “a grotesque and perverse sham.” Tim DeHaan, one of the two board members who signed the letter, explained at the meeting, “We feel the election was held according to the law that we have, but that the law is not right.”

This argument failed to win over the three Democratic board members, according to a recording of the meeting. DeHaan eventually agreed to join the three on a technicality, and the board certified the election with a 4-1 vote. Jerry Forestieri, the Republican board secretary who also signed the letter, held out.

DeHaan and Forestieri declined to comment and did not respond to written questions.

Before 2020, local election officials seldom voted against certifying results. But in 2022, conservative officials in North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and New Mexico refused to do so. Some admitted to refusing to certify for political reasons. In all the 2022 cases, the election results eventually were certified, sometimes under a court order.

Election law experts say that these disruptions reveal a weakness in the American electoral system, which relies on thousands of local officials to certify the totals in their counties and municipalities before their results can be aggregated and tallied for state and federal elections.

Local elections officials “could create chaos” all the way up the chain by refusing to certify, said Alice Clapman, a senior counsel in election law at the Brennan Center for Justice. “And in that chaos you have more room for political interference.” Five legal experts described to ProPublica scenarios in which legislatures, courts, secretaries of state or governors could use a failure to certify at the local level to exert partisan influence.

Clapman said that even if refusals to certify don’t affect election outcomes, they can violate state laws and can amplify and validate harmful misinformation that feeds election denialism because of the imprimatur of the officials’ offices.

A ProPublica review of 10 instances of local officials refusing to certify 2022 results in four states found that, for the majority of them, the state election authority did not ultimately pursue official consequences. Two of them have been referred for criminal prosecution, but the attorney general in that state would not comment on whether there is an open investigation. And two — the ones in Surry County — are facing potential removal from their posts by the State Board of Elections.

“There needs to be some sanction when there is lawlessness,” said Richard L. Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project. “If you allow these things to take place without any sanction, then you invite more serious rule-breaking in the future.”

After the DeHaan and Forestieri letter, Bob Hall, the former executive director of the watchdog group Democracy North Carolina, submitted a complaint to the State Board of Elections to start a disciplinary process, as permitted by North Carolina law if board members commit an alleged breach of duty. An attorney for Hall argued in a subsequent document that “if left unchecked, Forestieri and DeHaan may be the first of many board members throughout the state and across the political spectrum who cannot be trusted to faithfully certify election results.”

That led the state board to summon Forestieri and DeHaan to its headquarters in the capital, a roughly three-hour drive from their rural home, for a hearing last month.

At the beginning of the proceeding, DeHaan argued that the hearing itself was “illegal” because it was supposed to be held in the county the board members are from. The Democratic board chairman agreed and voted with a Republican colleague to move the hearing to Surry County. A date has not yet been set. “The relocation to Surry County shows that this isn’t normal,” said Christopher A. Cooper, a professor specializing in North Carolina politics at Western Carolina University. “There isn’t a long history of examples of this sort of thing to lean on.”

A replica sheriff’s car from “The Andy Griffith Show” drives through downtown Mount Airy, North Carolina, in Surry County. (Cornell Watson for ProPublica)

Experts point out that efforts to hold local officials accountable for not certifying their elections have been of a patchwork nature across the nation. “I think states are trying to figure out what to do and are approaching it differently, like a prosecutor making a judgment on a case-by-case basis whether to bring a case or not,” said Derek T. Muller, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law who has researched legal options for ensuring that local officials certify elections. “States need to figure out how to bring these cases in a fair, consistent and lawful way.”

In Cochise County, a rural part of Arizona on the Mexican border, a pair of county supervisors refused to certify their November 2022 results despite state officials warning them multiple times that doing so would be illegal under state law. In early December, a court ordered them to certify, but one supervisor, Tom Crosby, still skipped the vote.

The next day, the state elections director, at the urging of a former Republican Arizona attorney general, sent a letter to the state attorney general referring the supervisors for criminal investigation, arguing that they had committed “potential violations of Arizona law.” The letter concluded, “This blatant act of defying Arizona’s election laws risks establishing a dangerous precedent that we must discourage” by taking “all necessary action to hold these public officers accountable.” A spokesperson for the Arizona Attorney General’s Office wrote that they “cannot confirm or deny any potential investigation” that may have resulted from the letter.

In January, a group of Cochise County voters launched a petition to recall Crosby. As of late February, it had approximately a quarter of the 6,000 signatures it would need by early May to result in a new election, according to Eric Suchodolski, the chairperson of a committee leading the effort. “It’s our best recourse as citizens,” he said. “I didn’t think the authorities would ultimately do something, and even if they did, it can take awhile.”

In response to a request for comment, Crosby said: “If I get into defending myself it will never end. I’ve already answered all this stuff.” In the past, he has disputed the validity of the certification of the county’s voting machines, despite assurances from the state.

While in North Carolina and Arizona there are ongoing efforts to hold accountable local officials who didn’t certify their elections, Nevada and New Mexico decided not to pursue such efforts.

In Nevada, one Republican commissioner in Washoe County and another in Nye County refused to certify, though in both cases the other four commissioners outvoted them. A spokesperson for the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office said that “our office is not aware of any legal consequences for that action” by the commissioners.

In Otero County, New Mexico, the county’s three commissioners initially voted unanimously against certifying the June 2022 primary elections. This followed months of disputes about election security driven by conservative activists who also fueled protests in Surry County.

New Mexico law requires commissioners to approve election results unless they can point to specific problems. The Otero commissioners only raised debunked concerns about hacked voting machines, with one of the officials, Couy Griffin, referencing his “gut feeling.” The New Mexico secretary of state subsequently asked the state’s Supreme Court to step in, and it ordered the commissioners to certify. The secretary of state also sent a letter to the state’s attorney general notifying him of “multiple unlawful actions by the Otero County Commission” and asked for “a prompt investigation.” Faced with this, two of the commissioners switched their votes, certifying the election. Griffin did not. (In Sandoval County, on the other side of the state, one commissioner voted against certification, though the four others on the panel outvoted him.)

Griffin did not respond to a request for comment.

The New Mexico Secretary of State’s Office decided not to further pursue “punitive action” against the officials who did not certify, according to Alex Curtas, its communications director, because “our concern was getting the election certified, so that’s where that ended.”

“Once it became clear that we had that state Supreme Court precedent and this wasn’t really a widespread thing, just two hard-right commissioners, we felt comfortable that this wouldn’t be a major problem in the general election,” he said, “and in our perspective it became a bit of a moot point.”

Griffin eventually was subsequently removed from public office and banned from holding it by a judge’s order as part of sentencing for participating in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Part of the challenge for states seeking to crack down on officials who refuse to certify elections is that many of the laws that provide recourse were written more than a century ago. “We’re dealing with modern issues with very old statutes,” said Quinn Yeargain, a professor at the Widener University Commonwealth Law School in Pennsylvania.

Some states recently enacted new regulations. Last year, Colorado legislators passed the Election Security Act, which mandates that the secretary of state certify a county’s results if it misses the deadline to do so. In Michigan, voters passed a wide-ranging voter-protection ballot proposal in November that made certification a “ministerial, clerical, nondiscretionary duty.” This clause was in response to conservative members of a county canvassing board for Detroit refusing to certify the 2020 presidential election for a few hours, momentarily threatening to throw its certification into chaos.

Election legal experts note that holding local election officials accountable for voting against certifying elections will continue to be complicated. Muller, the Iowa law professor, favors what he calls the “least invasive process,” one that would allow courts to replace local officials who refuse to certify elections with other officials who would do their duty.

But he said any process that results in an official being forcibly replaced is likely to carry political risks, including the potential to abuse the system to disempower political opponents.

“We haven’t seen fallout from local election officials being removed yet, because these processes are just beginning,” Muller said. “But we could see that soon.”

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by Uriel J. García, The Texas Tribune, and Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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

Uvalde’s district attorney has joined the Texas Department of Public Safety in fighting the release of public records related to last year’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, arguing that all of the families who lost children want them withheld. But attorneys for a vast majority of the families are refuting that claim, saying that the information should be made public.

“These Uvalde families fundamentally deserve the opportunity to gain the most complete factual picture possible of what happened to their children,” wrote Brent Ryan Walker, one of the attorneys who represents the parents of 16 deceased children and one who survived, in a court affidavit filed Tuesday evening.

Numerous news organizations, including The Texas Tribune and ProPublica, are suing DPS for records that could provide a more complete picture of law enforcement’s response to the shooting, which left 19 students and two teachers dead in the border community.

The state’s top police agency has refused to release records, including incident reports, internal communications, ballistic reports and body-camera footage.

Last week, Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell supported DPS’ position in a court filing. Disclosing such records could jeopardize any criminal charges Mitchell may seek in response to an investigation by the Texas Rangers, her office wrote.

Mitchell did not respond to multiple requests for comment. She previously told the Tribune that “every adult that was in that building is going to be looked at,” including law enforcement officials. She has not clarified whether she plans to pursue prosecutions.

Attorneys for the coalition of news organizations argued that DPS is required to show how releasing records could harm its investigation. The agency, attorneys wrote, has not provided that explanation but instead asserted that Mitchell has “unlimited power” to unilaterally decide what information should be withheld. DPS officials did not respond to requests for comment.

“By claiming the possibility of a future prosecution (without even identifying potential charges), the District Attorney seeks to withhold from the public not just sensitive investigative materials, but every single piece of information that could shed light on the tragedy and the law enforcement response, including information about the deceased shooter,” the attorneys wrote.

In a court filing asking a judge to block the release of records, Mitchell’s office claimed that the families of every child who was killed shared her view.

“All of the families of the deceased children have stated to District Attorney Mitchell that they do not want the investigation of the Texas Rangers released until she has had ample time to review the case and present it to an Uvalde grand jury, if appropriate,” her office wrote.

At least two parents told ProPublica and the Tribune that Mitchell never asked for their input on the release of records. Separately, attorneys representing numerous families said they disagreed with Mitchell’s attempt to withhold the records related to the investigation.

“To date our attempts to gain information that these families should be entitled to receive from their government officials has been thwarted under the vague allegation of ongoing investigations. This attempt by Ms. Mitchell to intervene and prevent the release of this report is another example,” said Robert Paul Wilson, a lawyer representing the families of a teacher and a student killed in the shooting as well as children who survived.

Since the May 24 massacre at the elementary school, state and local officials have offered conflicting accounts of what happened. Gov. Greg Abbott initially praised the response, then said he was misled when authorities revealed that law enforcement waited more than an hour to confront the gunman.

Footage and records separately obtained by news organizations have helped to show the flawed law enforcement response and additional failures that further delayed emergency medical treatment.

Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old son, Uziyah Garcia, was killed during the shooting, said that he is torn on whether the records should be released, but that Mitchell had not reached out to him.

“She didn’t ask me, so she ain’t being factual,” Cross said.

He said his efforts to hold local officials accountable and to seek transparency have come, in part, as a result of journalists’ scrutiny of local officials’ actions after the shooting.

“At the same time, I don’t want anything to happen to jeopardize the case, but I also feel like she’s not going to do everything in her power to do this correctly,” he said.

Thomas Leatherbury, the director of the First Amendment Clinic and adjunct law professor at Southern Methodist University, said he has been disappointed by government officials’ efforts to avoid releasing public records related to the Uvalde shooting.

“It’s interesting to see the lengths that are gone to, to not be transparent, not let the public see the information and make up their own minds about the quality of the investigation and gain additional facts about an issue that was of such great public concern,” Leatherbury said.

by Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune, and Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica

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

This story is a collaboration between ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune.

The U.S. Department of Education has opened a civil rights investigation into a tiny Illinois school district for students with disabilities to determine whether children enrolled there have been denied an appropriate education because of the “practice of referring students to law enforcement for misbehaviors.”

The investigation was initiated Feb. 13, two months after ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune reported how the district, which operates a therapeutic day school for students with severe emotional and behavioral disabilities, turned to police to arrest students with stunning frequency.

An Education Department spokesperson said its Office for Civil Rights does not discuss details of open investigations. But in a five-page letter dated Feb. 24, federal investigators requested numerous records from the Four Rivers Special Education District, including details of every student discipline incident for the past two school years at Garrison School in Jacksonville.

For each incident in which police were summoned, investigators asked for the reason police got involved, an accounting of how much classroom time was missed and how that time was made up, and records of any communication with parents.

The district, which also provides special education services to students in nearby school districts, was given 15 days to respond and was directed not to destroy any records.

“I emphasize that at this time OCR has reached no conclusion as to whether the District has violated any law OCR enforces,” wrote Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department, in opening the case. Results of the department’s review “will have a direct and positive impact on students” at Four Rivers, she wrote.

In a letter to the school district director, the U.S. Department of Education requested all records related to student discipline incidents at the Garrison School from the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years. (Source: United States Department of Education)

In recent years, Garrison administrators called the police to report student misbehavior every other school day on average, the Tribune and ProPublica found. Staff members routinely asked to press charges against the children — some as young as 9 — and officers arrested them.

No other school district — not just in Illinois, but in the entire country — had a higher student arrest rate than Four Rivers, according to the most recent federal data that has been made public. That school year, 2017-18, half of all Garrison students were arrested. The school has fewer than 65 students in most years.

The Tribune-ProPublica investigation found that Garrison students had been arrested at least 100 times in the past five school years, including five students in the first 12 weeks of this school year. Officers typically handcuffed students and took them to the Jacksonville police station, where they were fingerprinted, photographed and placed in a holding cell.

There have been no student arrests since Nov. 15, when school administrators called police on a student who had spit at staff members. He was arrested for aggravated battery, records show. The next day, reporters visited the school for a board meeting and asked questions about Garrison’s approach to discipline, including its reliance on police. School officials said they had begun to make changes.

Guidelines for detaining children are posted above temporary evidence lockers in a room where the Jacksonville Police Department brings students after their arrest. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)

“I think it’s long overdue,” a parent named Lena said of the federal attention on Garrison. “I want some kind of change for that school and the students still in there. I want them to find out everything that was done; I want somebody held accountable for all the crap that people are put through there.”

One of Lena’s sons attended Garrison until September, when he was arrested at school and his parents decided to withdraw him. Her stepson was a student there in 2019 until she had him transferred to a private school. (When including the last name of a parent would identify the student — and in doing so create a publicly available record of the student’s arrest — ProPublica and the Tribune are referring to the parent by first name only.)

Although the civil rights office often launches investigations in response to a complaint, the Education Department said it initiated the Garrison case on its own.

“Probably from the media attention,” Four Rivers Director Tracey Fair told district board members at a meeting in late February when she briefed them on the investigation. A recording of the meeting was provided to ProPublica and the Tribune by Jacksonville news radio station WLDS.

Fair, who has overseen Four Rivers since July 2020, did not respond to reporters’ requests for comment. But she told the Tribune and ProPublica previously that administrators call police only when students are being physically aggressive or in response to “ongoing” misbehavior.

Records obtained by the news organizations, including 415 of the “police incident reports” that employees fill out every time they involve law enforcement, detailed instances when staff called police for a range of misbehavior, from disobedience to damaging a filing cabinet to shoving staff members. About half of the calls to police were for students who had run away from school, but those incidents rarely led to an arrest.

The school called police on a 12-year-old who was “running the halls, cussing staff” and on a student who broke a desk in the hallway after he was told he couldn’t use the restroom and left the classroom anyway, school records showed. Both students were arrested.

Education Department investigators are focused on whether school workers discipline students for behavior related to their disability — something explicitly prohibited by federal law — and fail to educate and support those students, according to the letter notifying Fair of the inquiry.

Investigators also asked for records detailing the reasons that students were transferred to

Garrison. Students, some of whom have autism, ADHD or other disorders in addition to their other disabilities, are supposed to stay at Garrison only long enough to get the skills and education they need to succeed, then transfer back to their home schools.

Concern about the students at Garrison has also prompted a separate inquiry by Equip for Equality, the federally appointed watchdog for people with disabilities in Illinois. In February, an attorney for the group sought the names and contact information of parents or guardians of Garrison School students, citing “probable cause to suspect educational neglect, i.e. that students with disabilities enrolled at Garrison School have been harmed by the school.”

The Equip for Equality letter, citing ProPublica and Tribune reporting, noted that the school had no curriculum for teaching social and emotional skills even though students are placed there because of their emotional and behavioral disabilities. It also referenced incidents that former students had described to reporters, including a teenager who reported being placed in a seclusion room for misbehavior and another student being denied access to the restroom.

After Four Rivers provided parents’ contact information to Equip for Equality, the organization mailed letters and flyers to current Garrison School families inviting them to reach out to an attorney with the group.

“We want to be able to help families and help the students get what they are entitled to. And we want to listen to what parents’ needs are and what students’ needs are,” said Olga Pribyl, vice president of the special education clinic at Equip for Equality. “We want to help them get back what they lost for educational opportunities for their children.”

The group’s efforts are focused on current Garrison students, but Pribyl said she also hopes to hear from former students who may have been denied educational services.

There have been signs of change at the small school. The Garrison principal, Denise Waggener, plans to resign effective June 30, and the school is looking to hire another social worker and behavior management specialist, board members were told at their meeting last month. Waggener did not respond to a request for comment.

The school added an “on call” social worker in November to respond quickly to classrooms when students are upset or struggling with their behavior. In the past, a “crisis team” of four aides would respond and could remove the student from class, sometimes putting them in a seclusion space or physically restraining them. Amy Haarmann, who is serving as co-principal until June, told the board the new social worker approach could “help us become a little more therapeutic.”

She said the number of crisis situations has decreased and no students have been arrested since the social worker was put on call. Jacksonville police have issued three municipal citations to students since Nov. 15, two for fighting and one for disorderly conduct, Jacksonville Police Chief Adam Mefford said Tuesday. Police were not called to the school at all in February, he said.

Other efforts to make the school more therapeutic and less punitive are being funded in part by a $635,000 federal grant through the Illinois State Board of Education. The grant is meant to fund training for staff to help students with their behavioral and mental health needs and reduce the reliance on punitive discipline.

Following the reporting by the Tribune and ProPublica, a team from the state board of education visited the school one day in December but did not mandate any changes. They confirmed an overreliance on police and said they plan to send a representative to monthly meetings with school leadership to discuss ways to help support students. The agency also connected school officials with education experts from universities in the state.

Michelle Prather, whose daughter Destiny graduated from Garrison in 2021, said she’s glad investigators are looking at the school. She said she believes an overhaul is needed.

“They need to shut it down or get new workers,” she said, for the sake of students. “I don’t feel like they get fair treatment and they’re actually learning. The teachers are not doing what they need to do.”

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by Beth Hundsdorfer, Capitol News Illinois, and Molly Parker, Lee Enterprises Midwest

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

Update, March 9, 2023: This story has been updated to include community reaction after the plan to make changes was released.

The Illinois Department of Human Services plans to dramatically reduce the number of patients with developmental disabilities who live at the embattled state-run Choate Mental Health and Developmental Center.

In an exclusive interview before an expected Wednesday announcement, IDHS Secretary Grace Hou outlined a “repurposing and restructuring” of Choate, located in rural Anna, about 120 miles southeast of St. Louis. That process will start with the relocation of 123 residents with developmental disabilities who entered the facility voluntarily — roughly half the current population.

In a separate interview with reporters, Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker said that IDHS has been working on improvements at Choate since he first took office in January 2019. But he said “it became clear, I would say certainly over the last year — and, in part, because of your reporting — that there were more significant changes that needed to be made.”

The announcement — which the governor’s office billed as a “transformational” behavioral health initiative in southern Illinois — comes after months of reporting by Capitol News Illinois, Lee Enterprises and ProPublica that detailed the beatings of patients, a concerted effort by some staff members to cover up abuse and serious neglect, the intimidation of employees who reported it and the attempt to coerce new employees into participating in the abuse or being silent about it. Local prosecutors have filed felony charges against at least 49 people, both residents and employees, since 2015, a review of court records by reporters showed.

Hou also said the reporting played into the timing of the announcement because it has “brought a lot of this to light and I think forced the conversation into the public discourse.”

The agency will help residents relocate from Choate, and it will give them two to three years to move, Hou said. She said some will likely move into state-supported centers and others will go to community settings.

IDHS will also develop a plan for an additional 112 residents with developmental disabilities who currently live in its so-called specialty units, Hou said. The group includes some people who were sent to Choate by a criminal court judge after they were found unfit to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity. Hou said that the state is likely to move a “significant portion” of those residents, but that the agency does not want to rush the decision before it is able to determine “what capacity we have to serve those individuals in a different setting.”

In the interviews and news release, Hou, IDHS and the governor’s office did not label their plans for Choate as a closure, and no layoffs were included in the announcement. The facility’s 49-bed psychiatric hospital will remain open and may expand, Hou said. They’ve tapped the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine to determine the best path forward for the institution.

The restructuring of Choate, she said, is part of a broader goal for Illinois to expand services for people with developmental disabilities who are receiving state funding and want to live in the community; the aim is ultimately to reduce the number of people living at its seven developmental centers.

Advocacy and legal organizations that represent people with disabilities have long criticized the state for its heavy reliance on large public and private institutions to house people with disabilities, and for its lack of adequate funding for community-based options such as group homes or supports to keep people at home with loved ones.

Spurred by a slew of lawsuits across the country, states have reduced the number of people with developmental disabilities in state-operated institutions by more than 90% over the past half century, according to a 2022 study by the University of Minnesota. As of 2018, only four states — Illinois, Texas, North Carolina and New Jersey — had 1,000 or more state-operated beds open, the Minnesota study found.

Closures of large institutions accelerated with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1999 Olmstead decision, which found it unconstitutional to segregate people with disabilities from the rest of society. Seventeen states no longer operate developmental centers at all, and others have dramatically reduced the number of beds they operate.

Illinois has shuttered some of its large institutions over the past two decades, but it has been slow to transition compared with other states. It houses more people with developmental disabilities in large institutions and spends more to operate those institutions relative to statewide personal income than almost every other state in the nation, according to a review of data compiled by researchers with the University of Kansas. The number of people, nearly 15,000, on its waitlist for community-based services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities is one of the largest in the country.

In addition, a 2005 lawsuit brought on behalf of residents living in large privately operated state-funded centers argued the state had failed to live up to the mandates of Olmstead. As a result, Illinois currently operates under the terms of a federal consent decree to ensure that people with developmental disabilities get sufficient support from the state in their homes and community settings.

Hou said this week that when Pritzker appointed her to lead IDHS after he took office in 2019, the state’s poor record was common knowledge. “I think all of us leaders knew that Illinois was a laggard as it relates to prioritizing community-based care,” she said.

But Hou said that back then, the provider network that serves people in the community was not in a place to handle a large influx of people. Then COVID-19 hit the following year, putting significant changes on hold. “We’ve taken the opportunity over the course of the past four years to build up the community-based system,” she said, including increasing pay for direct service professionals, the front-line caretakers.

Hou said the state has made significant new investments in its community-based system since Pritzker took office, but it has so far failed to make the improvements needed to bring the consent decree to a close.

Pritzker, who just won a second term, has faced numerous challenges with the large state agencies that provide social and human services. Advocates for people with disabilities have praised the administration’s expansion of services, but they argued it hasn’t been enough to correct decades-old problems. Pritzker said the budget crisis under his predecessor “hollowed out” social service agencies; the pandemic further caused a labor shortage, he said.

“Rebuilding takes time, and we’re proud of the progress that we’ve made so far,” he said.

The plan Hou put forth also signaled changes for all state-operated developmental centers, including safety enhancements, and expanding support for community-based living.

The agency also created a new position of chief resident safety officer to oversee security at all residential centers. Ryan Thomas, a former compliance officer for a Chicago community health organization, will fill that role. In addition, the agency announced it would be adding 10 investigators to its Office of Inspector General, which investigates allegations of patient maltreatment.

In an exclusive interview, IDHS Secretary Grace Hou, right, and Chief Resident Safety Officer Ryan Thomas discussed impending changes to the state’s system that serves developmentally disabled individuals. (Jerry Nowicki/Capitol News Illinois)

This week’s decision to repurpose Choate “advances the State’s commitment to equity and the civil rights of people with disabilities,” IDHS said in its news release about its planned announcement. “It also reflects the State’s legal duty to ensure residents with disabilities have a full opportunity to live in the least restrictive environment of their choosing.”

In its news release, IDHS noted that Choate had been heavily scrutinized by state and federal overseers, as well as Equip for Equality, a legal advocacy organization appointed to monitor conditions inside Choate, for at least the past 20 years.

In a 2005 report, Equip for Equality detailed cases of patient abuse and neglect, poor medical and mental health care and an excessive use of restraints; it said that an “archaic system” had resulted in “tragic consequences for people with disabilities.” A U.S. Justice Department investigation had similar findings in a report four years later. At the time, IDHS promised to improve conditions, but the news organizations’ reporting uncovered that strikingly similar patient mistreatment and poor care persisted long after the Justice Department closed its case in 2013.

Past governors have closed facilities, but Illinois has a poor record when it comes to ensuring that the community-based system has the proper oversight and staffing to provide safe care for those who move. In 2011, then-Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, announced plans to close several state-operated facilities under a plan he called a “rebalancing initiative.” Those included Jacksonville Developmental Center, about 35 miles southwest of the capital, Springfield, and the Warren G. Murray Developmental Center in the southern Illinois city of Centralia.

Some residents moved out of Murray, but ultimately it was not closed after parents, the union and local leaders opposed the plan and Quinn lost his reelection bid. Jacksonville was. Four years later, a Chicago Tribune investigation documented the state’s botched transition efforts, resulting in horrifying mistreatment and tragic deaths across the state.

Hou, in the interview, acknowledged the difficulty of closing facilities. “The one thing that is common throughout those closures is that it tears communities apart. And it pits people against each other,” she said, adding that it was her hope to avoid past mistakes.

Hou also said there would be no change in the administration at Choate. Bryant Davis, the facility manager, and Gary Goins, the quality manager, were both indicted by a Union County grand jury in 2021 on charges of felony official misconduct in connection with a patient abuse case. After the charges were issued, they were relieved of their duties at the facility. They pleaded not guilty, the charges were later dismissed and they returned to work.

“We’ve weighed a lot of different perspectives, but I think we need a leader who knows Choate inside and out, who has relationships with the residents and the parents and the staff to lead us through this challenging transition. I think to put someone new in there, I think would be very disruptive and even further unsettling,” Hou said.

After the announcement, families of Choate patients expressed concern that residents were being pushed out of stable homes, potentially to other placements far away in the state. And union leaders representing Choate employees expressed alarm at potential job losses.

Terri Bryant, a Republican from Murphysboro whose district neighbors Choate, called the plan shortsighted and said it lacked concrete details. In a call with reporters on Wednesday, she accused the governor of taking the “lazy-man’s route” to fixing safety and workforce issues raised in news reports. Other legislators took a more wait-and-see approach.

During a news conference on the day of the announcement, Pritzker told reporters that IDHS was making reforms to ensure patient safety, but “this is something that you can’t snap your fingers and fix.”

by Caroline Chen, photography by Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica

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This story discusses pregnancy loss.

Jocelyn knew only one way to live. Growing up next to the Manombo Special Reserve in southeast Madagascar, his family taught him from a young age to see the forest as a source of income. His grandfather had been a logger, cutting trees for timber and burning wood to make charcoal to sell. His grandfather taught his father, and his father taught him.

It was dangerous work. He risked landing in jail for illegal logging every time he ventured into the protected reserve. “I needed to feed my family,” recalled Jocelyn, who doesn’t use a surname; the vegetables he grew near his house weren’t enough. He also needed money for health care. Once, when his wife was pregnant and fell ill, he sold all of their plates and pans to pay for treatment at a government clinic. She wound up losing the baby anyway.

Then in 2019, Jocelyn went to a meeting that upended his life. Representatives from an American nonprofit, Health In Harmony, asked villagers who lived around the forest: “What do you need from the world as a thank you to continue to protect this precious rainforest that the health of our planet depends on?” The answers across 31 villages were consistent: health care, job alternatives and help growing food for their families.

Jocelyn’s wife, Falinety, holds Kristy as the family gathers for an evening meal.

The following year, representatives from each of those villages gathered in a soccer field to watch as their chiefs pressed inky thumbs onto paper, signing an agreement that affirmed their communities would stop encroaching on the forest. In return, Health In Harmony began providing affordable health care through mobile clinics and teaching residents how to grow more food and support themselves without cutting down more trees.

Founded in 2006 to save rainforests and combat climate change, Health In Harmony may have stumbled upon a way to help prevent the next pandemic.

Researchers have shown that deforestation can drive outbreaks by bringing people closer to wildlife, which can shed dangerous viruses. Scientists found these dynamics can explain several recent outbreaks of Ebola, including the largest one nearly a decade ago in Guinea, which scientists believe started after a toddler played in a tree that was home to a large colony of bats. The child may have touched something contaminated with saliva or waste from an infected bat, then put his hands in his mouth, inadvertently giving the virus a foothold.

The moment in which a virus jumps from an animal to a human is called spillover. Though we now know more than we ever have about why, where and how these events happen, global health authorities have failed to make preventing them a priority. Instead, they’ve focused resources on fighting outbreaks once they begin.

Many see stopping deforestation as an intractable problem that would eat up the scarce money set aside to combat pandemics. Experts convened at the request of the World Health Organization last year argued that the “almost endless list of interventions and safeguards” needed to stop spillover was like trying to “boil the ocean.”

But this Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit, with an annual budget of just $5.3 million for programs in three countries, is demonstrating how working creatively across health, agriculture and the environment may be the key to prevention.

First image: Dr. Andriantiana Tsirimanana, Madagascar program director for Health In Harmony, pays a visit to the village of Maharoroka. Second image: Dr. Néhémie Fiderantsoa Andrianasoloherilala discusses medication with a patient. Third image: Residents can pay for medications with cash or cups they weave from reeds. The nonprofit uses the cups to plant tree seedlings. First image: A young girl gets a finger prick to test for malaria. Second image: Tsirimanana gives advice about caring for children experiencing diarrhea.

The organization has managed to quantify its success at its pilot location in a rural part of Indonesia on the island of Borneo. With help from Stanford University researchers, Health In Harmony analyzed 10 years of patient records along with satellite images of the forest there, comparing 73 villages that signed its agreement to places that hadn’t. They estimated that the project averted 10.6 square miles of deforestation and achieved significant declines in malaria, tuberculosis, neglected tropical illnesses and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, even while the rates for some of these conditions increased in the surrounding region.

In 2019, Health In Harmony launched its program in Madagascar. An island nation off the southeast coast of mainland Africa, Madagascar is a biodiversity hot spot with hundreds of mammals and birds that can be found only there. Researchers say the extensive range of unique animals makes it a more likely place for a novel virus to emerge. Madagascar fruit bats, which roost in the Manombo reserve, can carry coronaviruses, filoviruses (the family of viruses that includes Ebola) and henipaviruses (the family that includes the brain-inflaming Nipah and Hendra viruses). Rats and fleas in parts of the country carry the bubonic plague.

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Madagascar was once known as the “green island,” but the lush areas of the Manombo reserve now are filled with holes cleared by loggers or people using trees to make charcoal. On the fringes, slash-and-burn farming has scarred the hillsides, sending red dust and gritty sand over the landscape when the dry-season winds blow.

But today Jocelyn walks in the reserve without his former trepidation. He works for Health In Harmony as a paid “forest guardian,” trekking barefoot through the reserve to collect seedlings and deter loggers, people harvesting wild yams and hunters poaching lemurs. His observations are used to grade the village three times a year. There’s a strong incentive not to break the rules: Fewer infringements earn villagers a deeper discount on testing, prenatal care and other health care services that the nonprofit provides.

“I have learned that the forest, humans and animals are interdependent,” Jocelyn said, “and if the forest is sick, then the animals will be sick, and animals will surely impact humans’ health too.”

Jocelyn works on a plot of farmland next to his house.

On a clear morning last October, 40 people were already waiting when Health In Harmony’s van pulled into Karimbelo, a coastal village of about 500 residents on the southern edge of the Manombo reserve. Some mothers stood with babies tied to their backs with brightly patterned cloth. An elderly woman, who was recovering from a broken hip, sat in a wheelbarrow that a young man pushed to a makeshift clinic set up by the van.

Before the nonprofit arrived, the only option for health care here was to walk three hours on hilly terrain to a government clinic that few could afford. Some villagers recall neighbors dying on the road on their way to seek care.

Now, two teams, each with a doctor and two midwives, visit 13 sites like this around the reserve on rotation so patients are seen in each location twice a month. Medicines cost substantially less than what they do in a government clinic, but most people choose to pay with an alternate currency: cups that they weave from reeds that grow next to their rice paddies. The cups piled up around the feet of Dr. Néhémie Fiderantsoa Andrianasoloherilana, an energetic 30-year-old who goes by “Dr. Dera”; he traded them for medicines that treat malaria, fevers and coughs.

Health In Harmony uses the cups to hold tree seedlings in its 11 nurseries. Villagers help the nonprofit plant 50,000 trees a year in an effort to reconnect gaps in the forest. The nonprofit’s programs in Madagascar, Indonesia and Brazil follow an approach known as “one health,” which posits that human health is intrinsically connected to the health of animals and the environment, and that to address one requires addressing the others. Dr. Dera has seen how slash-and-burn agriculture can harm people’s lungs and believes that rates of malaria and bubonic plague could be reduced if forests were left untouched.

First image: Jocia is employed by Health In Harmony to care for seedlings in a nursery. Second image: Trees grow in pots woven by residents. First image: The nonprofit planted native tree seedlings in a gap in the Manombo Special Reserve. Second image: Cédric Andriamananarivo, who leads reforestation efforts, crouches by young trees growing in that gap. Third image: Nelly Ranjemiarisoa, who works as a community liaison, spends time with residents at a Health In Harmony nursery.

Though Health In Harmony is based in the U.S., its staff is hired locally. Dr. Andriantiana Tsirimanana, its director in Madagascar, says his upbringing as a child of farmers made him particularly interested in working for the organization. He and his staff have worked to build trust with the local residents. When COVID-19 vaccines became available, conspiracy theories circulated and nobody showed up to get their shots. Tsirimanana rolled up his sleeve in public. Now about 70% of adults in the organization’s treatment area have received the vaccine, compared with 8% for the country as a whole, according to Health In Harmony.

There are limits to what the organization can do. As a primary care provider, it doesn’t pay for hospital visits. The nonprofit plans to seek government approval to treat tuberculosis, but it currently isn’t authorized to help those patients. When two sisters in Health In Harmony’s treatment area tested positive for TB, they had to go to a government clinic for treatment. Though the medicine would have been free, the clinic was a seven-hour walk away, and the women, both single mothers, couldn’t afford the bus fare for weekly visits for the six-month treatment period. They both died last year, leaving their mother to raise six grandchildren.

First image: Denise, who lost two daughters to tuberculosis, brought her grandson Jomel to the clinic to be tested for malaria. Second image: Habeloma walks through her village, Karimbelo, on the southern edge of the Manombo reserve. It is home to about 500 residents.

Still, more villages are eager to join Health In Harmony’s project. Some residents south of the Manombo region have been asking the group to expand, but so far, the team has had to decline. It’s too small to meet the needs of the larger area.

In addition to health care, a big draw is the nonprofit’s support of farmers. Hunger was driving villagers to scavenge and log in the forest. The nonprofit introduced new varieties of crops that allow farmers to grow sweet potatoes in three months rather than nine and to harvest rice two to three times a year rather than once every eight months. Trainers showed communities how to make fertilizer using a mix of dead plants and dung from zebu, a type of cattle. In one village, the organization replaced the leaky wood in an irrigation channel with concrete, a move that helped protect rice paddies during a severe drought last year.

Bruno, king of the village of Morafeno, originally was drawn to the nonprofit’s health care but has come to appreciate the agricultural programs even more as climate change has wreaked havoc. In the past, when there were no crops left to eat, he recalls neighbors foraging for wild yams and honey, often eating plants not meant for human consumption. “Many people died for nothing,” said Bruno, who uses one name.

There have been occasional setbacks. A pilot project to grow cash crops, including cloves and vanilla, was destroyed by a cyclone. While Bruno still worries about the ongoing drought, the farming improvements have convinced him his village will survive. “We are not afraid of hunger anymore,” he said.

Bruno, king of the village of Morafeno, has welcomed guidance on farming from Health In Harmony.

Watch video ➜

Health In Harmony has taught residents new ways to plant rice.

Watch video ➜

Health In Harmony is now planning a project to measure its ability to restore biodiversity, improve the health of people and wildlife and reduce the risk of spillover in Madagascar. Partnering with Zoo New England, Centre ValBio and researchers at four universities, Health In Harmony plans to document the diversity of regional wildlife; test rodents, bats, tenrecs and lemurs for pathogens; and track human diseases affected by the environment. In all, the researchers estimate a 10-year project will cost $8.9 million — more than 1.5 times the nonprofit’s annual budget across the countries in which it operates.

Raising that much money has been challenging in the siloed world of grant giving. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a statement like this from prospective funders: ‘We do health care. We don’t do conservation’ or ‘We do conservation. We don’t do health care,’” said Devika Agge, the organization’s chief development officer. “There are hundreds, potentially thousands, of grants that I can’t and don’t apply for because of our intersectional work.”

The other constraint is the limited number of years in typical grants. The nonprofit wants to help farmers plant cloves and coffee to sell, but it takes five years to grow coffee and seven to grow cloves — too long to show results for most grants.

In the world of scientific grants, three years of funding is considered solid. Five years is great. Beyond that, good luck.

For now, the Health In Harmony team in Madagascar says it is buoyed by the turnabout within the community, starting with people like Fanjanirina Pascaline Andrianandraina, or, as she prefers, “Madame Fanja.” The 56-year-old moved to the region two decades ago to join the timber industry. It was only when Health In Harmony arrived that she was forced to consider the destruction of her work.

She stopped logging and led women in her village to start their own tree nursery. They grow seedlings she sells to Health In Harmony for reforestation. And her green thumb has touched her home too. Potted plants surround the entrance, and pink bougainvillea flowers climb over her door.

When Madame Fanja looks at the Manombo reserve now, she is filled with regret. “I hope someday,” she said, “I can replace all the trees I have destroyed.”

Madame Fanja at her home in the village of Anivorano. She moved to the region two decades ago to join the timber industry, but she stopped logging and led women in her village to start their own tree nursery. .spillover-toc-wrapper{ width: 100%; display: block; } .spillover-kicker{ display: block; margin-left: 0; margin-top: 0; } .spillover-kicker h4, .toc-body .toc-hed h4, .toc-body .toc-block h4{ font-size: var(--scale-1); font-family: var(--fonts-sans); color: var(--warm-30); font-weight: 700; } .toc-body{ background-color: #312822; padding: 1.5em; } .toc-body .toc-hed{ display: block; border-bottom: 1px solid var(--warm-20); display: flex; flex-direction: row; } .toc-body .toc-hed h2{ font-size: var(--scale1); color: var(--warm-20); font-family: var(--fonts-sans); font-weight: 700; line-height: var(--line-height-1); } .toc-body .toc-hed h2.toc-hed-left{ text-align: left; flex: 1; } .toc-body .toc-hed h4.toc-hed-right{ text-align: right; flex: 1; align-self: end; } .toc-body .toc-hed h4 a, .toc-body .toc-block h3 a{ text-decoration: none; color: inherit!important; } .toc-body .toc-hed h4 a:hover, .toc-body .toc-hed h4 a:visited, .toc-body .toc-block h3 a:hover, .toc-body .toc-block h3 a:visited{ text-decoration: underline; cursor: pointer; } .toc-body .toc-block h3{ font-family: var(--fonts-hed); font-weight: 700; text-transform: none; letter-spacing: 0; font-size: var(--scale1); color: var(--warm-10); line-height: var(--line-height-2); } .toc-body .toc-block{ display: flex; flex-direction: row; padding: 1em 0 0.5em 0; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item{ flex: 1; width: 50%; gap: 1em; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper{ display: flex; flex-direction: row; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper .item{ flex: 1; width: 50%; gap: 1em; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper .item img{ width: 90%; margin-left: 0; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper .item.right{ border-right: 1px solid var(--warm-60); padding-right: var(--spacing1); } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper.left{ padding-left: var(--spacing1); } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper.just-read{ opacity: 0.5; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item p{ position: absolute; padding: 5px 7px 5px 7px; background-color: var(--warm-20); color: #312822; z-index: 100; font-size: var(--scale-2); font-family: var(--fonts-sans); font-weight: 700; } @media screen and (max-width: 60em){ .toc-body .toc-block{ flex-direction: column; column-gap: 1em; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item{ width: 100%; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper .item.right{ border: none; padding-right: 0; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper.left{ padding-left: 0; padding-top: var(--spacing1); border-top: 1px solid var(--warm-60); margin-top: var(--spacing1); } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item p{ margin-top: 4em; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper{ flex-direction: column; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper .item{ flex: 1; width: 100%; } .toc-body .toc-block .block-item .item-wrapper .item img{ width: 100%; padding-bottom: 10px; } .toc-body .toc-hed h2.toc-hed-left{ flex: 3; } } Read More From Our Series Roots of an Outbreak View All Part One On the Edge: The Next Deadly Pandemic is Just a Forest Clearing Away

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Part Two Seeding Hope: How Saving the Rainforests Could Prevent the Next Pandemic

Translation by Ndriha Nomena Taitsy and Amir Antoy. Photo editing by Peter DiCampo. Design and development by Anna Donlan.

by Jessica Miller, The Salt Lake Tribune

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

This story discusses sexual assault.

Ninety-four women whose sexual abuse lawsuit against a Utah OB-GYN was thrown out of court last year are celebrating a victory this month. But it’s a victory tinged with irony.

Last week, the Utah Legislature passed a bill that will — if signed by Gov. Spencer Cox — put their rallying cry into law: Sexual assault is not health care.

The change, however, will not help the women, whose case was dismissed because Utah judges and appellate courts have interpreted the state’s current law to mean sexual assaults by health care providers are considered part of medical treatment. That meant their allegations had to be filed under the more restrictive rules of the state medical malpractice act.

The new law would reform medical malpractice law to exclude sexual assault. It would not be retroactive, which leaves the women hoping that the Utah Supreme Court will reverse the dismissal of their case on appeal.

Still, Brooke, one of the women suing the OB-GYN, Dr. David Broadbent, said it felt like a victory that their case will change how future victims will be treated if they decide to sue their abuser in court. Brooke is using only her first name to protect her privacy.

“It just felt like we were really a part of this,” Brooke said. “I’m so glad that the legislative side of the law corrected this huge problem, fixing that gap in our legal system that 94 women essentially fell through. We’ll fill it in for future people in this situation.”

Brooke alleges that Broadbent groped her in December 2008 while she was hospitalized after experiencing complications with her first pregnancy. (Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune)

The bill’s passage follows a recent investigation by The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica, which detailed how survivors who had been sexually abused by health care workers were treated more harshly in Utah’s civil courts than those harmed in other settings. Their cases had to be filed within two years, and they faced a $450,000 cap on damages for pain and suffering in medical malpractice cases. Both those restrictions are now likely to be lifted, and those who allege sexual assault in medical settings have the same legal standing as those who allege abuse in other settings: no damages cap and a four-year filing deadline.

Limits on medical malpractice awards are routine around the country, initially in response to concerns — largely driven by insurance companies — that the cost of health care was rising in the 1970s because of frivolous lawsuits and “runaway juries” doling out multimillion-dollar payouts. But Utah’s insistence that victims of intentional assaults like sexual abuse face the same caps is far less common.

The women who sued Broadbent alleged that he inappropriately touched their breasts, vaginas and rectums, hurting them, without warning or explanation. Some said he used his bare hand, instead of a speculum or gloves, during exams; one woman alleged that she saw he had an erection while he was touching her. His actions were not medically necessary, the women allege, and were instead “performed for no other reason than his own sexual gratification.”

The OB-GYN’s attorney, Chris Nelson, has said they believe the allegations against Broadbent are without merit. He declined to comment further, saying they will present their case in court.

The new law doesn’t open an avenue for these women to refile their case. Their hope remains with the Utah Supreme Court, which has agreed to hear their appeal of District Judge Robert Lunnen’s ruling dismissing their case.

“Sexual Abuse Is Not Health Care”

In arguing for the new law in the House, bill co-sponsor Rep. Nelson Abbott said the shorter, two-year filing deadline for medical malpractice can be particularly difficult for those who have been sexually assaulted. An abuser may try to assure them that the inappropriate behavior was part of a medical treatment, he explained, and it can take time for the victim to understand they were sexually assaulted.

“I think we can all agree that sexual abuse is not health care,” Abbott said on the House floor. “To create extra burdens or difficulties is really not fair to the patient. I think that’s why we’re carving out those exceptions to try to help those patients in those difficult situations.”

Fixing the law was particularly urgent in Utah because of the broad way its medical malpractice law is written and how it has been interpreted by judges, said state Sen. Mike McKell, who co-sponsored the bill.

State Sen. Mike McKell presented a bill to the Senate in February that would give those who allege sexual assault in medical settings the same legal standing as those who allege abuse in other settings. (Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune)

Any acts “arising” out of health care are considered part of a practitioner’s treatment under Utah law, which means any related claims must be filed under the medical malpractice act. Judges and appellate courts have ruled, for example, that a teenage boy was receiving health care when he broke his leg while hiking in a wilderness therapy program, as was a woman who was allegedly groped during a chiropractic exam.

Both of those plaintiffs’ lawsuits were dismissed because they were not filed as medical malpractice claims.

McKell said he thinks Utah judges have interpreted the malpractice act incorrectly.

“We need to be careful when we draft legislation. Words like ‘arises out of’ create a broad interpretation,” he said. “I think it's tragic the way it happened.”

Patients sexually assaulted by health care providers face different challenges in other states. In Wisconsin, for example, an appellate court ruled that a physician groping a patient and having an erection was not medical malpractice. But there, the distinction hurt the victim’s case, because Wisconsin’s filing deadline for medical malpractice is longer than an intentional injury lawsuit. She lost her ability to sue.

Utah’s bill sailed through the state Legislature with little opposition. It received a unanimous vote in the Senate and only three nay votes in the House. The legislation had the support of the Utah Medical Association, which lobbies on behalf of state physicians, as well as an association of trial lawyers called the Utah Association for Justice.

Beau Burbidge, with the Utah Association of Justice, said he believed the legal challenges these women faced was an unintended consequence when the medical malpractice law was put into place decades ago.

McKell talks with personal injury attorney Beau Burbidge, center right, after the two presented McKell’s bill to a House committee on Feb. 28. (Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune)

“Nobody contemplated that a health care provider who sexually assaults a patient should be protected in some way by that act,” he said during a committee hearing. “The act is meant to protect health care providers providing good-for-the-community health care. Not rape. Not sexual assault.”

Broadbent’s accusers filed their lawsuit last year after one former patient, Stephanie Mateer, spoke out publicly about feeling violated during an examination more than a decade prior. She said Thursday that she “couldn’t be happier” that legislators took action in response to their lawsuit’s dismissal. The Salt Lake Tribune generally does not identify alleged sexual assault victims, but Mateer agreed to the use of her name.

“When I first spoke out about what happened to me, I had no idea that it would have such a massive and far-reaching impact,” Mateer said. “I never imagined that it would lead to the passing of this law, which increases the rights and safety of everyone receiving medical care in the state of Utah.”

Stephanie Mateer (Bethany Baker/The Salt Lake Tribune)

Brooke said she and the other women knew that the law change wouldn’t benefit them personally, but they wanted to advocate for it in hopes it could help prevent future abuse.

“It’s not about taking anyone down. It’s not about trying to win settlements,” she said. “It’s about trying to right a wrong that happened, whether that’s changing the law or through getting our justice in the courtroom. But that’s the goal that everyone is seeking.”

“Hiding Under White Coats”

Although he recognized that the plaintiffs suing Broadbent wouldn’t benefit from the new law, McKell, the Senate sponsor, said he did not write the bill to be retroactive because he worried the law could be found unconstitutional if it allowed older cases to be reopened.

The Utah Supreme Court in 2020 struck down a similar law that reopened a window of time where survivors of childhood sexual abuse could sue their abuser in civil court. Those victims previously had until they were 22 years old to sue.

The law, passed in 2016, was a recognition by state lawmakers that childhood sexual assault has long-lasting effects on victims and that it could take decades of healing before someone is ready to sue their abuser. But Utah's high court found it unconstitutional, saying that a filing deadline, called a statute of limitations, was a “vested right” of a defendant that state legislators could not take away.

The 94 women who sued Broadbent are now hoping that the Utah Supreme Court will reverse Lunnen’s ruling and allow them to continue their lawsuit against Broadbent and two hospitals where he had delivered babies and where some of the women say they were abused.

Adam Sorenson, the women’s attorney, argued in an appeal filed Thursday that Utah’s existing medical malpractice law was “not meant to advantage sexual predators hiding under white coats and specialty titles.”

“To think this is even a question, that is an issue being heavily debated, is shocking,” he wrote.

Attorney Adam Sorenson is representing the 94 women who sued Broadbent. (Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune)

Sorenson further argued that medical malpractice insurance policies often expressly exclude acts like sexual assault from its coverage, noting that Broadbent’s insurance carrier has also filed a lawsuit asking a judge to declare that his alleged actions are not covered by their insurance policy. It’s “nonsensical,” he wrote, to apply medical malpractice limitations to his clients simply because their alleged abuser is a health care provider.

Attorneys for Broadbent and the hospitals being sued now have a month to file their response. Sorenson estimates a Supreme Court decision won’t come until late fall.

Brooke said she lost hope in the legal system after the judge dismissed their case. Seeing the Legislature’s swift and nearly unanimous support to change the law because of their lawsuit has renewed her hope that the Utah Supreme Court will also take action and let their case move forward.

“I just never thought it would be questioned,” she said. “I never thought this would ever be the situation when I signed the paperwork and decided that this was something that I felt strongly that I needed to be involved in.”

Help ProPublica and The Salt Lake Tribune Investigate Sexual Assault in Utah

If you need to report or discuss a sexual assault in Utah, you can call the Rape and Sexual Assault Crisis Line at 801-736-4356. Those who live outside of Utah can reach the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673.

Mollie Simon of ProPublica contributed research.

by Jeremy Schwartz and Kiah Collier

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

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

Texas lawmakers are working to plug a gap in a 2009 law that was meant to keep people with a history of serious mental health issues from legally acquiring firearms.

Bipartisan legislation has been filed in the state House and Senate that would explicitly require courts to report information on involuntary mental health hospitalizations of juveniles age 16 and older after a ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigation revealed that they were being excluded from the national firearms background check system.

Under the current law, county and district clerks across the state are required to send information on court-ordered mental health hospitalizations to the Department of Public Safety. The state’s top law enforcement agency is charged with forwarding those records to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, known as NICS. Federally licensed dealers are required to check the system before they sell someone a firearm.

Elliott Naishtat, a former state lawmaker from Austin who authored the 2009 law, told the news organizations that he intended for it to apply to all Texans no matter their age. But following the May 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, the outlets discovered that local court clerks were not sharing that information for juveniles, either as a matter of policy or because they didn’t believe that they had to.

A bill by state Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston-area Republican, passed unanimously out of committee last week with bipartisan support.

The legislation aligns Texas with new federal reporting requirements and is “meant to make the background check more thorough and hence make our communities and schools safer,” Huffman at the committee hearing.

Congress passed gun reform legislation in June that includes a requirement that federal investigators check state databases for juvenile mental health records. But such checks would fail to reveal many court-ordered juvenile commitments in Texas because they are not currently being reported.

It’s impossible to say how many Texans with juvenile mental health records have been able to purchase firearms as adults. But the same month Congress passed the reforms, San Antonio police arrested a 19-year-old man who had been placed in mental health facilities twice when he was 16, his father told police. The man, who had recently purchased an AR-style rifle, considered the Uvalde gunman an “idol” and threatened to commit a mass shooting at an Amazon delivery station where he worked, according to an arrest affidavit.

Since the news organizations’ investigation, the Texas Judicial Council, which monitors and recommends reforms to the state judiciary, has called on lawmakers to clarify juvenile reporting requirements, concluding that there was widespread confusion about them.

Naishtat also reached out to current legislators to request that they file legislation to clarify the requirements after learning about the gap from ProPublica and the Tribune.

“I just want to get this fixed,” Naishtat said.

by Evan Robinson-Johnson for ProPublica

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

A former Lebanese diplomat sanctioned by U.S. authorities for allegedly funneling money to the terrorist group Hezbollah was arrested last week in Bucharest, Romania, and U.S. officials are seeking his extradition.

Mohammad Ibrahim Bazzi, 58, is accused by federal prosecutors of attempting to evade sanctions by trying to launder and move more than $800,000 from the United States to Lebanon, according to the Department of Justice.

Bazzi was one of 500 current or former diplomats identified last year in an investigation by ProPublica and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that revealed widespread abuses in a little-known and poorly regulated system of international diplomacy.

So-called honorary consuls work from their home countries to represent the interests of the foreign governments that appoint them. In exchange, the volunteer diplomats are afforded some of the same legal protections offered to career diplomats, including travel benefits and political connections unavailable to most private citizens.

The “Shadow Diplomats” investigation found that a number of consuls have stood accused of crimes or were embroiled in controversy — many while they held their posts. Thirty current and former honorary consuls have been sanctioned by the United States and other governments; nine have been linked to terrorist groups by law enforcement and governments, including Bazzi.

Bazzi was appointed honorary consul in Lebanon by the government of Gambia in 2005 under the regime of then-Gambian President Yahya Jammeh, according to court records. The Gambian government terminated his appointment in 2017.

A year later, the U.S. Treasury Department designated Bazzi a “global terrorist,” accusing the businessman of funneling money to Hezbollah, a militant group that has attacked U.S. service members, civilians and others in countries including Israel, Argentina and Iraq. The designation blocked Bazzi’s interests in domestic real estate and prohibited American citizens from conducting any business that would benefit him.

In 2019, Bazzi sought to overturn the U.S. sanction. In court records, he said the government failed to provide evidence that he had financed Hezbollah. The sanction is still in place.

Bazzi’s attorney could not be reached for comment.

In a three-count indictment unsealed last week in New York, Bazzi and a second man were charged with conspiring to launder money and to cause U.S. individuals to conduct unlawful transactions involving a global terrorist. Recorded communications revealed that the men proposed numerous strategies to move money, including transferring funds through a fake restaurant deal and a family loan scheme in Kuwait, according to the Justice Department.

“The defendants in this case attempted to provide continued financial assistance to [Hezbollah], a foreign terrorist organization responsible for death and destruction,” Daniel Kafafian, acting special agent in charge at the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New Jersey division, said in a statement.

John Marzulli, a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in New York’s Eastern District, declined to comment on Bazzi’s prior status as an honorary consul. Marzulli said he could not say when the men will arrive in the United States; the government is seeking extradition. Each count in the indictment carries up to 20 years in prison.

The Eastern District U.S. attorney, Breon Peace, said in a release: “Mohammad Bazzi thought that he could secretly move hundreds of thousands of dollars from the United States to Lebanon without detection by law enforcement.” This “arrest proves that Bazzi was wrong.”

Matthew Levitt, a counterrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Bazzi was especially skilled at finding ways to establish relationships with people in power.

“This is someone who is a player for senior Hezbollah operatives and senior Iranian leadership,” Levitt said. “His arrest and extradition is significant.”

Evan Robinson-Johnson is a student at Northwestern University's Medill Investigative Lab.

Debbie Cenziper contributed reporting.

by Mary Hudetz, ProPublica, and Graham Lee Brewer, NBC News

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

For decades, famed professor Tim White used a vast collection of human remains — bones sorted by body part and stored in wooden bins — to teach his anthropology students at the University of California, Berkeley.

White, a world-renowned expert on human evolution, said the collection was passed down through generations of anthropology professors before he started teaching with it in the late 1970s. It came with no records, he said. Most were not labeled at all or said only “lab.”

But that simple description masked a dark history, UC Berkeley administrators recently acknowledged. UC Berkeley conducted an analysis of the collection after White reported its contents in response to a university systemwide order in 2020 to search for human remains. Administrators disclosed to state officials in May that the analysis found the collection includes the remains of at least 95 people excavated from gravesites — many of them likely Native Americans from California, according to previously unreported documents obtained by ProPublica and NBC News.

The university’s disclosure was particularly painful because it involved a professor who many Indigenous people already viewed as a primary antagonist, according to interviews with tribal members.

UC Berkeley has long angered tribal nations with its handling of thousands of ancestral remains amassed during the university’s centurylong campaign of excavating Indigenous burial grounds.

.repat-intro-block .repat-tag h2{ color: var(--black); text-align: center; font-family: var(--fonts-sans); } .repat-intro-block{ background-color: #E1DCD0; padding: 1em; border-radius: 5px; } p a.intro-block-link{ text-decoration: none; color: var(--color-accent-70); font-weight: 700; } p a.intro-block-link:hover{ text-decoration: underline; } .repat-intro-block p{ font-size:var(--scale-1); font-family:var(--fonts-sans); line-height:var(--line-height-1); padding-top: 1em; } .repat-intro-block h6{ font-size: var(--scale-2); font-family: var(--fonts-sans); line-height: var(--line-height-1); color: var(--warm-60); padding-top: 1em; } .repat-tag{ display: block; position: relative; } .repat-tag h2{ font-size: var(--scale-1); text-align: center; padding-bottom: 1em; color: var(--warm-10); font-family: var(--fonts-sans); font-weight: 700; } The Repatriation Project A series investigating the return of Native American ancestral remains.

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More than three decades ago, Congress ordered museums, universities and government agencies that receive federal funding to publicly report any human remains in their collections that they believed to be Native American and then return them to tribal nations.

UC Berkeley has been slow to do so. The university estimates that it still holds the remains of 9,000 Indigenous people in the campus’ Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology — more than any other U.S. institution bound by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, according to a ProPublica analysis of federal data.

That tally does not include the remains that White reported and relinquished in 2020. For decades, White served as an expert adviser in the university’s repatriation decisions, sitting on committees that weighed whether to grant or deny tribes’ requests, according to a review of hundreds of pages of federal testimony and internal university documents.

White said the collection did not need to be reported under NAGPRA because there is no way to determine the origin of the bones — and therefore the law does not apply.

The collection has exposed deep rifts at UC Berkeley, pitting a prominent professor who said he’s done nothing wrong against university administrators who have apologized to tribes for not sharing information about the remains sooner.

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For tribes the episode follows a familiar pattern of UC Berkeley’s delays and failures to be transparent with them.

“This is a major moral, ethical and potentially legal violation,” said Laura Miranda, a member of the Pechanga Band of Indians and chair of the California Native American Heritage Commission. She made her comments at a July hearing held by the commission, which oversees the university system’s handling of Indigenous remains.

UC Berkeley officials declined interview requests, saying “tribes have asked us not to.” In a statement, the university said White was no longer involved in repatriation decisions. There is now a moratorium on using ancestral remains for teaching or research purposes, according to the statement. The Hearst Museum is currently closed to the public so that staff can prioritize repatriation.

The university also acknowledged that, in the past, UC Berkeley had “mishandled its repatriation responsibilities.”

“The campus privileged some kinds of scientific and scholarly evidence over tribal interests and evidence provided by tribes,” the university said in the statement.

University of California, Berkeley, anthropology professor Tim White holds a replica of a 1.7-million-year-old homo erectus skull in the National Research Centre on Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain. (Ricardo Ordóñez/Ediciones El País, 2022)

In an interview with ProPublica and NBC News, White said he’s been villainized for strictly adhering to the federal law, which he said requires balancing scientific proof with other evidence.

In the years immediately after Congress passed NAGPRA, UC Berkeley relied on White’s expertise as curator of the museum’s skeletal collection to challenge Indigenous people’s repatriation requests, according to testimony before a federal advisory committee.

Some tribal members accused him of demanding too high a burden of scientific proof for repatriations and discounting knowledge passed down through the generations. In the 1990s, he made headlines for fighting to use Native American remains as teaching tools, arguing that students should not be deprived of the opportunity to learn from them. He later sued to block the UC system from returning two sets of remains estimated to date from 9,000 years ago, saying they were too old to be linked to any living descendants.

NAGPRA does not require definitive scientific proof for repatriation, only that institutions report human remains that could potentially be Native American and consult with the affected tribal nations, said Sherry Hutt, an attorney who is a former program manager of the federal National NAGPRA Program. “It’s not a scientific standard. It’s a legal standard,” she said.

White often had the backing of university administrators in disputes over remains, but not anymore. At the July hearing before the California Native American Heritage Commission, UC Berkeley administrators cited an analysis by another anthropologist at the school, Sabrina Agarwal, that determined thousands of the bones in the collection were excavated from gravesites.

Given UC Berkeley’s legacy of raiding Native American graves, it is likely the collection White taught with contains the remains of Native Americans from what is currently California, said Linda Rugg, associate vice chancellor for research at the university.

“I want to apologize for the pain that we caused by holding on to this collection,” Rugg said at the hearing. “When we found out about it, we were dismayed ourselves.” A university spokesperson said staff and administrators are consulting with several tribes on next steps. Federal officials confirmed UC Berkeley has contacted them requesting guidance.

The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley (Justin Katigbak for ProPublica)

White, who retired last spring but is still a professor emeritus, said administrators knew about the collection, which was used to teach hundreds of students over the years. “It is very disappointing to find the Berkeley employees are making false allegations and misrepresentations,” he said.

Behind UC Berkeley’s reckoning is the centurylong saga about a powerful, progressive institution that is finally confronting its past. Isaac Bojorquez, chairman of the KaKoon Ta Ruk Band of Ohlone-Costanoan Indians of the Big Sur Rancheria, called for accountability for the newly reported remains, but also for UC Berkeley’s decadeslong delays and denials of other tribes’ repatriation requests.

“We want our ancestors,” he said. “They should have never been disturbed in the first place.”

A Painful History

With no documentation for the origin of his teaching collection, White surmised in a report to university officials in 2020 that it dated back to UC Berkeley’s early days and the university’s first anthropology professor, Alfred Louis Kroeber.

Kroeber, who joined the faculty in 1901, became a world-renowned scholar for his research on Native Americans in California, encouraging the excavations of Indigenous gravesites during his four-decade tenure.

His name recently was stripped from Berkeley’s anthropology building, in part for housing an Indigenous man found in the Sierra Foothills as a living exhibit at what would later become the Hearst Museum. Described as the last living member of his band of Yahi Indians, the man — whom Kroeber called “Ishi” — was studied and made to craft arrows and greet visitors for nearly five years, until his death in 1916.

Anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber with “Ishi,” the last known member of the Yahi tribe (Via website of University of California, San Francisco)

The Hearst Museum continued for decades to voraciously collect Native American remains and funerary objects, trying to assemble a collection to rival the British Museum and Harvard University, said historian Tony Platt, a distinguished affiliated scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society. “To be a great university you’ve got to acquire stuff, you’ve got to hoard massive amounts of things,” Platt said.

The vast majority of UC Berkeley’s collection of remains came from sacred ancestral sites in California, according to ProPublica’s analysis of federal data. The collection included ancestors of the Ohlone, the tribe whose land was seized by the federal government to fund public universities, including UC Berkeley.

The university eventually amassed the remains of about 11,600 Native Americans, stored in the basement beneath its gymnasium swimming pool and in other campus buildings. But Platt said that number is likely an undercount because museum records often counted multiple remains excavated from the same gravesite as one person.

A section in the 1878 University of California Register soliciting contributions to the school’s collections (Highlighting by ProPublica. Register of the University of California, 1878-79.)

In the early 1970s, Native American activists’ long-standing resistance to the grave robbing started gaining momentum amid protests that stealing from Native Americans’ burial sites in the name of science was a human rights violation.

By then, the teaching collection that anthropology professors used had grown to thousands of bones and teeth that White said in his report to university administrators had been commingled with others donated by amateur gravediggers, dentists, anatomists, physicians, law enforcement and biological supply companies.

The remains were unceremoniously sorted by body part so students could study them. A jumble of teeth. A drawer of clavicles. Separate bins for skulls. For decades, anthropologists added to the collection, used it in their classes and then passed it along to the professors who came after them, White said.

It was this collection that White started teaching with when he joined UC Berkeley’s anthropology faculty in 1977.

UC Berkeley hired White, then 27, soon after he had obtained his Ph.D. in biological anthropology from the University of Michigan. He already was collaborating with a team to analyze “Lucy,” a 3.2-million-year-old human ancestor.

White published articles in prestigious journals and co-authored a textbook, “Human Osteology,” that boasted of UC Berkeley’s collection of human remains and called ancient skeletons “ambassadors from the past.”

American anthropologists Donald C. Johanson, left, credited with discovering the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton “Lucy,” and White in 1979. (Johanson is not involved in the current controversy at Berkeley.) (Bettmann/Getty Images)

Congress passed NAGPRA in 1990, recognizing that human remains of any ancestry “must at all times be treated with dignity and respect.” As UC Berkeley prepared to comply with the new law, the campus museum appointed White curator of biological anthropology, overseeing the university’s collection of human remains.

Almost as soon as tribes started making claims to ancestral remains under NAGPRA, Indigenous people accused White of undermining their efforts to rebury their ancestors, according to a review of hundreds of pages of testimony before a federal review committee tasked with mediating NAGPRA disputes.

Since NAGPRA only applied to federally recognized tribal nations, many tribes in California were not entitled to seek repatriation. (Of the 183 tribes in the state, 68 still lack federal recognition, according to the Native American Heritage Commission.) UC Berkeley’s collection of remains included those of thousands of people designated as unavailable for repatriation because they came from tribes lacking federal recognition.

Recourse under the law was limited, leaving tribal nations to file formal challenges with the federal NAGPRA Review Committee, an advisory group whose members represent tribal, scientific and museum organizations. It can only offer recommendations in response to disputes.

In the first challenge following the passage of the law, in February 1993 the Hui Mālama I Nā Kūpuna O Hawai’i Nei, a Native Hawaiian organization, took a dispute over repatriation of two ancestral remains before the federal committee. The remains had been donated to UC Berkeley in 1935, at which time a museum curator classified them as Polynesian. White disagreed.

Addressing the committee, White introduced himself as “the individual who is responsible for the skeletal collections at Berkeley.” He argued the remains might not be Native Hawaiian and could belong to victims of shipwrecks, drownings or crimes. They should be preserved for study, he added, making an analogy to UC Berkeley’s library book collection, where historians access volumes for years as their understanding evolves.

Edward Halealoha Ayau, then the Native Hawaiian organization’s executive director, pounded his fists on the table in outrage. “We do not have cultural sensitivity to books. We did not descend from books,” he said, according to a transcript of the meeting.

Ancestral remains are not research material, Ayau said, they are people with whom he shares a connection — a perspective that is central to Native Hawaiian culture.

White recently said that his analogy comparing human remains to books was taken out of context. “Both hold information,” he said. “I was obviously speaking metaphorically.”

Instead of recommending that both ancestors’ remains be repatriated directly to the Hui Mālama, the committee advised UC Berkeley to return one of them and send the other to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu for analysis, Ayau said. There, researchers finally agreed that the remains were Native Hawaiian — but only after conducting a scientific analysis over Ayau’s objections.

“I just started crying,” Ayau, who now chairs the federal NAGPRA Review Committee, recalled in a recent interview. “We failed to prevent one more form of desecration.”

The Bishop Museum declined to comment on its role in the 1993 repatriation, saying it happened too long ago for anyone to have knowledge of it.

For Ayau, the experience left him with a sense of loss over the treatment of his ancestors.

“To have someone disturb them is really bad,” he said. “But then to have them steal them and then fight you to get them back is beyond horrific.”

Kalehua Caceres, left, and Edward Halealoha Ayau, former director of Hui Mālama I Nā Kūpuna O Hawai’i Nei, represent the Office of Hawiian Affairs at a ceremony to present the human remains from the collection of Germany’s Overseas Museum to a delegation from the state of Hawaii in 2022. (Sina Schuldt/picture alliance via Getty Images) “Berkeley Should Be Ashamed”

White’s fight to use a set of Native American remains he had borrowed from the Hearst Museum for teaching purposes made headlines in the 1990s after he clashed with then-museum director Rosemary Joyce. She said when she was hired in 1994, it was common practice for White and other museum curators with keys to borrow ancestral remains and belongings without documenting what they’d taken.

“Just leaving aside NAGPRA, as a museum anthropologist, that’s an unacceptable thing,” she told ProPublica and NBC News. “When materials are not in the physical control of the staff of the museum, you need legal documentation.”

She changed the locks on the museum’s storage space. Heeding requests from tribes, she tried to recall a museum collection of Native American remains that White kept on loan in his lab and used for teaching. White refused to return them.

The vice provost for research of the UC system sent Jay Stowsky, then the system’s director of research policy, to mediate the dispute between White and Joyce. Stowsky agreed with Joyce, calling the lack of controls at the museum “terrible.” He said human remains were “just sort of thrown into boxes” with a label on them. “Berkeley should be ashamed of itself on so many levels,” Stowsky, now a senior academic administrator at UC Berkeley, said in a recent interview.

Drawers in the “Osteology Teaching Collection,” as depicted in a report that White wrote and sent to the director of the Hearst Museum and others. (Via letter from Tim White, Aug. 28, 2020)

White filed a whistleblower complaint with the university in 1997 accusing the museum, under Joyce’s leadership, of seeking an unnecessary extension to NAGPRA’s reporting deadline. (Campus investigators found no improper activity, according to White.)

Joyce said she was simply trying to account for all the remains that would need to be reported under NAGPRA. “It’s really kind of insane to have to say, I did the thing that the law said I should do,” she told ProPublica and NBC News. Joyce said the complaints were found to be “meritless.”

White then filed an internal grievance against Joyce with the school’s Academic Senate, alleging that by asking him to relinquish the human remains she had infringed on his “academic privileges.”

The university brokered a deal: White could keep ancestral remains provided museum staff and tribes could access them to conduct inventory and report them under NAGPRA.

Joyce said the arrangement was untenable and she felt unsupported by the university’s leadership. White continued to teach with the remains.

A Decade After NAGPRA

Myra Masiel-Zamora, now an archaeologist for the Pechanga Band of Indians, enrolled in White’s osteology class more than 20 years ago when she was 18 and a first-year student. But, she said, she withdrew from the course after a teaching assistant told her the human remains belonged to Native Americans.

“That was the first time I really truly learned that an institution could and can — and is — using real Native American ancestors as teaching tools,” she said. “I was really upset.”

Concern over institutions’ handling of Indigenous remains extended beyond the classroom.

Troubled by the slow pace of repatriations under NAGPRA, California lawmakers passed their own version of the law in 2001, aiming to close loopholes in the federal statute and allow tribes to claim remains regardless of whether they have federal recognition. But the state failed to fund an oversight committee established by the bill.

In 2007, without consulting tribes or offering public explanation, UC Berkeley abruptly fired museum employees who were responsible for NAGPRA compliance, and named White and others to a newly formed campus repatriation committee, according to tribal leaders.

That upset tribal members, who brought their concerns about the new committee to state senators. The firings “eliminated the only staff at the university that would stand up to Mr. Tim White and his offensive remarks regarding Native American tribes and our ancestral remains,” Reno Franklin, then a council member and now the chairman of the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians, said during a 2008 state legislative hearing.

In emails sent to ProPublica and NBC News, White sought to discredit the testimony by Franklin and others at the hearing by saying that it had been the result of a decadeslong effort by the university to use him as a scapegoat for its failures. White said he only held an advisory role and did not make final repatriation decisions.

Thousands of Native American remains were used as research materials in the Anthropology and Art Practice Building at UC Berkeley. (Justin Katigbak for ProPublica)

Meanwhile, White’s career was skyrocketing after he led a team that discovered and excavated a 4.4-million-year-old hominid unearthed in Ethiopia. It was deemed the scientific breakthrough of the year in 2009 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and cemented his reputation in the field. It also landed him, along with the likes of Barack Obama and Steve Jobs, on Time magazine’s 2010 list of the world’s 100 most influential people.

Two years later, White and two other professors sued to block the repatriation of two 9,000-year-old skeletons to the Kumeyaay, 12 tribes whose homelands straddle the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego. White and the other professors wanted to study the remains, which had been unearthed in 1976 from the grounds of the chancellor’s house on the University of California, San Diego, campus.

They argued that there wasn’t enough evidence to support the Kumeyaay’s ancestral connection to the remains, and that the UC system had failed to prove that the remains could legally be considered “Native American.” Based on the professors’ interpretation of the law, human remains had to have a cultural or biological link to a present-day tribe to be considered Native American.

They said that not allowing them to study the remains violated their rights as researchers. An appeals court ruled against the professors, citing the Kumeyaay’s sovereign immunity, meaning they couldn’t be sued.

As tribes’ frustration with the lack of progress on repatriations grew, UC Berkeley convened a “tribal forum” in 2017. In the private gathering, tribal leaders and others expressed anger that university staff, including White, had resisted their requests to repatriate and that the university was requiring an excessive amount of proof to reclaim ancestors, according to an internal university report.

The following year, UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ disbanded the campus’ NAGPRA committee that White had served on, records show. The university established a new one that did not include him.

Meanwhile, Berkeley prepared for its biggest repatriation to date: the return of more than 1,400 ancestors to the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, a small tribe whose ancestors’ remains were excavated from burial grounds along California’s coast and Channel Islands. According to the school’s NAGPRA inventory records, many of the remains had been taken by an archaeologist in 1901 whose expeditions were funded by Phoebe Apperson Hearst, wife of mining magnate George Hearst and namesake of UC Berkeley’s anthropology museum.

UC Berkeley held on to the Chumash remains and loaned some to White for research projects, before returning them to the tribe in the summer of 2018.

When the repatriation day finally came, Nakia Zavalla and other tribal members drove 300 miles to campus and entered a backroom of the anthropology building where UC Berkeley stored their ancestors.

“Going into that facility for the first time was horrifying. Literally shelves of human remains,” said Zavalla, the tribe’s cultural director. “And you pull them out, and there’s ancestors mixed all together, sometimes just all femur bones, a tray full of skulls.”

Nakia Zavalla, cultural director of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, said the tribe had to bring its own cardboard boxes when retrieving repatriated remains. (Alejandra Rubio for NBC and ProPublica)

Zavalla said tribal members had to bring their own cardboard boxes to carry their ancestors home for burial — a complaint other tribal nations have made in dealing with the university. UC Berkeley officials said they were unaware of Zavalla’s “disturbing account” but have changed their policies to ensure they provide assistance “as requested by Tribes.”

Zavalla said the visit highlighted how the university had deprived the tribe of more than ancestral remains, she said. The university housed recordings and items that ethnographers and anthropologists had previously collected from Chumash elders.

For Zavalla, the information could have benefited her and other tribal members’ efforts to revitalize the Santa Ynez Chumash’s language and traditions — which government policies once sought to eradicate. But the information was not freely shared, she said: “They stole those items.”

The Chumash reservation is in California’s Santa Ynez Valley. (Alejandra Rubio for NBC and ProPublica) “They Need to Go Home”

California state lawmakers passed a bill in 2018 to expand the Native American Heritage Commission’s oversight of repatriation policies and compliance committees within the UC system. The legislation called for an audit of all UC campuses’ compliance with NAGPRA.

The following year, UC Berkeley finally barred the use of Native American remains for teaching or research, according to the university.

The state auditor’s office announced the results of its review in 2020, singling out UC Berkeley for making onerous demands of tribes claiming remains.

The auditor also noted that UC Berkeley had identified 180 missing artifacts or human remains. In a statement, UC Berkeley said staff had searched for the missing remains and artifacts, some of which had been lost for more than a century.

Soon after the audit, the UC president’s office called for all campuses to search departments that historically studied human remains for any that had not been previously reported.

In August 2020, White reported the contents of the collection he taught with to university administrators.

White told ProPublica and NBC News that given the lack of documentation, it would be impossible to determine if they were Native American, much less say which tribe they should be returned to.

“There’s nobody on this planet who can sit down and tell you what the cultural affiliation of this lower jaw is, or that lower jaw is. Nobody can do that,” he said.

The Native American Heritage Commission is continuing to press UC Berkeley for answers and accountability for its handling of the collection White reported.

Bojorquez, the tribal chairman and an NAHC commissioner, said it was “mind-blowing” that Berkeley still has not provided any documentation on the origins of the collection.

The university should have consulted tribes sooner, he said, to ensure the remains were handled respectfully and to help speed the repatriation process. “So much happened to these ancestors,” he said — they should not be in a box or on a shelf.

“They need to go home,” he said.

More Missing

Separate from the teaching collection that White reported in 2020, he also notified administrators that he’d discovered remains with museum labels stashed in gray bins in a teaching laboratory. They later were identified as the partial remains of six ancestors of the Santa Ynez Chumash that were supposed to have been repatriated in 2018.

When UC Berkeley finally informed the Chumash six months later, it felt like a “blow to the chest,” said Zavalla, the tribe’s cultural director. Zavalla and other tribal staff members drove to Berkeley to retrieve the remains.

“I felt lied to,” she said. “They did not give us all of the ancestors, and they didn’t do their due diligence.”

The discovery of the missing remains outraged Sam Cohen, an attorney for the tribe, who called for probes into whether UC Berkeley or White had violated policies or laws.

“He is considered untouchable, I think, by Berkeley because he’s so famous in human evolution,” Cohen said of White. “He basically wasn’t going to voluntarily comply with anything until he was forced.”

White said he was unsure how the remains ended up in the teaching laboratory. He suggested they may have been mistakenly placed in his lab during a move years ago while he was overseas. He provided ProPublica and NBC News with a copy of an email from an investigator with UC Berkeley's Office of Risk and Compliance Services, which said the office found no violation on his part regarding the Chumash remains. UC Berkeley declined to comment on the outcome of the investigation, calling it a personnel matter.

“I have accounted for everything that happened in granular detail,” White said in an interview.

Chancellor Christ apologized to the tribe in December in a letter and acknowledged: “We do understand that, given our history, it is difficult for tribes to have confidence in our university and Professor White.”

The apology was little consolation, Cohen said, especially since it came with yet another painful acknowledgement. University records show there are still more unreturned Chumash ancestors. So far, they have yet to be found.

Christ assured the Chumash that the university was committed to returning all Native American ancestors to all tribes. UC Berkeley officials estimate it will be at least a decade before that happens.

Alex Mierjeski contributed research. Ash Ngu contributed data analysis.

Correction

March 5, 2023: A photo caption with this story originally misstated the positions of Kalehua Caceres and Edward Halealoha Ayau. Caceres was representing the Office of Hawaiian Affairs but is not an employee. Ayau is the former director of Hui Mālama I Nā Kūpuna O Hawai’i Nei, not its current executive director.