Last month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott repeated a claim he’s made for the past five years. He stated that the number of people crossing the Texas-Mexico border illegally “posed an ongoing and imminent threat” across the state. In doing so, he renewed a border security disaster proclamation that has greatly expanded his powers without going through the state Legislature.

Abbott’s declaration stands in sharp contrast to the numbers reported by the Trump administration, which says the drop in the flow of migrants crossing the border has been unprecedented and has reached historic lows since it took over in January 2025. 

Yet, since Abbott first declared an emergency at the border during the Biden administration in 2021, he’s renewed or amended the proclamation at least 69 times — 21 of those during Trump’s tenure. 

The Republican governor, who is running for his fourth term next month, has consolidated power like no Texas governor before him, building on his predecessors’ efforts to strengthen what by design is supposed to be a “weak governor” state as the constitution limits what can be done without legislative approval, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have reported. One of the methods he’s used to do that is issuing executive orders and disaster declarations that allow him to shift funds, suspend regulations and award no-bid contracts at times of emergency. 

Since January 2025, two of the top agencies involved with border enforcement — the Department of Public Safety and the Texas Military Department — have awarded more than $5 million in noncompetitive contracts citing the emergency for items like a Ford F-150, rifles and apartments, state records show.

“I think it’s unprecedented,” said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “I don’t think that there is a similar example, certainly not as to the length of the emergency, and certainly not after the emergency has seemed to pass.” 

Abbott’s office did not respond to specific questions for this story, including about the noncompetitive contracts, but Deputy Press Secretary Madeline Waschak said in a written statement that the governor has been clear that border security is an ongoing priority.

“The damage caused by four years of failed border policies under Democrat rule did not disappear overnight, and the progress we have made will not sustain itself without continued vigilance,” she wrote.

“Securing the border requires constant, deliberate action to combat illegal crossings, cartel smuggling, fentanyl trafficking, and other criminal activity that threatens public safety in Texas. Governor Abbott will ensure the tools remain in place to safeguard our state as we work alongside the Trump Administration to deter, arrest, detain, and deport illegal immigrants,” she added.

At the time of Abbott’s first border declaration, four months into President Joe Biden’s term, Border Patrol was making more than 180,000 apprehensions along the southwest border in a single month. According to Abbott, the federal government’s inability or unwillingness to enforce immigration laws had created a humanitarian crisis in many communities in Texas. 

“The Biden Administration’s open-border policies have enabled escalating violence from the cartels, dramatically increased the risk of human trafficking, and created a severe crisis of illegal drugs crossing into the United States,” the order stated.

Since then, apprehensions along the southwest border have dropped on average to about 8,000 a month this year. 

The border security declaration remains Abbott’s longest continuously running emergency proclamation. Abbott similarly renewed his 2020 COVID-19 disaster declaration for three years, even as he downplayed the severity of the pandemic. 

“This is the quiet power of the governor,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston. “It’s not something often that they brag about because the more that it becomes a political issue, the more that there might be some contestation of it.”

Other than border security, the governor’s second longest-running emergency declaration is related to droughts. He declared a state disaster in July 2022 and within days amended it bringing the total of counties to 189. He’s continued to renew it, but now it applies to about a third of the counties originally identified.

State lawmakers have repeatedly tried — and failed — to curb the governor’s powers under the state’s disaster act. Last year, legislators from both parties filed at least a handful of measures that would mandate Abbott get approval from the Legislature if he wanted to extend a disaster declaration, but none passed. 

Abbott’s emergency declarations have been accompanied by record spending on border security efforts. Texas budgeted over $11 billion during the Biden administration and allotted an additional $3 billion last year, after Trump took office. 

It’s all part of Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, an initiative he launched in March 2021 contending it was needed to stem the smuggling of drugs and people into the country through Texas. Because of the emergency declaration, police could charge immigrants with criminal trespassing for crossing the border through private property, and the governor was able to shift money from other agencies to fund the operation and build border barriers, deploy the National Guard and get help from other states. 

Much of the funding for Operation Lone Star is funneled through the Texas Military Department and DPS, two of the agencies responsible for major enforcement efforts. But the governor’s share of border spending has also ballooned since Abbott took office over a decade ago. State lawmakers allotted his office nearly $230 million last year to distribute through grants, largely to local prosecutors and government agencies helping the state with Operation Lone Star.

Though the situation on the ground has changed, one aspect of the emergency declaration has remained constant: the ability of state agencies to award noncompetitive contracts. 

DPS and the Texas Military Department have awarded at least six noncompetitive contracts so far during the second Trump administration for work related to the operation where they cite an emergency. This includes a more than $2 million contract to Texas-based CTC Gunworks LLC for rifles and pistols for active-duty personnel. CTC Gunworks officials could not be reached for comment. 

Officials with the Texas Military Department referred questions about its procurement process to the governor’s office. A DPS spokesperson said in a written statement that even though the disaster declaration allows for expedited purchases, the department still follows best practices and “aims to select vendors offering the best value, determined by cost, quality, and ability to meet the specific disaster response requirements.” 

Regarding the specific contracts, the DPS spokesperson said they were purchases tied to existing state contracts.

The continued funding and expansion of Operation Lone Star has come even as it’s been plagued with problems. In 2022, an investigation by ProPublica, the Tribune and The Marshall Project found that the state’s reported success included arrests unrelated to the border or immigration and counted drug seizures made by troopers from across the state who were not directly assigned to the operation. The Tribune and Army Times also exposed poor working conditions, pay delays and suicides among National Guard members deployed as part of Operation Lone Star.

During a Tribune-hosted event this week with state lawmakers from El Paso, Democratic state Rep. Mary González, vice chair of the Appropriations Committee, said state legislators have already started to scale back when it comes to border funding and there’s interest from both sides of the aisle to continue to do so in the upcoming legislative session.

“I think that the problem is that some of that border security money still lies in the governor’s office which has no checks and balances and because we are still under an emergency — which is not an emergency anymore — an emergency border security statement which he can just use that money, you have seen some questionable appropriations under the veil of border security,” she said.

Abbott, however, has repeatedly said that Texas’ work in securing the border is not over.

“We must secure the border not just for the next two years of the Trump administration, but we gotta do it forever,” Abbott said at a press conference in early October where he discussed the federal government’s $7.5 billion reimbursement for border security expenses the state had incurred. 

Rottinghaus said that Texas will always have to confront border crossings and drug trafficking, but the existence of those problems don’t always justify an emergency declaration. 

“Even someone who strongly supports the governor’s board of policies might ask whether they want a future governor of the opposite party using the same interpretation of emergency authority for years,” Rottinghaus said, adding that the issue is that “governors, once they get a power, are hesitant to give it back.”

The post Trump Says the Border Is Secure. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Keeps Declaring an Emergency. appeared first on ProPublica.

Some 86 years ago, Missouri voters enshrined a system for selecting top judges that would remove political influence from the courts. And almost immediately, it came under attack.

Under what has come to be known as the Missouri Plan, lawyers help choose a slate of three candidates from which the governor must make an appointment for the state Supreme Court, appeals courts and, in some populous areas, the circuit courts. 

In the first years after adoption, it faced pushback from party bosses who had historically used judicial seats for political patronage. They said it gave too much power to the lawyers. Voters, though, decisively defeated a repeal measure in 1942. 

More recently, the conservative activist Leonard Leo, who viewed Missouri as a crucial battleground, tried in 2007 to persuade Republican Gov. Matt Blunt to reject a slate of Supreme Court candidates — part of a broader effort to weaken a judicial selection system that had become a model for some two dozen states around the country. 

Blunt resisted and picked one of the three judges from the approved slate. 

Then, in 2012, GOP lawmakers put a proposed overhaul before voters that, if approved, would have given the governor more control. Voters, by a 3-to-1 margin, turned back the plan.

Now the attacks are back, driven by a new grievance. 

At President Donald Trump’s behest, Republican lawmakers redrew the state’s congressional map in a mid-decade gerrymander. The goal: to give the GOP a shot at winning seven of Missouri’s congressional seats, instead of the six it now holds.

But voters gathered enough signatures to force a referendum on the map and put it on hold. While Secretary of State Denny Hoskins tried to keep the referendum off the ballot, the Missouri Supreme Court overruled him. It ordered the old map restored until voters decide on the new one. 

Hoskins, citing a federal court ruling that contradicted the state’s highest court, directed officials to use the new map anyway, prompting Chief Justice Brent Powell to demand that Hoskins appear in court to show why he shouldn’t be held in contempt.

Fourteen Republican lawmakers responded by threatening to impeach “responsible members of this Court” for “willful neglect of duty, incompetency and misconduct” if the justices held Hoskins in contempt; the court did so anyway. Hoskins backed down and instructed local election officials to distribute ballots using the old map; the justices decided not to have him arrested.

The drama played out as Republicans in Missouri and elected officials nationwide have sought to weaken institutions that limit their power. In North Carolina, the Republican-dominated General Assembly stripped authority from Democratic governors. In Wisconsin, Republicans threatened to impeach a newly elected Supreme Court justice to protect gerrymandered maps. And in New York, Democrats bypassed an independent commission to pass a gerrymander that favored them, but the state’s highest court struck it down.

Rather than electing top judges, as Illinois does, or giving the governor primary responsibility for choosing them, like California, Missouri selects its appellate and Supreme Court judges through a commission made up of three lawyers, one elected by lawyers in each appellate district; three non-lawyers appointed by the governor, one from each district; and a state Supreme Court judge selected by the court. After they are appointed, judges face a retention vote at the first general election after completing one year in office, then every 12 years, with voters deciding whether they keep their positions.

In response to the controversy, a number of Missouri Republicans have attacked the system. U.S. Rep. Jason Smith called for the state to switch to electing its Supreme Court judges. Republican Party executive director Miles Ross declared on X, “The Missouri Plan is done.” Dan Seitz, chief of staff to Sen. Brad Hudson, called for replacing it with a system in which the governor could nominate judges directly, subject to Senate confirmation.

State Rep. Cathy Jo Loy, a Carthage Republican who has introduced legislation in each of the past two sessions to replace the Missouri Plan with gubernatorial appointment and Senate confirmation, said she intends to file a new proposal Dec. 1, the first day lawmakers can file bills for next year’s session. Loy said her opposition to the system predates the recent clashes with the Supreme Court. But she acknowledged that those defeats could give the proposal new momentum.

“There will probably be more appetite because there are several senators that feel the same way,” she said.

Republicans, who hold every statewide elected office, supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature and six of the state’s eight congressional seats, seem to have suddenly found the limits of their power. At the ballot box, voters have overwhelmingly rejected major pieces of the party’s agenda, including an effort to weaken their power to bypass the legislature by amending the constitution or putting laws passed by lawmakers to a statewide vote. 

Time and again, when elected officials have sought to limit voters’ use of the ballot initiative, the courts have protected voters’ use of direct democracy. Courts repeatedly rewrote ballot summaries prepared by Republican state officials that they found unfair or misleading, including language describing the initiative that ultimately established abortion rights in 2024.

By the end of that year, after the Missouri Supreme Court rejected a last-minute effort by Republican lawmakers and anti-abortion activists to keep the abortion measure off the ballot, Senate President Pro Tem Cindy O’Laughlin was calling to repeal the Missouri Plan. She proposed replacing the system for selecting Supreme Court and appellate judges with a nonpartisan election. But her bill stalled in committee.

Then came Hoskins. The former state representative and senator from west-central Missouri took office as secretary of state in January 2025 and brought a more combative approach to overseeing elections and ballot measures. Hoskins made a bright-red sport coat his sartorial trademark, often posing with a wood baseball bat and speaking about politics as a series of battles and himself as a conservative warrior. 

Hoskins didn’t respond to questions sent to his office. He has previously said that he disagreed with any suggestion that he and Republican leaders were defying the will of voters. He hasn’t publicly called for changing how Missouri selects Supreme Court judges, but his office’s official X social media account reposted Smith’s message calling for the end of the Missouri Plan.

Gov. Mike Kehoe also complained, saying in a post on X that “unelected judges” have shown a “lack of respect for the legislative process.” On a radio show the next day, Kehoe acknowledged that changing how judges are selected hadn’t even been on his radar before the ruling.

“But I think it’s definitely something a lot of people are going to start asking about,” he said. “And I’m not sure the judges across our state, whether Supreme Court or other judges, really wanted that on people’s radar screen.”

Kehoe’s office said it would not respond to questions from ProPublica.

Although some Republicans have derided the state Supreme Court as being a bastion of liberal activists, five of the Supreme Court’s seven judges were appointed by Republican governors. Among them is Powell, whom the then-chair of the state GOP hailed as a “good conservative” before Republican Gov. Eric Greitens selected him in 2017.

Powell, who also serves as chair of the judicial selection commission, declined to comment for this story. In remarks on Sept. 17 to the joint annual meeting of the Missouri Bar and the Judicial Conference of Missouri, he warned of “threats from those who seek to detract from the ideals of our republic and to undermine faith in our sacred institutions — including our legal profession and our courts.”

“It is incumbent on all of us as lawyers and judges to rise up and defend our constitutions and the rule of law,” he added.

Whether there’s enough support to repeal the Missouri Plan remains to be seen. Peverill Squire, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Missouri, said some of the bills that would eliminate the Missouri Plan might go to committee hearings, “but my guess is there probably won’t be enough appetite among enough Republicans to really want to put it on the ballot.”

Any change would ultimately have to be approved by the voters, something Loy acknowledged could be difficult after Republicans’ recent losses at the ballot box.

But the renewed calls have also mobilized the system’s longtime defenders. Ed Dowd, a former U.S. attorney who for two decades has helped lead the Citizens for Missouri Courts, a campaign that advocates for preserving the Missouri Plan, said the group has historically become most active when the system is under threat. 

Dowd’s St. Louis-based firm, Dowd Bennett, recently contributed $100,000 to the campaign.

“It’s something that we take very, very seriously and don’t want to take any chances on losing something that we have that works so well,” he said.

The post Frustrated by Losses in the Courts, Missouri Republicans Want to Change How Top Judges Are Selected appeared first on ProPublica.

They were victims, not abusers. That’s what they told police officers, attorneys, visitors and anyone else who would listen. It didn’t matter. The women were all taken to a sprawling immigration detention center in the woods of west Michigan and handed thin jumpsuits — red, to mark them as a high security risk.

Inside the North Lake Processing Center, they talked about the men whose calls to police landed them there. The boyfriends or husbands who threatened to get them deported and cut them off from their children. The men, or sometimes women, who hit them, pulled their hair or choked them, bruising their throats.

They didn’t know where to go for help before, but now, in the confines of a cold cellblock in a former prison, the women helped one another. If one spoke to somebody on the outside who could connect them with advice, legal aid or money for the commissary, she’d pass around a tablet used for calls so others could tell their stories.

Migladys Bermudez, an immigration attorney in southeast Michigan, remembers a call in May from a Peruvian woman detained at North Lake. Her name was Pilar, and she’d heard about Bermudez from a fellow detainee who had been a client. Pilar told Bermudez about the boyfriend she tried to escape before her arrest, when she used makeup to cover the marks she said he left on her face. But he had accused her of being the abuser, resulting in her arrest.

Pilar handed the tablet to a Cuban woman named Leya. Over the echoes of the other detainees’ chatter, she described how her boyfriend insulted her, isolated her and gave her a black eye. Then, after grabbing him by the arm during an argument, she was the one behind bars, separated from their nursing daughter. On video calls, the girl didn’t seem to recognize her mother anymore. She stopped calling her “Mamá.”

Bermudez was taken aback. All three women in that chain — the former client, Pilar and Leya — said they were trying to get out of abusive relationships when they were arrested by local police on domestic violence allegations. In all three cases, the charges were dropped or never filed at all. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained the first woman during a routine check-in a few months after her charges were dropped. The others were handed over to ICE by local officials. 

It’s long been intimidating for immigrants who suffered abuse to call 911, regardless of who was in the White House. They knew — and their abusers knew — that their immigration status made them vulnerable. But previous administrations treated victims as just that, people who needed help, not as targets for deportation. Bipartisan coalitions in Congress have long supported the Violence Against Women Act, which creates a pathway toward legal status for immigrants who are victims of domestic violence or other serious crimes.

Now, under President Donald Trump, all bets are off. On inauguration day, his administration rescinded guidelines that largely prevented immigration agents from making arrests at sensitive locations — including domestic violence shelters and hospitals. About a week later, the administration eliminated key protections granted to VAWA applicants and other crime victims. For the first time in decades, immigration authorities could disregard those protections and more freely arrest, detain and deport immigrant victims.

Life became more harrowing in other ways for immigrants who were victims of domestic violence. Federal immigration agents made arrests outside specialized domestic violence courts. And the administration persuaded more and more local police and jails to carry out the president’s mass deportation campaign, sweeping still more immigrants into custody. 

Even communities without these so-called 287(g) agreements are helping the government round people up. In west Michigan’s Kent County, where Pilar and Leya were arrested, the county jail turned over more immigrants to ICE in the first six months of 2026 than it did during the entire Biden administration.

Advocates across the country say they’re seeing signs of an alarming increase in the numbers of domestic violence victims who are detained and deported. And many immigrants are staying in abusive relationships, fearful of calling for help or even stepping outside their homes.

“It’s just probably the most dangerous time for immigrant women right now who are victims of domestic violence,” said Bermudez, who took on Leya’s immigration case.

The arrest and detention of domestic violence victims is, in part, an unanticipated consequence of an effort meant to keep them safe. In much of the country, law enforcement officers are encouraged — or even required — to make an arrest when they have probable cause to believe that a domestic violence assault has taken place. Sometimes victims are mistaken as the abuser and taken into custody. Then, if they’re immigrants, they can be turned over to ICE — even if they were never criminally charged.

There’s no comprehensive way to track how often this happens or how many domestic violence victims have been detained by ICE or deported. But ProPublica spoke with a half-dozen alleged victims who were locked up together in a single facility, North Lake, and reviewed police records about others who were there, too. Their stories offer a picture of why Congress created programs like VAWA in the first place, and what’s at stake when those guardrails are taken away. 

A coalition of immigrant survivors and advocates have sued the Trump administration, saying changes to how immigrant victims are treated not only undermined public safety, but also broke promises enshrined in federal law and policy.

“We were seeing our clients be more scared, be systematically targeted, be arrested, and deported very quickly,” said Kathleen Rivas, supervising attorney of the survivors team at Public Counsel, a law firm that’s involved in the litigation.

In May, a federal judge ordered the government to restore protections while the case played out. The Trump administration has appealed the order. 

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement that ICE is targeting the “worst of the worst.” The real story, she added, is the “American women whose lives have been taken by illegal alien criminals.” A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that “we will never apologize for deporting illegal aliens, because that’s how we save lives.”

But Leya, Pilar and other immigrants we interviewed have no criminal records. And advocates said communities are less safe now because immigrants are afraid to call police when their partners hurt them. This gives more ammunition to the threats of their abusers, said Casey Carter Swegman, director of public policy at the Tahirih Justice Center, a national nonprofit that advocates for immigrant survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking.

“Certainly more immigrant survivors are feeling like the violence and abuse they experience behind the closed door is somehow more tolerable than the violence and abuse they could experience if they tried to leave,” she said.

The first time her boyfriend’s fist slammed into her face was in July 2025, Leya recalled. They were living in Florida with his relatives. Only a month before, Leya gave birth to their daughter.

One night, she said, he heard her laugh in the kitchen with his mother and a man his mother was dating. Leya’s boyfriend flew into a jealous rage, she said, and punched her a few feet from their sleeping baby.

Leya called 911 but hung up when the operator answered. She was afraid of what might happen. She was 26; her boyfriend was a decade her senior. Leya, a recent immigrant from Cuba, had applied for status and was in active immigration proceedings. She said he was a permanent resident, with permission to work in the U.S. and better command of English. She felt trapped.

Sheriff’s deputies arrived and spoke with Leya and her boyfriend. They took photos of her puffy and bruised face, with the white of her left eye bright red. Her boyfriend said the injury occurred during an “argument,” according to the report, but he didn’t specify how. He was arrested on suspicion of domestic battery. 

Leya said her boyfriend’s mother threw her out that night. Unsure of where to go, she and her daughter moved in with another one of his relatives. Pursuing a criminal case felt daunting. She said his relatives urged her to drop the charges and reconcile with him. Eventually, she asked prosecutors to drop the charge because the battery took place in “a moment of impulse that he feels very sorry for,” records show. Her boyfriend didn’t enter a plea before the case was dismissed.

Like other immigrants interviewed for this story, Leya asked not to be fully identified because of her pending immigration case, and because she worries about repercussions for her and her daughter.

She and Pilar also asked that ProPublica not interview their alleged abusers because they’re afraid the men will interfere with their cases, hurt them or take away their children. To report their stories and get their partners’ perspective, we reviewed records from law enforcement, immigration court proceedings and habeas corpus petitions seeking their release from detention. We also interviewed attorneys, family and others who interacted with them.

Soon after the Florida arrest, Leya and her boyfriend moved to the city of Wyoming, Michigan, a suburb of Grand Rapids that’s a magnet for immigrants who come for jobs in manufacturing and food processing. The unpretentious city is dotted with temporary staffing agencies, money-wiring businesses and Mexican restaurants.

Leya said their relationship worsened. Her boyfriend pushed her, pulled her hair and broke her phone, she said. He made her delete her social media accounts and isolated her from friends and family. They fought about money and talked about breaking up. One night in April, during an argument, he called the police.

“I’m having problems with my wife,” he said in Spanish, according to a recording of the call. The operator asked if there had been any violence. “No, no, no. None,” he said. “Just a discussion.”

He told officers who came to their apartment complex that Leya got angry because he had talked to an ex-girlfriend, according to body camera footage and a police report. When he tried to leave, he said, Leya pushed him and grabbed his arm. Then she attempted to hang up his phone when he dialed 911. 

He said he wasn’t injured, though he accused her of hitting him several times a few days earlier.

Officers interviewed his brother, who mentioned the arrest in Florida, according to bodycam footage. “They had a cycle of problems where she called the police for abuse and he was detained for three days,” he said in Spanish. “My brother is trying to avoid having that happen again.”

The police report doesn’t mention the earlier arrest.

Footage of the interview with Leya was redacted due to state privacy laws, in part because she was interviewed inside their residence, unlike her boyfriend, who was interviewed outside. According to the police report, she “minimized” the argument and said there was no physical contact. She acknowledged trying to hang up the phone.

In an interview with ProPublica, Leya said they argued when she learned he sent money to his ex-girlfriend, who is the mother of his son. At the same time, she said, he had told her he couldn’t afford to buy diapers for their daughter. She said she has never hit him. 

Officers arrested Leya on suspicion of domestic assault and interfering with a 911 call. They didn’t arrest her boyfriend or seek charges against him. Leya said she didn’t tell officers she was a victim of abuse because she thought she’d be able to tell a judge.

She never got a chance.

The Wyoming Police Department’s written policy encourages officers to make an arrest in incidents involving domestic violence “when there is reasonable cause to believe an assault was committed.”

Arrests demonstrate that “violence in the home is recognized as a serious crime,” according to Michigan’s law enforcement training manual on domestic violence. This approach is common across the country. Twenty-four states require an arrest when there’s probable cause of a domestic assault.

But domestic violence scenes can be chaotic, with both partners accusing each other of being the aggressor. It can be difficult for officers to understand what happened, said Erin Ross, a former domestic violence prosecutor who works at the national nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice. Sometimes, the wrong person ends up in handcuffs.

“The complexity of DV situations can thus lead to survivors being criminalized by the very system meant to protect them,” Ross and her co-authors wrote in a 2025 report about the effects of arrests on domestic violence survivors. 

The Vera report doesn’t touch on immigration. But Ross and a dozen other domestic violence advocates across the country told ProPublica that immigrants who don’t speak English or understand their rights are, under the Trump administration, especially vulnerable to an arrest that can have irreversible consequences.

ProPublica reviewed hundreds of habeas corpus petitions filed nationwide since January 2025, in which immigrants challenged their ICE detention on constitutional grounds. We found dozens of petitioners who were arrested on suspicion of domestic violence and turned over to ICE, even though they were never charged or their charges were dropped. Using jail and police records from Florida and Michigan, as well as news reports, we identified even more cases.

In their petitions, several immigrants said that officers mistook them for the aggressor. The underlying arrest records show that officers often had to make close calls in messy cases where it was unclear who was the victim and who was the aggressor. Either way, under Trump, there’s little grace for immigrants. 

In one case in Florida, a state where sheriff’s offices cooperate with immigration authorities, a deputy came upon a Venezuelan couple arguing in the street in November 2025. In his report, the deputy said the woman pulled at her husband’s pants, necklace and arm, leaving marks on his body. The woman said her husband had taken her keys and phone. She didn’t want to be left stranded, she said, so she ran after him.

She was charged with misdemeanor battery; her husband wasn’t charged. The woman was turned over to ICE while the case was pending. Prosecutors later dropped charges. The sheriff’s report didn’t mention any allegations of prior domestic violence, but the woman later said that, during their marriage, her husband had beaten her and threatened to kill her. In her habeas corpus petition, she said she was “afraid to report the abuse to the police.” 

The woman was released in May, but during the five months she was incarcerated, her husband took their daughters out of state, her attorney told ProPublica. She still hasn’t seen the girls in person.

For Leya, it was a shock to find herself handcuffed, sitting in the back of a police cruiser, headed toward the Kent County jail. She was silent during the 15-minute ride, unable to make sense of what had just happened: “I had suffered from domestic violence,” she said. “But the one who ended up in trouble was me.” 

The next day, a detective asked the prosecutor’s office to file charges against her. Prosecutors declined to do so, saying there was insufficient evidence, there were no injuries and Leya hadn’t successfully interfered with the phone call. 

Still, she wasn’t released.

Leya had no criminal history, apart from this arrest, according to a DHS record. But her fingerprints had been run against state and federal databases, flagging ICE officials who could match them with her prints from when she arrived in the U.S. In addition, Leya said, a jail official asked about her status, and she told him she was waiting for an immigration court hearing. 

ICE issued a detainer, essentially asking the jail to hold Leya until agents could pick her up. Kent County officials honored their request. A day later, Leya was at the detention center in the woods.

She cried in despair over her daughter. They’d never been separated. The 80 miles between Wyoming and North Lake seemed infinite. Her breasts ached from the drying milk. Leya wondered whether she’d be deported and if their separation would be permanent. 

From a narrow window in her cell, she saw people outside holding signs, protesting ICE. She could hear their chants in English. Though she had trouble understanding them, she felt comforted by the care of strangers. 

Inside, she familiarized herself with the routines. She spent most of her time in a large, open room with other women in red. Cameras eyed them as they talked about their children and upcoming court dates. They shared contact information for relatives in their home countries in case one of them got deported and had nowhere to go. To pass the hours, they watched telenovelas, played rounds of Uno and pieced together jigsaw puzzles of forests and farms.

Leya grew close to a few women from Latin America and Eastern Europe who said they, too, had been in abusive relationships. Several had called police for help, records show. A Honduran woman said her partner tried to choke her. A Dominican woman said her husband, a U.S. citizen, hit her, pulled her hair and chased her with a stick.

Then there was Pilar, Leya’s first cellmate. The asylum seeker from Peru had also been arrested on suspicion of domestic violence in the city of Wyoming.

Pilar, her boyfriend and her teenage daughter called 911 five times in the 15 months before her arrest, records show. On one occasion, Pilar’s daughter said she worried that the boyfriend would hurt her mom; according to bodycam footage, Pilar assured officers that everything was fine. On another, the man said he experienced mental abuse and wanted to find a shelter. On yet another, Pilar said she just wanted him to leave.

None of these calls ended in an arrest. Officers ensured that the boyfriend had another place to stay when he sought help, and they told Pilar to call back if he tried to return and hurt her, according to the footage. They advised the couple to go to civil court for future disputes over money and property.

In an interview with ProPublica from North Lake, Pilar, 48, said that her boyfriend took financial advantage of her and physically assaulted her. And in her habeas corpus petition, she described the relationship as one of “physical, mental, psychological, economic abuse.” Her sister took a photo of the bruises around Pilar’s neck and feared the worst. “I would tell her to leave that man,” she said. 

Pilar said she was ashamed to go to her job at a food-processing plant with bruises on her face. She wondered what her co-workers would think. She distanced herself from relatives and friends. Pilar said she never told the police the full story because she worried about the possible repercussions — not for herself, but for her boyfriend. She didn’t want him to be deported. Despite everything, she loved him and felt he loved her. 

One night in October 2025, her boyfriend drove up to their apartment complex in a rental car. The couple argued in the parking lot. He called 911.

“I need police,” he said over and over in English.

Pilar called moments later: “This man is leaving my house and he’s not giving me my keys,” she screamed in Spanish. “This man has hurt me. He has scratched my whole arm.”

When officers arrived, they separated the couple. The boyfriend said that Pilar slapped his head, grabbed his shirt and tried to pull him out of the car while he was in the driver’s seat, according to bodycam footage and the police report. One side of his T-shirt was torn. He said he never assaulted Pilar and any injuries were her own fault. “I’ve never hit her,” he said in Spanish.

He told officers that he’d become a U.S. permanent resident two months earlier and that Pilar was jealous. “She is making this up because she knows she can get papers,” he said.

Pilar insisted she was the victim. She showed officers the scratch marks on her arm and said her boyfriend was to blame. She begged them to make him return the apartment keys, according to bodycam footage and a police report. “I’ve been trying to kick him out for a while and he won’t leave, and he doesn’t want to help pay the rent,” she said in Spanish.

An officer asked how her boyfriend’s shirt got ripped. Pilar said she grabbed onto him when he started driving away in order to avoid being dragged by the car. The officer asked her several more times about the ripped shirt. Pilar told him she wanted to speak to a lawyer. 

In their report, police noted that the boyfriend had called 911 first. His shirt was ripped. Pilar’s wasn’t. If the boyfriend had thrown her down, the officer wrote, then her shirt should have been ripped because he was “much taller and heavier (around 80lbs more).”

Her boyfriend wasn’t arrested. Pilar was.

Wyoming Public Safety Chief Kip Snyder declined to speak about the arrests of Pilar or Leya. In an email to ProPublica, he said officers don’t “participate in enforcing federal immigration laws. We encourage trust and cooperation with all residents and aim to ensure that everyone feels safe reporting crimes or seeking assistance.”

Shortly after Pilar’s arrest, a police detective asked the prosecutor’s office to file domestic violence charges against both her and her boyfriend.  

Prosecutors declined to file any charges, citing insufficient evidence. Pilar wasn’t released. Apart from this arrest, she had no criminal history, according to DHS records. She also had a pending asylum case.

Still, ICE put a detainer on her and jail officials turned her over.

A few years earlier, Kent County Sheriff Michelle Lajoye-Young said a handoff like this wouldn’t happen.

In 2019, she announced that deputies would stop automatically honoring detainers and instead require warrants signed by a federal judge or magistrate. The move came after a U.S. citizen — a Marine combat veteran — was transferred from her jail into ICE custody.

“There needed to be a judicial oversight inserted into that process to give us the assurance that somebody wasn’t erroneously detained without due process,” Lajoye-Young said around that time. 

Trump called Kent a “sanctuary jurisdiction.” The label haunted the county, which in the 2016 election voted for Trump. A national think tank that aims to reduce immigration put Kent County on its list of sanctuary communities, while Republican state lawmakers tried to compel its cooperation with federal authorities.

Yet it’s unclear whether Lajoye-Young ever delivered on her promise. ProPublica requested copies of all department policies, procedures, memos and instructions on how it handles ICE detainers since 2018. None said a judicial warrant was needed. ProPublica also asked for copies of judicial warrants for Pilar and Leya. The county said no such records exist.

Lajoye-Young, who retired last week, declined interview requests. Sgt. Scott Dietrich, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, didn’t directly answer questions about whether the policy was ever implemented. But in a statement he said that detainers are “handled under applicable law and established policy, consistent with our commitment to public safety, due process, and fair and impartial enforcement.”

Gema Lowe, an organizer with the local chapter of an immigrant rights group, said the sheriff had backtracked on her promise and wasn’t being forthright. “I don’t understand why they’re being secretive,” she said.

The shift deepened the mistrust among immigrants in a county with one of the state’s fastest-growing immigrant populations. Lowe, an immigrant herself from Mexico, said she advises victims to think twice before reporting domestic violence to the police because of the risk of arrest and deportation, while pointing them to other local resources like shelters. 

She and others said the stakes are especially high now. ICE arrests have skyrocketed under Trump. Nobody is off limits, including immigrants with pending asylum claims and no criminal records.

And more local authorities are helping ICE make arrests. In January 2025, fewer than 150 state and local law enforcement agencies had signed 287(g) agreements with DHS to help carry out the president’s deportation agenda. That number has ballooned to more than 2,600 today. 

“Partnerships with law enforcement are critical to having the resources we need to arrest criminal illegal aliens across the country,” a DHS spokesperson said. “We have had tremendous success when local law enforcement works together with us.”

Kent County doesn’t have a 287(g) agreement. Still, the jail hands over the vast majority of people with detainers to ICE, records show. Dozens of people who were turned over to ICE this year had their criminal charges dropped, or, like Pilar and Leya, were never charged in the first place. 

Dietrich said the dismissal of a criminal charge “does not, by itself, mean the original arrest lacked probable cause.” The sheriff’s office also doesn’t “determine whether criminal charges are ultimately prosecuted, nor does it determine whether an individual is deported,” he said.

DHS told ProPublica in a statement that both Leya and Pilar “illegally entered the country” in 2022 and that both “will receive due process” in their immigration proceedings.

Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker said he hadn’t heard of victims getting detained by ICE after calling the police. In his experience, he said, more perpetrators with active cases get deported.

Becker said he tries to get the message out that his team serves all victims, regardless of their immigration status. He’s aware that immigrants are reluctant to seek help. His own staff has told him that victims are afraid to testify or file restraining orders. They don’t want their partners — often the breadwinners and the fathers of their children — to be deported.

“There’s been a chilling impact to women coming forward in domestic violence situations due to what’s going on,” Becker said.

As the months passed at North Lake, Leya watched as women she befriended started to leave.  

Some were deported, including at least two Mexican women who were also arrested in Kent County on suspicion of domestic violence. Others were released. New women took their cells. Some told Leya that they, too, had been arrested after 911 calls about domestic violence.

Leya fought for her freedom. She met with volunteers from Kent County, who raised money to hire her lawyers and pay for a required physical exam and fees. Even her ex-boyfriend, the one who she said gave her a black eye, wrote a letter on her behalf to help her case, calling her “a calm person.” He explained that he had called the police after their argument “escalated” and that “problems are situations that can happen in any relationship.”

Leya, he added, “deserves a second opportunity to remain in this country and be close to our daughter, as our baby truly needs her very much.” While Leya was locked up, their little girl celebrated her first birthday, got her first teeth and took her first steps.

At virtual hearings, Leya sat with her arms crossed, her dark, wavy hair neatly braided in cornrows and wearing an oversized coat over her red uniform. She tried to follow the discussion of people who seemed to have her life in their hands.

In late August, a judge granted Leya bond. While her immigration case played out, she could be free.

It was a profound relief. At the same time, it felt awful to leave behind her friends. It seemed like some of them were never getting out. Pilar was approaching a year in detention.

Four months after her arrest, Leya walked out of the old prison. She thought about how she would live on her own now and support her daughter.  

She promised herself she wouldn’t go back to the man who hurt her. 

The post These Women Were Trying to Escape Domestic Abuse. ICE Detained Them Instead. appeared first on ProPublica.

Last December, New Mexico officials celebrated publication of a plan to address climate change, designed to dramatically reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. A few months later, just across the state line in Texas, El Paso city officials adopted their own such plan with a similar ambition. 

Each report cost millions of dollars to draft, but neither one took into account how the construction of data centers could upend climate goals in both places. 

Work is underway in Doña Ana County in southern New Mexico on one of the largest data center developments in the country: Project Jupiter, built by Austin-based Oracle. Twenty miles away in El Paso, construction is underway on another massive data center, this one built by Meta Platforms. 

A third, larger data center project is planned less than a 30-minute drive from the Meta site, on the Fort Bliss Army post in east El Paso.

The data centers are “going to undo a lot of the very expensive and very meaningful work a lot of people are doing,” New Mexico state climatologist Dave DuBois told El Paso Matters.

The sites are among a wave of data centers under construction across the country, driven by the rapidly escalating demand for artificial intelligence services like Claude and ChatGPT. Such projects have drawn intense scrutiny in recent months, as residents and elected officials have questioned their impact on communities’ water supplies, household electric bills and air quality. Texas alone has 596 data centers that are either in operation or planned across Texas as of early September, according to research by The Texas Tribune. 

But the projects located in this population center of 1.2 million, which encompasses El Paso and parts of southern New Mexico, are particularly notable because of their combined scope. When fully built out, the three data centers, each with its own power plant, will emit millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to the planet-warming emissions released by more than two million cars in a year.

They will also release air pollutants like particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, which directly affect local air quality and human health. The Meta and Project Jupiter data centers are expected to release these kinds of pollutants at relatively low levels, according to paperwork submitted to state regulators. But even a small increase in air pollution can still negatively impact communities close to and downwind of the data center sites, said Shaolei Ren, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at University of California, Riverside. 

“The health impacts can be significant for local communities,” Ren said.

Because Project Jupiter, Meta and the Fort Bliss data centers are in two different states, and because there is no single federal regulation governing climate change or emissions, regulators have largely considered the projects’ impacts separately.

“We’ve never had a national climate law passed by Congress,” said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. “And so what we’ve had in this country are primarily state and local efforts.”

The result is that officials in one state have little say over a project happening minutes away from them. 

Texas and New Mexico also take different approaches to dealing with climate change. New Mexico has codified greenhouse gas reduction targets into state law; Texas has not.

New Mexico state Rep. Sarah Silva, a Democrat, represents the community of Chaparral, directly across the state line from Meta’s data center site in northeast El Paso. Her state has the power to regulate air quality and impose noise requirements, but only in New Mexico, not at a Texas construction site, even if it’s only a few hundred yards away. 

Likewise, residents living in west El Paso across the state line from Project Jupiter have no say in the project despite sharing an aquifer that crosses the state boundary. Emissions do not remain within the state where they originate, Silva said.

“This is why we need federal regulation,” said Silva. “How do we knit something together that makes sense for our region when actually this is the job of the federal government?”

Though they profess a desire to mitigate the impacts of climate change, local governments in El Paso and Doña Ana counties green-lit these projects in a part of the country seeing rapidly rising temperatures. The counties offered Meta and Project Jupiter tax incentives in exchange for corporate investment in their communities, job creation and, hopefully, the ability to attract more technology companies to the region. 

State officials have also provided incentives. More than a decade ago, Texas legislators approved a data center sales tax break, which exempts the facilities from paying sales tax on equipment they purchase, a decision that could now cost the state $3.2 billion in revenue over the next two years, according to The Texas Tribune. 

New Mexico lawmakers declined to advance a bill creating a similar tax break for data centers in 2021. But in 2025, they passed an unrelated law allowing large facilities such as Project Jupiter to generate their own electricity using natural gas. The law exempts these private power systems, known as microgrids, from renewable energy requirements, even as New Mexico requires electric utilities to source 50% of the power they sell from clean energy by 2030. 

The power plants that keep data centers running typically produce large amounts of emissions like carbon dioxide and methane that drive global climate change over time. Combined, the plants proposed for Project Jupiter and Meta’s data center could emit up to 10 million tons of planet-warming emissions annually. Comparatively, the region spanning El Paso County and neighboring Hudspeth County released 8.4 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2019. (The Army has shared scant information about the Fort Bliss data center, so it’s not clear what level of emissions the facility will produce.) 

“This does add to our greenhouse gas emissions in a massive way,” said Gunnar Schade, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. “This is a huge source.”

An Unprecedented Amount of Energy

Silva, the New Mexico representative, was initially supportive of Project Jupiter, in part seeing it as an opportunity to create long-term jobs. Last year, she voted in favor of a bill that included an amendment — tacked on by state Sen. Michael Padilla, a Democrat from Albuquerque — that allows facilities like Project Jupiter, which aren’t connected to the local power grid, a 20-year exemption from clean energy laws, allowing them to generate all their electricity with fossil fuels. 

“We worked this bill pretty much the entire session, but it did not quite get done. So, we found a piece of legislation that was very similar,” Padilla said in an interview last year. “That’s the legislative process. You have to be very creative to get your work done.”

But Silva soon soured on the project out of concern that it won’t employ enough local workers and because it won’t rely on zero-emission renewable energy. Oracle has said the data center will have 750 full-time employees when it’s up and running. The company told Doña Ana County officials in early September that nearly 3,700 people had worked at the site during construction up to that point. 

Silva and other state lawmakers have said they voted for Padilla’s bill without realizing the broader implications for a data center project in the southern part of the state. 

“State regulators, state legislators, I think, were so caught off guard at the speed at which these hyperscale data centers showed up in all of our communities almost simultaneously,” Silva said. “I would support a moratorium.” 

The amount of energy Project Jupiter needs is unprecedented in the region: The data center will receive electricity from an on-site power plant made up of fuel cells built by a company called Bloom Energy. Bloom has said the plant will have the ability to produce up to 2.45 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power around 1.5 million homes and more than El Paso Electric has ever supplied to its 465,000 residential and commercial customers at one time, according to the utility’s corporate reports.

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, has specifically lauded Oracle’s promise to use fuel cells for electricity instead of natural gas turbines, which would have used more water and produced more air pollution. However, an air permit — a state-granted license that authorizes industrial facilities to emit a predetermined amount of pollution — would allow the fuel cells to produce up to 8.8 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year. Lujan Grisham didn’t address questions from El Paso Matters about the impact of these additional climate emissions.

The Meta power plant in El Paso could release up to 1.3 million tons of climate emissions every year, according to an estimate calculated by El Paso Matters based on El Paso Electric regulatory filings and the Environmental Protection Agency’s emissions factors. Nancy L. Seidman, a senior adviser with the Regulatory Assistance Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on energy policy, confirmed the emissions estimate is sound.

“Regulators should weigh all emissions and other impacts like water usage, noise and local air pollution, which can affect public health, when they make decisions about data center projects,” Seidman wrote in an email to El Paso Matters. “This is particularly important when projects are phased over time, so that an accurate account can be made of the total, holistic impacts.”

The data center planned for Fort Bliss is expected to use 3 gigawatts of electricity that would likely be supplied by natural gas turbines, according to officials with the Department of Defense, who shared details with reporters during a briefing in April. The Army has issued few other details about the project because it is still in “exclusive negotiations” with the developer, Carlyle Group, a large publicly traded private equity firm.

Carlyle Group did not respond to a request for comment. 

“These are cities in terms of their electricity consumption,” Peskoe, of Harvard Law School, said of AI hyperscale data center campuses such as Oracle’s and Meta’s. The facilities are cropping up so fast that “the pace of this and the scale of this — I think there’s no real parallel, at least for 50, 60, 70 years, but probably ever for the U.S. power industry.”

Facilities in New Mexico seeking a state air permit are required by law to disclose estimated amounts of air pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions the project will release. And the state Environment Department has spent months evaluating Project Jupiter’s air permit application, which was submitted in April. A spokesperson for the environmental department didn’t respond to emailed questions.

By contrast, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality only requires project developers to disclose information about pollutants that affect local air quality, and not about greenhouse gas emissions, which are what contribute to climate change. 

So when El Paso Electric sought an air permit last fall for the Meta data center’s natural gas power plant, the utility didn’t have to share estimated greenhouse gas emissions. The Texas commission approved the permit 20 days after it was filed, following an expedited review. 

Meta directed questions about its data center’s power plant to El Paso Electric. The electric company declined to share estimates of the plant’s greenhouse gas emissions but said in a statement that the Texas environmental commission had reviewed and authorized the Meta power plant “under a standard permit, which is specifically for projects with limited and well-controlled emissions.” The statement said the facility will “operate in compliance with state and federal standards.”

A spokesperson for the agency said, “All Standard Permits have gone through formal notice and comment procedures and have been adopted by the Commission in a public meeting.”

These plants will be releasing large amounts of greenhouse gases even as climate change has become increasingly evident in the El Paso metro area, which sits where Texas’ westernmost boundary meets New Mexico and northern Mexico. El Paso’s temperatures have risen faster than those of almost any other city in the U.S. since 1970, according to Climate Central, a nonprofit that quantifies climate shifts throughout the United States. Drought driven by climate change has amplified the impact of wind storms that fill the air in El Paso with hazardous dust in the spring and summertime.

This year has been the hottest on record in El Paso through the first nine months of 2026, according to the National Weather Service. Similar records have been set across the state line in New Mexico.

“If we started to do these kinds of things — having big data centers with natural-gas-fired turbines — it’s kind of like bringing back a lot of the retired plants that were more dirty, like coal,” said DuBois, the New Mexico state climatologist. 

Fernando Berjano, El Paso’s climate coordinator, wouldn’t comment specifically on effects resulting from the data centers in the region, but he said the kinds of power plants tied to them produce greenhouse gases that will make it harder for the city to meet its climate goals, as well as produce air pollutants.

If emissions increase in the El Paso area, “that has an impact on air quality, that has an impact on pollution,” Berjano said, “which is something that we all know is not good.”

The Road Ahead for Data Centers

Although construction is already underway on the Project Jupiter and Meta data centers, regulatory hurdles remain for both facilities. The public hearing on the Project Jupiter air permit was scheduled to begin Sept. 14, but the New Mexico Supreme Court delayed it when opponents filed lawsuits challenging the state’s approval process and the facility’s use of groundwater. 

The state Supreme Court last month lifted the stay. New Mexico more recently appointed an examiner to preside over the hearing that would authorize the facility’s emissions. Other legal challenges are making their way through the court system. 

In Texas, El Paso Electric is still waiting for the state’s Public Utility Commission to approve construction of the power plant planned next to Meta’s data center, a decision that could come later this year.

Officials with both Project Jupiter and Meta have said they are taking steps to help mitigate the climate effects of their projects and plan to develop clean energy projects elsewhere to create new electricity sources and offset the greenhouse gases their data center power plants will release. Oracle also maintains that its emissions will be lower than what it sought in its air permit application and that it plans to get to net zero greenhouse emissions by 2031. 

“Oracle is committed to building Project Jupiter responsibly and incorporating community feedback into our planning,” the company said in a statement. 

The road ahead for data centers is unclear. Even once-supportive officials have softened or changed course: Last year, Lujan Grisham, New Mexico’s governor, said Project Jupiter “reaffirms New Mexico’s leadership in global trade, advanced manufacturing, and digital infrastructure.” In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott at one point called his state “the epicenter of AI development.” 

Now, amid growing opposition to Project Jupiter, Lujan Grisham recently said she takes seriously residents’ concerns about the data center “and expects any data center operating in New Mexico to meet the state’s rigorous environmental standards and use water responsibly.” This summer, Abbott called on the Texas Public Utility Commission to ensure the projects pay for their own infrastructure and don’t lead to higher electricity costs for residents. He also recommended the state Legislature pass a number of regulations related to data centers next year, many concerning water and electricity usage, and recently told the Texas Water Development Board to penalize data centers that do not report their water usage. 

Abbott’s new edicts do not address air pollution or climate change, nor the effects that a data center project in one state can have on another. 

Texas Democratic state Rep. Joe Moody, whose district includes much of west and northeast El Paso, near two of the data center projects, said Abbott’s proposals will likely shape the Texas Legislature’s debate over data-center-related policies next year but called them just a starting point. 

“In the governor’s directives, we’re not talking about local control and local autonomy to make decisions on these projects,” he said. “And I do think that that’s a whole other lane of conversation that we’re going to get into next session.”

The post New Mexico and El Paso Spent Millions on Climate Plans. Three New Data Centers Could Undo Them. appeared first on ProPublica.

It wasn’t the kind of call a grocery store gets every day. A customer with a thick Eastern European accent was on the phone saying he wanted to buy several thousand cans of Red Bull. Could the store have them in stock in a few days? Also, did they have equipment to move all those stacks of energy drinks into the parking lot, where two minivans would be waiting?

When the day came, Oct. 19, 2022, employees at the Smart & Final store in San Diego sold 3,960 cans of Red Bull and 720 of Monster Energy to two men and two women, all with the same accent, and helped them wheel the pallets out back. To pay for it all — the bill came to $10,747.05 — the group pulled out piles of plastic. These weren’t credit or debit cards; they looked more like hotel-room keys. There were 25 cards in all, each with a different amount loaded onto it, and the four people took turns swiping one after another. Then, the payment complete, they drove off.

In the days that followed, people as far away as New York and Florida made panicked calls to the store. They wanted to know why their food-stamp accounts (containing their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits) had been drained at this seemingly random location in San Diego.

It would turn out that what became known as the Red Bull Crew had gotten ahold of their SNAP data and used the funds to buy the energy drinks, which they then sold online or to smaller stores. It was hardly an isolated event. From September through November of that year, the same crew, part of a criminal syndicate based in Romania, bought at least $305,274.52 in energy drinks, using SNAP account information and PINs stolen from at least 174 victims nationwide, according to court documents and federal investigators.

To hear the Trump administration tell it, the SNAP program is under siege by well-heeled recipients of food stamps. Vice President JD Vance, upon being named “Fraud Czar” this spring, said: “There are people who have Lamborghinis who currently receive SNAP benefits.” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, whose agency oversees the program, regularly goes on TV and social media to allege that masses of SNAP recipients are scamming the system, driving Bentleys, Ferraris, Maseratis and, yes, Lamborghinis.

The federal government’s own statistics tell a different story. Confirmed cases of intentional program violations — fraud — committed by SNAP recipients account for $64 million a year, or about 0.08% of all benefits issued annually, according to the most recent 50-state reports compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Meanwhile a far bigger fraud wave has exploded over the past five years: organized theft from SNAP recipients. In 2025, $470 million was stolen electronically from beneficiaries — and thus from the U.S. taxpayer — according to data supplied to ProPublica by Propel, a company that provides a mobile app for SNAP recipients to check their account balances and transaction histories. More than 990,000 households that received food assistance last year had benefits stolen. (The reason it’s necessary to use data from a private company: The federal government has stopped tracking rates of this crime.)

ProPublica interviewed nearly 100 victims of SNAP theft, federal prosecutors, Secret Service agents, USDA officials, caseworkers and other experts to understand what’s behind this phenomenon and why more isn’t being done to stop it. The victims are almost all working people with families, or retirees, who have struggled to afford groceries in the current economy. Most didn’t learn about the crime until they were in a checkout line, only to have their benefit card declined.

Upon reporting the disappearance of their food assistance, victims are informed that nothing can be done under current federal law. “The only thing they said was that [my benefits] cannot be refunded unless they were lost due to a natural disaster,” said one SNAP theft victim in Ohio. “They told me they’d add my name to the list,” said another in rural Oregon. “They advised if I feel the place is sketchy, don’t run my card there,” a victim in Philadelphia said. Still another, in Virginia, added, “They even charged me $2 for a replacement card.”

Perhaps the most vexing aspect of all: The federal government knows how to prevent the vast majority of this crime in a single step. Congress just hasn’t been willing to take it.

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SNAP theft is an old scheme applied to a new target. For years, scammers would surreptitiously install skimming devices on card readers at ATMs, gas pumps and corner stores. These devices could read the data on people’s cards as they swiped — while a pinhole camera or overlay keypad captured their PINs — all of which could be picked up later or sent via Bluetooth to someone sitting in a nearby cafe or parking lot. This pilfered data, in turn, was used to make online purchases, or it was loaded onto cloned cards to withdraw cash.

Skimming became exponentially more difficult when credit and debit card companies installed digital microchips in the 2010s and then introduced tap-to-pay. But one kind of card did not get the new chips: Electronic Benefits Transfer, or EBT, cards, which people use to access SNAP and other public assistance. These still rely on the 1960s-era magnetic-stripe technology that skimmers can easily read.

EBT cards are not a particularly high-value target compared with bank cards. (The average monthly SNAP benefit is about $350 per household.) But funding boosts to SNAP during the pandemic temporarily increased benefit amounts, and profits could be considerable if you skimmed hundreds of people’s card information every month. Skimming teams, often run by Romanian gangs, pivoted. With cloned magnetic-stripe cards, they started buying up huge quantities of SNAP-eligible products like energy drinks and baby formula that are easy to store and resell.

“We’ve started many, many briefings saying that one of the biggest ways we’re going to fight this is to just get chips in the cards,” said Michael Peck, assistant special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Criminal Investigative Division. Among the Secret Service’s lesser-known functions is investigating many financial crimes, and Peck leads its efforts against benefit theft. He said he and his team have delivered this message on Capitol Hill both at committee meetings and to individual members of Congress.

Yet congressional leadership has continually blocked legislation that would fund chip EBT cards nationally, despite universal support for the measure among Democrats and significant support among the Republican rank and file. For instance, House Committee on Agriculture Chairman Glenn Thompson, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said at a hearing in March that chip technology is “very effective.” But he shut down a bipartisan proposal to upgrade EBT cards with chips, citing unspecified budgetary constraints. (“Chairman Thompson is supportive of finding a fiscally responsible path forward for implementing policy that supports chip cards,” a committee aide said in a statement on his behalf. She added that “there was an appetite” for this reform among Republicans, but that Democrats weren’t willing to “find the budgetary offsets” for it.)

The Congressional Budget Office has yet to formally score the proposal, but multiple Hill staffers said they were told the total cost would be in the range of $215 million, as compared to the $600 million-plus annual loss on theft of SNAP and other benefits.

The main thing Congress has done about SNAP theft is to abandon a previous effort to help victims. The federal government had, since late 2022, been replacing people’s stolen funds, just as banks are required to do if your debit card is hacked. As a result, 753,929 households were compensated.

In December 2024, a bipartisan spending agreement that included a provision to extend these reimbursements through 2028 was on the brink of becoming law. But Elon Musk, who had been named a leader of the new Department of Government Efficiency, attacked the legislation more than 100 times on X, pushing to “defund everything.” (Musk did not reply to a request for comment.) Trump then sank the deal. Victims of SNAP theft can no longer get any of their benefits replaced. And with the government off the hook for losses, there is now less incentive to put money into the solution.

In the 22 months since, the Trump administration has gone on to strip funds for addressing EBT theft from the USDA’s annual budget requests to Congress, while cutting at least 650 of the staff of the federal Food and Nutrition Administration, the subagency that oversees SNAP. More than half of the technical experts whom the agency had hired to help it develop EBT card security guidance have been pushed out, according to the Government Accountability Office.

“Many of us who were working on fraud, we’ve left the federal government entirely,” said Kym Ayodeji, who had been a data scientist in the SNAP program until she departed this spring. (FNA, the agency she worked for, is also responsible for tracking fraud committed by retailers, which is far more prevalent than that committed by beneficiaries.) Ayodeji said she and her colleagues had been working on ways to identify retailers where unusually large quantities of certain items had been purchased and addresses where purchases made with many different EBT cards were being delivered. Some of this work was indefinitely delayed by firings, early retirements, agency reorganizations and government shutdowns, she said.

SNAP is federally funded and supervised. Congress and the USDA traditionally mandate, and pay much of the costs for, major changes to the system, especially involving technical coordination between states. States evaluate applicants and administer the accounts of those who are approved.

That said, states are allowed to adopt chip cards on their own. California has nearly completed the transition, and Alabama and Oklahoma began rolling out new cards this year. A handful of others initiated the process in recent months — before the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, starting Oct. 1, cut 50% of states’ administrative funding for SNAP, which Alabama and the others had tapped to transition to chip technology.

The rest — about 40 states — have likely missed their window, unless Congress acts. They’re also waiting for regulatory guidance on EBT card security and chip card implementation that the USDA has been claiming for nearly four years it is planning to publish. (The USDA Office of Inspector General has found that the agency’s failure to issue this has allowed the theft of at least $555 million in SNAP benefits.)

State-level SNAP administrators have also been overwhelmed with the hundreds of new requirements that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act has saddled them with. For one, the law mandates that states adopt intensive new work requirements for older adults and others, resulting in voluminous additional monthly paperwork. And federal funds will be slashed even further next year if states don’t scramble to reduce their “payment error rate,” a figure that measures unintentional over- and underpayments in SNAP benefits. With all of this to juggle, many state officials told ProPublica that they’ve put chip card implementation on hold in order to implement the Trump law — one of whose ostensible goals was to reduce fraud.

All the while, that law has cut food aid for more than 1.2 million children. The USDA’s Rollins has said that nearly 6 million people in total have been “moved off SNAP” during the current administration.

The White House declined to respond to a detailed list of questions. A USDA spokesperson, in an emailed statement, did not refute that Rollins has focused on individual SNAP recipient fraud rather than on EBT theft, but said that finding “cracks in public statements screams politics, not fact-finding.” The spokesperson also did not address ProPublica’s reporting showing that the agency has failed to deliver solutions on EBT theft specifically. Instead, the statement pointed to the agency’s work, in collaboration with the Department of Justice, combating retailer fraud. The USDA says it has cracked down on thousands of stores that were abusing their SNAP privileges.

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Absent action from Congress or USDA leadership, it has largely been left to the Secret Service to apply an enforcement approach to what is arguably a policy problem. Agents first went after gangs like the Red Bull Crew, often by watching hours upon hours of grocery store surveillance footage. More recently, they’ve tried to get ahead of the scammers by heading to cities that have been hit by EBT theft attacks and then going store to store to check card readers for skimming devices. The agency has run more than 70 of these operations since April 2024, independent of any White House initiative.

Most of them are led by Peck, the assistant special agent in charge. With his form-fitting black polo tucked into cargo pants and a contoured beard, he has a flat affect even as he lists off colorful details like how the criminals sometimes ship dishwashers full of cash overseas. But he also emphasizes the vulnerability of the victims and wishes there was even more his team could do for them. “The U.S. has been fighting the War on Drugs and the War on Terror for how many years?” he said. “We are pushing hard and we’re doing all we can with the resources and abilities that we have.”

One bright morning in late June, dozens of law enforcement officers gathered in a Secret Service meeting room on the top floor of a downtown Brooklyn skyscraper, with a commanding view of the New York City skyline. In addition to unarmed Secret Service analysts in short-sleeved shirts inscribed with the field office they were joining from (Nashville, Miami, San Diego), there were agents from the USDA Office of Inspector General as well as a smattering of NYPD officers — who had guns, handcuffs and the jurisdiction to make arrests should anything go awry that day.

From a podium, Peck recapped how the multiday New York operation was going so far, including that the previous day, officers had happened upon two foreign nationals installing a skimming device, chased them down and made arrests. “Be safe, watch backs, stay fed,” he concluded.

Then everyone dispersed into teams of three or four. Each was given a list of dozens of stores in Brooklyn or Queens — disproportionately ethnic and dollar stores, but also some larger chains like 7-11 — that they were assigned to visit, based on data analytics showing where skimming activity was most probable.

The squad that ProPublica joined was headed to Midwood, in South Brooklyn, which is home to Orthodox Jews and immigrants from the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere. As we walked around the neighborhood with these federal agents, we got plenty of confused looks and some scared ones, too.

“Hello, we’re here with the Secret Service,” one of the analysts would say upon entering each store. Then they’d ask the store manager for permission to inspect each card reader. They also handed out flyers in four languages telling the cashiers what to look out for.

When they did find a skimming device, they donned gloves and masks to handle it. After prying it off the card reader, they bagged it and tagged it, to be sent in for DNA and fingerprint testing as well as digital forensic analysis. Maybe a lead could be extracted, a connection to a larger EBT theft ring.

These missions are clearly well-intentioned, and every skimmer removed saves families from being deprived of food. Yet, plainly, conducting store-to-store checks of card readers is inefficient. Over the course of two years, the agency has spent tens of thousands of staff hours checking 69,805 point-of-sale terminals at stores, 42,972 gas pumps and 10,661 ATMs. They’ve found 637 skimming devices. And as one agent told ProPublica, “There could be a new skimmer on there tomorrow.”

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Ultimately, it just won’t be possible to arrest one’s way out of this crisis, both federal and state law enforcement officials acknowledged. Low-level runners keep arriving from Romania and elsewhere; even if they do get caught, they’re often able to bond out of jail because they’re only facing state charges for nonviolent offenses. Then they disappear.

Funding for chip EBT cards still faces dim prospects on Capitol Hill, according to Democratic and Republican lawmakers and staffers, even with newfound support from major retailer associations and big players like Walmart. There’s a chip card provision in the Senate’s draft version of this year’s Farm Bill, but the whole package is mired in a dispute between the parties — over the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s cuts to SNAP funding — that looks like it will last until well after the midterm elections. This almost doesn’t matter, given that on the House side, the Farm Bill has already passed, and it contains no funding for chip cards.

And there’s been no movement on repeated bipartisan proposals from Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and others to renew the reimbursement program for families that have had their food assistance taken.

Certainly, the mass distribution of any new payment technology isn’t easy. California, Alabama and Oklahoma have had to phase in their new cards gradually, allowing customers to still use the card’s magnetic stripe if the chip isn’t working everywhere yet. And they’ve tried to notify rural convenience stores and gas stations, and help corner bodegas update their card readers, so that no one is left with only a chip card in a desert of stores that still just accept magnetic stripe.

But by doing all of this and employing additional data tools, California has reduced the theft of food and cash benefits by as much as 83% in just two years, the governor’s office said. And Alabama officials claim their state hasn’t had any confirmed EBT theft cases since they began to distribute chip cards this year.

Still, chip cards aren’t the entire solution and doubtlessly, scammers will find clever ways to get around this technology. Moreover, SNAP recipients have largely been denied the basic services that banks and credit card companies use to block likely fraudulent transactions in real time. (Think of the email or text alerts you get from your bank when suspicious purchases are attempted with your card information.)

If states were to try this without federal help, they would have to individually pay for the additional security features. Most have gone for cheaper options like advising or requiring SNAP recipients to change their PIN regularly and to lock their card when not using it. Both are useful stopgaps but require constant diligence.

State and county SNAP caseworkers said they’ve been deeply frustrated that ever since Trump and Musk killed the reimbursement program, all they can do for victims is suggest they change their PIN more often and maybe try reporting the crime to local law enforcement. “It is a short conversation,” said Norman Vogele, a caseworker in Oregon. The date of the crime and the missing amount is recorded. “It isn’t clear why we even do that much,” he said, “as there is zero recourse.”

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The Red Bull Crew stayed on the run for over a year, using looted food benefits to buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of bulk energy drinks in Oklahoma, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. After hundreds of hours of surveillance by the Secret Service, federal prosecutors and local authorities, all but one of the members were arrested and served sentences ranging from one to three years. They’ve all since been released, and some may have been deported.

Meanwhile, every day, SNAP theft sprees keep popping up in new corners of the country. A Secret Service official sounded gloomy about the pursuit of street-level operatives on its own, without policy change. “You can arrest them,” he said. “But essentially once you take them off the street, there’s 10 more that are doing the same thing.”

The post Scammers Are Stealing Millions From Food Stamp Recipients. Congress Could Fix It — but Won’t. appeared first on ProPublica.

In 2020, seven years after he was appointed to represent a client who claimed he was wrongly convicted, attorney Scott Galloway told the judge that he was still looking into the case and needed more time.  

“I am still in the process of interviewing individuals,” the lawyer wrote to the judge in Delaware County, outside Philadelphia, who had already granted him 32 extensions. 

His client, Nolan O’Neal, had been a 20-year-old high school student when he was arrested for murder by Chester police, who had four eyewitnesses identifying him. At his 2005 trial, those witnesses all recanted, saying police had pressured them to accuse O’Neal. 

By the time Galloway joined the case, in 2013, O’Neal had already spent eight years in prison insisting he was innocent. The lawyer’s job was to help him file a petition under Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act. That law provided a narrow path to freedom if Galloway could find crucial new evidence or prove that previous lawyers had mishandled the case.

But court records do not show that the attorney did much other than ask for more time. 

In 2022, after nine years, one unsuccessful request to access evidence and 41 extensions, Galloway filed a two-page petition addressing just one of the many issues O’Neal had wanted him to raise. It would not be enough to get O’Neal his day in court. 

For more than half a century, Pennsylvania has promised people who claim they didn’t get a fair trial the right to “effective” post-conviction legal representation, regardless of their ability to pay. That’s more than most states promise people after they have been convicted and lost their appeals.  

Yet Pennsylvania has done little to fulfill that promise. The Philadelphia Inquirer and ProPublica previously reported that Pennsylvania lets lawyers resolve cases quickly using a practice that is discouraged in several states: filing “no-merit” letters, also known as Finley letters, urging judges to reject their clients’ handwritten or typed claims. In Philadelphia, dozens who had received such letters later had their convictions or sentences overturned based on issues their lawyers had rejected or overlooked. 

But the problems go deeper than that: The state’s loose rules and its failure to fund post-conviction work have made the type of breakdown O’Neal encountered a recurring feature of this system. 

By filing public records requests with courts serving all 67 Pennsylvania counties and analyzing a decade of court dockets, an Inquirer and ProPublica investigation found that the system Pennsylvania set up to protect the right to counsel instead allows, or even encourages, shoddy representation.

The news organizations found that:

• Unlike in other types of appeals, attorneys handling post-conviction cases work under no particular timeline and are allowed numerous extensions. The state also has no standards regarding how many cases lawyers should be assigned, and many counties ask lawyers to sign contracts that set no limit on the number of cases courts can assign them. At least 250 people have languished in prison for five years or longer while waiting for their lawyers to act. 
• Unlike some other states, such as North Carolina and New York, Pennsylvania requires no specific training, experience or qualifications for appointed post-trial lawyers, and it holds them to few standards. Lawyers are not required to speak to their clients or take other basic investigative steps before withdrawing from cases by writing no-merit letters.  
• Pennsylvania, which lags behind almost every other state in funding legal defense for poor people, known as indigent defense, dedicates no money for post-trial work. Instead, it leaves it up to each individual county to set pay rates. A majority of county court systems use flat-rate fee structures that some other states ban. 

While almost every county in the state has a public defender office, most post-conviction cases are handled by private lawyers who are paid hourly, by the case or by the year and work with little to no supervision. Our review of court records found pay as low as $500 per case and delays as long as 19 years without a single court filing. 

In some counties, contracted lawyers’ backlogs spanned dozens of cases. In Chester County, an affluent region west of Philadelphia, a lawyer left cases untouched for as long as two years before the county ended his contract last fall.  

Delaware County, where O’Neal was convicted, relies on a group of part-time lawyers to handle most of its post-trial matters. One is Galloway, who has handled 20 or 30 post-trial cases per year for the county in addition to running his own law practice and, for a time, holding local elected office. Galloway said that his ethical obligation to confidentiality prevented him from commenting on O’Neal’s case. Judge George A. Pagano, who granted him 41 extensions on O’Neal’s case, declined to comment.

In the years Galloway was on the case, O’Neal wrote him dozens of letters from state prison, proposing legal arguments and sending leads to investigate. 

“It is a daunting and exhausting task to navigate this legal process and be heard,” O’Neal said in an interview. “We at times even have to fight the attorneys who are supposed to represent us.” 

In 2020, he received a letter from the brother of the murder victim, admitting that his testimony against O’Neal was a lie. “I want to fix it. I know my brother would want me to. It’s been long enough,” he wrote. O’Neal said he pleaded with Galloway to track down the man. 

In 2022, Galloway attached the brother’s signed statement to a sparse two-page brief, which mentioned none of the other issues O’Neal had raised nine years earlier or the other witnesses who’d come forward over the years. The judge started the process of dismissing the claim. One reason: The filing had been made too late. O’Neal is still fighting his case, now with a new court-appointed lawyer.

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Delays and Extensions

Before they are assigned a lawyer, Pennsylvania prisoners must write the first draft of their post-conviction filing on their own within a strict one-year deadline. The lawyers appointed to revise their petitions, on the other hand, are not generally held to any timeline. The state courts say lawyers should act “expeditiously so as to reduce unnecessary delays.” Yet judges have granted extensions liberally, court dockets show, and in many cases failed to impose any deadlines at all.  

An Inquirer and ProPublica review of court dockets found that hundreds of people have waited two years or longer, only to receive no-merit letters. That analysis is an undercount, since many court clerks don’t clearly label attorney filings on their dockets. In Philadelphia alone, some 65 people have waited three to eight years for lawyers to take action before reaching that same outcome. Similarly, across the state, dockets show that lawyers received seven or more extensions in dozens of cases before filing Finley letters or nothing at all. 

In 2017, Lee Mandell, who has been practicing law in Philadelphia for more than 50 years, sent a Finley letter saying that he’d written to but never spoken with his client of four years and did not understand his claims.

“It is entirely unclear as to what the defendant really means,” wrote Mandell. In his own review of the case, Mandell failed to flag an erroneous jury instruction that four years later would lead to the conviction being overturned. Mandell was later formally reprimanded for allowing another client’s hearing to be delayed by six years, during which time two witnesses died. He did not return calls seeking comment.

Judges’ inaction added to lawyers’ delays, leaving matters to stagnate for years on end. In 2023, the state’s Superior Court registered such concerns about a case from Wayne County, where a lawyer filed a “two-page, deficient motion to withdraw, and the PCRA court did nothing in this case for 20 years.” 

To be sure, there can be good reasons for delays, since investigations can be complex. Lawyers have spent years chasing down missing witnesses, litigating requests for DNA testing or combing through police files. 

But in almost 200 post-conviction cases across Pennsylvania in the last 15 years, lawyers were appointed, then filed nothing at all over the span of a year or longer before being replaced with a new appointed lawyer. One of the cases stagnated for almost seven years, only for a new attorney to pick up the file. Another man was appointed five lawyers over eight years, dockets show, none of whom filed anything on his behalf.

Court officials have long been aware of the backlogs wracking this system, even publishing a law review article about it in 2003. The study outlined needed reforms but acknowledged the lack of political will, saying the “low status” of these cases stems from a bias among judges and lawyers who believe “that most post conviction claims are frivolous.”

No Standards for Lawyering

The loose timeline is just one dimension of a system with few standards. The state has published no best practices for indigent defense or guidelines on how many cases a lawyer can take; it has provided no training and instituted virtually no guidelines to ensure that court-appointed lawyers are qualified. As a result, lawyers hold widely diverging views on just what obligations they have to their clients.

The Inquirer and ProPublica previously found that about three-quarters of the time, Philadelphia lawyers who ended up filing Finley letters did not take basic steps such as meeting with their client, tracking down the trial lawyer’s file and obtaining all available discovery. 

“I do not know how you can evaluate trial counsel’s performance, which is the main role of post-conviction counsel, without talking to your client and reading trial counsel’s file,” said Jennifer Merrigan, a co-founder of Phillips Black, a nonprofit law firm. That file would reveal whether the lawyer consulted with experts, received all relevant evidence from the prosecutor and investigated potential witnesses. 

The state’s lack of vetting and training stands in contrast with national norms. A majority of other states have centralized defender services or support offices that provide resources, education and oversight. For instance, in North Carolina, appeals lawyers seeking court appointments must apply with the state appellate defender and submit references, work history showing the lawyer is qualified to litigate appeals and legal writing samples. They’re also required to take a training course covering strategy and best practices. 

Even without a statewide office, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court could establish minimum qualifications for lawyers handling indigent defense. In August, a state court committee published such a proposal, but it recommends only that lawyers have relevant work experience “to the extent practicable.” Work experience requirements have been enforced in some other states, such as Ohio, for years. But the committee’s proposal argued that work experience is not “possible to quantify” and that “less-than-experienced representation is better than no representation.”  

Ted Skaarup, a public defender who has advocated for training and qualification requirements, said inexperienced and untrained lawyers are more likely to default to writing Finley letters. New lawyers, he said, are left to consult with older attorneys who may pass on bad practices. “You go to them for advice and they say, ‘I’ll send you a copy of my [no-merit] letter.’”

Only one of the state’s 67 counties provided written criteria requiring specific work experience for lawyers to be appointed to post-conviction cases in response to records requests. Philadelphia court leadership says that lawyers must complete a training session and show they’ve recently handled three hearings involving disputed evidence. A volunteer panel tasked with approving prospective lawyers there rarely meets and is not empowered to approve or reject candidates based on writing samples, a core part of screening appeals lawyers in some other places.

In Pittsburgh, the nonprofit Allegheny Lawyers Initiative for Justice has urged local court officials to set up a system to screen and supervise appointed lawyers. For now, the organization is running its own voluntary trainings, as well as a resource center with office hours, a library of sample motions and help with social service referrals. 

Without such systems, the organization’s executive director, Rob Perkins, said, “There’s no quality control.” Lawyers can get away with “doing a poor job in these cases for years without anyone really paying attention.”

“Your Incentive Is to Do the Least Work”

When attorney Corrie Woods took over Washington County’s post-conviction caseload in 2020, he was startled to discover about a dozen files that had been untouched since being assigned to the previous lawyer in 2019 or earlier. In some, the lawyer’s inaction had caused the clients to lose their appeal rights.

Looking back, Woods said, it’s not surprising, given that the western Pennsylvania county was paying him $25,000 a year as a part-timer for up to 24 cases. “These cases are not going to take priority in most law offices,” said Woods, who now handles mostly personal injury cases. 

Under such a contract, he said, “Your incentive is to do the least work. You’re not getting more for doing more.” 

The American Bar Association has long opposed such flat-fee pay structures for that reason. States including Colorado, Idaho and Nevada have banned them. 

Not Pennsylvania. The state began contributing any money to indigent defense only in 2023. Today it kicks in just 57 cents per capita; neighboring states, on average, pay $26 per resident. Counties provide the rest as they see fit. A pending American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit claims that has resulted in widespread violations of the right to counsel.

About three-quarters of Pennsylvanians live in counties that use flat-fee arrangements or cap the amount a lawyer can bill for a case. Daniel Buzard, the court administrator in the county where Woods held the contract several years ago, said in an email, “This provides financial stability for both parties.”  

Some counties pay as little as $500 per case. Based on time estimates from Maine, one of the only states to publish post-conviction workload standards, that would come out to $11 per hour.

Twenty-one Pennsylvania counties offer flat annual pay for part-time lawyers — sometimes then assigning them caseloads that exceed Maine’s standard for full-time work.

“We at times even have to fight the attorneys who are supposed to represent us.”

Nolan O’Neal, Pennsylvania prisoner

Only five of the 18 contracts obtained in response to public records requests included a limit on the number of cases the court could heap onto a lawyer. None of the contracts set deadlines, specified a time commitment or described any oversight mechanism.

Stuart Wilder said his contract to handle post-conviction cases in Bucks County, outside Philadelphia, kept the lights on in his office for years. He worked hard for clients, he said, and won several challenging cases. But he said the flat-fee structure did require him to deprioritize cases where he didn’t see merit. 

“Being able to file Finley letters gave me the time to work on cases I could fix,” said Wilder, who recently retired.

But in at least three counties, contract lawyers left multiple clients stranded for a year or longer with no progress on their cases, dockets show.

In 2021, the court in Erie County yanked 50 cases from attorney James P. Miller and eventually reported him for discipline, citing extreme delays that cost some clients their appeal rights. Miller, whose law license was suspended as a result, declined to comment. But Erie court administrator Robert Catalde said the debacle spurred the county to double lawyers’ pay to $46,800 and provide benefits. 

A similar situation played out last year in Chester County, which abruptly ended its contract with the lawyer handling all its post-conviction cases, Charles Thomas Jr., after discovering that he had been putting in an average of just five hours a week across his roughly 25 cases.

One client, Patrick Hickson, said he spent two years trying to get Thomas to track down evidence that could clear him of a 2018 shooting or at least prove he didn’t get a fair trial. His defense lawyer had failed to call a single witness — admitting to the judge, mid-trial, that he’d wrongly assumed the prosecutor would send a summons to an eyewitness who had told police Hickson wasn’t the shooter. 

To raise the issue, Hickson needed Thomas to track down the missing witness. But when he reached Thomas by phone in August 2025, for the first time in months, the lawyer told him he was off the case. “He said the courts told him he was taking too long,” Hickson said. Thomas declined to comment. 

Chester County criminal court administrator Jordan Ludwick acknowledged concerns about the delays but said he resolved the problem by finding a qualified lawyer to take over the contract. 

That attorney, Shannon McDonald, said it was “not an easy transition.” 

“There were many cases that had not been touched at all,” she said. 

She cut through the backlog by filing 17 briefs in just over three months. All but three were Finley letters. 

“The case has to survive on the merits,” she said, “and, frankly, the deck is stacked against overturning a case.”

This March, she also sent Hickson a Finley letter. McDonald said ethics rules prevented her from discussing Hickson’s case, but in the letter she blamed Hickson for failing to track down the would-be witness and said his trial lawyer had a strategic reason for not sending the subpoena.

Reading the letter, Hickson said, “I felt defeated.” 

Since McDonald asked to drop the case, he is pursuing exoneration alone.

The post He Waited Nine Years in Prison for His Lawyer to File a Single Brief. In This State, There’s No Rule Against It. appeared first on ProPublica.

At 4:59 a.m. on Aug. 25, Verlon Jose, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation in Southern Arizona, received an email from the head of the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector. Government contractors were en route to conduct soil tests for construction of a 62-mile wall along the Nation’s southern boundary, wrote acting chief patrol agent Henry N. Laxdal.

If the tribe wished to have cultural monitors observe the work, they were welcome to, but they could not interfere with the government’s operations.

The work would begin in exactly one minute.

Jose, 59, was already aware of the contractors’ arrival. An hour earlier, a tribal member had called to report a caravan heading south through the reservation, and Facebook was lighting up with similar accounts. The convoy included not only work trucks and drilling rigs, but Border Patrol vehicles as well.

For months, the O’odham had maneuvered to avoid such a scene, taking their case to federal court. Their homeland straddles the border, and thousands of tribal members live in Mexico. A wall would disrupt routine border crossings for ceremonies and family visits and destroy landscapes they consider their duty to protect, members and leaders say. Their lawsuit argued that the Trump administration’s efforts to build it despite their opposition constituted an historic attack on tribal sovereignty.

But administration attorneys gave assurances that the government was engaging with the O’odham in good faith, and a judge in Washington, D.C., denied the tribe’s request for a preliminary injunction. In his Aug. 25 email providing Jose a 60-second heads up, the Border Patrol chief said his agency’s willingness to accommodate cultural monitors underscored its “commitment to ongoing coordination” with the Nation.

As daylight broke, Jose learned the contractors were guarded by federal agents in masks and tactical gear, drawn from a special operations cadre that participated in citywide sweeps in Minneapolis and Chicago the previous year, which left three people dead, including two U.S. citizens. When the tribe’s chief of police tried to reach the worksite, he was stopped at a roadblock set up by the agents.

Jose issued a statement on the Nation’s website declaring the incursion illegal and revealing that the Department of Homeland Security had deployed a surveillance blimp and enlisted Mexican security forces to help protect the work crews.

For a quarter-century, Tohono O’odham leaders have staved off a border wall by allowing DHS to use the reservation as a testing ground for some of the government’s most aggressive homeland security measures — from vehicle barriers on the reservation’s southern boundary, to state-of-the-art surveillance towers, to law enforcement partnerships with the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Despite the collaborations, and assurances from the Trump administration, ProPublica found that DHS has turned its vast apparatus on tribal members, with 24-hour surveillance directed at an ongoing border prayer ceremony and tribal members being questioned outside the reservation about their ceremonial activities. ProPublica’s account is based on photos, videos, court filings, interviews with tribal leadership, firsthand observations and more than 1,000 contemporaneously written observations compiled by tribal members.

The battle over a border wall on the Nation has broken along familiar partisan lines in Arizona. While GOP legislative leaders have filed briefs in support of the project, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has done the same in support of the tribe.

Progressive U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva, whose district includes the reservation, has said she is crafting legislation to rein in the Department of Homeland Security’s sweeping powers to waive federal laws in order to expedite wall construction. The Trump administration has used those authorities to circumvent environmental and cultural preservation statutes on 60 occasions across its two terms.

For Deshane Gregg, whose vehicle was forced off the road by a convoy of contractors and federal agents, the recent show of force on the reservation has felt like a government siege, not cooperation.

“You just feel helpless. You see these people, and they’re just so aggressive. They want you to react. They want you to show them that we could be ugly too,” she said. “We’re just here doing prayer. We’re just here, not trying to bother them, but it gets to you when it’s constantly being like that.”

“The drones flying over us all day,” she added, “it’s a lot.”

ProPublica sent DHS, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the Border Patrol nearly 30 questions about the government’s surveillance and interactions with tribal members and leaders. The agencies answered none of those questions. Instead, CBP pointed to a statement Commissioner Rodney Scott made in August, in which he described the reservation’s southern boundary as “one of the most dangerous smuggling and trafficking corridors on the Southwest border” and a “remote desert that has facilitated decades of drug loads, migrant deaths, and cartel activity.”

Regarding construction of a wall, Scott said, “Congress funded this work, a Federal court has affirmed it, and CBP is carrying it out under the legal authorities that apply. Under President Trump’s leadership, we are securing the border and giving our agents the tools and support they need to protect the American people.”

With no sign the White House or the O’odham government is backing down, DHS has cast off any pretense that the agency will work cooperatively with the Nation. Within hours of the judge’s denial of the emergency injunction, on Aug. 14, the department’s general counsel, James Percival, posted a celebratory meme depicting one of the cybernetic Star Trek supervillains known as “the Borg.”

“RESISTANCE IS FUTILE,” it read.

“We respect tribal sovereignty but not to the detriment of border security,” he wrote. “This wall is getting built. Our authority is beyond dispute.”

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The O’odham have inhabited the Sonoran Desert, from what is now Southern Arizona to Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, for thousands of years. According to the tribe, roughly 14,000 of its 37,000 enrolled members live on tribal land west of Tucson. Approximately 3,000 more reside in Mexico. At 2.8 million acres, their reservation is the largest on the southern border by a long shot.

During President Donald Trump’s first term, Arizona saw 226 miles of border wall built, but the Nation maintained its status as the longest unwalled section in the state. Confirmation that things would be different this time came in February, when CBP informed the tribe that it planned to seal off the reservation entirely, tapping nearly $52 billion from Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The tribe’s elected leaders met with DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin in hopes of changing the administration’s mind. As an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Mullin is the first Native American to head the department. “Maybe we can work with this guy,” Jose recalled thinking.

But Mullin’s message was clear: We want to work with you, but we’re building the wall. Justice Department attorneys were prepared to defend the project to the Supreme Court. O’odham council member Vivian Juan-Saunders, who also attended the April 21 meeting, recalls the secretary saying, “Don’t mess with me.” Mullin’s office did not respond to questions from ProPublica, including about the exchange.

The message was more direct the following month, when tribal leaders met with Scott. According to Jose, the CBP commissioner told the delegation that if they filed a lawsuit opposing the wall, the Nation could lose access to three border gates members use to travel to and from Mexico. Accessible only to tribal members, the gates are maintained at the discretion of CBP.

Juan-Saunders confirmed that CBP threatened to close the gates, as did another council member, Jesse Navarro. CBP declined to comment on the alleged threat.

In June, a $1.3 billion contract to build the wall, known as the “Tucson 5” project, was awarded to Sullivan Land Services Co., also known as SLS and SLSCO. The Texas firm has a long history of Republican political donations and was a major recipient of border wall contracts during Trump’s first term.

The O’odham filed a lawsuit to stop the project on June 16 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The tribe contended it would reduce the size of its reservation, which can only be done by Congress — and that the wall would mark an enduring act of trespass on sovereign lands and destroy sacred cultural sites.

The administration’s plans cast aside decades of tribal cooperation with DHS, the Nation’s lawyers argued, and came at a time of record-low border crossings.

Trump and his administration have repeatedly claimed that the border is safer than ever, with CBP reporting border apprehensions 94% lower than they were during the Biden presidency, and Border Patrol “encounters” hitting their lowest levels in more than 50 years. The Nation underscored these figures as evidence that a wall is unnecessary.

The tribe’s interim chief of police, James Cook, claimed there had been a 90% drop in reports of illegal entry over the preceding year, saying in a sworn declaration that smuggling and other border-related crimes had “almost disappeared.”

Benjamin S. Hollinder, a senior Border Patrol official, argued in a sworn declaration opposing the tribe’s lawsuit that the absence of a wall on the Nation has produced a funneling effect, channeling smugglers onto the reservation, and saying that dynamic would intensify once the rest of Arizona was walled off.

“Not having a border barrier system in this particular area makes it a vulnerable and a desirable area for [transnational criminal organizations] to operate,” wrote Hollinder. “If encounters of aliens entering illegally between ports of entry increase, vulnerabilities in the area will become particularly problematic.”

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The Nation sought the preliminary injunction to bar border wall activity until the litigation was resolved.

On the eve of a July 22 hearing, DHS filed a notice affirming that to accelerate the project, it was waiving, in whole or in part, more than 30 laws, including several that mandate tribal consultation.

In court filings, the government acknowledged its long history of working “cooperatively” with the tribal government while also arguing that the Nation “does not hold veto power over the United States’ sovereign duty to secure its borders.”

Trump administration attorneys contended that an injunction was premature; planning was ongoing, thus problems the Nation envisioned could still be addressed.

The government insisted construction would be limited to the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot-wide zone that runs across California, Arizona and New Mexico on the U.S. side of the border, where CBP was authorized to construct barriers as it saw fit.

Riyaz Kanji, the tribe’s lead attorney, argued the Roosevelt Reservation doesn’t extend onto tribal land, and even if it did the rugged landscape would force construction to diverge far from the 60-foot boundary.

Sweeping as its powers were, Kanji contended, DHS could not override a sovereign government. The administration’s plans, he argued, constituted a “blatant and unprecedented disregard for the tribe’s rights.”

Adam R.F. Gustafson, a Justice Department attorney, countered that the tribe had already approved a barrier on its land many years ago. The question now was what kind of barrier it should be. That was for DHS to decide, he argued. The department was “committed” to consultation, he continued. “We take very seriously the tribe’s views on this,” he told the court.

The judge appeared swayed by DHS’ assurances but needed time to consider. “I don’t think the government is trying to go outside of that 60-foot strip,” he said.

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The O’odham suspected the government would not be as mindful as it claimed.

Two days after the meeting with Mullin, the DHS secretary, a border wall contractor had “inadvertently disturbed a cultural site” west of the reservation. The crew had bulldozed a 70-foot swath through the Las Playas Intaglio, a 200-foot long earthen etching in the shape of a fish that was at least 6,500 years old. The site was well marked and well known to area archaeologists.

Wynona P. Larson Yazzie, an O’odham tribal elder, Marine Corps veteran and former tribal police officer, had organized prayer runs that included stops at the intaglio. She’d visited the site the day before its destruction. Since then, she’d closely followed the Nation’s lawsuit.

On Aug. 6, Larson Yazzie saw a disturbing filing from the tribe’s attorneys. They’d received word that in four days government contractors would enter the reservation to conduct tests. DHS, the tribe argued, was “exploiting” the judge’s reflection period to “move forward with highly disputed actions.”

Tribal leaders erected dozens of 8-foot-wide “no trespassing” signs along the three main access roads leading through the reservation to the border.

Larson Yazzie, meanwhile, began making plans of her own.

She was joined by Amy Juan, a longtime O’odham activist. Juan, 40, had grown up riding in her grandfather’s truck over the clanking cattle guard at Ko:li Ki:jig, a traditional crossing on the U.S.-Mexico line. After 9/11, a locking gate was placed over the cattle guard. The Border Patrol built a “forward operating base” near her grandparents’ home that would eventually feature a helipad, a detention space and an endless cycle of agents. Around the reservation’s perimeter, CBP established some of the largest Border Patrol stations in the country. Checkpoints went up on roads leading north.

Human rights groups documented U.S.-born tribal members being arrested and deported, and verbal and physical abuse by Border Patrol agents. CBP did not respond when asked about the report’s allegations.

For Juan, the Nation’s collaboration with DHS had sacrificed safety and civil liberties for elusive gains. Virtually everyone on the reservation had been touched by the dark side of border smuggling. During the mid-2000s, some tribal members, enticed by a chance at life-changing money, got involved in moving people and drugs, fueling cycles of arrest and incarceration that exacerbated challenges the community was already facing.

At the same time, virtually everyone also had a story about negative interactions with the Border Patrol — a child traumatized at a checkpoint, an unlawful traffic stop or a loved one assaulted by an agent.

“We want safety and the same respect as the next person,” Juan said. “We’ve never been against keeping people safe, but at what cost?”

Larson Yazzie was similarly concerned. She worried that in the face of DHS pressure the Nation would fold and, like the intaglio, the borderlands would be lost.

---

Prayer fires are an important O’odham tradition, often convened in moments of communal struggle. To Larson Yazzie, the coming of a wall was such a time.

The chosen site was symbolic: the border gate at Ko:li Ki:jig. The camp had limited amenities — cots and chairs that encircled the fire, a cooler for ice, a weathered canopy for relief from the sun. They called it Tadai Me:i — roadrunner on fire.

Someone was always awake to watch the flame, which was lit on Aug. 9, as the Trump administration’s contractors were preparing to enter the reservation. The first drone sighting in the area was recorded the following night, at 11:43 p.m., documented in the first of two activity logs. Kept in spiral notebooks, the logs offered a minute-by-minute account of what participants in the ceremony saw and heard.

The handwritten observations, shared with ProPublica, span 13 days and chart a steady escalation by DHS, culminating in an elite tactical team that blocked tribal authorities from issuing trespassing citations to contractors or removing them.

The camp wasn’t a protest site like those seen in Minneapolis, Chicago or other cities over the past year. Participants didn’t shout at passing Border Patrol agents. They focused on the fire, making sure there was enough sugai — creosote bush, a fragrant desert plant — to keep it burning. They were in ceremony, concentrating on morning prayers and nightly cleanses. The atmosphere was that of a family gathering in a moment of crisis. There were jokes and levity amid the uncertainty.

Larson Yazzie knew at least one legislative council member who opposed the gathering. They feared it could lead to large groups converging on the reservation to physically block the border wall, in an occupation similar to the 10-month protest on Standing Rock Sioux land that halted construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. The idea terrified tribal leaders. With its lethal heat and unforgiving terrain, the desert was dangerous enough without outsiders squaring off against Border Patrol.

Supporters of the ceremonial fire were themselves uneasy. They knew the story of Ray Mattia, the 58-year-old who was shot and killed by the Border Patrol in 2023 while unarmed on the doorstep of his home on the reservation. Agents, who were backing tribal police on the call, claimed to have mistaken a cellphone he was holding for a gun.

“My fear is that they gonna start shooting us,” said 24-year-old camp visitor Collin Quasule. Quasule had videos on his phone of recent interactions he’d had with federal agents, including agents trailing him as he drove around the reservation, following him to his home, pulling him over without explaining why, refusing to accept his legal name and birthdate, and winking at him when he protested his detention.

Across the reservation, community members were on the lookout for large trucks traveling together with out-of-state plates. On Aug. 12, Juan received a call about a caravan: six trucks with Texas plates, following an unmarked SUV with government plates. She called the tribe’s police department. The caravan was intercepted and escorted off the land by tribal authorities. The driver of the unmarked vehicle was confirmed to be a Border Patrol agent. The interception was one of nearly a dozen tribal police recorded over a three-day period.

During the camp’s first seven days, the activity log filled with nearly 665 observations, mostly federal agents buzzing around their location.

While many would drive by without stopping, other agents would park and watch. At least one was reported snapping photos of the campers. ProPublica later obtained video of an agent doing exactly that. Mexican security forces, both military and police, were also observed conversing with Border Patrol agents over the international boundary. “It appeared that the 2 BPs were showing the Mexicans pictures on their phones,” read an Aug. 11 entry.

“Surveillance has heightened,” Juan said, days after the prayer fire was lit. “Drones, helicopters, a lot of air activity.” The choppers included both marked CBP and what appeared to be military Black Hawks. The drones were of the handheld quadcopter variety, let loose directly over the camp, at times during prayer song ceremonies.

On the fourth night, a gathering was held. Upwards of 100 people turned up, including members of distant sister tribes.

The evening was peaceful until Juan received a text from an elder couple who’d left early to return to their home near Tucson. The Border Patrol had stopped them at a checkpoint a half-mile outside the reservation, they reported. The officers said they were conducting an “immigration check” and asked to see tribal ID.

“Where you guys coming from?” the agent asked.

“Ceremony,” the couple replied.

“Oh,” the agent said, “is that the one going on down south?”

The encounter was unusual, said Juan. The checkpoint is rarely staffed. When agents are on hand, she said, “they never ask us for a tribal ID.”

When Juan shared the information with the gathering, people immediately began packing up, afraid, she surmised, of a late-night encounter with Border Patrol.

On Aug. 14, Judge Richard J. Leon declined the Nation’s injunction request. “I fully expect the government in the months ahead to follow through on its guarantees of consultation and cooperation with the Nation to address the Nation’s concerns regarding border wall construction!” he wrote.

Eleven days later, on Aug. 25, the Border Patrol sent the Nation its one-minute notice that the contractors were coming. Larson Yazzie jumped in her truck and raced for the border to document what was happening. An agent on foot stopped her. He’d laid a spike strip in the road ahead, he warned. Larson Yazzie filmed the contractors in the distance.

When the tribal police department’s interim chief arrived, he too was stopped at a Border Patrol roadblock. A trio of Border Patrol supervisors approached, including two from a nearby station and a third representing BORTAC, the agency’s special operations wing. The SWAT-style agents wore desert camo, masks and patterned scarves favored by U.S. military units in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was only after promising not to interfere that the tribal police chief was permitted to record. He observed three drilling rigs manned by a handful of operators. An equal number of agents stood guard. The contractors’ heavy vehicles were all beyond the 60-foot zone that government attorneys assured the judge they would not leave.

The chief also encountered a trio of Bureau of Indian Affairs agents, who claimed to have been sent on orders from Washington, D.C. Their mission, they said, was to “preserve the peace and monitor activities.”

---

For the prayer camp’s participants, the need to relight the flame, which they had extinguished after a seven-day ceremony, was self-evident. They began that night.

Davy Cross, a stocky 57-year-old with an intricate tattoo running down the left side of his face, was tending the fire when, at 4:33 a.m., he noticed buzzing above his head.

At first, the machines were visible. There were at least five. “I seen all the red lights,” Cross recalled. But as they got lower, the drones went dark. Cross could still hear them and feel the draft of the rotors against his skin. Then, he said, “they disappeared.”

The drones were soon replaced by an airplane and a helicopter. Shortly after 9 a.m., a caravan of Border Patrol and construction vehicles trundled into view. The work trucks continued on, but much of the Border Patrol force remained, forming a semicircle around the camp with Mexican state police closing the loop on the other side of the line.

“We got surround[ed] by over 30 vehicles,” Cross wrote in the activity log. A video of the moment spread across social media in the borderlands.

The tribe’s attorneys filed an appeal of the judge’s order allowing construction to proceed and pleaded for a halt to the government’s activities. They argued that the Trump administration was making “a mockery” of the court’s expectation of “consultation and cooperation.”

That night at the camp, Larson Yazzie was singing prayer songs when Juan pulled in. It was near midnight. Border Patrol agents were coming and going constantly. Some passed without stopping. Others idled at the edge of the firelight while the red lights of a surveillance blimp blinked over the mountains to the east.

Tadai Me:i wasn’t the only pocket of resistance on the border. In Texas, the Trump administration’s plans to run a wall through Big Bend National Park had brought together an unusual coalition that saw environmental nonprofits and river guides standing with hunters, ranchers and local sheriffs in opposition to the project. One week before the armed convoy rolled onto the Tohono O’odham reservation, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott announced that after speaking with the secretary of DHS, he’d secured a pause on the controversial project.

“There are technology tools that don’t include barriers,” the governor said at a press conference. “Think of drones, think of fiber optics.”

Last week, a judge granted a preliminary injunction halting construction in the Big Bend area while a lawsuit against the project proceeds.

To Juan, it was darkly ironic. For two and a half decades, the Nation had been a laboratory for the technology Abbott described. Yet when tribal leaders made that case, they were told to stand down; the wall was coming whether they accepted it or not. “What makes Texas the exception to us is very clear,” Juan said. “It’s good old boy conversations that are happening between the politicians and the CBP commissioners and Markwayne Mullin.”

---

The early fire watch that morning fell to a young Pascua Yaqui member named Nate Sosa.

At 3:28 a.m., Sosa heard a noise — a round being chambered in a weapon. A Border Patrol agent had exited his vehicle. With a long gun slung low across his back, he shined a light into Mexico. He then walked within feet of the campers asleep on their cots.

A half an hour later, a drone flew in from the north, followed by a helicopter. After that came a convoy dozens of vehicles long. At 6:02, while Larson Yazzie was leading the camp in prayer, a helicopter passed overhead. An hour later, a drone ascended above the fire.

Liz Quiroga, a 28-year-old tribal member and regular at the prayer site, sat with the camp’s logbook open in her lap. Over the next five days, the book would fill with 379 observations. Nearly two-thirds involved Border Patrol units near the fire. The arrival of Mexican authorities was documented six times. An additional 39 entries referenced unmarked vehicles and suspected “undercovers.” Whether those individuals were Border Patrol, contractors or tribal police was unclear. The logbook cataloged a dozen instances of aircraft flying over the camp, including four helicopters, three planes and five drones.

“Nobody has any idea what’s actually happening out here,” Quiroga said. “This is true dystopia.”

While its legal challenge continues, the Nation has ceased attempting to remove border wall contractors from its lands.

The camp and the surveillance that’s come with it remain.

The post As Trump’s Wall Closes in, DHS Intimidates a Border Tribe With Surveillance, Masked Agents and Drones appeared first on ProPublica.

Earlier this year, we heard that reporter Jake Pearson planned to ask our editors at ProPublica for more than $20,000 so he could spend the NBA playoffs betting like a problem gambler. 

We told him we wanted in on the action. 

For 10 weeks, our documentary team at ProPublica filmed Jake as he dove ball-cap-first into DraftKings and FanDuel, the country’s largest online sportsbooks. Jake bet early, late and often, ramping up the amounts and frequency of his wagers, chasing his losses with even bigger bets.  He wanted to flagrantly wave the red flags of a gambler descending into addiction. Would the apps serve up speed bumps as he careened into the red, or would they push him to keep betting? 

Since 2018, the year the Supreme Court opened the door for states to legalize sports betting, the number of people staking money on games has exploded. It’s now legal in 39 states and Washington, D.C. The apps don’t just offer straight action on the outcome of a “Sunday Night Football” game — you can put money on myriad sports events and outcomes, including who will score the next point in a tense contest of Czech table tennis. Every month, millions do. 

More than $600 billion has sloshed through the legal sportsbooks in wagers — and brought billions in state tax revenue — in the last eight years. But between the ever-present ads featuring celebrities from LeBron James and Charles Barkley to Kevin Hart and Kendall Jenner, cracks in the system have started to show. 

About a quarter of active sportsbook account holders surveyed by the Siena Research Institute this year said that they’d lost enough on a bet that they’d have trouble meeting their financial obligations. Other studies and public health experts warn of rising cases of bankruptcy, addiction and self-harm.

DraftKings and FanDuel say that they don’t want to profit off bettors who can’t control themselves, and they provide a range of what the industry calls “responsible gaming” tools to help users stay in check. 

Jake received pop-up notices, reminders and emails noting his time on the app and nudging him to “take a beat” after a loss. He opted into some of the tools DraftKings makes available. But he was struck by user design choices and promotions that encouraged him to keep betting, some of which he was served right after setting limits on his play. 

In a statement, DraftKings told ProPublica that it trains its more than 5,000 employees on responsible gaming and has more than 50 full-time staff dedicated to its “responsible engagement” program. A FanDuel spokesperson wrote that the company’s program is “designed to identify potential risk early and empower customers with real-time information about their play.” 

Even so, regulators and lawmakers from Colorado to Massachusetts have begun to question whether sportsbooks have sufficient protections in place. Those concerns have risen with the popularization of prediction markets, which are even less regulated than sports betting apps like DraftKings. 

We were behind the camera back in April when Jake opened his DraftKings account to place his first bet, a $100 Hail Mary wager for the New York Knicks to win the chip. We had no idea what a ride it would be.  

Watch our new documentary that follows Jake as he intentionally descends into problem gambling — and see how the apps react. 

Have you used apps like DraftKings or FanDuel to place sports bets? ProPublica is looking for at least 250 people who use these apps to share their data with us. Your transaction history will help us better understand how the apps respond to user behavior. You can also reach Jake Pearson and the reporting team at 917-512-0276 or sportsbetting@propublica.org.

The post Watch: Inside Our $22K Sports Betting Experiment appeared first on ProPublica.

Gambling regulators in New York on Friday formally proposed two rules that they say will help curb gambling addiction in the state.

The move adds the country’s largest sports betting market to a growing list of places that are seeking online gambling reforms as states that have legalized wagering on sports in recent years deal with the harmful side effects, including rising addiction diagnoses there.

While the drafts have been months in the making, their official introduction follows mounting media scrutiny, including a ProPublica investigation last month that showed weaknesses in the guardrails that companies like DraftKings have erected to address problem gamblers on their platforms. That system is called “responsible gaming.”

The commission’s chair, Brian O’Dwyer, said that the proposed rules “provide an opportunity for the industry to illustrate its commitment” to protecting its customers. 

“The industry is on notice by me and this commission that they need to solve this problem,” O’Dwyer said. “If the industry does not address it, then we will address it and they may not like the solution that we come up with.”

One of the new rules would effectively adopt guidelines that New Jersey already uses, requiring sportsbooks to follow specific thresholds to identify at-risk bettors. The company would then be mandated to check in with those users. Another rule would bar companies from using artificial intelligence to customize bonuses or wagers.

DraftKings, one of the country’s largest sports betting companies, has said it already follows the New Jersey trigger thresholds. Among them: depositing more than $10,000 in a 24-hour period or wagering more than $1 million in a 90-day period.

But as ProPublica recently reported, problem gambling can manifest in much smaller amounts. With the advice of recovering addicts, addiction specialists and professional sports bettors, a reporter deposited $21,600 into his DraftKings account in less than eight weeks and purposefully bet compulsively, exhibiting the hallmark signs of problem gambling throughout that time. The behavior didn’t qualify for a company review or interventions beyond responsible gaming notices, including in-app pop-ups.

Some advocates for gambling reforms said that’s one big reason why the proposed rules don’t go far enough.

New York and New Jersey “are clearly complacent in the status quo by endorsing and prescribing regulations that are nothing more than giving the appearance of reform and not effectuating actual change,” said Brianne Doura-Schawohl, a gambling reform advocate who lobbies for consumer and public health protections.

After the commission advanced the rules unanimously on Friday, O’Dwyer said he recognized “the limitations of this proposal” and urged the state’s nine licensed mobile sports betting companies to share data so that problem gamblers can’t elude intervention by bouncing between them. 

The introduction of the rules is a key step toward formal adoption. There will be a 60-day comment period for the public to weigh in on them. Barring major changes, the rules will then go back before the commission.

Though the plans were first published in March and received dozens of public comments, their official introduction at the gaming commission comes on the heels of reporting by The New York Times, which found that DraftKings used artificial intelligence and data scientists to target its promotions to losing bettors, and ProPublica, which found that promotions far outweighed the responsible gaming notices sent to a reporter exhibiting problematic behavior.

DraftKings made that journalist a VIP after he displayed red flags of problem gambling.

Since those articles were published last month, regulators in Maine and Michigan have also said that they are reviewing some of the issues raised in the stories.

A spokesperson for Maine’s Public Safety Department said the Gambling Control Unit is “monitoring the use of AI locally and nationally” but has no rules or laws addressing the issue and declined to provide any additional information “regarding the scope of that monitoring or specific operations.” A spokesperson for Michigan regulators hasn’t responded to requests for comment.

Massachusetts regulators, who have been looking into the use of AI by gambling companies, said they were also taking a look. The governor of Maryland has separately said he’d like to limit gambling companies’ use of AI to “identify and target users showing problem-gambling patterns.”

Asked for comment on the New York regulations, a FanDuel spokesperson said the company “welcomes the opportunity to engage with regulators and work collaboratively to establish best practices for the industry.”

A spokesperson for DraftKings referred ProPublica to its prior comments.

In statements and interviews, the company has defended its responsible gaming program and disputed any characterization that it targets addicts or those prone to addiction with inducements.

In an interview with ProPublica, Lori Kalani, DraftKings’ chief responsible gaming officer, said that, overall, “the system worked the way it was supposed to” during our gambling investigation, citing the more than 30 messages it sent our reporter. She added that “as a business, as an industry, we’re doing a good job of educating people, of raising awareness, of making tools and resources available, of monitoring accounts.”

DraftKings told the Times it “rejects any implication that its marketing practices are unfair or improperly targets customers” and said its perks were delivered to “customers who demonstrated sustained, engaged use on our platform, not toward customers based on their losses.”

The rules presented on Friday were made in response to a call by Gov. Kathy Hochul this year to address problem gambling. The Democrat, who is running for reelection, has announced a 10-year survey of residents’ gambling behavior to help “guide smart, targeted investments that protect New Yorkers and strengthen access to care.”

But the commission’s proposed rules are a relatively moderate step in that direction.

The measures would require a sports betting company to do more due diligence into a user’s “financial vulnerability” under certain conditions. Those triggers include a range of behaviors, including, for example, if a user’s time on the app jumps by 50% or more in a week compared with the immediately preceding two-week period.

In a comment letter this May, the Responsible Online Gaming Association, a trade group that includes DraftKings, FanDuel and three other major sportsbook operators, said the rules “establish a strong framework for responsible gaming” but offered some “targeted recommendations.”

Those included ensuring the triggers “avoid displacing or disrupting the mature, data-driven behavioral risk assessment systems already in use” and don’t confuse the company’s “responsible gaming role and the role of qualified clinicians.” It said any interventions should be “proportionate, operationally scalable, and effective.”

The post New York Plans Stronger Sports Betting Regulation to Curb Gambling Addiction appeared first on ProPublica.

Among a cadre of Wall Street executives brought into the Pentagon during President Donald Trump’s second term, George K. Kollitides II has emerged as a powerbroker with a broad mandate to improve procurement of weapons and critical minerals.

The longtime partner at the private equity firm Alvarez & Marsal Capital has framed his tour of duty in government as a service to the country. But the work he’s leading has also been a boon to his old friends in the private sector, government procurement records show.

In April, months after Kollitides had started work at the Pentagon, he was listed on a securities filing as continuing to work for his old company as a senior adviser. Two months later, the Defense Department finalized a $281 million no-bid consulting contract with an affiliate firm, Alvarez & Marsal Federal, to advise Kollitides’ new Pentagon office, the records show.

That contract, large for consulting work even by Defense Department standards, is the second in a pair of deals that since December have awarded almost $350 million in military spending to the firm — about five times more than Alvarez & Marsal entities had received from all U.S. agencies combined in the two decades before Trump returned to office, according to federal spending data. Both of those contracts have been for work connected to Pentagon offices where Kollitides is the head or has a senior role.

The deals remain shrouded in secrecy, records show, because they were signed under an unusual contracting method the Defense Department uses to fund experimental weapons — work A&M has never claimed to do. They have begun to send unprecedented sums of taxpayer money to a company that boasts helping government agencies create a “customer-centric culture” and that is deeply intertwined with the private equity firm where Kollitides was a partner for almost 10 years. The two partner firms tag-team investment deals and share back-office support, company documents and federal filings show.

Kollitides was still working with A&M Capital when the deals were signed. It’s unclear if he will benefit financially from the windfall of military spending on A&M consulting. His employment at the Pentagon is under a special classification that allows him to keep his financial disclosures confidential.

Ethics experts said it’s generally illegal for executive branch officials to play a role in awarding contracts that would have a direct impact on their own finances, unless they were granted a waiver.

“It looks way too cozy to be legitimate. I think taxpayers should be appalled,” said Virginia Canter, a former federal government ethics lawyer. “There are a million consulting firms in D.C. and New York. Why would you sole source this contract? They’re not sending replacement parts for a ship that is sinking.”

After ProPublica sent questions to the Pentagon, Kollitides and both A&M entities early this  week, A&M Capital said Kollitides had just stopped working there days earlier.

In a statement, A&M Capital said it is a “separately capitalized and separately managed firm from the Alvarez & Marsal consulting business” and its “management and employees have no involvement in the day-to-day operations of the consulting business, and vice versa.” The firm said that none of Kollitides’ work for it related to the “defense industry, the Department of War or Mr. Kollitides’ government service.”

The Alvarez & Marsal consulting business did not answer any of ProPublica’s questions, including how it became aware of the possibility that it could seek the $281 million no-bid contract and what services it is providing to Kollitides’ Pentagon team. The Wall Street Journal on Thursday reported the existence of some of the Alvarez & Marsal contracting.

“We are proud to serve clients across all industries, and all levels of government,” the company said in a statement. “The common denominator is always the same: we help solve difficult problems.”

“It looks way too cozy to be legitimate. I think taxpayers should be appalled.”

Virginia Canter, former federal government ethics lawyer

Kollitides did not respond to questions about whether he played a role in A&M securing contracts to work for his office, but a Pentagon spokesperson replied for the department and on Kollitides’ behalf saying they both followed all applicable rules.

“The Department of War maintains a rigorous, multi-layered ethics framework that includes financial disclosure reviews, divestitures where appropriate, and screening to prevent conflicts of interest,” Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Jacob Bliss wrote in an email. Kollitides, he added, “is in full compliance with all ethical laws and regulations. Any claims otherwise are false.”

There is widespread bipartisan agreement that the Pentagon’s procurement systems are in need of radical reform and private-sector know-how could help the country better secure supply lines and accelerate the development of new weapons to ensure the military is prepared to fight future wars.

But current and former defense officials say the massive spending for connected consultants is a reflection of a changed Defense Department under Trump. They say a clubby and politicized culture has taken hold in a wing of the Pentagon controlled by Kollitides and other former Wall Street executives recruited by Steve Feinberg, the billionaire private-equity titan who is now the deputy defense secretary. It’s an operation, they say, that favors people and companies that have close ties to the administration.

This year, ProPublica reported that the Office of Strategic Capital, a unit at the Pentagon that Kollitides helps lead, granted a small North Carolina startup linked to Donald Trump Jr. a $620 million loan after a top aide to the president intervened on the company’s behalf. A group of Democratic lawmakers accused the office of “a staggering level of corruption and influence peddling.”

ProPublica also reported that the same Pentagon unit was considering a loan to Unusual Machines, a second company connected to the president’s son. A defense official told ProPublica recently that the unit is now in the late stages of a $220 million loan for the Florida drone parts maker, where Trump Jr. sits on the advisory board and was granted a stake.

The Pentagon did not respond to a question about the advancing loan process for Unusual Machines and if Trump Jr.’s connections were playing a part. After the earlier loan to a Trump-connected company, the Pentagon said “no company receives preferential treatment” and “political connections play absolutely no role in the Department’s funding decisions.” Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson pushed back on criticism, saying the Defense Department is conducting extensive due diligence on potential lending.

That Pentagon lending unit was launched during the Biden administration with an open application process for interested companies. Current and former officials and people who have interacted with the office say Kollitides and other leaders now rely more on their own personal networks to choose companies to fund — as well as the consultants to vet those deals.

Multiple Pentagon Hats

That reliance on personal networks is how Kollitides got to the Pentagon.

Feinberg first hired Kollitides more than two decades ago.

Then a rising private-equity star who had graduated from Columbia Business School, Kollitides moved up the ranks at Cerberus, Feinberg’s firm, taking the reins of its aerospace, defense and government groups. In 2012, Kollitides took on an especially sensitive and more public job for the private-equity giant. Kollitides was named chief executive of a Cerberus company combining Remington, the nation’s oldest gun maker, with more than a dozen other firearms and parts companies, eliminating hundreds of jobs from New York to Georgia to Montana.

After three years with the Cerberus-owned gunmaker, Kollitides left and became a partner at Alvarez & Marsal Capital, an offshoot of A&M consulting, whose co-founder also had long-standing business ties to Feinberg.

Some former business associates said they were not surprised that Kollitides jumped at the chance to rejoin Feinberg at the Pentagon. The two share a love for firearms and defense industry investments. They have also both described their work addressing the military’s most vexing supply chain issues as a patriotic calling.

“Americans need us at the Pentagon and our civilians and our contractors to do better,” Feinberg said last year. “We can’t fail, we can’t make excuses, we must succeed.”

On social media, Kollitides has shown the kind of partisanship long taboo in the Pentagon but now fostered in its ranks by Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Kollitides has decried the “Democrat Party,” warned of the ills of socialism and posted that “the government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.”

Over the last year, Feinberg has continued to heap responsibility on Kollitides: naming him his co-chief of staff and senior adviser; vice chairman of the Office of Strategic Capital’s investment committee; and director of two other new offices, the Economic Defense Unit and the Business Operators for National Defense, or BOND — the office with the $281 million no-bid contract.

His employment status allowing him to hold any of those roles at the Pentagon is somewhat of a mystery.

Unlike Feinberg, who was confirmed to his post by the Senate, Kollitides was reportedly first brought onto the federal government last year as a special government employee, or SGE, a designation that allows someone to work in government for no more than 130 days a year. Kollitides seemingly exceeded that cap several months ago.

But in the Pentagon’s email system, Kollitides’ name now carries an abbreviation signifying he has been designated an HQE, or highly qualified expert. His employment classification, which the Pentagon confirmed, is designed to hire people who bring “enlightened thinking and innovation” to Defense Department roles that can last up to six years.

That distinction brings a unique benefit for Kollitides. Financial disclosures filed by HQEs are generally confidential, while those of high-ranking SGEs are often subject to release once a person fills a government role for more than 60 days. It’s unclear if Pentagon ethics officials granted Kollitides a waiver to keep any disclosures confidential.

(ProPublica requested Kollitides’ financial disclosure forms in August, but the Pentagon has not yet responded.)

Kollitides’ continued tie to Alvarez & Marsal Capital surfaced in April in a securities filing by a second company with which the defense official was taking a leadership post.

Days after Feinberg named him the head of BOND, granting Kollitides deep visibility into weapons production rates of U.S. military contractors, Kollitides took a seat on the board of D. Boral Acquisition I, an offshore shell company whose affiliate D. Boral Capital has partnered with defense-related businesses. The Guardian and Bloomberg Government previously reported on the filing, and Bloomberg reported that Kollitides stepped down from the position at the end of September.

Kollitides’ biography in the filing described his current roles at the Pentagon, then added that “he is also a Senior Advisor” to Alvarez & Marsal Capital and that he previously was a partner and co-head of one the firm’s funds.

The A&M entity that Kollitides is described as still advising in the filing is essentially the private-equity partner of the sprawling Alvarez & Marsal firm that includes A&M Federal, which is now providing consulting services for his offices at the Pentagon.

Though the private-equity and consulting businesses are distinct, they work together, share back-office staff for human resources  and tech support, and have overlapping ownership, according to company documents. The private-equity arm describes itself as having a “strategic relationship” with the consulting side of A&M. The firm boosts its investment decision-making by working with the consulting firm’s thousands of employees around the globe to assess particular companies. And after the fund takes a stake in a company, it deploys the consulting arm’s employees to improve that firm’s operations and make the company more valuable.

In other words, the fund’s success hinges on the consulting firm’s.

Whether Kollitides violated government ethics rules hinges on details that he and the Pentagon have declined to provide.

A Defense Department official told ProPublica that Kollitides “does not and has never had” any investments or financial relations with A&M consulting. The official said Kollitides is also “recused on any conflicted matters related to A&M Capital,” which could be referring to Defense Department decisions related to companies A&M Capital has a financial stake in.

Ethics experts said that without a written waiver, executive branch officials are generally barred from participating in decisions, such as the awarding of a contract, that would have a direct impact on their financial interests. That law, the experts said, could apply even if the official doesn’t have a stake in a company but just draws a salary — the rationale being that they’ve improved the odds that the company will be able to continue paying them.

The Pentagon official did not answer specific questions about whether Kollitides was being compensated by A&M Capital when the contracts were signed, if he played any role in the contract decision-making process or if he sought or received an exemption to do so.

A “Blank Sheet of Paper” Contract

A&M’s first contract with the Pentagon was signed in December, months after Kollitides joined the government. That $67.6 million deal was awarded to Alvarez & Marsal Federal through a Defense Department entity focused on efforts to strengthen the nation’s industrial base.

The full scope of work that A&M provided is unclear. But documents reviewed by ProPublica show that by late last year, the firm had begun helping to vet possible loan deals for the Office of Strategic Capital, the lending unit then run in part by Kollitides.

Like that first contract, the larger, $281 million deal that followed to advise Kollitides’ BOND office came in the form of what is called an OTA, or other transaction agreement, which allows agencies to bypass regular federal contracting rules on public disclosure and oversight.

Congress first authorized the Defense Department to use the contracting method in the 1980s to fund breakthrough technologies without publicly disclosing much about the work. The Pentagon has increasingly turned to OTA contracts over the last decade to quickly fund a broader range of one-time costs, including prototype weapons and urgent production needs, even as government auditors have lamented OTAs as a “blank sheet of paper” arrangement with little oversight or accountability.

Still, experts said an OTA contract for consulting work was extraordinary. That’s because consulting is one of the simplest services the military can buy, and it has a long history of doing so through competitive bidding. Firms often publish the hourly costs for their associates, managers and other work before solicitations are posted.

But like black-box OTA contracts for secret weapons systems, the funding mechanism has hidden from public view details of what taxpayers are getting for the money.

The sheer size of the A&M contract stunned experts.

At $281,089,206.65, the consulting contract is among the largest OTAs funded through the Defense Department’s main support division in the last decade, including for top secret semiconductor projects and underwater drones, records show.

The Pentagon has said little about the impact of BOND since Hegseth claimed in February that the new entity would revolutionize military purchasing.

The defense secretary said that under the program, the military would embed former corporate executives, or, as he put it, “elite, private-sector patriots” to help optimize and accelerate the manufacturing of critical munitions. Hegseth said he thought the exercise would help the Pentagon increase resiliency in supply chains. The “era of managed decline is over,” he said.

In private recruitment materials for those executives, as well as for candidates to fill posts in other Kollitides-run units, the stakes and the mission for BOND were described in even starker terms: Neoliberalism and trade deals have left the U.S. as a country that “can no longer manufacture ships, munitions or planes in a timely manner.”

The recruiting materials cast the job of fixing that systemic problem as part-time work: “Recently retired Fortune 100 executives spend five days per month solving public- and private-sector operational challenges,” read pages viewed by ProPublica.

Two people familiar with A&M’s work for BOND said the firm’s consultants have accompanied former executives on trips to review work at major defense contractors such as Lockheed, Boeing, RTX and BAE Systems. BAE acknowledged a visit by BOND representatives but declined to comment further. Lockheed, Boeing, RTX and other companies contacted by ProPublica did not respond to requests for comment.

Contracting experts said that A&M is likely not guaranteed the full amount, and that contracts like these typically span several years, but records show A&M has already been paid about $31 million.

Not everyone, however, is welcome to participate.

One former military officer who worked in the defense industry told ProPublica he was contacted by an outside recruiter for Kollitides’ new BOND office. The recruiter, he said, told him that all applicants would be asked who they voted for.

The former military officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retribution, said he expressed discomfort with that line of questioning. He received an email shortly after from the recruiter telling him he was no longer under consideration. The Pentagon did not respond to a question about the officer’s account.

“Getting more effective and efficient is not a political question,” the former officer said.

The post The Pentagon Gave $350 Million in Contracts to a Firm Closely Tied to a Senior Defense Department Official appeared first on ProPublica.

In the summer of 2023, after he was impeached on charges of abusing his office for personal gain, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was suspended and barred from conducting any official business for more than three months while awaiting trial in the state Senate.

So, he traveled.

Paxton, a Republican who is now running for U.S. Senate, took at least 17 trips over three months, including to resort destinations Park City, Utah, and Vail, Colorado. He visited the Oklahoma town where he owns a vacation lodge and a Utah community with a golf resort, where he later bought four condominiums.

State police joined him each time, costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars for trips unrelated to his job as attorney general. The Texas Senate ultimately acquitted him on the impeachment charges.

But Paxton’s use of the taxpayer-funded detail did not begin or end there. In fact, it stands out compared with his predecessor, fellow elected officials in Texas and other state attorneys general, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found.

Paxton has traveled frequently out of state while listing little on his official calendar, The Associated Press reported last week. ProPublica and the Tribune’s analysis, which included reviewing every publicly available document Paxton’s office says it possesses about his travel, discloses for the first time how few of his trips had a listed business purpose: just 1 in 6.

It also found Paxton’s security has cost taxpayers far more than has previously been reported.

Since assuming office in 2015, Paxton has taken nearly 1,000 trips with a state-funded security detail, costing $3.3 million. The newsrooms’ review of Paxton’s travel records, obtained through the state’s Public Information Act, could only connect 138 of those trips and $553,000 in security costs to state business.

Records detailing the purpose of Paxton’s visits to 36 states and 19 countries do not appear to exist in most cases. These include a trip to a small town in Hawaii months before his family’s blind trust bought land there; 24 trips to Utah, where the trust owns five properties; and 53 trips to Florida, where Paxton and the trust have two houses and a townhome.

“If you’ve got all these extra trips, it becomes ethically and morally problematic,” said Chris Toth, former executive director of the National Association of Attorneys General, who has also criticized Paxton’s conduct on other issues. “The ethical question is whether a legitimate security function has effectively become a taxpayer-funded subsidy.”

Texas law allows the Department of Public Safety to provide security for key state leaders, including the attorney general, but does not require officials to use it. In fact, Paxton himself hasn’t used it in at least two dozen cases while traveling on official business.

Paxton has dismissed opponents’ attacks that he has used the perks of office to benefit himself and has not answered questions about how he vastly increased his wealth as a public servant.

He also did not answer detailed questions for this story. ProPublica and the Tribune sent Paxton a spreadsheet detailing travel for which there was no record that he was on state business and asked him to provide additional information if the trips were not personal. Neither Paxton nor his office provided such records. Instead, his office provided a general statement.

“Throughout his career, Ken Paxton has faced numerous security threats stemming from his courageous work as Attorney General fighting on behalf of the people of Texas,” his office said in the statement. “Those threats are a direct result of him taking on the cartels terrorizing Texans and some of the nation’s most dangerous violent criminals.”

Paxton’s office directed additional questions to DPS.

A DPS spokesperson declined to answer the newsrooms’ questions, saying the agency does not comment on its security arrangements.

An Outlier Among Peers

To analyze Paxton’s travel, ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed DPS logs for his security detail and records from the attorney general’s office, including airfare and lodging receipts, per diems and his daily calendars.

The records available for his predecessor, Greg Abbott, show a stark difference: Abbott traveled mostly within the state as attorney general, and his security cost $203,000 during his last three years in the office. Adjusted for inflation, Abbott’s security detail cost $7,400 per month. Paxton’s has averaged $24,300.

Because the state keeps records only for a limited time, Abbott’s travel expenses and his daily calendars as attorney general no longer exist, so the news organizations could not determine how many of his trips were for business.

Records are available, however, for Abbott’s security costs as governor and for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Both are also offered state police security and have been in their current roles as long as Paxton.

When compared, the records show Paxton has taken 82 more out-of-state trips with a security detail than Abbott and nearly as many as the governor and lieutenant governor combined.

Though DPS security detail records are available for state leaders’ full tenure, Abbott’s office only provided calendars that document business-related activity for his first six years in office. More than two-thirds of the governor’s international trips during those years had a listed business purpose, compared with just two of 25 for Paxton during his full tenure. The governor’s office said it planned to release the remaining five years on Tuesday but only provided five months, saying it needed more time.

The attorney general’s records do not show a business purpose for travel to Albania, Aruba, Australia, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, England, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Mexico, Poland, South Africa or Taiwan.

The share of Paxton’s travel with a documented business purpose peaked early in his tenure, in 2018 and 2019, at 30%, the newsrooms’ analysis found. That aligns with the governor’s share of business travel during that period.

Since then, Paxton has taken fewer trips that are documented as state business while increasingly traveling out of state. Last year, just five of Paxton’s 91 trips with the security detail had a listed business purpose. Forty-one were outside Texas.

In some cases, Paxton has taken business trips without a DPS detail, an analysis of records from the department and the attorney general’s office shows. They include a 2019 meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, with that state’s attorney general to discuss opioid litigation and a 2021 visit with unnamed U.S. senators in North Carolina. There is also no record of Paxton taking the detail on political fundraising trips to Florida and the Bahamas.

But Paxton has traveled with security to other campaign-related activities, including one that came just two days after he was acquitted in the impeachment trial. Paxton boarded a Maine-bound private plane owned by a North Texas businessman to tape an episode of Tucker Carlson’s show, according to campaign finance records. During the interview, he hinted that he’d challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in the 2026 Republican primary.

“Everything is on the table for me,” Paxton said when Carlson suggested he should run.

In his interview with Carlson, Paxton said it was unfair that he was automatically suspended before he could clear his name. He said he was eager to get back to work and that he was “reenergized to do the things the voters sent me to do.”

Paxton should pay for his own security on trips where there is no benefit for Texans, like vacations and campaign events, said Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia Law School who has written about government ethics.

“There’s no reason for the taxpayers to be paying for things that they would not be paying for if he had stayed home,” Briffault said. “That’s a misuse of public funds.”

State officials said there are no records of Paxton or his campaign reimbursing Texas for security costs.

Of the 10 most populous states, Texas and New York confirmed that they provide security for their attorneys general, while Florida law allows its top lawyer to receive a detail upon request. North Carolina does not. Attorneys general offices for the remaining six states did not respond to requests for comment.

Former Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said she never used a security detail during her 12 years in office, which ended in 2024. The Democrat said that Paxton’s higher profile might create a greater need for protection, but his extensive out-of-state travel without a documented business purpose raises questions about his workload.

“Was he minding the store? There’s a lot of work to be done at the office,” Rosenblum said.

Travel and Real Estate

Some of Paxton’s travel to four states with a security detail has overlapped with locations where he or his family’s trust has purchased 10 properties since 2021. A recent ProPublica and Tribune analysis found he owns or co-owns 15 properties with a market value of about $11 million.

In June 2021, Paxton attended an attorneys general conference in Maui. The security detail listed the destination as Lahaina, a small community on the Hawaiian island’s west coast. Four months later, Paxton’s family trust purchased an oceanview lot in a residential neighborhood there for $410,000, land records show.

The 7,000-square-foot lot remains vacant but has proved to be a savvy investment, now assessed at $1.2 million by Maui County.

Paxton set up the trust with his estranged wife, State Sen. Angela Paxton, who declined to be interviewed but said through a spokesperson that she has not been involved in her husband’s business dealings since 2024, when she filed for divorce. The Paxtons’ friend, Chip Loper, runs the trust. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Paxton has also gone to the Salt Lake City area 19 times, twice for listed business purposes. He visited three times — once on business — in the months leading up to his family trust’s July 2021 purchase of a plot in the ski town of Eden. The trust bought a mountainside lot on about two-thirds of an acre for $315,000 in cash, the seller told the newsrooms. It also remains undeveloped.

During his suspension in August 2023, Paxton visited St. George, Utah, a small city in the state’s southwest corner. Nearby is the Black Desert Resort, which hosts an annual PGA Tour golf tournament. Paxton purchased one condo at the resort in 2025 and three more in February. Paxton took out mortgages totaling $1.9 million for them, according to legal documents filed with the local county.

Paxton has visited Florida more than any other state, 53 times. Two of those trips have a documented business purpose. Between 2021 and 2022, Paxton purchased two homes in Ocala, known for its horse breeding industry, and a townhome in Dunedin, on the Gulf of Mexico near Tampa.

Paxton also traveled with the detail twice to Broken Bow, Oklahoma, where he purchased a $1.5 million vacation lodge in 2022. He visited in June 2023, during his suspension. Then again the following December. He traveled to the neighboring town of Idabel in 2023 and 2024. None of the trips had a listed business purpose.

Records that show travel with a security detail do not list the attorney general’s name but rather the position. State officials familiar with the travel records said the two temporary attorneys general appointed during Paxton’s suspension did not take the trips listed on the state police travel logs.

The attorney general’s office has said that Paxton’s work to secure large legal settlements with drugmakers and tech companies requires routine travel. Such travel is noted in calendars reviewed by ProPublica and the Tribune. Even so, more than 800 trips lack a documented business purpose.

Paul Nolette, a Marquette University political science professor who studies attorneys general, said that the role has become more expansive in recent years as states increasingly collaborate on big lawsuits. That could lead to more travel, he said. Nolette added these officials deserve occasional vacations like everyday Americans.

But given repeated accusations from Democrats and Republicans alike about Paxton’s ethics, Nolette said it is difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt that he’s constantly working while leaving the state so frequently.

“It just raises more red flags about how he’s using the office to do things that may not give the best bang for the buck for Texans,” Nolette said.

Paxton has not commented publicly about his use of the taxpayer-funded detail. During a podcast interview in November, Houston lawyer Tony Buzbee, who led his impeachment defense, asked the attorney general where he liked to travel.

“I love Jackson Hole. I like Park City. I like the mountains. I also like beaches,” Paxton responded. “I like places in Florida, places in California, even though I don’t like to admit I go to California. But it’s beautiful to see them.”

The post Ken Paxton’s Security for Travel Cost Taxpayers Millions. Just 1 in 6 of His Trips Had a Stated Business Purpose. appeared first on ProPublica.

A decade ago, nonprofit leaders in Arizona’s most populous county boasted that they had created the Amazon of homeless service systems. Families in crisis would no longer have to contact a dozen agencies in search of shelter or housing. A single system could point them to help.

But for all the hype, this system has become a dead end for many families. A 2023 evaluation found 94% of people who were assessed for housing help by the system didn’t receive it. And that didn’t account for parents who were unable to connect with a worker to see if they qualified for assistance.

Families say it hasn’t improved.

In interviews, 30 families that are homeless told ProPublica that calling the hotline, meeting with outreach workers or showing up at shelters rarely results in offers of help. Some families said they called 211 multiple times without being connected to the homeless response system for families, known as the Family Housing Hub. Others, who said they were sleeping in cars or outdoors, said they couldn’t get a spot on the waitlist for shelter.

The system has returned to what it was a decade ago, with families calling as many shelters as they can, repeating the very situation the hub was intended to fix.

Those who did make it onto the hub’s waitlist said they were left guessing how long it would take to get help. Some said operators told them to sleep in their cars.

Vanessa Lopez said she experienced this frustration after leaving a hostile relationship in the spring. While she and her two children stayed with a friend, Lopez said she repeatedly contacted 211, which functions as a referral service for the hub, hoping it would lead to shelter for her family.

Her friend eventually asked them to leave. Overwhelmed by the stress of not knowing where to take her family, Lopez took a leave from her job. By then, she said, she’d called 211 at least five times.

Yet no matter how dire her situation became, it still took months to get on the waitlist for shelter. During one call she said she broke down in tears, frustrated that others seemed to get help but she could not. She wondered if she needed to be addicted to drugs to receive assistance.

“It’s not me telling you no,” she said the operator told her. “It’s the system.”

Monique Lopez, the CEO of United Methodist Outreach Ministries, known as UMOM, which runs the Family Housing Hub and the shelter waitlist, acknowledged the frustrations of people like Vanessa Lopez (no relation). But before UMOM offers callers shelter or a spot on the waitlist, the organization first tries to help them find other options.

“We don’t start the conversation with, ‘Hey, do you want to get on the shelter waitlist?’” Monique Lopez said. “It really is ‘Let’s try to figure your situation out first.’”

Lopez attributed some frustrations to the number of organizations offering assistance through the hub. Each shelter has its own rules, and some families may not meet the requirements of every program.

To address the confusion, UMOM updated its website to provide more information about the homeless response system for families, she said. The federally funded system, known as Coordinated Entry, mandates that providers use an assessment to prioritize scarce housing.

“It’s not me telling you no. It’s the system.”

211 operator

But families told ProPublica that the process in Maricopa County often leaves them confused and hopeless. Family homelessness in the county has risen to its highest level in more than a decade, while every shelter is full and housing vouchers are scarce. In 2025, there were 630 units of shelter and transitional housing for families in the county, down from 769 the year before, according to the most recent federal data.

Monique Lopez acknowledged that family shelters are full, leaving few good options. “People are living in unsafe and unstable situations while waiting just to get into emergency shelter,” she said.

The process, experts said, shouldn’t leave people wondering if there is help and what it takes to get it.

“You have to have some kind of method for setting priorities when there aren’t enough resources to go around,” said Marybeth Shinn, an expert on family homelessness at Vanderbilt University. “The process should be transparent. People should know if they’re on a waitlist.”

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UMOM and other Maricopa County nonprofits launched the Family Housing Hub in 2014, after years of planning and strategizing over how to end family homelessness in the county that is home to Phoenix. As they envisioned it, families would meet with a worker at UMOM who could match them with the best solution for their situation.

At the time, there was a national push to create these local systems. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2012 asked communities to establish a Coordinated Entry system. By 2018, the agency required it in order to receive housing and homelessness grants. The mandates coincided with a Barack Obama-era plan to end family homelessness by 2020. (That did not happen.)

Experts said the systems were set up without evidence they would be effective. When researchers did look at Coordinated Entry — in a 2021 study of single adults — they found issues similar to those now faced by families in Maricopa County, including concerns about fairness and a lack of transparency. People didn’t understand the screening process and generally received vague explanations about how their information would be used to decide if they would get help.

As Maricopa County nonprofit leaders developed their system for families, they also pledged to provide a “rapid response without waiting lists” to immediately meet the needs of any family asking for help.

The county saw a decline in family homelessness from 2015 to 2019. But then the numbers began to rise, even as the stock of emergency shelter increased. During the COVID-19 pandemic, efforts to address the problem began to fray. The group of nonprofit leaders, which called itself “Standing Strong for Families,” stopped meeting regularly. Arizona, along with other Sun Belt states, also saw an increase in housing prices. With one of the lowest supplies of housing for low-income people in the country, eviction filings began to soar.

By 2023, only 6% of families that were assessed by Maricopa County’s homeless response system received help with permanent housing, according to an analysis of three years of enrollment data from the system and interviews with providers and people who had sought housing assistance.

The evaluation, by Homebase, a nonprofit consulting group, was requested and paid for by the Maricopa Association of Governments, which provides staffing for the regional response to homelessness.

Homebase concluded the system for single adults who are homeless was accessible, but the family system was not. Across the system, auditors said, families encountered a “breakdown in communication” and a “lack of transparency.”

Ashley Oakley, UMOM’s chief development officer, said in a statement that the evaluation reflects a gap between the need in the community and the housing that’s available. Oakley called it “one of the biggest challenges” facing those who are working on family homelessness in Maricopa County.

To decide who gets onto the housing list, workers with the Family Housing Hub conduct an assessment of vulnerability, which assigns a score based on how long a person has been homeless and whether they have a disability. That score helps determine eligibility and priority for housing programs, Oakley said.

Nonprofit leaders recently developed a new evaluation. Before it was implemented over the summer, testing had showed it didn’t fully account for the vulnerabilities of families and needed more changes. Now, for example, households with children under 6 receive a higher score, making it more likely they can get help.

Any family sleeping in a place not meant for “habitation” or in a dangerous situation is eligible for shelter, said UMOM’s Oakley. To remain on the shelter waitlist, families must check in weekly and say where they slept the previous night. Staying in a hotel for a night should not “by itself” remove a family from the waitlist, Oakley said.

But families told ProPublica that they had been removed from the waitlist because they stayed in a hotel. (UMOM said it is reviewing its process to make sure check-ins are handled “consistently.”)

Families in dire situations may not get help, said Richard Southee, a regional executive director at Central Arizona Shelter Services, the largest shelter provider in Arizona. Southee also works on a committee that oversees Maricopa County’s response to homelessness.

That’s in part because the federal government has focused funding on more noticeable forms of homelessness, such as people living in encampments. Homeless families are typically less visible and move more frequently. They couch surf, stay in hotels or do other things to avoid drawing the attention of the Arizona Department of Child Safety. Child welfare officials sometimes consider a lack of shelter to be evidence of child neglect, along with other factors.

“We’re deciding who’s going to be at the back of the line, and we as a nation really have said people who are not chronically homeless are going to be at the back of the line,” Southee said. “You have to stay homeless to get to the front, and that’s a design choice.”

Felicia Vela and her two children were kicked out of a guest house they were renting in February, text messages from that time show. She said she searched online for help and was repeatedly directed to 211 for “emergency shelter,” which she called at least twice and explained her situation: She had stashed her belongings in a storage unit, text messages show, and was staying at a hotel that she couldn’t afford for much longer.

There was nothing immediately available, she said operators told her, with one saying the waitlist was closed and the other telling her it could take six months to a year to get shelter. (UMOM said to protect the privacy of clients, it does not comment on individual families. The organization also said that the waitlist does not close.)

When Vela didn’t have anywhere to go, she slept in her car while her children stayed with a friend. She tried to make extra money by donating plasma, but her blood pressure was too high.

Vela, who works a warehouse job, moved into an apartment with the help of a local nonprofit that is not associated with the hub, but she’s now fallen behind on rent and is facing eviction. Her car broke down, and she can’t get to work. She started calling 211 again, seeking rental assistance.

“It’s like I can’t get a break,” she said.

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Every January, volunteers in cities across the country spend one night trying to count people who are homeless. In Maricopa County, the 2026 count showed the number of people in homeless families, at 2,103, was the highest it had been since 2015. The survey is considered an undercount, especially for families.

Over the summer, the waitlist for shelter ballooned to more than 200 families. It takes about seven weeks for those on the list to get shelter, according to UMOM.

Some families interviewed by ProPublica said they waited longer. And more people are entering the system than leaving it, delaying help for newly homeless families.

In Maricopa County, 139 units of shelter for families closed from 2024 to 2025, after COVID-19 pandemic relief funds expired. The state also cut $867,000 in funding to help families get into housing quickly. It had helped about 40 families.

As families wait, they have searched for other ways to access the homeless service system.

Some go to one of the city of Phoenix’s heat relief centers, inside a 21,000-square-foot former charter school. City officials said the number of families seeking help has doubled from a year ago. Some families said they were able to immediately get shelter through the workers there.

After city officials learned a local advocate, Austin Davis, was sending families to the center to receive shelter, he said they asked him to stop sending families.

Davis runs a local nonprofit that helps families like Vela’s find emergency shelter. He said his interactions with hundreds of families over the past year have shown the official channels to shelter are “too complicated.” Calling weekly to stay on the waitlist is time-consuming. The families are already managing day-to-day responsibilities while trying to resolve an overwhelming personal crisis, he said.

“The system is really designed to run people in circles until they either give up or hit enough roadblocks where they can’t continue,” Davis said.

Davis crowdsources donations to put the families in hotel rooms on and off for days, weeks or sometimes months.

Ebony, a single mother of six who has breast cancer, needed longer-term help. She lost her job as a security guard this year after a chemotherapy treatment caused her to faint as she was about to begin her shift, she said.

In April, she lost her apartment. Ebony, who asked that her last name not be used to protect future job opportunities, said she called every number she could find looking for help, including 211. Eventually she was placed on the waitlist, but that didn’t solve her immediate problem of where to sleep.

She and her children stayed in hotel rooms until she ran out of cash. Then, she said, the family slept in an alley.

If a mother with breast cancer and young children sleeping outside was not vulnerable enough to get help, she wondered, who was?

The next day, she connected with Davis, who helped her pay for weeks of shelter. Then one morning she texted Davis with some good news.

She had met a pastor who helped her get into a local housing program. But she needed help for a few more days, until she could move into her new apartment.

The post An Arizona County’s “Housing Hub” Is a Dead End for Many Homeless Families appeared first on ProPublica.

Last year, many of America’s largest health insurers vowed to reduce their use of prior authorization — the extra layer of approval insurers require before covering a medical expense. The industry’s pledge came after massive backlash to the process from patients, providers and politicians. ProPublica’s reporting has found it can delay or outright deny patients’ critical medical care.

Data as of last year shows the industry is still relying heavily on the approval process. Now, ProPublica is looking into the ways that insurers’ continued use of prior authorization is impacting patients. We need your help to figure out if prior authorization is still leading to delayed or missed treatments, tests, medical equipment or medication.

If you are covered by a plan through Medicaid, Medicare, Children’s Health Insurance Program, or the Affordable Care Act marketplace — and have had a prior authorization request delayed or denied — we want to hear from you. Your experiences help us better understand the real-life stakes of prior authorization. (For this investigation, we’re not seeking responses from people with insurance through their employer at this time.)

We’re also interested in hearing from people whose jobs provide insight into the inner workings of prior authorization, including medical providers and their staff, along with insurance company employees and regulators.

Our team may not be able to respond to everyone personally, but we will read everything you submit. We appreciate you sharing your story, and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these stories for the purposes of our reporting and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story. We will not publish anything you send us without asking for additional consent.

The post We’re Investigating Prior Authorization. Help ProPublica Understand Your Health Insurance Denial. appeared first on ProPublica.

What Happened: Bipartisan leaders from the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee launched an inquiry on Wednesday into the Amateur Athletic Union, criticizing the sprawling youth sports organization for its handling of child sexual abuse allegations and demanding answers, citing reporting by ProPublica and The Washington Post.

What They Said: “It is unacceptable that AAU is failing to implement standard reforms to protect child athletes, and is misleading the public, parents, and athletes about preventative measures in place within AAU sports,” the letter reads.

The committee chair, Kentucky Republican Brett Guthrie, called ProPublica and The Post’s reporting “deeply disturbing” in a statement on Thursday, saying it “raises serious questions about the organization’s actions over the past decade.” 

“Our Committee is seeking information on how the AAU’s policies have potentially fallen short, and what needs to be done in order to protect young athletes,” Guthrie said.”

The members of the committee, which in 2018 investigated systemic failures surrounding sexual abuse by former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar and others, said in the letter that they were “seeing parallels” between its past investigation and “what is being uncovered within the AAU today.”

The letter is addressed to Jo Mirza, the AAU’s president, and asks detailed questions about the organization’s operations, taking the extra step of demanding a briefing from Mirza to the committee by Oct. 21. Among questions about its safety policies and coach training, the committee asks Mirza to lay out how many sexual abuse allegations the nonprofit receives each year and how many coaches it disciplines, information that has long been shrouded in secrecy. The AAU declined to provide the data to ProPublica and The Post. The AAU does not publish a list of banned coaches like many other youth sports groups do, and ProPublica and The Post found that it has used confidential arbitration clauses to keep lawsuits from child sexual abuse victims from being heard in open court.

The letter is signed by Guthrie, ranking Democrat Frank Pallone Jr. from New Jersey and representatives in charge of oversight and investigations.

Background: ProPublica and The Post found that the AAU, which has some 760,000 athletes and coaches nationwide, is failing on nearly every level to adequately protect young athletes from sexual abuse — breaking pledges it made in the wake of a 2011 sexual abuse scandal involving its CEO and young basketball players.

The investigation found that the AAU has become a haven for coaches suspected of abuse, according to a review of public disciplinary lists and interviews with current and former executives from six national sports governing bodies and other key stakeholders.

The AAU, the investigation found, does not offer child abuse prevention training, though it claims to the public that it does. And ProPublica and The Post found that it has suppressed allegations of sexual misconduct, including against another top executive in 2018.

Why It Matters: The committee is one of the key congressional groups charged with overseeing the federal youth sports safety system. It has the power to push for changes in child safety law — and to force transparency from organizations like the AAU, which has repeatedly failed to deliver on past promises of reform.

In 2018, in the wake of the allegations against Nassar, scrutiny from Congress led to the passage of a law known as the Safe Sport Act. It created the U.S. Center for SafeSport, an oversight group, to investigate allegations of sexual misconduct and gave it the power to suspend or ban coaches for life.

But SafeSport has jurisdiction only over national sports governing bodies, like USA Gymnastics and USA Volleyball, that are overseen by the Olympic and Paralympic Committee — meaning much of the law does not apply to the AAU.

The law does require “all amateur sports organizations” — not just governing bodies — to “offer and provide consistent training to all adult members … regarding prevention and reporting of child abuse.” The Energy and Commerce Committee’s letter cites that provision of the law and demands that the AAU explain how it complies.

Response: In a statement, the AAU said, “As always, we will cooperate fully and respond appropriately to any questions or requests from congressional committees or U.S. government agencies.”

Previously, the AAU told ProPublica and The Post that it is “committed to protecting its athletes through comprehensive protection policies overseen by our Compliance Department,” and said it has an “ongoing commitment to providing a safe, secure, supportive, and trusted environment where athletes can thrive.”

The post U.S. Lawmakers Launch Sexual Abuse Probe of Youth Sports Giant AAU appeared first on ProPublica.

When SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket exploded over the Caribbean last year, the internet lit up with videos from airline passengers, island tourists and locals showing flaming debris shooting across the sky. Even some airline pilots recorded the fiery aftermath as planes scrambled to move out of its path.

Some of those videos of Starship’s seventh test flight — including ones taken from Disney and Royal Caribbean cruise ships and a Club Med resort — went on to play a role in the company’s efforts to count and track pieces of debris after the explosion, a report obtained by ProPublica says.

The report — obtained by ProPublica from the Federal Aviation Administration through a freedom of information request — shows video captured a fireball, then a shower of sparkling debris in the sky moments after the explosion. It includes maps pinpointing where the images were shot, which helped the company understand how debris tumbled to earth after the blast.

“At 1 minute 42 seconds, the debris cloud is observed transiting behind the cruise ship,” says the report, which SpaceX provided the FAA two weeks after the so-called mishap.

Such reports are required by federal rules in the days after a rocket failure and are supposed to describe what happened and where hazardous debris landed. The information is key for the FAA’s efforts to keep busy air traffic corridors safe at a time of rapid growth in the commercial space industry as companies like SpaceX develop and test rockets that they hope will eventually reach the moon and Mars.

During launches, the FAA preventively closes airspace. It has also been forced to clear areas quickly after test flights of massive spacecraft went wrong.

Starship flights 7 and 8 broke apart last year and scattered debris above airline traffic over the Caribbean. Before Flight 9, the FAA moved to greatly increase the size of the airspace it walled off pre-launch.

The agency defined its no-fly zones, which are closed to airplane traffic during a launch, and its so-called debris response areas, which are closed after a mishap, using information from SpaceX and modeling from Space Force, the branch of the military that deals with the nation’s space interests, to predict where debris might fall.

Nearly doubling those pre-launch no-fly zones “only makes sense if the prior margin was judged inadequate rather than just unlucky,” said Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

Earlier this year, the FAA issued a warning that rocket launches could “significantly reduce safety” for airplanes, after ProPublica reported that 21 planes appeared to make sudden turns to exit or avoid an FAA-designated emergency no-fly zone in the minutes after the Flight 7 explosion. Such disruptions are likely to become more frequent. SpaceX is seeking to launch Starship up to 76 times a year from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The FAA provided ProPublica the reports on Starship flights 7, 8 and 9 — all of which involved mishaps — after we requested them under the Freedom of Information Act. The FAA redacted the vast majority of all three reports, citing, among other things, exemptions in the law that protect confidential business information from disclosure. The blackouts were, in part, a reflection of SpaceX’s objections; FAA allowed the company to challenge the release of information it deemed proprietary.

The FAA refused to release information that would show SpaceX’s estimates of where debris fell during the three rocket failures. It’s unclear what the agency or the company knows about how close any airplanes came to falling debris.

“Withholding the underlying debris estimates makes it impossible for anyone outside SpaceX and FAA to check whether that pattern is improving or repeating,” Jah said. “Given a regulator already revised its own safety margins once, the public has a real interest in seeing the data behind both the old margin and the new one.”

The unredacted part of the report did not show whether the debris from the Flight 7 explosion fell where SpaceX and the FAA expected it to. But the references to Disney and Club Med guests’ video suggest SpaceX did not have a full picture of where the debris landed without them. “I would read it as evidence their own tracking did not carry cleanly through the debris cloud phase, so they used the public to fill the gap,” Jah said.

SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment. The company has said that it learns from its mistakes and that each test improves Starship’s reliability. Last December, it said on X that “SpaceX is committed to responsibly using airspace during launches and reentries, prioritizing public safety to protect people on the ground, at sea, and in the air.”

The FAA did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Disney, Royal Caribbean or Club Med.

Ron Madler, a professor of aerospace engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, said the videos could help SpaceX “either confirm their breakup models or possibly to improve them.”

The mishap report for Flight 8, which rained debris near the Bahamas, said before that flight’s explosive failure, SpaceX did not have the proper “test stand” that was capable of testing the rocket’s engines “for a full Starship mission.” The remainder of the page was blacked out, so it was unclear from the report whether the company had found another way to fully test the engines before launch. 

Flights 7 and 8 both involved the same model. Both ended in engine-related failures.

Text in the report around the statement about the test stand was redacted. But Jah said it “means some part of the engine’s actual flight behavior was being verified for the first time in flight rather than on the ground.”

John Crassidis, an aerospace engineering professor at the University at Buffalo, said launching before having a fully capable test stand was likely “a cost-saving decision.” In building rockets, he said, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has used both the old approach of launching and then fixing any issues that arise, and the newer approach of running simulations and ground tests first to head off problems.

“Doing too much of the old school can lead to too many mishaps and cost overruns,” he said. “Doing too much of the new school leads to long times to get things done and a reduction in flexibility.”

The post Club Med, a Disney Cruise and an Exploding Starship: SpaceX Used Bystander Videos to Track Falling Debris appeared first on ProPublica.

The nation’s largest professional group of pediatricians has renewed its call for a nationwide ban on the sale and distribution of unpasteurized milk and other raw dairy products, according to a policy statement it published earlier this week. 

The revised guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics warns of the serious health risks from consuming raw dairy products, particularly for children, as well as pregnant and immunocompromised people.

“More and more people are discussing this as a potentially healthful thing to do, when in fact it’s a highly risky thing to do,” said the academy’s president, Dr. Andrew Racine. “So our responsibility, as the leading voice of pediatric healthcare in the United States that’s dedicated to the health and well-being of children, is to make sure that the accurate, evidence-based information is out there.”

The revised statement follows ProPublica reporting that dived deep into the causes and severe consequences of America’s current fascination with raw milk, which has not been heated to kill off harmful bacteria. Once limited to the fringes of health-food culture, unpasteurized milk has morphed into a widespread movement rooted in wellness trends and institutional distrust.  Today, more than 10 million Americans drink it. 

Most scientists and health experts agree that raw milk has no significant, proven nutritional benefits over its pasteurized counterpart and that it cannot treat or cure any disease. It also subjects its consumers to over 100 times the risk of foodborne illness, which can be especially dangerous for young children. Before milk pasteurization was widely adopted a century ago, thousands of children died each year from diseases linked to contaminated dairy. 

As it has grown in popularity in recent years, raw dairy products have contributed to numerous outbreaks of pathogenic diseases, such as salmonella and E. coli. Over the past two years, nine states have experienced outbreaks that regulators have linked to raw dairy. Just last month, federal regulators linked an E. coli outbreak to unpasteurized cheese. Thirteen people fell ill, more than half of whom were young children.

As illnesses have surged, high-level lawmakers and government officials, including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have championed the industry instead of curbing it. In his federal role, Kennedy said he was “advocating” for raw milk and celebrated the release of a report to Make America Healthy Again with a toast of raw-milk shooters in the White House. The health department did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the new professional guidance or the pediatric group’s call for a ban on raw milk sales.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Congressional Food Safety Caucus, told ProPublica that she is taking the guidance of the academy “very seriously.”

“They see firsthand what these illnesses can do to children,” she said in an emailed statement. “Right now, Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK Jr. cannot even bring himself to tell parents not to give it to their kids.”

DeLauro said she was “supportive of any policy that reduces risk of exposure to harmful foods,” including putting warning labels on raw-milk products and maintaining adequate funding for outbreak prevention and tracking. 

Federal law restricts the sale of raw milk across state lines, but states can decide how it can be sold within their boundaries. In recent years, proponents have fought to increase access to raw milk within states, often opposing efforts to limit its sales. People can legally purchase raw milk in all but a handful of states, either directly from a store or from a farmer, or even as “pet food.”

Last week, ProPublica detailed the case of two girls severely sickened last year after consuming raw goat milk from an unregulated farm in southern California. The state, which is teeming with black-market dairies, did little to punish the farmer who sold the families the milk. It allowed her to provide her own sample for testing, weeks after the outbreak began, and did not independently sample her grounds for traces of the pathogen, as state investigators have done in other cases. (The farmer told ProPublica that her milk, which tested negative for pathogens, did not cause the outbreak and claimed the families had knowingly bought milk that was not for human consumption, which they deny.) 

The mother of one of the girls, a toddler who nearly died, had read about the purported benefits of unpasteurized milk on a site for the Raw Milk Institute, a nonprofit founded by Mark McAfee, one of the nation’s most prolific sellers. In a profile of the California farmer, ProPublica chronicled how social media influencers have amplified his claims and helped him build what is now a $30 million-a-year business even as regulators have linked it to more than a dozen recalls and outbreaks that have sickened hundreds. (McAfee previously defended the claims made on the institute’s website and maintained to ProPublica that raw milk still has therapeutic benefits.) 

Members of the academy said they read and circulated ProPublica’s reporting as they drafted their statement. 

“This product is being marketed to families as being beneficial for their kids,” said Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease doctor in New York City and one of the lead authors of the academy’s revised statement. “They don’t see the risks, and unwittingly they end up making a decision that is much more dangerous.”

The academy first published a policy statement on raw milk in 2014, endorsing a nationwide ban on its sale and encouraging its members to reach out to state representatives to advocate for such a restriction. The statement published this week reaffirms this appeal with recent epidemiological evidence. In addition, it cites a growing concern of highly pathogenic avian influenza, which has been shown to contaminate unpasteurized milk.

Racine, the academy’s president, told ProPublica that the policy was also updated on account of “the rise in the discussion about the alleged benefits of raw milk and the fact that more people are experimenting with using it.” 

“Prevention really is the best single way to keep children healthy and safe, and this is a preventive move,” he said. “The more that we can disseminate this information to a greater number of people, the healthier we’re going to be able to keep the children of this country.”

The post American Academy of Pediatrics Renews Call for Ban on Raw Milk appeared first on ProPublica.

For about a year, Austin Davis’ phone has been flooded with hundreds of pleas for help from across the Phoenix metropolitan area.

A school employee wanted to help a homeless family but couldn’t find space at a shelter. Could Davis pay for a hotel room?

A mother of five living in a storage unit contacted a homeless services organization for help. They told her to call Davis.

A mother panhandling with her six children said passersby gave her Davis’ phone number, telling her he might be able to provide shelter. “I feel like the worst mother in the world,” she texted him.

Nearly every person who’s reached out to Davis, a 26-year-old poet and advocate for homeless people, says they’d first called 211, seeking help through the official channel, only to learn it could be months before they’d get shelter or a housing placement. His phone has become the unofficial hotline for emergency shelter.

Caseworkers, teachers, social workers, police and hospital workers have called and texted to see if Davis can help people without a place to go. Even workers from the official channel — 211 and the Family Housing Hub — have sent people to him.

Davis’ path to becoming the de facto advocate of last resort illustrates how the system set up to care for families who are homeless in Maricopa County is failing them. ProPublica found that calling and visiting the official channel to address family homelessness rarely leads to offers of help, leaving families feeling hopeless.

In January, I started coming to Tempe’s Moeur Park, known as “The Hill,” to meet the families Davis was assisting. I was struck by the scene of desperate parents, some of whom had recently been evicted, lost a job or fled domestic violence, surrounding Davis to tell him about their situation. As he listened, he played with their children, always with an energy drink in hand.

The scene was both heartening and disconcerting. Davis was helping families stay off the street, which was good. But why, I wondered, in a county of nearly 5 million people, was a man in a park their best chance at getting help? And why were government agencies and multimillion-dollar nonprofits, some tasked with helping the very same homeless families, sending people to him?

Davis, who runs a small nonprofit called AZ Hugs, is known for working outside the system. With the help of volunteers, he hosts a nightly meal for homeless people at a suburban Phoenix park. This has drawn the ire of Tempe officials and led to 35 citations against him for trespassing and holding picnics without permits. (In 2024, he reached a deal to plead guilty to one permit violation, and the city dismissed the other citations, according to court documents. He’s spent three nights in jail.) In 2025, Davis and two other advocates for homeless people filed a lawsuit against Tempe, alleging it had violated their free speech protections by citing them for feeding people in parks. The city revised its permit ordinance, and Davis withdrew the lawsuit.

In recent months, he has tried to draw attention to what he calls the “family homelessness crisis,” raising money on social media to pay for hotel rooms for families, many with young children, who would otherwise sleep on the street or in their cars. Davis said he cannot assist everyone who asks for help. A much bigger effort is needed, he added, involving nonprofits and local and state officials, but he sees little evidence that it’s happening.

The number of people in homeless families in Maricopa County reached 2,103 this year, its highest level since 2015, according to the latest figures that are compiled locally and reported to the federal government. And those numbers are considered an undercount because the tally is taken on a single night by volunteers who can miss people who are trying to stay out of sight. In late September, nearly 200 families were on the waitlist for shelter in the county. It doesn’t include those who couldn’t get on; were kicked off because they weren’t considered homeless; or those who called 211, found it unhelpful and never called back. (Solari, a nonprofit that runs the statewide 211 line, said that the Family Housing Hub, which is run by UMOM, a nonprofit, sets the eligibility criteria for placement on the shelter waitlist.)

I spoke to more than 30 families searching for shelter. Parents told me they worried how their situation was affecting their children. Research shows homelessness harms children, disrupting brain development and growth and leading to permanent changes in the brain and body.

Candice Ortiz had tried since spring to find stable shelter and housing. As the months dragged on, she noticed the toll on her 8-year-old son. He was hospitalized for heat exhaustion after spending the day outside, and she worried about the school he missed.

Davis helped Ortiz as she hit dead ends in her search for a place to stay, according to text messages reviewed by ProPublica.

She said she had called 211 over and over, answering the same questions about her living situation, only to receive information she could have found through a simple internet search. She said a worker with the Family Housing Hub told her that since she and her children were sleeping in her car, she wasn’t actually homeless. Another told her the waitlist was full.

In June, she spent the day at a Phoenix cooling center to escape the heat. A representative told her to go to UMOM, which runs an emergency shelter for families. She said she used her last $20 on a rideshare to the shelter. They took her information again and told her she wasn’t “in the system.” Nothing was available. UMOM said to protect the privacy of clients, it does not comment on individual families.

At the end of August, she connected with the Phoenix Rescue Mission, a nonprofit that offers programs for homeless people. The group sent Ortiz to a local apartment complex where she viewed an apartment. Later, a worker with the Phoenix Rescue Mission told her that it ran out of funding to pay for it, text messages reviewed by ProPublica show. Phoenix Rescue Mission did not respond to requests for comment.

UMOM, which during the last fiscal year received more than $7 million in government grants, set aside 23 units of shelter and about a dozen tents for families this summer, as temperatures reached 117 degrees. The program, which is part of the city of Phoenix’s heat relief effort, has helped nearly 300 households so far but is winding down this month.

In early April, Davis had tried to force a broader effort to address the crisis by launching an online petition. It called on Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, to declare a state of emergency to address family homelessness. The petition has more than 5,000 signatures.

In June, a volunteer with Davis’ organization attended a fundraiser for Hobbs, who is running for reelection, to hand her a letter about the petition. The letter suggested such a declaration could unlock funding for emergency shelter and recommended making it easier to access the Family Housing Hub.

“I implore you to consider the children who endure extreme heat without safe shelter,” the letter stated. “No parent should be told to wait months for assistance while temperatures reach life-threatening levels.”

Davis told me he hasn’t heard from the governor’s office or from other nonprofit leaders about joining his effort — only from caseworkers hoping he might help them find shelter for families. He wished that other organizations would at least acknowledge the problem and called their silence “frustrating” and a “disservice” to those in crisis.

The governor’s press secretary, Liliana Soto, told me emergency declarations are reserved for natural disasters, and using one to address homelessness might not be appropriate. Soto added that the governor is “deeply aware” of these challenges. Since taking office in 2023, Hobbs has allocated at least $245 million statewide on efforts such as eviction prevention, affordable housing, emergency shelter and rapidly rehousing people experiencing housing insecurity. “The governor believes no family, especially families with infants or young children, should be left without a safe place to go during the summer heat,” Soto said in a statement.

Davis sees families in that situation daily. And he spends most nights pleading for money on social media to put them in hotel rooms. Some nights he has raised thousands of dollars, posting updates at 2 a.m.

In September, Davis’ organization started hosting an overnight shelter at the First United Methodist Church of Mesa. It has space for at least six families. Davis said he knows it’s a Band-Aid on a much bigger problem.

At the church on a recent evening, some families arrived in vehicles packed with their belongings. Inside a large air-conditioned room, a volunteer had set up canopy tents with cots, pillows and blankets. She offered them a dinner of chicken penne pasta.

A mother and her two children showered, then got in their tent and zipped it up. Gradually, others, some with toddlers, settled in, and the room became quiet.

They’d need to be gone by 6 a.m.

The post Homeless Shelters Around Phoenix Are Full. His Phone Is the Unofficial Hotline for Struggling Families. appeared first on ProPublica.

Over the course of two hours, witnesses watched and listened as Christa Pike cried, whimpered and snored through Tennessee’s attempt to execute her. By the end of it, executioners had given her two doses of the state’s lethal injection drugs. Her arms were swollen and blistered, and one had turned purple, her attorneys said. And she was still alive, marking what legal experts say is the first time a prisoner in the U.S. has survived one dose — let alone two — of lethal injection drugs. 

Even if the outcome was unprecedented, what went wrong was not. Pike’s was the third Tennessee execution in 14 months to go awry. But as a reporter who has covered death row for nearly a decade and witnessed several executions, I know the state is not alone. The factors behind the breakdowns in Tennessee have popped up again and again across the country — and show how easily another botched execution could occur, even as soon as the ones planned Wednesday in Texas and next week in Florida.

Here’s what we know about Tennessee’s attempt to execute Pike: The procedure started more than nine hours late, delayed by last-minute legal fights. Then, inside the death house, executioners struggled to find a vein, jabbing Pike with at least seven needles, according to her lawyers, one of whom watched in dismay. As the caustic barbiturate finally started flowing into the IV lines, Pike did not fall into sedation quickly. Instead, witnesses said, she sang with her spiritual adviser. Then she said her arm felt like it was about to burst open. “Does this happen like that?” she asked. 

Like Pike, many aging death row prisoners have medical problems that can complicate efforts to kill them, potentially turning what are supposed to be relatively quick deaths into agonizing, drawn-out procedures. Even when prisoners are healthy, several states have faced questions about the competence of their execution teams, as both the American Medical Association and American Nurses Association have strongly opposed their members taking part in death penalty procedures. And death penalty states across the country shroud their executions in such secrecy that it is often difficult or impossible to confirm the age, source or sterility of the drugs.

“The types of failures that went into this botch happen all the time,” said Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Policy Project. “There is nothing in the execution process that states are incapable of getting wrong.”

The Tennessee Department of Correction declined to comment, though hours after the attempted execution the agency said in a statement that it had “followed every step” of the state’s established protocol, which “has been consistently effective.” On Saturday, the head of the agency resigned. Meanwhile, Gov. Bill Lee said in a statement that he had ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred” and that the execution previously scheduled for December would no longer take place this year. His office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

On Friday, Pike’s lawyers filed a motion asking a court to order the agency to preserve any evidence related to the state’s failed effort to kill their client. In a statement, they said the filing “details the serious complications that occurred during the execution attempt, many of which Christa and her attorneys had warned the State and the courts about months earlier.”

Pike remains in the hospital where she is receiving critical medical care, they said. After several days on a ventilator, intubated and unconscious, on Tuesday afternoon her attorneys said she was awake and speaking. “Her prognosis remains unclear but, at a minimum, we expect a long recovery,” they wrote in a statement. “We continue to ask the Governor of Tennessee to commute Christa Pike’s sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.”

Unhealthy Prisoners

By the time the Tennessee Department of Correction strapped her to the gurney last week, Pike had been on death row for 30 years. She had been sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow Job Corps student in Knoxville. Pike was 18 at the time and, like many people on death row, had a history of mental illness and childhood sexual abuse. 

Now 50 years old, Pike has faced an array of health problems, which her legal team had repeatedly warned could lead to a bungled execution. During a three-day hearing in August, Pike’s attorneys argued that her small veins and a blood disorder would make it harder and more painful to put in the IV lines to administer the lethal dose. The Tennessee Supreme Court did not agree, calling their arguments “speculative” and rejecting their request for a stay.

Tennessee’s execution protocol relies on pentobarbital, a caustic barbiturate that slows down breathing and has been used to treat seizures, sedate people before surgery and euthanize animals. But its use in putting to death humans has drawn scrutiny. After relying on the drug for all 13 federal executions during the first Trump administration, the Justice Department under President Joe Biden said there was too much uncertainty about whether it would cause “unnecessary pain and suffering” and decided to stop using it “unless and until that uncertainty is resolved.” This year, President Donald Trump’s DOJ reversed course and readopted its use.

Despite supply difficulties and repeated lawsuits from death row prisoners arguing that using pentobarbital is cruel and unusual, several states still use it, including Georgia, Missouri, South Carolina and Texas, where I witnessed five executions in the late 2010s as a reporter for the Houston Chronicle. Four of the condemned prisoners said the drug burned. Two said they could taste it. One said he could “hear it going through the vein.” But all of them stopped moving within minutes and were declared dead in under an hour. 

Tennessee prison officials have not offered an explanation as to why Pike’s attempted execution was so drastically different. Initially, Pike’s attorneys and several death penalty experts raised the possibility that the drugs may have been too old or degraded to work as intended. Yet in Friday’s legal filings, Pike’s lawyers focused on the way the drug was administered, saying it was “abundantly clear” that Tennessee prison officials either didn’t know that the IV lines were out of place or didn’t realize her veins had been so badly damaged that the highly alkaline liquid started leaking out into the surrounding tissue of her arm. Joel Zivot, a professor of anesthesiology in Atlanta and one of Pike’s medical experts, said that meant there wasn’t enough of the drug in her bloodstream at once to kill her. “It just got into her arms, and most of it stopped there,” he said.  

Like Pike, many people on death rows nationwide have significant health problems often compounded by old age. As the appeals process has drawn out, condemned prisoners are spending longer awaiting execution. People put to death in 1988 had spent an average of less than seven years on death row, federal data shows. By 2023, the most recent year with data, that figure had ballooned to more than 23 years. That means more people reaching the execution chamber are old, ill, worn down by decades of poor prison medical care and potentially harder to put to death. One analysis, by the nonprofit human rights group Reprieve, found that the odds of a botched lethal injection increased 6% on average with each additional year of age. Some of the most notorious failed executions of the past decade involved prisoners whose bodies were failing them.

In 2017, Ohio halted the execution of Alva Campbell after the execution team couldn’t find a usable vein. His attorneys had warned in legal filings beforehand that his medical problems — including lung cancer, COPD, prostate cancer and pneumonia — could make for an exceptionally painful execution. The 69-year-old died on his own in prison three months later. The following year, Alabama failed to kill 61-year-old Doyle Hamm, a terminally ill cancer patient. Executioners spent more than two hours trying to find a vein, possibly puncturing his bladder before giving up. He died three years later from cancer complications. And in 2024, Idaho called off the execution of 73-year-old Thomas Creech after trying to find a vein for nearly an hour. He’s still alive and on death row. 

Last year, Tennessee put to death Byron Black, a 69-year-old with dementia and congestive heart failure who used a wheelchair and had a defibrillator implanted in his chest. The defense team warned the device could cause painful shocks and prolong the execution, but Tennessee’s highest court refused to intervene and prison officials left it on. After the drugs started flowing, witnesses said Black lifted his head up, groaned and said, “It’s hurting so bad.”  

Defense attorneys worry similar problems could surface again as soon as next week, when the state of Florida plans to execute William Lee Thompson for a 1976 murder in Miami-Dade County. Since August, the 74-year-old — who has dementia and does not always remember that he is facing execution — has suffered from sepsis, pneumonia, blood clots in his lungs, a severe sacral wound and an array of other debilitating conditions. Bri Lacy, the lead attorney on Thompson’s case, told ProPublica her client is also malnourished and dehydrated, which could make it even harder for executioners to access his “hard, fragile veins.” She said Thompson had been in an outside hospital until the night before Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a warrant for his execution, after which prison officials put him in death watch, the section for people with scheduled executions. 

Last week, DeSantis issued an executive order temporarily staying the execution and requiring that Thompson be evaluated by a panel of three psychiatrists to determine whether he is competent to be executed. The results are still outstanding. DeSantis and the Florida Department of Corrections did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Unscrupulous Actors”

If the prisoner’s health is not a problem, sometimes the execution team is. 

In May, Tennessee tried to execute Tony Carruthers, who’d been sent to death row in connection with a 1994 triple murder for which he has long maintained his innocence. Executioners jabbed his hands and feet more than a dozen times trying to find a working vein, according to Maria DeLiberato, senior counsel at the American Civil Liberty Union’s Capital Punishment Project, a member of his defense team who was there as a witness. Eventually, a physician — who DeLiberato said had introduced himself as Dr. Mark Fowler — decided to try placing a central line, an invasive procedure that involves puncturing the neck, chest or groin to insert a deep IV near the heart. 

DeLiberato objected, saying Fowler wasn’t qualified. Less than a year earlier, he’d admitted in a deposition that he didn’t have hospital privileges and hadn’t placed a central line in about 12 years. “His hands were shaking, and it appeared to me he didn’t know what he was doing,” DeLiberato told ProPublica. By the time Fowler gave up trying to put one in Carruthers, DiLiberato could hear her client moaning and see blood oozing out of his puncture wounds. After more than an hour, the governor called off the execution and gave Carruthers a one-year reprieve. 

“Placing a central line is like riding a bicycle. You don’t forget,” Fowler said in a text message to ProPublica. “My hands were not shaking and the process requires deliberation. I stopped because it was uncomfortable for Carruthers.” He added that his lack of hospital privileges was “irrelevant.”

It’s not clear whether Fowler took part in Pike’s attempted execution last week. Though he previously told local media that he would, neither the state nor the defense team confirmed his participation. He declined to comment on the matter to ProPublica.  

After the failed attempt to execute Carruthers, several dozen Tennessee doctors and nurses wrote to the governor urging a moratorium on the death penalty. They said medical providers who take part in executions “are those willing to set aside their professional ethics” and that bungled executions “are the predictable result of working with such unscrupulous actors.”

For years, the physician overseeing executions in Missouri was a surgeon who’d been disciplined by the state board and sued about 20 times for malpractice, he estimated in a deposition, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. At least five of those cases ended in settlements, and one ended in a court judgment that he appealed and lost, the paper reported. In court testimony in the mid-2000s, he admitted that he sometimes confused names of different drugs and said he’d decided on his own to halve the amount of anesthetic given to condemned prisoners. A court eventually banned him from taking part in executions in Missouri — though federal officials later put him on the execution team at the federal death chamber in Indiana. He did not respond to phone calls and an email seeking a comment.

After Oklahoma executed Clayton Lockett in 2014 in a drawn-out and bloody procedure, a paramedic involved later testified that it took a long time because “Black people have smaller veins than white people.” 

Death penalty experts compared what happened last week in Tennessee to a 2006 Florida execution, where the first dose of drugs failed to kill 55-year-old Ángel Díaz. He struggled for about half an hour, and executioners eventually dosed him a second time. It turned out the needles had gone through his veins and the drugs had seeped into the surrounding tissue, leaving footlong burns on his arms. An investigation found the state hadn’t provided adequate training or followed its own protocols, and the lead executioner later testified he had “no medical training and no qualifications.” Following a short moratorium, the state revised its procedures and resumed executions in 2008. 

Shrouded in Secrecy

Cases like these come to light largely by accident. Secrecy laws generally shield the names of execution team members, so it’s almost impossible to know whether they have a troubled history.

Secrecy laws likewise conceal information about the drugs themselves, as well as their effects. Maya Foa, who heads up Reprieve, said that states have “gotten more secretive over time” and that some hide aspects of executions that could shed light on the effects of lethal injection drugs. Some states do not allow witnesses to watch the placement of the IV lines, and in Florida, she said, officials “tape [prisoners’]  fingers so you can’t see if they’re wiggling or still conscious.”

Various states withhold everything from the supplier name to sterility testing results to purchase dates — all of which could help determine if the drugs have degraded or become tainted. When executions go badly, that lack of information can make it difficult to know whether the age of the drugs or inadequate testing could have played a role.

Tennessee’s record gives little reason for confidence. In 2022, citing a “technical oversight,” the governor called off the execution of Oscar Smith, then paused future executions and ordered an investigation that ultimately found the state hadn’t been testing its death drugs for bacterial toxins as required by its own rules. After a three-year hiatus, the state resumed executions last year.

It’s not clear how old the drugs were that Tennessee used in Pike’s execution, though records obtained by ProPublica suggest the state purchased some earlier this year. An email from the corrections department to the state comptroller, turned over in response to a public records request regarding payments for lethal injection drugs, showed that the prison agency spent $650,000 this year on execution-related expenses. Legal experts said it’s still not clear where the drug supplies came from, when they were made or even whether they were manufactured by a pharmaceutical company or mixed in a compounding pharmacy.

Prisoners across the country have repeatedly sued over this kind of secrecy, demanding to know more about the drugs used to kill them. Right now, that’s happening in Tennessee, where six condemned men are suing for information about the age, origin and expiration dates of the state’s pentobarbital supplies. One of the lawyers involved in the lawsuit — Kit Thomas, a deputy chief in the Middle District of Tennessee’s federal public defender office — said state officials have resisted providing basic details such as whether the drug was manufactured by a pharmaceutical company or mixed in a compounding pharmacy. The case is ongoing. The state attorney general did not offer a comment on the lawsuit.

“Without public accountability or transparency,” Thomas said, “we should expect to see more people strapped to gurneys and tortured for hours at a time.”

That is what Jamaal Howard’s attorneys fear could happen Wednesday in Texas. The 46-year-old is scheduled for execution in connection with the May 2000 shooting of a convenience store clerk in Hardin County. On Saturday, his legal team asked Gov. Greg Abbott for a 30-day reprieve — not because their client is innocent, but because they want more information about the drugs Texas plans to use. In the past, the state has routinely turned over testing results and other records. But in recent months, that’s changed — and after the botched execution in Tennessee, Howard’s attorneys say they want more proof the drugs are still good.  “We expect [the Texas Department of Criminal Justice] will assure you that its drugs are sound,” Don Bailey and Jeff Newberry wrote. “Tennessee gave the same assurance.”

Abbott’s office didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Amanda Hernandez, a Texas prison spokesperson, said the state has successfully put to death more than 600 people since 1976 and “stands ready to carry out the execution scheduled for Oct. 7.”

The post I’ve Covered Death Row Cases for Nearly a Decade. What Happened to Christa Pike Wasn’t an Anomaly. appeared first on ProPublica.

Experts have long warned that immigration dragnets and the erosion of civil rights for immigrants will inevitably result in the erosion of rights for citizens.

Since the start of this Trump administration, we’ve watched those warnings come true.

The Trump administration says none of this is happening.

“DHS is NOT arresting U.S. citizens by mistake.” “There are no ‘indiscriminate’ stops.” Allegations of “racial profiling are disgusting, reckless and categorically FALSE.” “The pattern is NOT of law enforcement using force.” “ICE does not zip tie or restrain children.”

But that is precisely what is happening, and at a far larger scale than previously reported.

We know because we have once again done what the government hasn’t:

We have tallied and cataloged every case we can find of an immigration agent holding a citizen during the current administration.

More than 500 cases. That includes:

• More than a hundred Americans held after agents questioned their citizenship. Nearly all were people of color.
• At least 70 American children and teens detained, some of whom were handcuffed.
• Of the more than 300 Americans we tracked as detained for allegedly assaulting or obstructing agents, we found fewer than half were actually charged in federal court, and many of those cases were dropped or dismissed.
• At least 63 Americans detained while recording.
• 36 Americans held for at least a day without being able to contact a lawyer or their family.
• Roughly a dozen citizens deported, mostly children.

Collectively, these cases show that as the administration has relentlessly pursued immigrants, federal agents have run roughshod over the constitutional rights of citizens too.

We’re showing you every case — the reality that the administration denies — along with the receipts.

Explore our list of incidents where 506 citizens were detained.

In January 2025, agents held a 21-year-old citizen at gunpoint and put him in handcuffs during a raid at the Philadelphia car wash where he worked.

In April, a 20-year-old was held in a Florida jail for more than 24 hours, despite having proof of his citizenship.

In June, a dual citizen of Mexico and the U.S. was detained while working in California. He was held for four days without access to a lawyer or his family.

During the enforcement surge in Chicago last fall, known as Operation Midway Blitz, there were “no administrative arrests of U.S. citizens,” according to the Department of Homeland Security. “ICE has significant protections in place to ensure U.S. citizens are not arrested, detained, or mistakenly removed.” But we found that federal agents detained more than 120 citizens in Illinois during the height of the surge.

In November, agents took an 18-year-old citizen off the street, eventually dumping him in the woods.

In December, an American in Baltimore was picked up and held for 25 days, unable to see her 5-year-old son over Christmas.

In January, hours after Renee Good’s killing, agents tackled and handcuffed a school staffer in Minneapolis. He was terrified, he recalled: “I feel lucky to be alive.”

In April, when agents stopped a man in Texas, he told them, “I’m a citizen, it’s fine.” He was deported four days later.

In May, a New York teen was thrown to the ground, bloodied and then dumped in an unfamiliar neighborhood. “He just grabbed me and threw me on the floor,” the teen recalled.

In September, agents detained and injured an Illinois man they thought was someone else.

We shared details and footage of many of the incidents with former immigration officials. They reacted with anger and disbelief.

“This is just terrible,” said Eric Balliet, who spent more than two decades at Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol, both agencies under DHS, including in President Donald Trump’s first administration.

“I’ve never seen so many U.S. citizen encounters in all my years,” said Darius Reeves, who oversaw the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s Baltimore office before retiring last year. “It’s an embarrassment.”

In tallying these detentions, we included anyone who authorities held against their will for any period of time — whether they were handcuffed, held at gunpoint or otherwise prevented from leaving by immigration agents. The courts consider someone detained if they aren’t free to leave.

Immigration agents do have authority to detain Americans in limited circumstances: if they can reasonably suspect they are in the country illegally, or if they allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers.

ProPublica shared its findings and information on each case with DHS. 

The department defended agents’ conduct. “DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted. We do our due diligence,” the agency said in a statement. It added that anyone who obstructs agents “will of course face consequences which include arrest.”

We compiled our list by scouring social media, court records and local media to confirm and compile incidents.

Our work doesn’t include all of agents’ problematic interactions with citizens. We didn’t count incidents where, say, an agent shot but didn’t detain a citizen. And as with the tally we did last year, the new list is an undercount. For instance, witnesses estimate that more than 200 citizens were detained in an Idaho raid last fall, but we only included the 30 citizens who we were able to identify.

Willy Wender Aceituno, a naturalized citizen who voted for Trump twice, said he never imagined that the immigration crackdown he supported would entangle him.

Then, last November, Border Patrol agents broke his truck window, yanked Aceituno out and threw him onto the pavement of a parking lot, where one agent knelt on his back. (DHS says he “refused to comply” with agents’ commands.)

“ICE isn’t looking for criminals,” Aceituno said. “They’re looking for Latinos. Having papers in this country does not protect you.”

“Upon Probable Cause”

Under the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement generally must have probable cause to arrest someone. But there’s a lower bar, reasonable suspicion, for stopping someone to question them.

The Trump administration has repeatedly said its agents are just questioning citizens, not detaining them — even when they’re in handcuffs or held for hours. DHS also cites a concurring opinion issued last year by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh stating that agents can consider factors like “apparent ethnicity” when making stops. Citizens around the country have been detained because, they’ve said, of their skin color, accents or jobs.

Ever since his arrest in November, Aceituno said his U.S.-born daughter carries her passport at college. “She has a Latino face,” he said, adding, “My daughter’s white friends aren’t carrying their passports.”

“Secure in Their Persons, Houses, Papers and Effects”

The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution also prohibits officers from entering homes without a judge’s warrant.

An ICE memo revealed by a whistleblower this year showed that agents had been doing it anyway. The agency asserted that administrative warrants that didn’t involve a judge gave agents the ostensible authority to force their way into homes looking for someone with a final deportation order. Some of those incidents have also resulted in Americans being detained.

In January, Jeyli Salguero, her parents and her sister were asleep at home when armed federal agents broke through the front door and rushed inside.

“The first thing I yelled when I stepped out of my room was that I was a U.S. citizen and I had the right to record,” Salguero recalled. “That’s when they snatched my phone.”

The agents told Salguero’s family they were looking for her brother, who does not live there. After half an hour, the agents released Salguero and her mother, but detained her father, who had temporary protected status, and her sister, who was undocumented. The sister was eventually deported to El Salvador, and her father was later released from detention.

Salguero told us that agents left her and her mom alone in their wrecked house with the Minneapolis winter air coming in through a broken door.

Salguero is one of several plaintiffs who have filed a lawsuit against the government for going into homes without a judicial warrant. DHS has moved to dismiss the lawsuit, saying it has “paused” the policy.

“Against Unreasonable Searches and Seizures”

The Fourth Amendment is also intended to protect people from “unreasonable” use of force during arrests. Previously, we’ve documented how agents have used chokeholds that DHS banned other than when deadly force is authorized. We’ve also documented how immigration agents have broken car windows while pursuing people they believe are in the country illegally. But they’ve been doing it to citizens, too. Many of those citizens have filed lawsuits.

Darren Eichler was working at a Christian cemetery in a Chicago suburb last October when he and his coworkers moved to help a man who was wading in the nearby river. They soon realized — too late — that the man was running from immigration agents, who emerged from the brush near the river and demanded access to a gated area of the cemetery. When the men refused and started filming, agents used bolt cutters to cut open the gate, then fired pepper balls and tackled the men.

Explore incidents where citizens were subjected to crowd control weapons.

Eichler said his face felt like it was on fire and he had trouble breathing. “I pleaded with them for an hour to please call an ambulance.” Eichler told ProPublica. He was eventually brought to a hospital, still handcuffed, while the agents stood over his bed. Eichler’s co-workers were held for several hours at a nearby federal office. No one was charged.

DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment about the incident.

“The Right of the People Peaceably to Assemble”

The First Amendment protects protesters and those documenting agents’ conduct. The amendment guarantees the freedom to assemble — in other words, to protest peacefully — and the freedom of speech, which courts have interpreted to include recording in public.

The Trump administration has, however, aggressively pursued the arrest and prosecution of citizens who were protesting, often claiming the protesters were assaulting officers or interfering with enforcement activities. We counted more than 300 people accused of assaulting or obstructing officers, about 130 of them at protests.

Top DHS officials, including former Secretary Kristi Noem, went further, claiming that filming ICE agents was interfering with arrests. Last summer, three siblings driving in Texas were detained after they stopped to film an immigration arrest. One of the siblings was a young teen. “They tackled me down and an agent put one knee behind my knee, where I felt a sharp pain,” he told ProPublica. He was separated from his mother, who has a green card. “They were saying my mom wasn’t a U.S. citizen, and I was scared they were gonna take her away.”

The siblings have filed claims for damages with the government. Asked about the incident, DHS said it respects “the First Amendment rights of individuals to observe and express themselves. However, if such actions interfere with or obstruct our operations, ICE will take necessary steps to address the situation.”

Our review did uncover instances that appear to show some protesters or other civilians assaulting officers. One person pleaded guilty to throwing pieces of cinder block at an agent. A woman in California pleaded guilty to pulling off an officer’s mask.

Many protesters were accused of crimes but never actually charged. We found 137 instances of citizens who were charged with federal crimes, most of whom were charged with assaulting or obstructing federal agents. In nearly half of those instances, the charges were dropped or dismissed. Three dozen citizens have been sentenced to prison or probation, and another three dozen cases are pending, as of September 15.

Explore incidents where citizens were detained while recording.

Some of those arrested, like clarinet player Oriana Korol, were initially charged with felony assault before pleading guilty to a misdemeanor — in Korol’s case, for trying to kick an officer. She said she did so after officers shoved her and pepper-sprayed her twice in the face. Just moments before, the band had been playing the “Ghostbusters” theme song as part of a peaceful protest.

Video footage shows agents leading Korol away, handcuffed, while one pulls her tear-gas-soaked mask over her mouth. “Please pull it down,” Korol tells the agents in the video. “I’m going to have an asthma attack. I have asthma. Why are you doing this to me? Please.”

The Rights of Children

Unlike earlier administrations, Trump has detained significant numbers of immigrant children living far from the border. Citizen kids have been swept up too — at least 70 of them. We’ve found about 20 kids who were handcuffed or zip-tied.

DHS said that ICE doesn’t zip-tie or restrain children, or separate families. But agents handcuffed a 15-year-old with disabilities outside a school in Los Angeles in 2025. The agents said they mistook the teen for an alleged gang member. A few months later, officers detained more than a dozen American children during a raid on an Idaho horse track. Anabel Romero said her children are still deeply shaken by their detention.

Romero told us how her 7-year-old son warned his older sister about going to another race this month: “He said, ‘Watch out for ICE, make sure you have your phone to film — I’ll come save you.’”

“Without Due Process of Law”

As the government has rushed to deport people as quickly as possible, Americans have also been swept up and removed from the country too. About a dozen American kids have been deported with their parents, allegedly over their parents’ objections.

DHS said: “Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates.”

One American adult in Texas was also deported this spring.

The car Brian Morales Garcia was in was pulled over earlier this year in central Texas. Officers didn’t believe him when he said he was a citizen. And they wouldn’t let him get his birth certificate. Morales Garcia was held for four days without being able to call his lawyer or anyone else. Then he was deported to Mexico.

After suing, Morales Garcia was allowed back into the country just last month using his birth certificate.

DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Morales Garcia’s deportation. In earlier court filings, officials disputed Morales Garcia’s citizenship and claimed he had admitted to being born in Mexico.

“I couldn’t process what they were doing to me.” Morales Garcia told ProPublica. When he was first stopped in Texas, he had told officers, “I’m a citizen, it’s fine.”

Explore more video evidence compiled by ProPublica and our list of incidents where 506 citizens were detained.

How We Reported This Story

How We Counted Incidents

We found and vetted cases from a number of sources, including English- and Spanish-language social media, DHS statements, court records and local news reports, in addition to our own reporting. We included an incident in our dataset only if we could find at least two sources for it. For additional details about the incident, like whether crowd control weapons were used, we accepted one source in some cases.

When DHS provided a response specific to an incident — including about whether it happened or the circumstances under which it happened — we noted that response in cases in our full list for which we offered detail beyond a simple count of detained citizens. DHS responses that generically denied ever detaining citizens or that are proven inaccurate by our reporting were not included.

As with our count a year ago, most of the detained Americans on our list fell into two broad categories. The first is Americans who were held because agents questioned their citizenship. This time, we found more than a hundred such cases. The second category is Americans arrested by immigration agents after being accused of assaulting or impeding officers at protests or during immigration arrests of others. In that category, we tallied roughly 300 Americans. 

In many of these cases, the government accused but never charged these individuals with assault. Sometimes agents detained people because of questions about their citizenship but later accused them of crimes. While public attention often focuses on ICE, the immigration dragnet often relied on officers from agencies across the government.

Since the government itself does not track these cases, our list is almost certainly an undercount. Except in a few cases in which DHS itself confirmed detentions, we only counted citizens we were able to individually identify. So, for example, while witnesses estimate as many as 200 citizens were detained in an Idaho raid last fall, we were only able to identify 30 individuals by time of publication. We encountered the same issues for many smaller raids and protests, such as a raid of a food plant in Cato, New York; protesters detained by ICE at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey; and a raid of a Hyundai-LG plant in Ellabell, Georgia.

ICE itself occasionally has stated higher numbers than we were able to confirm: It told Congress that 131 citizens were arrested for assaulting, obstructing or interfering this year in Minnesota’s Metro Surge. It didn’t name them. We cataloged fewer than a hundred.

We tagged each case with details like whether a minor was detained or a citizen was held after filming. Another trend we tracked was citizens held for more than a day without access to a lawyer or their family. When multiple citizens were detained in one incident or sometimes on the same day and city, we grouped them together.

Because we focused on the expanded presence of immigration agents in American communities, we restricted our count to warrantless arrests that took place outside of airports and away from the borders, where immigration agents have long had more authority. We also excluded cases of Americans who were arrested after a judicial warrant.

We did not include incidents where an agent shot, tackled or pepper-sprayed a citizen but didn’t detain them.

We also did not include immigration protesters arrested by police who were only enforcing local laws. We did, however, include some cases involving police working with immigration agents. We still have little visibility into how many citizens have been detained by police deputized to act as immigration agents.

We also found reports of more than 30 Americans who felt racially profiled by immigration agents, but we did not include them in our database because it was not clear they were held against their will.

How We Counted and Reviewed Court Cases

We searched every named adult in our list to see if they were charged with a federal crime in relation to their detention. We conducted searches, using several name combinations for people with double names or compound names, in federal district courts through the online platform PACER. We looked for a criminal case filed within two months of the noted date of a person’s detention in the judicial district in which the detention happened. We then noted whether we found charges, what the charges were, and whether the person involved was sentenced or had their case dismissed or discharged.

How We Chose the Videos in This Report

We reviewed hundreds of videos of federal agents detaining American citizens across the country. While that included body camera footage, news clippings and helicopter footage, the vast majority of videos were made by bystanders and shared over social media. Many of the videos went viral and were recirculated across the internet by a range of third-party accounts. They touch on everyday American life in a range of settings, including workplaces, homes, protests, car washes, suburban sidewalks and the interiors of vehicles.

We tagged each video with how clearly it shows the incident and whether the citizen detained was clearly visible. We then categorized the videos by the kind of conduct they show, such as citizens being detained after recording. We provided DHS an opportunity to respond to each of the videos we included.

We did not alter videos, nor did we add watermarks, blur faces or overlay captions on videos unless otherwise noted. Videos that include captions or watermarks are shown as they were obtained.

The post More Than 500 U.S. Citizens Have Been Detained, Including Handcuffed or Held at Gunpoint, in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown appeared first on ProPublica.