The Trump administration is directing employees at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to investigate foreign scientists who collaborate with the agency on research papers for evidence of “subversive or criminal activity.”

The new directive, part of a broader effort to increase scrutiny of research done with foreign partners, asks workers in the agency’s research arm to use Google to check the backgrounds of all foreign nationals collaborating with its scientists. The names of flagged scientists are being sent to national security experts at the agency, according to records reviewed by ProPublica.

At a meeting last month, USDA supervisors pushed back against the instructions, with one calling it “dystopic” and others expressing shock and confusion, according to an audio recording reviewed by ProPublica.

The USDA frequently collaborates with scientists based at universities in the U.S. and abroad. Some agency workers told ProPublica they were uncomfortable with the new requirement because they felt it could put those scientists in the crosshairs of the administration. Students and postdocs are particularly vulnerable as many are in the U.S. on temporary visas and green cards, the employees said.

Jennifer Jones, director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, called the directive a “throwback to McCarthyism” that could encourage scientists to avoid working with the “best and brightest” researchers from around the world.

“Asking scientists to spy on and report on their fellow co-authors” is a “classic hallmark of authoritarianism,” Jones said. The Union of Concerned Scientists is an organization that advocates for scientific integrity.

Jones, who hadn’t heard of the instructions until contacted by ProPublica, said she had never witnessed policies so extreme during prior administrations or in her former career as an academic scientist.

The new policy applies to pending scientific publications co-authored by employees in the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, which conducts research on crop yields, invasive species, plant genetics and other agricultural issues.

The USDA instructed employees to stop agency researchers from collaborating on or publishing papers with scientists from “countries of concern,” including China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela.

But the agency is also vetting scientists from nations not considered “countries of concern” before deciding whether USDA researchers can publish papers with them. Employees are including the names of foreign co-authors from nations such as Canada and Germany on lists shared with the department’s Office of Homeland Security, according to records reviewed by ProPublica. That office leads the USDA’s security initiatives and includes a division that works with federal intelligence agencies. The records don’t say what the office plans to do with the lists of names.

Asked about the changes, the USDA sent a statement noting that in his first term, President Donald Trump signed a memorandum designed to strengthen protections of U.S.-funded research across the federal government against foreign government interference. “USDA under the Biden Administration spent four years failing to implement this directive,” the statement said. The agency said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins last year rolled out “long-needed changes within USDA’s research enterprise, including a prohibition on authoring a publication with a foreign national from a country of concern.”

International research has been essential to the Agricultural Research Service’s work, according to a page of the USDA website last updated in 2024: “From learning how to mitigate diseases before they reach the United States, to testing models and crops in diverse growing conditions, to accessing resources not available in the United States, cooperation with international partners provides solutions to current and future agricultural challenges.”

Still, the U.S. government has long been worried about agricultural researchers acting as spies, sometimes with good reason. In 2016, the Chinese scientist Mo Hailong was sentenced to three years in prison for conspiring to steal patented corn seeds. And in 2022, Xiang Haitao, admitted to stealing a trade secret from Monsanto.

National security questions have also been raised about recent increases in foreign ownership of agricultural land. In 2022, Congress allocated money for a center to educate U.S. researchers about how to safeguard their data in international collaborations.

Since Trump took office last year, foreign researchers have faced increased obstacles. In March, a French researcher traveling to a conference was denied entry to the U.S. after a search of his phone at the airport turned up messages critical of Trump. The National Institutes of Health blocked researchers from China, Russia and other “countries of concern” from accessing various biomedical databases last spring. And in August, the Department of Homeland Security proposed shortening the length of time foreign students could remain in the country.

But the latest USDA instructions represent a significant escalation, casting suspicion on all researchers from outside the U.S. and asking agency staff to vet the foreign nationals they collaborate with. It’s unclear if employees at other federal agencies have been given similar directions.

The new USDA policy was announced internally in November and followed a July memo from Rollins that highlighted the national security risks of working with scientists who are not U.S. citizens.

“Foreign competitors benefit from USDA-funded projects, receiving loans that support overseas businesses, and grants that enable foreign competitors to undermine U.S. economic and strategic interests,” Rollins wrote in the memo. “Preventing this is the responsibility of every USDA employee.” The memo called for the department to “place America First” by taking a number of steps, including scrutinizing and making lists of the agency’s arrangements to work with foreign researchers and prohibiting USDA employees from participating in foreign programs to recruit scientists, “malign or otherwise.”

Rollins, a lawyer who studied agricultural development, co-founded the pro-Trump America First Policy Institute before being tapped to head the agency.

There have long been restrictions on collaborating with researchers from certain countries, such as Iran and China. But these new instructions create blanket bans on working with scientists from “countries of concern.”

In a late November email to staff members of the Agricultural Research Service at one area office, a research leader instructed managers to immediately stop all research with scientists who come from — or collaborate with institutions in — “countries of concern.”

The email also instructed employees to reject papers with foreign authors if they deal with “sensitive subjects” such as “diversity” or “climate change.” National security concerns were listed as another cause for rejection, with USDA research service employees instructed to ask if a foreigner could use the research against American farmers.

In the audio recording of the December meeting, some employees expressed alarm about the instructions to investigate their fellow scientists. The “part of figuring out if they are foreign … by Googling is very dystopic,” said one person at the meeting, which involved leadership from the Agricultural Research Service.

Faced with questions about how to ascertain the citizenship of a co-author, another person at the meeting said researchers should do their best with a Google search, then put the name on the list “and let Homeland Security do their behind the scenes search.”

Rollins’ July memo specifies that, within 60 days of receiving a list of “current arrangements” that involve foreign people or entities, the USDA’s Office of Homeland Security along with its offices of Chief Scientist and General Counsel should decide which arrangements to terminate. The USDA laid off 70 employees from “countries of concern” last summer as a result of the policy change laid out in the memo, NPR reported.

The USDA and Department of Homeland Security declined to answer questions about what happens to the foreign researchers flagged by the staff beyond potentially having their research papers rejected.

The documents also suggested new guidance would be issued on Jan. 1, but the USDA employees ProPublica interviewed said that the vetting work was continuing and that they had not received any written updates. The staff spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk publicly.

Scientists are often evaluated based on their output of new scientific research. Delaying or denying publication of pending papers could derail a researcher’s career. Over the past 40 years, the number of international collaborations among scientists has increased across the board, according to Caroline Wagner, an emeritus professor of public policy at the Ohio State University. “The more elite the researcher, the more likely they’re working at the international level,” said Wagner, who has spent more than 25 years researching international collaboration in science and technology.

The changes in how the USDA is approaching collaboration with foreign researchers, she said, “will certainly reduce the novelty, the innovative nature of science and decrease these flows of knowledge that have been extremely productive for science over the last years.”

The post Trump Administration Orders USDA Employees to Investigate Foreign Researchers They Work With appeared first on ProPublica.

A judge in Milwaukee brought a 13-year quest for justice by a grieving father to a close on Thursday, accepting a plea deal for two men charged criminally for their role in the killing of his teenaged son. 

Robert W. Beringer and Jesse R. Cole pleaded guilty to felony murder under a deferred prosecution agreement that allows them to avoid jail time yet publicly stand accountable for their actions leading to the 2012 death of Corey Stingley. The men helped restrain the 16-year-old inside a convenience store after an attempted shoplifting incident involving $12 worth of alcohol.

“What happened to Corey Stingley should have never happened. His death was unnecessary, brutal and devastating,” Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne told the judge in a letter filed with the court. 

Both of Stingley’s parents spoke directly to the judge in an hourlong hearing in a courtroom filled with family members, community activists, spiritual leaders and some of the teen’s former classmates. 

“Corey was my baby. A mother is not supposed to bury her child,” Alicia Stingley told the judge. She spoke of the grace of forgiveness, and after the hearing she hugged Beringer. The Stingleys’ surviving son, Cameron, shook both men’s hands. 

The agreement requires Cole and Beringer to make a one-time $500 donation each to a charitable organization of the Stingley family’s choosing in honor of Corey. After six months, if the two men comply with the terms and do not commit any crimes, the prosecution will dismiss the case, according to documents filed with the court. 

ProPublica, in a 2023 story, reexamined the incident, the legal presumptions, the background of the men and Stingley’s father’s relentless legal campaign to bring the men into court. The three men previously had defended their actions as justified and necessary to deal with an emergency as they held Stingley while waiting for police to arrive.

Ozanne, who was appointed in 2022 to review the case, recommended the agreement after the two men and the Stingley family engaged in an extensive restorative justice process, in which they sat face to face, under the supervision of a retired judge, and shared their thoughts and feelings. Ozanne said in the letter that the process “appears to have been healing for all involved.”

From the bench, Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Laura Crivello said she found the agreement to be fair and just and commended the work of all the parties to come to a resolution. 

“Maybe this is the spark that makes other people see similarities in each other and not differences,” she said. “Maybe this is the spark that makes them think about restorative justice and how do we come together. And maybe this is part of the spark that decreases the violence in our community and leads us to finding the paths to have those circles to sit down and have the dialogue and to have that conversation. So maybe there’s some good that comes out of it.”

Craig Stingley, Corey’s father, said during the hearing that his 13-year struggle “has turned into triumph.” 

Earlier, the Stingley family filed a statement with the court affirming its support for the agreement and the restorative justice process. 

“We sought not vengeance, but acknowledgement — of Corey’s life, his humanity, and the depth of our loss,” it states. “We believe this agreement honors Corey’s memory and offers a model of how people can come together, even after profound harm, to seek understanding and healing.” 

The family remembered Stingley as a “vibrant, loving son, brother, and friend” and found that the restorative dialogues brought “truth, understanding, and a measure of healing that the traditional court process could not.” 

Jonathan LaVoy, Cole’s attorney, told reporters after the hearing: “This has been a long 13 years. He’s been under investigation with multiple reviews over that time. I think everyone is just so happy that this day has come, that there’s been some finality to this whole situation.” 

In a joint written statement provided to the court, Beringer and Cole said they came to recognize “the profound ripple effects” of the incident and their connection to Stingley’s death. They expressed sorrow that Stingley’s “time on this earth ended far too soon.”

The proceeding followed years of work by Craig Stingley to force the justice system to view his son as a crime victim whose life was unlawfully cut short by Beringer, Cole and another store patron, Mario Laumann, who died in 2022. 

Prosecutors at the time declined to charge anyone, saying the men did not intend to kill Corey Stingley when they tackled him and pinned him to the floor of VJ’s Food Mart, in West Allis, Wisconsin. They were detaining him for police after the youth attempted to steal bottles of Smirnoff Ice. In surveillance video, Laumann can be seen holding Stingley in a chokehold while the other two men aided in restraining him. A witness told police Laumann was “squeezing the hell” out of the teenager.

The Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office found that Stingley died of a brain injury due to asphyxiation after a “violent struggle with multiple individuals.” It ruled the death a homicide.

Under Wisconsin law, the charge of felony murder is brought in cases in which someone dies during the commission of another alleged crime — in this case false imprisonment. 

Ozanne wrote to the court that his analysis found that “there is no doubt Cole, Beringer and Laumann caused Corey Stingley’s death.”

All three men, he wrote, restrained Stingley “intentionally and without his consent” and without legal authority to “arrest” him. “Simply put, Corey, a teenager, was tackled and restrained to the ground by three grown men because they suspected him of shoplifting,” Ozanne wrote. “They killed him while piled on top of his body awaiting the police.” 

But he noted that there is no evidence that Beringer or Cole knew that Stingley was in medical distress during the incident. He described their hold on him as “rudimentary detention techniques.” 

It was Laumann, Ozanne concluded, who “strangled Corey Stingley to death.” Ozanne wrote that surveillance video shows Laumann’s arm for several minutes across Stingley’s neck “as he fades out of consciousness.” 

If Laumann were still alive, Ozanne said in court, prosecutors likely would have been seeking a lengthy prison term for him.

Stingley died the same year as Trayvon Martin, a Black Florida teen shot to death by a neighborhood volunteer watchman, who was acquitted in 2013. Martin’s case drew national attention and led to the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement. But Stingley’s death after being restrained by three white men did not garner widespread notice outside Wisconsin. 

Over the years, Craig Stingley unsuccessfully advocated for the men to face charges. Two prosecutors reviewed the case, but nothing came of it. 

He then discovered an obscure “John Doe” statute, dating back to Wisconsin’s territorial days, that allows a private citizen to ask a judge to consider whether a crime has been committed and, if so, by whom when a district attorney can’t or won’t do so.

Stingley filed such a petition in late 2020. That led to the appointment of Ozanne as a special prosecutor to review the matter yet again. In 2024, Ozanne informed the Stingley family that his office had found evidence of a crime but that a guilty verdict was not assured for the remaining two men.

That set in motion an effort to achieve healing and accountability through a restorative justice process. Restorative justice programs bring together survivors and offenders for conversations, led by trained facilitators, to work toward understanding and healing and how best to make amends. Last year, Stingley and members of his family met on separate occasions with both Cole and Beringer through the Andrew Center for Restorative Justice, part of the law school at Milwaukee’s Marquette University. 

The discussions led to the deferred prosecution agreement.

In an interview, Anthony Neff, a longtime friend of Craig Stingley’s, recalled seeing Corey Stingley in a hospital bed, attached to tubes and a ventilator in his final days. Corey Stingley had been a running back on his high school football team. Everyone in the program showed up for the funeral, Neff said. 

“Coaches. The ball boys. The cheerleaders. I mean, they’re all standing in solidarity with Craig and the family,” he said. 

In the years since, he and other golfing buddies of Craig Stingley’s have provided emotional support in his quest. Neff called it “a lesson in civics, a master lesson in civics.”

The post A Black Teen Died Over a $12 Shoplifting Attempt. 13 Years Later, Two Men Plead Guilty in His Killing. appeared first on ProPublica.

When I first learned that a critical medication for transplant patients — one that keeps them alive — had generic versions that might not be effective, I called a specialty pharmacist at a hospital in Virginia. Adam Cochrane had written a journal article about the problems with the generics. 

The drug is called tacrolimus, and it keeps a transplant patient’s body from rejecting a donated organ. I was surprised to hear that Cochrane had several patients he thought had died in part because their generic tacrolimus hadn’t worked right.

He told me about Hannah Goetz, though he didn’t divulge her name initially. She would become the focus of a story I published recently that’s part of a larger investigation into how the Food and Drug Administration has for years allowed risky drugs into your medicine cabinet. 

Hannah was 17 when she had a double lung transplant because of complications from cystic fibrosis, a genetic condition that fills the organs with mucus. She died in 2023 at just 21 years old, he said. And she had been taking one of the bad generics. 

He agreed to see if her mom would be willing to chat with me. When I met Holly Goetz at her home in Portsmouth, Virginia, she was open and personable. She was angry, too. Hannah had died too young. She welcomed the chance to tell her daughter’s story. “I was excited, because someone was going to research this issue,” Holly told me recently. “Possibly turn things around.” Before we’d met, she’d been told she didn’t have any legal recourse to sue over Hannah’s death despite the issue with the generic. Lawyers told Holly it was impossible to draw a straight line from Hannah’s death to a generic manufacturer.

I knew that in telling Hannah’s story in detail, I’d also be telling the larger story about tacrolimus, and larger still about the systemic failures at the FDA. ProPublica’s reporting typically focuses on exposing wrongdoing in the hopes of spurring change. I wasn’t sure whether our reporting would bring Holly the accountability she yearned for, at least not in a tangible way. I hoped Holly’s experience sharing an intimate, tragic part of her life wouldn’t end up being a disappointment.

Holly had been by Hannah’s side, advocating for her since she was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis and through the four-year journey after the transplant. Over several hours as the sky turned dark that February day, she took me through all that happened — from Hannah’s sudden need for a transplant where she almost died, to her doing well enough to take college courses and enjoy having her first (and only) real boyfriend, to her unexpected decline just three and half years after the successful transplant. 

“It was hard, because I was reliving everything over again,” Holly said of our first interview at her home. “Then again, I got to talk to someone else about Hannah, who she was, not just her in the hospital.” 

As she showed me Hannah’s peach bedroom that day, with its dozens of stuffed animals and the hair bows she wore every day when she was in school, Holly shared that when Hannah was a little girl she started sticking her tongue out in pictures. Holly laughed, saying she thought for sure Hannah would outgrow the habit, but it turned into her signature pose. Now, one of those pictures hangs from Holly’s rearview mirror in her car, one of many touchstones. There are photos and memorabilia of Hannah all over the house. I felt privileged to step into Holly’s own bedroom to see the pink urn with angel wings that holds Hannah’s ashes. 

During our conversation, I realized that my reporting had given me access to key details about Hannah’s death that Holly didn’t know. I didn’t relish being the messenger who informed her that Hannah had taken not just one but actually two different suspect generic versions of tacrolimus, that she had the misfortune of exclusively taking ones that doctors, pharmacists or the FDA had found problematic. Holly’s eyes widened. I had to share, too, that the FDA had revoked one version’s generic status just two months after Hannah had died. 

The two manufacturers of the generic medication Hannah was taking, companies named Accord and Dr. Reddy’s, both maintain that their tacrolimus is safe and effective. An Accord spokesperson said in a statement that the company cannot comment on individual cases but that it is “dedicated to patient safety, product quality and regulatory compliance.” Dr. Reddy’s said in a statement that it hasn’t received any complaints that “indicated any concerns in patient safety.” 

The next day as I made the three-hour drive back to Washington, D.C., where I live, I called one of ProPublica’s managing editors, Tracy Weber, whom I’ve known for years. I cried as I described my conversation with Holly. One unavoidable aspect of my job is that I’m often asking people about the worst things that have happened to them. In my two decades as a reporter — quite a few of those years spent covering the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — I’ve sat at many kitchen tables with grieving mothers. Talking with Holly, though, was the first time I’d done so as a mother myself. Her sorrow hit me differently. 

Over the next nine months, I’d be a constant presence in Holly’s life. We texted hundreds of times. She dug up old photos and videos and gave me access to Hannah’s private Instagram account. One of the hardest moments was listening to a recording Holly sent of the doctors telling Hannah shortly before she died that they couldn’t give her a second transplant.

The ask from an investigative reporter is never just, “Tell me about your loved one.” Our work requires meticulous detail and all the receipts. I had to recruit Holly to take considerable time to help with my reporting. 

There were four years of medical care I needed to comb through to write the story, which meant asking Holly to track down records from two hospitals and, crucially, the pharmacy where Hannah had gotten all her medications. It wasn’t a simple task. 

Hannah was an adult when she died, so Holly wasn’t automatically entitled to her records. Although Hannah had signed an advance directive giving Holly power of attorney before her death, including the ability to request records, Holly still couldn’t get access.

She had to recruit a lawyer friend and attend probate court to get Hannah’s hospital records for me. “What I had to go through to get them was ridiculous,” Holly said. I first asked about the records in February. It took until May for her to get appointed as executor of Hannah’s estate, and then several more months for the hospitals and pharmacy to fulfil Holly’s request and send her the records. We didn’t have them until July. 

There were upwards of 13,000 pages — all of which she shared with me. Sometimes, the records meant I had to ask uncomfortable questions of Holly. Why, for example, didn’t Hannah consistently take her medication for her pancreas? Did that mean she also didn’t take her tacrolimus? (Answers: She didn’t like how the pancreas drug made her feel, and Holly was so insistent on guaranteeing her daughter took her tacrolimus that she made her FaceTime when she took the pills away from home.) Holly was unfazed by even the most difficult questions. She and Hannah were alike that way: There was no shrinking from the world. Holly made my job a lot easier; she didn’t have to.

I hesitated each time I had to reach out, wondering if texting about Hannah in the middle of the day would be jarring. What was it like for Holly to check her phone on her break from teaching high schoolers and be greeted with a message that would take her back to Hannah’s final days in the hospital? To my relief, Holly told me later she looked forward to my texts or calls. “I like sharing everything about Hannah,” she said. 

Holly said she had agreed to talk to ProPublica because she thought speaking to me and the resulting story might bring her a sense of closure. Did it? I asked her. 

“Yes, because more people know now what really happened,” she said. “The real story.”

The post Her Daughter Died After Taking a Generic Version of a Lifesaving Drug. This Is What She Wants You to Know. appeared first on ProPublica.

When Ciji Graham visited a cardiologist on Nov. 14, 2023, her heart was pounding at 192 beats per minute, a rate healthy people her age usually reach during the peak of a sprint. She was having another episode of atrial fibrillation, a rapid, irregular heartbeat. The 34-year-old Greensboro, North Carolina, police officer was at risk of a stroke or heart failure. 

In the past, doctors had always been able to shock Graham’s heart back into rhythm with a procedure called a cardioversion. But this time, the treatment was just out of reach. After a pregnancy test came back positive, the cardiologist didn’t offer to shock her. Graham texted her friend from the appointment: “Said she can’t cardiovert being pregnant.”

The doctor told Graham to consult three other specialists and her primary care provider before returning in a week, according to medical records. Then she sent Graham home as her heart kept hammering.   

Like hundreds of thousands of women each year who enter pregnancy with chronic conditions, Graham was left to navigate care in a country where medical options have significantly narrowed.

As ProPublica has reported, doctors in states that ban abortion have repeatedly denied standard care to high-risk pregnant patients. The expert consensus is that cardioversion is safe during pregnancy, and ProPublica spoke with more than a dozen specialists who said they would have immediately admitted Graham to a hospital to get her heart rhythm under control. They found fault, too, with a second cardiologist she saw the following day, who did not perform an electrocardiogram and also sent her home. Although Graham’s family gave the doctors permission to speak with ProPublica, neither replied to ProPublica’s questions.

Graham came to believe that the best way to protect her health was to end her unexpected pregnancy. But because of new abortion restrictions in North Carolina and nearby states, finding a doctor who could quickly perform a procedure would prove difficult. Many physicians and hospitals now hesitate to discuss abortion, even when women ask about it. And abortion clinics are not set up to treat certain medically complicated cases. As a result, sick pregnant women like Graham are often on their own.

“I can’t feel like this for 9mo,” Graham wrote her friend. “I just can’t.” 

She wouldn’t. In a region that had legislated its commitment to life, she would spend her final days struggling to find anyone to save hers. 

---

Graham hated feeling out of breath; her life demanded all her energy. Widely admired for her skills behind the wheel, she was often called upon to train fellow officers at the Greensboro Police Department. At home, she needed to chase her 2-year-old son, SJ, around the apartment. She was a natural with kids — she’d helped her single mom raise her nine younger siblings.

She thought her surprise pregnancy had caused the atrial fibrillation, also called A-fib. In addition to heart disease, she had a thyroid disorder; pregnancy could send the gland into overdrive, prompting dangerous heart rhythms. 

When Graham saw the first cardiologist, Dr. Sabina Custovic, the 192 heart rate recorded on an EKG should have been a clear cause for alarm. “I can’t think of any situation where I would feel comfortable sending anyone home with a heart rate of 192,” said Dr. Jenna Skowronski, a cardiologist at the University of North Carolina. A dozen cardiologists and maternal-fetal medicine specialists who reviewed Graham’s case for ProPublica agreed. The risk of death was low, but the fact that she was also reporting symptoms — severe palpitations, trouble breathing — meant the health dangers were significant. 

All the experts said they would have tried to treat Graham with IV medication in the hospital and, if that failed, an electrical shock. Cardioversion wouldn’t necessarily be simple — likely requiring an invasive ultrasound to check for blood clots beforehand — but it was crucial to slow down her heart. A leading global organization for arrhythmia professionals, the Heart Rhythm Society, has issued clear guidance that “cardioversion is safe and effective in pregnancy.”

Even if the procedure posed a small risk to the pregnancy, the risk of not treating Graham was far greater, said Rhode Island cardiologist Dr. Daniel Levine: “No mother, no baby.”

Custovic did not answer ProPublica’s questions about why the pregnancy made her hold off on the treatment or whether abortion restrictions affect her decision-making.  

The next day — as her heart continued to thump — Graham saw a second cardiologist, Dr. Will Camnitz, at Cone Health, one of the region’s largest health care systems. 

According to medical records, Graham’s pulse registered as normal when taken at Camnitz’s office, as it had at her appointment the previous day. Camnitz noted that the EKG from the day before showed she was in A-fib and prescribed a blood thinner to prepare for a cardioversion in three weeks — if by then she hadn’t returned to a regular heart rhythm on her own. 

Some of the experts who reviewed Graham’s care said that this was a reasonable plan if her pulse was, indeed, normal. But Camnitz, who specializes in the electrical activity of the heart, did not order another EKG to confirm that her heart rate had come down from 192, according to medical records. “He’s an electrophysiologist and he didn’t do that, which is insane,” said Dr. Kayle Shapero, a cardio-obstetrics specialist at Brown University. According to experts, a pulse measurement can underestimate the true heart rate of a patient in A-fib. Every cardiologist who reviewed Graham’s care for ProPublica said that a repeat EKG would be best practice. If Graham’s rate was still as high as it was the previous day, her heart could eventually stop delivering enough blood to major organs. Camnitz did not answer ProPublica’s questions about why he didn’t administer this test.

Three weeks was a long time to wait with a heart that Graham kept saying was practically leaping out of her chest.

Camnitz knew about Graham’s pregnancy but did not discuss whether she wanted to continue it or advise her on her options, according to medical records. That same day, though, Graham reached out to A Woman’s Choice, the sole abortion clinic in Greensboro. 

North Carolina bans abortion after 12 weeks; Graham was only about six weeks pregnant. Still, there was a long line ahead of her. Women were flooding the state from Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina, where new abortion bans were even stricter. On top of that, a recent change in North Carolina law required an in-person consent visit three days before a termination. The same number of patients were now filling twice as many appointment slots. 

Graham would need to wait nearly two weeks for an abortion. 

It’s unclear if she explained her symptoms to the clinic; A Woman’s Choice spokesperson said it routinely discards appointment forms and no longer had a copy of Graham’s. But the spokesperson told ProPublica that a procedure at the clinic would not have been right for Graham; because of her high heart rate, she would have needed a hospital with more resources. 

Dr. Jessica Tarleton, an abortion provider who spent the past few years working in the Carolinas, said she frequently encountered pregnant women with chronic conditions who faced this kind of catch-22: Their risks were too high to be treated in a clinic, and it would be safest to get care at a hospital, but it could be very hard to find one willing to terminate a pregnancy. 

In states where abortions have been criminalized, many hospitals have shied away from sharing information about their policies on abortion. Cone Health, where Graham typically went for care, would not tell ProPublica whether its doctors perform abortions and under what circumstances; it said, “Cone Health provides personalized and individualized care to each patient based on their medical needs while complying with state and federal laws.” 

Graham never learned that she would need an abortion at a hospital rather than a clinic. Physicians at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, the premier academic medical centers in the state, said that she would have been able to get one at their hospitals — but that would have required a doctor to connect her or for Graham to have somehow known to show up.  

Had Graham lived in another country, she may not have faced this maze alone. 

In the United Kingdom, for example, a doctor trained in caring for pregnant women with risky medical conditions would have been assigned to oversee all of Graham’s care, ensuring it was appropriate, said Dr. Marian Knight, who leads the U.K.’s maternal mortality review program. Hospitals in the U.K. also must abide by standardized national protocols or face regulatory consequences. Researchers point to these factors, as well as a national review system, as key to the country’s success in lowering its rate of maternal death. The maternal mortality rate in the U.S. is more than double that of the U.K. and last on the list of wealthy countries.

Graham’s friend Shameka Jackson could tell that something was wrong. Graham didn’t seem like her usual “perky and silly” self, Jackson said. On the phone, she sounded weak, her voice barely louder than a whisper. 

When Jackson offered to come over, Graham said it would be a waste of time. “There’s nothing you can do but sit with me,” Jackson said she replied. “The doctors ain’t doing nothing.” 

Graham no longer cooked or played with her son after work, said her boyfriend, Shawn Scott. She stopped hoisting SJ up to let him dunk on the hoop on the closet door. Now, she headed straight for the couch and barely spoke, except to say that no one would shock her heart. 

“I hate feeling like this,” she texted Jackson. “Ain’t slept, chest hurts.” 

“All I can do is wait until the 28th,” Graham said, the date of her scheduled abortion. 

---

On the morning of Nov. 19, Scott awoke to a rap on the front door of the apartment he and Graham shared. He’d been asleep on the couch after a night out with friends and thought that Graham had left for work. 

A police officer introduced himself and explained that Graham hadn’t shown up and wasn’t answering her phone. He knew she hadn’t been feeling well and wanted to check in. 

Most mornings, Graham was up around 5 a.m. to prepare for the day. With Scott, she would brush SJ’s teeth, braid his hair and dress him in stylish outfits, complete with Jordans or Chelsea boots. 

When Scott walked into their bedroom, Graham was face down in bed, her body cold when he touched her. The two men pulled her down to the floor to start CPR, but it was too late. SJ stood in his crib, silently watching as they realized. 

The medical examiner would list Graham’s cause of death as “cardiac arrhythmia due to atrial fibrillation in the setting of recent pregnancy.” There was no autopsy, which could have identified the specific complication that led to her death. 

High-risk pregnancy specialists and cardiologists who reviewed Graham’s case were taken aback by Custovic’s failure to act urgently. Many said her decisions reminded them of behaviors they’ve seen from other cardiologists when treating pregnant patients; they attribute this kind of hesitation to gaps in education. Although cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in pregnant women, a recent survey developed with the American College of Cardiology found that less than 30% of cardiologists reported formal training in managing heart conditions in pregnancy. “A large proportion of the cardiology workforce feels uncomfortable providing care to these patients,” the authors concluded in the Journal of the American Heart Association. The legal threats attached to abortion bans, many doctors have told ProPublica, have made some cardiologists even more conservative.

Custovic did not answer ProPublica’s questions about whether she felt she had adequate training. A spokesperson for Cone Health, where Camnitz works, said, “Cone Health’s treatment for pregnant women with underlying cardiac disease is consistent with accepted standards of care in our region.” Although Graham’s family gave the hospital permission to discuss Graham’s care with ProPublica, the hospital did not comment on specifics. 

Three doctors who have served on state maternal mortality review committees, which study the deaths of pregnant women, told ProPublica that Graham’s death was preventable. “There were so many points where they could have intervened,” said Dr. Amelia Huntsberger, a former member of Idaho’s panel.

Graham’s is the seventh case ProPublica has investigated in which a pregnant woman in a state that significantly restricted abortion died after she was unable to access standard care. 

The week after she died, Graham’s family held a candlelight ceremony outside of her high school, which drew friends and cops in uniform, and also Greensboro residents whose lives she had touched. One woman approached Graham’s sisters and explained Graham had interrupted her suicide attempt five years earlier and reassured her that her life had value; she had recently texted Graham, “If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be here today, expecting my first child.”

As for Graham’s own son, no one explained to SJ that his mother had died. They didn’t know how to describe death to a toddler. Instead, his dad and grandmother and aunts and uncles told him that his mom had left Earth and gone to the moon. SJ now calls it the “Mommy moon.”

For the past two years, every night before bed, he asks to go outside, even on the coldest winter evenings. He points to the moon in the dark sky and tells his mother that he loves her.

The post A Pregnant Woman at Risk of Heart Failure Couldn’t Get Urgent Treatment. She Died Waiting for an Abortion. appeared first on ProPublica.

Last year, when Utah lawmakers passed the nation’s first statewide ban on community water fluoridation, they included a provision making it easier for people to get fluoride supplements without having to visit a dental provider.

This would make fluoride available through individual choice, rather than “mass public dosing,” as a Utah House of Representatives webpage put it — part of the rising rhetoric of skepticism that’s led to rollbacks of water fluoridation, a proven method to reduce tooth decay.

“It’s what I like to refer to as the win-win, right?” Speaker Mike Schultz said on a June episode of the “House Rules” podcast from the Utah House. “Those that want fluoride can now get fluoride easier, and those that don’t want fluoride in their drinking water don’t have to have that.”

But even as critics point to fluoride supplements as an alternative — along with fluoride toothpaste, rinses and varnishes — many are creating barriers to these same products.

Under U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s oversight, the Food and Drug Administration said it issued notices to four businesses about their ingestible fluoride supplements for children and also put out new guidance for health professionals.

In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton launched investigations into two large companies over their marketing of fluoride toothpaste to parents and children.

And changes to Medicaid in President Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act threaten to make it harder than it already is for the most vulnerable people to access any oral health care at all, let alone fluoride treatments at a dentist’s office.

More than anything, experts say, alarmist language from high-profile officials is trickling down to the public, leading more people to question whether any form of fluoride — in drinking water or in other treatments — is a good idea.

Scott Tomar, a professor and associate dean at the University of Illinois Chicago College of Dentistry, is among those who have watched with dismay as the conversation about fluoride has been affected by arguments likely to scare people.

“I’m certain that the net result of all of this is going to be a greater reluctance on the part of parents and providers to prescribe fluoride supplements,” Tomar said.

Low, consistent exposure to fluoride is widely credited for dramatic declines in decaying teeth. But long-simmering skepticism about its use gained more influence in recent years, especially with Kennedy’s credibility and influence as the nation’s chief health officer.

“The evidence against fluoride is overwhelming,” he said as he stood alongside Utah lawmakers at a press conference in Salt Lake City last April.

Even though the science to support his conclusions is limited, he claimed that fluoride “causes IQ loss, profound IQ loss,” and he linked water fluoridation to ADHD, hypothyroidism, osteoarthritis, and kidney and liver issues.

Lee Zeldin, who leads the Environmental Protection Agency, spoke at the Utah event, too, crediting Kennedy for helping to spur the agency’s review of its standard for fluoride in drinking water. An EPA spokesperson, in a statement to ProPublica, said that the agency’s “next analysis of new scientific information on potential health risks of fluoride in drinking water was not due until 2030, but this agency is moving at Trump Speed.”

Meanwhile, the FDA is partnering with other federal agencies to develop what it called “a fluoride research agenda.” And, as part of a series of drastic cutbacks last spring, the Division of Oral Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was eliminated.

In a statement emailed to ProPublica, an HHS spokesperson argued that fluoride’s “predominant benefit to teeth comes from topical contact with the outside of the teeth, not from ingestion. There is no need, therefore, to ingest fluoride.”

Fluoride’s opponents cite a hotly debated “state of the science” report from the National Toxicology Program in 2024, saying that it shows an association between fluoride exposure and a lowered IQ in children.

But those findings are not widely embraced because of the review’s limitations. It analyzed studies conducted outside the U.S., with different water conditions, and involving fluoride levels at more than twice the standard for drinking water here. The report itself states, in bold type, that it does not address “whether the sole exposure to fluoride added to drinking water” at the recommended level in the United States and Canada “is associated with a measurable effect on IQ.”

In this atmosphere, as ProPublica has reported, there’s been widespread wavering on water fluoridation, even in Michigan, where the treatment debuted more than 80 years ago.

Florida joined Utah in banning fluoridation statewide. Bills to do the same were introduced in at least 19 other states last year, and that momentum is carrying forward, with statewide bans recently proposed in Arizona and South Carolina. Meanwhile, local debates over fluoridation are turning raucous.

Utah’s dental professionals are concerned about how to stave off an expected hit to oral health, as other communities experienced when they cut off fluoridation.

“We get heartburn over the situation,” said James Bekker, a pediatric dentist and past president of the Utah Dental Association.

Bekker and others are piecing together ways to provide other forms of fluoride treatment to Utahns. But he’s worried, he said, about “all these susceptible, vulnerable children in underserved populations that don’t have a choice and don’t have a voice, but they are going to suffer.”

Shortly after Utah banned fluoridation, the FDA took aim at the kind of supplements that lawmakers had presented as a key alternative. The agency announced that it was working to remove certain ingestible fluoride products for children from the market. Its press release described associations with changes to the gut microbiome, thyroid disorders, weight gain “and possibly decreased IQ.”

More than 4,600 public comments poured into the FDA, including many from people worried about losing access to supplements while simultaneously losing water fluoridation.

“Now that fluoride has been removed from much of Utah’s water, it is imperative to provide supplementation through other means,” one orthodontist wrote. A dentist in South Florida criticized the scare tactics and bad science leading states like hers to ban fluoridation and said that prescribing fluoride drops and lozenges is one of the few alternatives for pediatric patients.

On Oct. 31, the FDA announced efforts to “restrict the sale of unapproved ingestible fluoride prescription drug products for children.” The agency said it sent notices to four companies about marketing the supplements for children under 3 and older children with moderate or low risk for tooth decay. It also said it issued letters to health care professionals “warning about the risks associated with these products.”

Even though the FDA landed short of a ban, Stuart Cooper, executive director of the Fluoride Action Network, called the agency’s shift a “major victory.” He said he believes it’s just the start of federal action to limit the use of fluoride products that FAN has long campaigned against.

Fluoride supplements, which emerged in the 1940s alongside water fluoridation, never went through an FDA review. A decade ago, Cooper said, FAN submitted a citizens petition that called for the agency to pull ingestible fluoride supplements from the market. “What we’re seeing is that come to fruition,” he said, “because we finally have FDA employees who were willing to look at the issue.”

The FDA’s stance on supplements is now at odds with several health organizations, including the American Dental Association, the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Several of them jointly support a graduated fluoride supplementation schedule that starts at six months for high-risk children.

Johnny Johnson, a retired pediatric dentist in Florida, questions the FDA’s risk parameters. “If you don’t have fluoride at appropriate levels in your water, by definition, you are at high risk” of tooth decay, said Johnson, who heads the nonprofit American Fluoridation Society.

The FDA’s letter to health professionals recommends topical fluoride as an alternative, such as toothpaste. But even that method faces scrutiny. The Texas attorney general’s office launched investigations into Colgate-Palmolive and Procter & Gamble, which sell Colgate and Crest fluoride toothpastes.

Their marketing to parents and children is “misleading, deceptive and dangerous,” Paxton’s office said in a press release. Referencing the NTP report on fluoridation, the release said the investigation came “amid a growing body of scientific evidence demonstrating that excessive fluoride exposure is not safe for children.”

In September, Paxton’s office announced a “historic agreement” with Colgate-Palmolive. When its packaging and promotional material for children’s fluoride toothpaste shows the paste on a brush, the company will display a pea-sized amount, rather than the traditional swirl. This month, Paxton’s office reported a similar settlement with Procter & Gamble.

A representative from Colgate-Palmolive said in a statement to ProPubica that Paxton’s press release acknowledged that “we already provide directions on our packaging that complies with U.S. FDA requirements for how our children’s fluoride toothpastes should be used.” Procter & Gamble said in a statement that “the Texas Attorney General acknowledged in the settlement that our products comply with all laws and regulations regarding directions for use.”

Another tool for fluoride treatment is varnish applied during a dental checkup, which may be provided at free or reduced cost through insurance programs. But even with health coverage, there are barriers that often make it difficult to see the dentists and pediatricians providing such treatment. Recent research found that insurance denials for fluoride varnish applications can add another layer of complication for patients and providers.

Supplemental fluoride treatments are limited, compared with the effectiveness, reach and cost of fluoride in drinking water, said Johnson, the retired pediatric dentist, but “it is the only option that we have in Florida and in Utah.”

“Nothing replaces fluoridated water,” he added. “Nothing comes close.”

The post After Sowing Distrust in Fluoridated Water, Kennedy and Skeptics Turn to Obstructing Other Fluoride Sources appeared first on ProPublica.

The quest for justice dominated his life. 

He gathered police reports, witness statements and other evidence in the Dec. 14, 2012, fatal incident inside a Milwaukee-area convenience store. The youth had tried to shoplift $12 worth of flavored malt beverages at the shop before abandoning the items and turning to leave. That’s when three men wrestled him to the ground to hold him for the police. 

The medical examiner determined that he died of a brain injury from asphyxiation after a “violent struggle with multiple individuals.” The manner of death: homicide. 

When prosecutors chose not to charge anyone, Stingley waged a legal campaign of his own that forced the case to be reexamined. A 2023 ProPublica investigation pieced together a detailed timeline of what happened inside the store, recounted what witnesses saw and examined the backgrounds of the three customers involved in the altercation.

Finally, this week, in an extraordinary turn of events, Stingley will see a measure of accountability. On Monday, a criminal complaint filed in Milwaukee County Circuit Court charged the surviving patrons — Robert W. Beringer and Jesse R. Cole — with felony murder. The defendants are set to appear in court on Thursday. 

Beringer’s attorney, Tony Cotton, described the broad outlines of a deferred prosecution agreement that can lead to the charges being dismissed after the two men plead guilty or no contest. The men may be required by the court to make a contribution to a charity in honor of Corey Stingley and to perform community service, avoiding prison time, according to Cotton and Craig Stingley.

In Wisconsin, felony murder is a special category for incidents in which the commission of a serious crime — in this case, false imprisonment — causes the death of another person. The prosecutor’s office in Dane County, which is handling the matter, declined to comment. Cole’s attorney said his client had no comment. Previously, the three men have argued that their actions were justified, citing self-defense and their need to respond to an emergency. 

For Stingley, a key part of the accountability process already has taken place. Last year, as part of a restorative justice program and under the supervision of a retired judge, Stingley and the two men interacted face to face in separate meetings.

There, inside an office on a Milwaukee college campus, they confronted the traumatic events that led to Corey Stingley’s death and the still-roiling feelings of resentment, sorrow and pain. 

Craig Stingley said he felt that, after years of downplaying their role, the men showed regret and a deeper understanding of what had happened. For instance, Stingley said, he and Cole aired out their different perspectives on what occurred and even reviewed store surveillance video together. 

“I have never been able to breathe as clearly and as deeply and feel as free as I have after that meeting was over,” Stingley said. 

Restorative justice programs bring together survivors and offenders — via meetings or letters or through community panels — to try to deepen understanding, promote healing and discuss how best to make amends for a wide range of harms. The approach has been used by schools and juvenile and criminal justice systems, as well as nations grappling with large-scale atrocities.

Situations where restorative justice and deferred prosecution are employed for such serious charges are rare, Cotton said. But, he said, the whole case is rare — from the prosecution declining to issue charges initially to holding it open for multiple reviews over a decade. 

“Our hearts go out to the Stingley family, and we believe that the restorative justice process has allowed all sides to express their feelings openly,” Cotton said. “We are glad that a fair and just outcome has been achieved.”

The Legal Quest

Milwaukee’s district attorney at the time of Corey Stingley’s death, John Chisholm, announced there would be no charges 13 months later, in January 2014. Cole, Beringer and a third man, Mario Laumann, now deceased, were not culpable because they did not intend to injure or kill the teen and weren’t trained in proper restraint techniques, Chisholm determined. 

Craig Stingley, who is Black, and others in the community protested the decision, claiming the three men — all white — were not good Samaritans but had acted violently to kill a Black youth with impunity. “When a person loses his life at the hands of others, it would seem that a ‘chargeable’ offense has occurred,” the Milwaukee branch of the NAACP said in a statement at the time.

Looking for a way to reopen the case, Stingley reexamined the evidence, including security video. In a painful exercise, he watched the takedown of his son, by his estimation hundreds of times, analyzing who did what, frame by frame. What he saw only reinforced his view that his son’s death was unnecessary and his right to due process denied.

Corey Stingley and his father lived only blocks from VJ’s Food Mart, in West Allis, Wisconsin. That December day, Stingley made his way to the back of the store and stuck six bottles of Smirnoff Ice into his backpack. At the front counter, the teenager provided his debit card to pay for an energy drink, but the clerk demanded the stolen items. Stingley surrendered the backpack, reached toward the cash register to recover his debit card, then turned to exit.

Cole told police he extended his hand to stop Stingley and claimed that the teen punched him in the face, though it is not evident on the video. The three men grabbed the youth. During a struggle, the men pinned Stingley to the floor. 

Laumann kept Stingley in a chokehold, several witnesses told investigators. ProPublica later discovered that Laumann had been a Marine. His brother told ProPublica he likely learned how to apply chokeholds as part of his military service decades ago. 

Beringer had Stingley by the hair and was pressing on the teen’s head, a witness told authorities. Cole helped to hold Stingley down. Eventually, Stingley stopped resisting. The police report states that Cole thought the teen was “playing limp” to trick them into loosening their grip.

“Get up, you punk!” Laumann told the motionless teen when an officer finally arrived, according to a police report. Stingley was foaming at the mouth and had urinated through his clothes. The officer couldn’t find a pulse. Stingley never regained consciousness, dying at a hospital two weeks later.

Craig Stingley unsuccessfully sought a meeting with Chisholm in 2015 to discuss the lack of charges. “Feel free to seek legal advice in the private sector regarding your Constitutional Rights,” an assistant to Chisholm replied to Stingley in an email. “I extend my deepest sympathy to you and your family!”

Stingley’s review of the video, however, did bring about another legal opportunity in 2017, after he notified West Allis police that there was footage showing Laumann with his arm around the teen’s throat. (Laumann had denied putting him in a headlock.) A Racine County district attorney was appointed to review the evidence again. She issued no report for three years, until pressed by the court, then concluded that no charges were warranted. 

Finally, Stingley discovered an obscure Wisconsin “John Doe” statute. It allows private citizens to petition a judge to consider whether a crime had been committed if a district attorney refuses to issue a criminal complaint.

A former process engineer for an electrical transformer manufacturer, Stingley had no legal training. Still, in November 2020, he filed a 14-page petition with the then-chief judge of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court, Mary Triggiano. It cited legal authority and “material facts,” including excerpts from police reports, witness statements and stills from the surveillance video. Stingley quoted former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in the petition and the British statesman William Gladstone: “Justice delayed is justice denied.”

That led to the appointment in July 2022 of Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne to review the case. But that process was slowed by procedural hurdles. Stingley took the delays in stride, saying he trusted that Ozanne and his staff were treating the matter seriously and acting appropriately.

In 2024, Stingley said, Ozanne’s office advised him that they had found sufficient evidence to issue charges against Cole and Beringer but could not guarantee that a jury would deliver a guilty verdict. Stingley, researching the family’s options, said he inquired about the restorative justice process. The DA’s office supported the idea, arranging for him and the two men to meet under the supervision of the Andrew Center for Restorative Justice, part of the law school at Milwaukee’s Marquette University. The program is run by Triggiano, who’d retired from the court.

The concept of restorative justice can be traced back to indigenous cultures, where people sat together to talk through conflict and solve problems. It emerged in the United States in criminal justice systems in the 1970s as a way to provide alternatives to prison and restitution to victims. Elsewhere, it has notably been used to address the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda, where beginning in 2002 truth-telling forums led to forgiveness and reconciliation.

Stingley, who has three remaining grown children and four grandchildren, desperately wanted “balance restored” for his family. He decided the best path forward was to meet with the men he considered responsible for his son’s death.

The Quest for Closure

Stingley brought photos of Corey to the restorative justice meeting with Berringer in April.

The goal: to respectfully share their perspectives on the tragedy and how it impacted each of them personally. What was said was not recorded or transcribed. It was not for use in any court proceeding. 

The sessions began with the Stingley family sharing heartfelt stories about Corey as a son, brother, student and friend. They spoke of their great bond, Corey’s love of sports and their struggle to cope with his absence. 

When discussion turned to what happened in the store, Stingley said, Berringer described having only faint memories of the fatal encounter. He recalled a brief struggle and grabbing the teen by his jacket, not his hair. 

Before departing the meeting, a tearful Beringer told Stingley he was looking for peace, Stingley recalled.

Cotton, Beringer’s attorney, told ProPublica that the incident and the legal steps affected his client in profound ways. “He’s had anxiety really from this from day one,” Cotton said.

The result, he said: “Sleeplessness. Horrible anxiety. Fearful because he has to go to court.”

Does the resolution ease Beringer’s mind? “I don’t know,” Cotton said, adding that the hope is that the Stingley family finds solace in the resolution process.

Cole, in a meeting in May with Stingley and some of his family, brought a gift: a pair of angel wings on a gold chain with a small “C” charm and several clear reflective orbs. With it came a handwritten note, saying: “I hope this sun catcher brings a gentle reflection of the love & light of Corey’s memory and that you feel his presence shining on you each day.” 

“I told him I appreciate the gesture,” Stingley said.

Cole, according to Stingley, told him that he felt something other than the altercation — perhaps some health ailment — led to Corey’s demise.

Stingley invited Cole to watch the surveillance video together at a second session. As that day neared, in July, Stingley considered backing out. “It was almost as if I had to drag myself up out of the car,” he said. But he said he realized that he’d been preparing for such an event for 13 years: to come to some honest reckoning with the men involved. 

After watching the video, he and Cole reviewed the death certificate, showing the medical examiner’s conclusions. Stingley said Cole stressed that he did not choke Corey but came to realize that what happened in the store caused the teen to lose his life, not any preexisting condition. The acknowledgment eased Stingley’s burden.

“I felt like I was reaching a place where I was finally going to get the justice that I’ve been pursuing,” Stingley said, “and this is one of the steps I had to go through to get that completed.”

Triggiano commended each of the participants for their courage in meeting and the Stingley family for “seeking the humanity of their son as opposed to vengeance.” She said Beringer and Cole “keenly listened, reflected and really acknowledged their connection to the events that led to Corey’s death.” 

“The conversations were emotional and difficult but deeply human,” she said.

After the loss of his son, Stingley wanted to see the three men imprisoned. But so many years later, justice now looks different. Now Laumann is dead. Beringer is changed by the experience. And Cole is a father eager to protect his own children. 

Now, in Stingley’s eyes, prison is beside the point. Criminal charges will stand instead as a strong signal of accountability, of justice — and of a father’s unyielding love.

The post A Father’s Quest for Justice Finds Resolution After 13 Years appeared first on ProPublica.

Immigration agents have put civilians’ lives at risk using more than their guns.

An agent in Houston put a teenage citizen into a chokehold, wrapping his arm around the boy’s neck, choking him so hard that his neck had red welts hours later. A black-masked agent in Los Angeles pressed his knee into a woman’s neck while she was handcuffed; she then appeared to pass out. An agent in Massachusetts jabbed his finger and thumb into the neck and arteries of a young father who refused to be separated from his wife and 1-year-old daughter. The man’s eyes rolled back in his head and he started convulsing.

After George Floyd’s murder by a police officer six years ago in Minneapolis — less than a mile from where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good last week — police departments and federal agencies banned chokeholds and other moves that can restrict breathing or blood flow.

But those tactics are back, now at the hands of agents conducting President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

Examples are scattered across social media. ProPublica found more than 40 cases over the past year of immigration agents using these life-threatening maneuvers on immigrants, citizens and protesters. The agents are usually masked, their identities secret. The government won’t say if any of them have been punished.

In nearly 20 cases, agents appeared to use chokeholds and other neck restraints that the Department of Homeland Security prohibits “unless deadly force is authorized.”

About two dozen videos show officers kneeling on people’s necks or backs or keeping them face down on the ground while already handcuffed. Such tactics are not prohibited outright but are often discouraged, including by federal trainers, in part because using them for a prolonged time risks asphyxiation.

We reviewed footage with a panel of eight former police officers and law enforcement experts. They were appalled.

This is what bad policing looks like, they said. And it puts everyone at risk.

“I arrested dozens upon dozens of drug traffickers, human smugglers, child molesters — some of them will resist,” said Eric Balliet, who spent more than two decades working at Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol, including in the first Trump administration. “I don’t remember putting anybody in a chokehold. Period.”

“If this was one of my officers, he or she would be facing discipline,” said Gil Kerlikowske, a longtime police chief in Seattle who also served as Customs and Border Protection commissioner under President Barack Obama. “You have these guys running around in fatigues, with masks, with ‘Police’ on their uniform,” but they aren’t acting like professional police.

Over the past week, the conduct of agents has come under intense scrutiny after an ICE officer in Minneapolis killed Good, a mother of three. The next day, a Border Patrol agent in Portland, Oregon, shot a man and woman in a hospital parking lot.

Top administration officials rushed to defend the officers. Speaking about the agent who shot Good, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said, “This is an experienced officer who followed his training.”

Officials said the same thing to us after we showed them footage of officers using prohibited chokeholds. Federal agents have “followed their training to use the least amount of force necessary,” department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said.

“Officers act heroically to enforce the law and protect American communities,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.

Both DHS and the White House lauded the “utmost professionalism” of their agents.

Our compilation of incidents is far from complete. Just as the government does not count how often it detains citizens or smashes through vehicle windows during immigration arrests, it does not publicly track how many times agents have choked civilians or otherwise inhibited their breathing or blood flow. We gathered cases by searching legal filings, social media posts and local press reports in English and Spanish.

Given the lack of any count over time, it’s impossible to know for certain how agents’ current use of the banned and dangerous tactics compares with earlier periods.

But former immigration officials told us they rarely heard of such incidents during their long tenures. They also recalled little pushback when DHS formally banned chokeholds and other tactics in 2023; it was merely codifying the norm.

That norm has now been broken.

One of the citizens whom agents put in a chokehold was 16 years old.

Tenth grader Arnoldo Bazan and his father were getting McDonald’s before school when their car was pulled over by unmarked vehicles. Masked immigration agents started banging on their windows. As Arnoldo’s undocumented father, Arnulfo Bazan Carrillo, drove off, the terrified teenager began filming on his phone. The video shows the agents repeatedly ramming the Bazans’ car during a slow chase through the city.

Bazan Carrillo eventually parked and ran into a restaurant supply store. When Arnoldo saw agents taking his father violently to the ground, Arnoldo went inside too, yelling at the agents to stop.

One agent put Arnoldo in a chokehold while another pressed a knee into his father’s neck. “I was going to school!” the boy pleaded. He said later that when he told the agent he was a citizen and a minor, the agent didn’t stop.

“I started screaming with everything I had, because I couldn’t even breathe,” Arnoldo told ProPublica, showing where the agent’s hands had closed around his throat. “I felt like I was going to pass out and die.”

DHS’ McLaughlin accused Arnoldo’s dad of ramming his car “into a federal law enforcement vehicle,” but he was never charged for that, and the videos we reviewed do not support this claim. Our examination of his criminal history — separate from any immigration violations — found only that Bazan Carrillo pleaded guilty a decade ago to misdemeanor driving while intoxicated.

McLaughlin also said the younger Bazan elbowed an officer in the face as he was detained, which the teen denies. She said that Arnoldo was taken into custody to confirm his identity and make sure he didn’t have any weapons. McLaughlin did not answer whether the agent’s conduct was justified.

Experts who reviewed video of the Bazans’ arrests could make no sense of the agents’ actions.

“Why are you in the middle of a store trying to grab somebody?” said Marc Brown, a former police officer turned instructor who taught ICE and Border Patrol officers at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers. “Your arm underneath the neck, like a choking motion? No! The knee on the neck? Absolutely not.”

DHS revamped its training curriculum after George Floyd’s murder to underscore those tactics were out of bounds, Brown said. “DHS specifically was very big on no choking,” he said. “We don’t teach that. They were, like, hardcore against it. They didn’t want to see anything with the word ‘choke.’”

After agents used another banned neck restraint — a carotid hold — a man started convulsing and passed out.

In early November, ICE agents in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, stopped a young father, Carlos Sebastian Zapata Rivera, as he drove with his family. They had come for his undocumented wife, whom they targeted after she was charged with assault for allegedly stabbing a co-worker in the hand with scissors.

Body camera footage from the local police, obtained by ProPublica, captured much of what happened. The couple’s 1-year-old daughter began crying. Agents surrounded the car, looking in through open doors.

According to the footage, an agent told Zapata Rivera that if his wife wouldn’t come out, they would have to arrest him, too — and their daughter would be sent into the foster system. The agent recounted the conversation to a local cop: “Technically, I can arrest both of you,” he said. “If you no longer have a child, because the child is now in state custody, you’re both gonna be arrested. Do you want to give your child to the state?”

Zapata Rivera, who has a pending asylum claim, clung to his family. His wife kept saying she wouldn’t go anywhere without her daughter, whom she said was still breastfeeding. Zapata Rivera wouldn’t let go of either of them.

Federal agents seemed conflicted on how to proceed. “I refuse to have us videotaped throwing someone to the ground while they have a child in their hands,” one ICE agent told a police officer at the scene.

But after more than an hour, agents held down Zapata Rivera’s arms. One, who Zapata Rivera’s lawyer says wore a baseball cap reading “Ne Quis Effugiat” — Latin for “So That None Will Escape” — pressed his thumbs into the arteries on Zapata Rivera’s neck. The young man then appeared to pass out as bystanders screamed.

The technique is known as a carotid restraint. The two carotid arteries carry 70% of the brain’s blood flow; block them, and a person can quickly lose consciousness. The tactic can cause strokes, seizures, brain damage — and death.

“Even milliseconds or seconds of interrupted blood flow to the brain can have serious consequences,” Dr. Altaf Saadi, a neurologist and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, told us. Saadi said she couldn’t comment on specific cases, “but there is no amount of training or method of applying pressure on the neck that is foolproof in terms of avoiding neurologic damage.”

In a bystander video of Zapata Rivera’s arrest, his eyes roll back in his head and he suffers an apparent seizure, convulsing so violently that his daughter, seated in his lap, shakes with him.

“Carotid restraints are prohibited unless deadly force is authorized,” DHS’ use-of-force policy states. Deadly force is authorized only when an officer believes there’s an “imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury” and there is “no alternative.”

In a social media post after the incident and in its statement to ProPublica, DHS did not cite a deadly threat. Instead, it referenced the charges against Zapata Rivera’s wife and suggested he had only pretended to have a medical crisis while refusing help from paramedics. “Imagine FAKING a seizure to help a criminal escape justice,” the post said.

“These statements were lies,” Zapata Rivera alleges in an ongoing civil rights lawsuit he filed against the ICE agent who used the carotid restraint. His lawyer told ProPublica that Zapata Rivera was disoriented after regaining consciousness; the lawsuit says he was denied medical attention. (Representatives for Zapata Rivera declined our requests for an interview with him. His wife has been released on bond, and her assault case awaits trial.)

A police report and bodycam footage from Fitchburg officers at the scene, obtained via a public records request, back up Zapata Rivera’s account of being denied assistance. “He’s fine,” an agent told paramedics, according to footage. The police report says Zapata Rivera wanted medical attention but “agents continued without stopping.”

Saadi, the Harvard neurologist, said that as a general matter, determining whether someone had a seizure is “not something even neurologists can do accurately just by looking at it.”

DHS policy bars using chokeholds and carotid restraints just because someone is resisting arrest. Agents are doing it anyway.

When DHS issued restrictions on chokeholds and carotid restraints, it stated that the moves “must not be used as a means to control non-compliant subjects or persons resisting arrest.” Deadly force “shall not be used solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing subject.”

But videos reviewed by ProPublica show that agents have been using these restraints to do just that.

In Los Angeles in June, masked officers from ICE, Border Patrol and other federal agencies pepper-sprayed and then tackled another citizen, Luis Hipolito. As Hipolito struggled to get away, one of the agents put him in a chokehold. Another pointed a Taser at bystanders filming.

Then Hipolito’s body began to convulse — a possible seizure. An onlooker warned the agents, “You gonna let him die.”

When officers make a mistake in the heat of the moment, said Danny Murphy, a former deputy commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department, they need to “correct it as quickly as possible.”

That didn’t happen in Hipolito’s case. The footage shows the immigration agent not only wrapping his arm around Hipolito’s neck as he takes him down but also sticking with the chokehold after Hipolito is pinned on the ground.

The agent’s actions are “dangerous and unreasonable,” Murphy said.

Asked about the case, McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said that Hipolito was arrested for assaulting an ICE officer. Hipolito’s lawyers did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Hipolito limped into court days after the incident. Another citizen who was with him the day of the incident was also charged, but her case was dropped. Hipolito pleaded not guilty and goes to trial in February.

Some of the conduct in the footage isn’t banned — but it’s discouraged and dangerous.

A video from Los Angeles shows a Colombian-born TikTokker who often filmed ICE apparently passed out after officers pulled her from her Tesla and knelt on her neck. Another video shows a DoorDash driver in Portland, Oregon, screaming for air as four officers pin him face down in the street. “Aire, aire, aire,” he says. “No puedo respirar” — I can’t breathe. Then: “Estoy muriendo” — I’m dying. A third video, from Chicago, shows an agent straddling a citizen and repeatedly pressing his face into the asphalt. Onlookers yell that the man can’t breathe.

Placing a knee on a prone subject’s neck or weight on their back isn’t banned under DHS’ use-of-force policy, but it can be dangerous — and the longer it goes on, the higher the risk that the person won’t be able to breathe.

“You really don’t want to spend that amount of time just trying to get somebody handcuffed,” said Kerlikowske, the former CPB commissioner, of the video of the arrest in Portland.

Brown, the former federal instructor and now a lead police trainer at the University of South Carolina, echoed that. “Once you get them handcuffed, you get them up, get them out of there,” he said. “If they’re saying they can’t breathe, hurry up.”

Taking a person down to the ground and restraining them there can be an appropriate way to get them in handcuffs, said Seth Stoughton, a former police officer turned law professor who also works at the University of South Carolina. But officers have long known to make it quick. By the mid-1990s, the federal government was advising officers against keeping people prolongedly in a prone position.

When a federal agent kneeled on the neck of an intensive care nurse in August, she said she understood the danger she was in and tried to scream.

“I knew that the amount of pressure being placed on the back of my neck could definitely hurt me,” said Amanda Trebach, a citizen and activist who was arrested in Los Angeles while monitoring immigration agents. “I was having a hard time breathing because my chest was on the ground.”

McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said Trebach impeded agents’ vehicles and struck them with her signs and fists.

Trebach denies this. She was released without any charges.

Protesters have also been choked and strangled.

In the fall, a protester in Chicago refused to stand back after a federal agent told him to do so. Suddenly, the agent grabbed the man by the throat and slammed him to the ground.

“No, no!” one bystander exclaims. “He’s not doing anything!”

DHS’ McLaughlin did not respond to questions about the incident.

Along with two similar choking incidents at protests outside of ICE facilities, this is one of the few videos in which the run-up to the violence is clear. And the experts were aghast.

“Without anything I could see as even remotely a deadly force threat, he immediately goes for the throat,” said Ashley Heiberger, a retired police captain from Pennsylvania who frequently testifies in use-of-force cases. Balliet, the former immigration official, said the agent turned the scene into a “pissing contest” that was “explicitly out of control.”

“It’s so clearly excessive and ridiculous,” Murphy said. “That’s the kind of action which should get you fired.”

“How big a threat did you think he was?” Brown said, noting that the officer slung his rifle around his back before grabbing and body-slamming the protester. “You can’t go grab someone just because they say, ‘F the police.’”

Roving patrols + unplanned arrests = unsafe tactics.

In November, Border Patrol agents rushed into the construction site of a future Panda Express in Charlotte, North Carolina, to check workers’ papers. When one man tried to run, an officer put him in a chokehold and later marched him out, bloodied, to a waiting SUV.

The Charlotte operation was one of Border Patrol’s many forays into American cities, as agents led by commander-at-large Gregory Bovino claimed to target “criminal illegal aliens” but frequently chased down landscapers, construction workers and U.S. citizens in roving patrols through predominantly immigrant or Latino communities.

Freelance photographer Ryan Murphy, who had been following Border Patrol’s convoys around Charlotte, documented the Panda Express arrest.

“Their tactics are less sophisticated than you would think,” he told ProPublica. “They sort of drive along the streets, and if they see somebody who looks to them like they could potentially be undocumented, they pull over.”

Experts told ProPublica that if officers are targeting a specific individual, they can minimize risks by deciding when, where and how to take them into custody. But when they don’t know their target in advance, chaos — and abuse — can follow.

“They are encountering people they don’t know anything about,” said Scott Shuchart, a former assistant director at ICE.

“The stuff that I’ve been seeing in the videos,” Kerlikowske said, “has been just ragtag, random.”

There may be other factors, too, our experts said, including quotas and a lack of consequences amid gutted oversight. With officers wearing masks, Shuchart said, “even if they punch grandma in the face, they won’t be identified.”

As they sweep into American cities, immigration officers are unconstrained — and, the experts said, unprepared. Even well-trained officers may not be trained for the environments where they now operate. Patrolling a little-populated border region takes one set of skills. Working in urban areas, where citizens — and protesters — abound, takes another.

DHS and Bovino did not respond to questions about their agents’ preparation or about the chokehold in Charlotte.

Experts may think there’s abuse. But holding officers to account? That’s another matter.

Back in Houston, immigration officers dropped 16-year-old Arnoldo off at the doorstep of his family home a few hours after the arrest. His neck was bruised, and his new shirt was shredded. Videos taken by his older sisters show the soccer star struggling to speak through sobs.

Uncertain what exactly had happened to him, his sister Maria Bazan took him to Texas Children’s Hospital, where staff identified signs of the chokehold and moved him to the trauma unit. Hospital records show he was given morphine for pain and that doctors ordered a dozen CT scans and X-rays, including of his neck, spine and head.

From the hospital, Maria called the Houston Police Department and tried to file a report, the family said. After several unsuccessful attempts, she took Arnoldo to the department in person, where she says officers were skeptical of the account and their own ability to investigate federal agents.

Arnoldo had filmed much of the incident, but agents had taken his phone. He used Find My to locate the phone — at a vending machine for used electronics miles away, close to an ICE detention center. The footage, which ProPublica has reviewed, backed the family’s account of the chase.

The family says Houston police still haven’t interviewed them. A department spokesperson told ProPublica it was not investigating the case, referring questions to DHS. But the police have also not released bodycam footage and case files aside from a top sheet, citing an open investigation.

“We can’t do anything,” Maria said one officer told her. “What can HPD do to federal agents?”

Elsewhere in the country, some officials are trying to hold federal immigration officers to account.

In California, the state Legislature passed bills prohibiting immigration officers from wearing masks and requiring them to display identification during operations.

In Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker signed a law that allows residents to sue any officer who violates state or federal constitutional rights. (The Trump administration quickly filed legal challenges against California and Illinois, claiming their new laws are unconstitutional.)

In Colorado, Durango’s police chief saw a recent video of an immigration officer using a chokehold on a protester and reported it to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which announced it was looking into the incident.

In Minnesota, state and local leaders are collecting evidence in Renee Good’s killing even as the federal government cut the state out of its investigation.

Arnoldo is still waiting for Houston authorities to help him, still terrified that a masked agent will come first. Amid soccer practice and making up schoolwork he missed while recovering, he watches and rewatches the videos from that day. The car chase, the chokehold, his own screams at the officers to leave his dad alone. His father in the driver’s seat, calmly handing Arnoldo his wallet and phone while stopping mid-chase for red lights.

The Bazan family said agents threatened to charge Arnoldo if his dad didn’t agree to be deported. DHS spokesperson McLaughlin did not respond when asked about the alleged threat. Arnoldo’s dad is now in Mexico. 

Asked why an officer choked Arnoldo, McLaughlin pointed to the boy’s alleged assault with his elbow, adding, “The federal law enforcement officer graciously chose not to press charges.”

How We Did It

ProPublica journalists Nicole Foy, McKenzie Funk, Joanna Shan, Haley Clark and Cengiz Yar gathered videos via Spanish and English social media posts, local press reports and court records. We then sent a selection of these videos to eight police experts and former immigration officials, along with as much information as we could gather about the lead-up to and context of each incident. The experts analyzed the videos with us, explaining when and how officers used dangerous tactics that appeared to go against their training or that have been banned under the Department of Homeland Security’s use-of-force policy.

We also tried to contact every person we could identify being choked or kneeled on. In some cases, we also reached out to bystanders.

Research reporter Mariam Elba conducted criminal record searches of every person we featured in this story. She also attempted to fact-check the allegations that DHS made about the civilians and their arrests. Our findings are not comprehensive because there is no universal criminal record database.

We also sent every video cited in this story to the White House, DHS, CBP, ICE, border czar Tom Homan and Border Patrol’s Gregory Bovino. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin provided a statement responding to some of the incidents we found but she did not explain why agents used banned tactics or whether any of the agents have been disciplined for doing so.

The post We Found More Than 40 Cases of Immigration Agents Using Banned Chokeholds and Other Moves That Can Cut Off Breathing appeared first on ProPublica.

The federal government allows livestock grazing across an area of publicly owned land more than twice the size of California, making ranching the largest land use in the West. Billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies support the system, which often harms the environment.

As President Donald Trump’s administration pushes a pro-ranching agenda, ProPublica and High Country News investigated how public lands ranching has evolved. We filed more than 100 public record requests and sued the Bureau of Land Management to pry free documents and data; we interviewed everyone from ranchers to conservationists; and we toured ranching operations in Arizona, Colorado, Montana and Nevada.

The resulting three-part investigation digs into the subsidies baked into ranching, the environmental impacts from livestock and the political clout that protects this status quo. Here are the takeaways from that work.

The system has evolved into a subsidy program for ranchers.

The public lands grazing system was modernized in the 1930s in response to the rampant use of natural resources that led to the Dust Bowl — the massive dust storms triggered by poor agricultural practices, including overgrazing. Today, the system focuses on subsidizing the continued grazing of these lands.

The BLM and Forest Service, the two largest federal land management agencies, oversee most of the system. Combined, the agencies charged ranchers $21 million in grazing fees in 2024. Our analysis found that to be about a 93% discount, on average, compared with the market rate for forage on private land. We also found that, in 2024 alone, the federal government poured at least $2.5 billion into subsidy programs that public lands ranchers can access. Such subsidies include disaster assistance after droughts and floods as well as compensation for livestock lost to predators.

Ranching is consolidated in the hands of some of the wealthiest Americans.

A small number of wealthy individuals and corporations manage most livestock on public lands. Roughly two-thirds of the grazing on BLM acreage is controlled by just 10% of ranchers, our analysis found. And on Forest Service land, the top 10% of permittees control more than 50% of grazing. Among the largest ranchers are billionaires like Stan Kroenke and Rupert Murdoch, as well as mining companies and public utilities. The financial benefits of holding permits to graze herds on public lands extend beyond cattle sales. Even hobby ranches can qualify for property tax breaks in many areas; ranching business expenses can be deducted from federal taxes; and private property associated with grazing permits is a stable long-term investment. (Representatives of Kroenke did not respond to requests for comment, and Murdoch’s representative declined to comment.)

The Trump administration is supercharging the system, including by further increasing subsidies.

The administration released a “plan to fortify the American Beef Industry” in October that instructed the BLM and Forest Service to amend grazing regulations for the first time since the 1990s. The plan suggested that taxpayers further support ranching by increasing subsidies for drought and wildfire relief, livestock killed by predators and government-backed insurance. The White House referred questions to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which said in a statement, “Livestock grazing is not only a federally and statutorily recognized appropriate land use, but a proven land management tool, one that reduces invasive species and wildfire risk, enhances ecosystem health, and supports rural stewardship.” Roughly 18,000 permittees graze livestock on BLM or Forest Service land, most of them small operations. These ranchers say they need government support and cheaper grazing fees to avoid insolvency.

The administration is loosening already lax oversight.

Ranchers must renew their permits to use public lands every 10 years, including undergoing an environmental review. But Congress passed a law in 2014 that allows permits to be automatically renewed if federal agencies are unable to complete such reviews. In 2013, the BLM approved grazing on 47% of its land open to livestock without an environmental review, our analysis of agency data showed. (The status of about an additional 10% of BLM land was unclear that year.) A decade later, the BLM authorized grazing on roughly 75% of its acreage without review.

This is in large part because the BLM’s rangeland management staff is shrinking. The number of these employees dropped 39% between 2020 and 2024, according to Office of Personnel Management data, and roughly 1 in 10 rangeland staff left the agency between Trump’s election win and last June, according to BLM records.

The system allows widespread environmental harm in the West.

The BLM oversees 155 million acres of public lands open to grazing, and assessments it conducts on the health of the environment found that grazing had degraded at least 38 million acres, an area about half the size of New Mexico. The agency has no record of land health assessments for an additional 35 million acres. ProPublica and High Country News observed overgrazing in multiple states, including streambeds trampled by cattle, grasslands denuded by grazing and creeks fouled by cow corpses.

Ranchers contend that public lands grazing has ecological benefits, such as preventing nearby private lands from being sold off and paved over. Bill Fales and his family, for example, run cattle in western Colorado and have done so for more than a century. “The wildlife here is dependent on these ranches staying as open ranch land,” he said. While development destroyed habitat nearby, Fales said, the areas his cattle graze are increasingly shared by animals such as elk, bears and mountain lions.

Regulators say that it’s difficult to significantly change the system because of the industry’s political influence.

We interviewed 10 current and former BLM employees, from upper management to rank-and-file rangeland managers, and they all spoke of political pressure to go easy on ranchers. “If we do anything anti-grazing, there’s at least a decent chance of politicians being involved,” one BLM employee told us. “We want to avoid that, so we don’t do anything that would bring that about.” A BLM spokesperson said in a statement that “any policy decisions are made in accordance with federal law and are designed to balance economic opportunity with conservation responsibilities across the nation’s public lands.”

The industry has friends in high places. The Trump administration appointed to a high-level post at the U.S. Department of the Interior a lawyer who has represented ranchers in cases against the government and owns a stake in a Wyoming cattle operation. The administration also named a tech entrepreneur who owns a ranch in Idaho to a post overseeing the Forest Service.

Moreover, politicians from both parties are quick to act if they believe ranchers face onerous oversight. Since 2020, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have written to the BLM and Forest Service about grazing issues more than 20 times, according to logs of agency communications we obtained via public records requests.

Read our full investigation of the federal public lands grazing system.

The post The Biggest Takeaways From Our Investigation Into Grazing on Public Lands appeared first on ProPublica.

Linda McMahon, the nation’s secretary of education, says public schools are failing. 

In November, she promised a “hard reset” of the system in which more than 80% of U.S. children learn. But rather than invest in public education, she has been working to dismantle the Department of Education and enact wholesale changes to how public schools operate.

“Our final mission as a department is to fully empower states to carry the torch of our educational renaissance,” she said at a November press conference. 

To help her carry out these and other goals, McMahon has brought at least 20 advisers from ultraconservative think tanks and advocacy groups who share her skepticism of the value of public education and seek deep changes, including instilling Christian values into public schools.

ProPublica reporters Jennifer Smith Richards and Megan O’Matz spent months reporting and reviewing dozens of hours of video to understand the ideals and ambitions of those pulling the levers of power in federal education policy. They found a concerted push to shrink public school systems by steering taxpayer dollars to private, religious and charter schools, as well as options like homeschooling. The Education Department did not respond to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica. 

They also found top officials expressing a vision for the remaining public schools that rejects the separation of church and state and promotes a pro-America vision of history, an “uplifting portrayal of the nation’s founding ideals.” Critics argue the “patriotic” curricula downplay the legacy of slavery and paper over episodes of discrimination. 

Since its establishment in 1979, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has served as an enforcer of anti-discrimination laws in schools and colleges around the country. It’s the place parents turn to when they believe their schools failed to protect children from discrimination or to provide access to an equal education under the law. 

The Trump administration laid off much of the office’s staff in its first months and prioritized investigations into schools that allegedly discriminated against white and Jewish students and accommodated transgender students. McMahon and the department have framed this as a course correction in line with efforts to be more efficient and curb diversity, equity and inclusion policies from prior administrations. It has left little recourse for those seeking to defend the rights of students with disabilities, students of color and those facing sex discrimination. 

In this video, Smith Richards and O’Matz explain how McMahon and her advisers are reenvisioning the nation’s educational system and what that could mean for the future. 

Watch the video here.

The post Vouchers, Patriotism and Prayer: The Trump Administration’s Plan to Remake Public Education appeared first on ProPublica.

In late 2024, Nimrod Shimrony, an emergency medical technician for the New York City Fire Department, tried to end his life. After completing an intensive outpatient treatment program, he and his wife searched for a therapist for months. 

Valeria Calderón, a special education teacher with New York City’s public school system, suffered a miscarriage that same year. Before she tried to have a baby again, she sought help with the depression and anxiety she had been struggling with. She called more than a dozen therapists.

The therapists Shimrony and Calderón contacted were listed in their insurance plan’s provider directory, meaning they were supposedly in-network and the fees associated with visiting them would be lower. Given the number of names listed, there should have been lots of options. But Shimrony and Calderón couldn’t find any in-network provider who would see them.

“It blows my mind that I couldn’t find a therapist” through the directory, Shimrony said. “It was impossible.”

“I was hanging on by a thread,” said Calderón, who eventually paid more for an out-of-network provider. “There’s only so much you can vent to your family about and only so much support that they can do.”

Shimrony and Calderón are among the lead plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed last week against EmblemHealth, which offers the most popular health plan for New York City employees.

The city employees allege that extensive errors in EmblemHealth’s directory left them with a “deceptive” and “misleading” impression about the size of the insurer’s provider network. The employees were forced to delay care, forgo treatment or seek help from costlier out-of-network providers, said the lawsuit, which is seeking class-action status.

Health insurers rarely face consequences for errors in their provider directories that make it difficult for many consumers to find in-network mental health care. ProPublica’s 2024 series, “America’s Mental Barrier,” examined the harms that patients face from so-called ghost networks. The series, which is cited in the lawsuit, also detailed the many ways that insurers have prompted mental health providers to quit accepting insurance. 

Many insurers overseeing ghost networks have faced only small and sporadic fines from regulators, and patients often have limited legal recourse against them because of restrictions on the damages that typically can be recouped under federal law.

But there are health plans, such as ones local governments offer to employees or that some individuals buy through Affordable Care Act marketplaces, that aren’t covered by the federal law that restricts damages. Damages levied against those plans in lawsuits can be more substantial. That’s the basis for the current suit.

“We hope this case can use state consumer protection laws to better advocate for plan members,” said Sara Haviva Mark, an attorney representing the city employees. 

ProPublica sent EmblemHealth a list of questions about the lawsuit. Shimrony and Calderón also signed documents waiving their rights to privacy so the insurer could answer questions. “We don’t comment on pending litigation,” a spokesperson for EmblemHealth wrote in an email.

Attorneys have filed lawsuits similar to the New York one in at least two other states against insurers such as Kaiser Permanente and Molina. Last spring, the mother of an Arizona man who died after being unable to find mental health treatment sued his plan, which was overseen by Centene, saying it broke the law by publishing false information that misled its customers. (ProPublica had chronicled the man’s struggles to find mental health care.) Those lawsuits are still ongoing and the insurers in those cases have disputed the allegations.

This past fall, health insurers overseen by Centene agreed to a $40 million settlement over a similar lawsuit that had been filed by San Diego’s city attorney. A spokesperson for Centene did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

The New York lawsuit was also filed on behalf of the American Psychiatric Association, which alleged that some of its 39,000 members had been listed in EmblemHealth’s directory without their consent. It also claimed that those listings “artificially inflate[d] its provider network at psychiatrists’ expense.” The lawsuit claims that the directory contained many duplicate listings, with one psychiatrist listed 29 times.

The directory errors increased the chances that its psychiatrists’ reputations could be damaged, the lawsuit said. That’s because customers reaching out for appointments couldn’t actually get care — and could post negative reviews.

“What we do is based on trust,” said Dr. Robert Trestman, a leading ghost networks expert for the association. “So when our name appears in a listing that says you can get care, and then they call us, and we say, ‘Sorry, not taking new patients,’ it has a really negative impact.”

The insurance industry’s top trade group, AHIP, has told lawmakers that its members take steps to keep their directories accurate. AHIP claims errors could be fixed faster if providers better updated listings after they move or retire. Mental health experts have disputed that point: They say that insurers don’t always remove listings even after providers formally drop out of a network.

EmblemHealth covers more than 3 million people in New York and in neighboring states. New York city employees have been offered numerous options for health plans as part of their employment. But in recent years, roughly 3 out of every 5 city employees chose an EmblemHealth plan in which the premium was fully covered by the city. That plan was replaced by another one from EmblemHealth and UnitedHealthcare at the beginning of 2026.

The employees had expected to pay $15 or less to see an in-network mental health provider under the old plan, according to the lawsuit. All they had to do was find one in the company’s directory. 

But, according to the lawsuit, some employees using the directory were unable to find an in-network provider willing to take their insurance. Some providers in the directory had long waitlists and many had incorrect contact information, which the insurer is supposed to check. Others no longer accepted EmblemHealth, and a few never had accepted it. 

The plaintiffs’ claims follow a series of practices by EmblemHealth — and the companies that merged over the years to form it — that have come under scrutiny from state officials.

In 2010, the New York state attorney general’s office found that Group Health Inc., one of the insurers that merged into EmblemHealth, had “failed to maintain an accurate” directory. As part of a settlement, Group Health Inc. was supposed to confirm each year that the listed providers were still in the network and to correct inaccurate listings. 

In 2014, the attorney general’s office reached a separate settlement with EmblemHealth after it found that the insurer “improperly denied” coverage of treatment for mental health and substance use disorders. EmblemHealth agreed to change some of its practices to reduce barriers to getting those treatments. At the time of the settlement, an EmblemHealth spokesperson said in a statement that the insurer was working to “improve the management of behavioral services.”

And in 2023, the attorney general’s office published a report that found that EmblemHealth and another dozen insurers had failed to keep their listings of mental health providers free of extensive errors. The office’s staff had contacted a sample of doctors — nearly 400 providers listed in the 13 insurers’ directories — and the vast majority of them were “unreachable, not in-network, or not accepting new patients,” the report said. In EmblemHealth’s directory, the report found, 82% of the providers that were called were not available for an appointment. 

The report called on health plans to conduct routine checks of its directories to ensure the listings were accurate. It also recommended that the state’s insurance regulator “vigorously enforce the law” and fine insurers over violations.

When ProPublica previously reached out to New York’s insurance regulator, a spokesperson couldn’t point to a single fine related to a ghost network. Last year, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a new regulation to “eliminate so-called ‘ghost networks.’” But the state’s insurance regulator, which publishes enforcement actions on its website, hasn’t posted any notice of fines against EmblemHealth or other health insurers for inaccurate provider directories since then. 

ProPublica asked the state’s insurance regulator if there had been any fines against health insurers for inaccurate provider directories since the 2024 story. The regulator did not answer our questions.

The post They Couldn’t Access Mental Health Care When They Needed It. Now They’re Suing Their Insurer. appeared first on ProPublica.

Delta Airlines Flight 573 took off from San Juan, Puerto Rico, at 4:45 p.m. Eastern time on Jan. 16, 2025, and headed for Atlanta.

At 5:49 p.m., air traffic controllers told pilots over the Caribbean that a SpaceX Starship rocket had exploded. All planes were ordered to avoid an area where the Federal Aviation Administration estimated debris would fall.

The plane turned sharply south to get out of the debris zone.

And it wasn’t alone. ProPublica identified 20 other planes that appeared to make sudden turns to exit or avoid the danger zone in the minutes after the explosion.

While none of the planes were damaged by the debris, such emergency maneuvering can be risky.

The airspace remained closed for 86 minutes, during which time flight patterns show dozens of other planes likely had to change course — making pilots and passengers unwitting participants in SpaceX’s test of the most powerful rocket ever built.

When SpaceX CEO Elon Musk chose a remote Texas outpost on the Gulf Coast to develop his company’s ambitious Starship, he put the 400-foot rocket on a collision course with the commercial airline industry.

Each time SpaceX did a test run of Starship and its booster, dubbed Super Heavy, the megarocket’s flight path would take it soaring over busy Caribbean airspace before it reached the relative safety of the open Atlantic Ocean. The company planned as many as five such launches a year as it perfected the craft, a version of which is supposed to one day land on the moon.

The FAA, which also oversees commercial space launches, predicted the impact to the national airspace would be “minor or minimal,” akin to a weather event, the agency’s 2022 approval shows. No airport would need to close and no airplane would be denied access for “an extended period of time.” 

But the reality has been far different. Last year, three of Starship’s five launches exploded at unexpected points on their flight paths, twice raining flaming debris over congested commercial airways and disrupting flights. And while no aircraft collided with rocket parts, pilots were forced to scramble for safety. 

A ProPublica investigation, based on agency documents, interviews with pilots and passengers, air traffic control recordings and photos and videos of the events, found that by authorizing SpaceX to test its experimental rocket over busy airspace, the FAA accepted the inherent risk that the rocket might put airplane passengers in danger. 

And once the rocket failed spectacularly and that risk became real, neither the FAA nor Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy sought to revoke or suspend Starship’s license to launch, a move that is permitted when “necessary to protect the public health and safety.” Instead, the FAA allowed SpaceX to test even more prototypes over the same airspace, adding stress to the already-taxed air traffic control system each time it launched.

The first two Starship explosions last year forced the FAA to make real-time calls on where to clear airspace and for how long. Such emergency closures came with little or no warning, ProPublica found, forcing pilots to suddenly upend their flight plans and change course in heavily trafficked airspace to get out of the way of falling debris. In one case, a plane with 283 people aboard ran low on fuel, prompting its pilot to declare an emergency and cross a designated debris zone to reach an airport.

The world’s largest pilots union told the FAA in October that such events call into question whether “a suitable process” is in place to respond to unexpected rocket mishaps. 

“There is high potential for debris striking an aircraft resulting in devastating loss of the aircraft, flight crew, and passengers,” wrote Steve Jangelis, a pilot and aviation safety chair.

The FAA said in response to questions that it “limits the number of aircraft exposed to the hazards, making the likelihood of a catastrophic event extremely improbable.” 

Yet for the public and the press, gauging that danger has been difficult. In fact, nearly a year after last January’s explosion, it remains unclear just how close Starship’s wreckage came to airplanes. SpaceX estimated where debris fell after each incident and reported that information to the federal government. But the company didn’t respond to ProPublica’s requests for that data, and the federal agencies that have seen it, including the FAA, haven’t released it. The agency told us that it was unaware of any other publicly available data on Starship debris.

In public remarks, Musk downplayed the risk posed by Starship. To caption a video of flaming debris in January, he wrote, “Entertainment is guaranteed!” and, after the March explosion, he posted, “Rockets are hard.” The company has been more measured, saying it learns from mistakes, which “help us improve Starship’s reliability.” 

For airplanes traveling at high speeds, there is little margin for error. Research shows as little as 300 grams of debris — or two-thirds of a pound — “could catastrophically destroy an aircraft,” said Aaron Boley, a professor at the University of British Columbia who has studied the danger space objects pose to airplanes. Photographs of Starship pieces that washed up on beaches show items much bigger than that, including large, intact tanks.

“It doesn’t actually take that much material to cause a major problem to an aircraft,” Boley said.

In response to growing alarm over the rocket’s repeated failures, the FAA has expanded prelaunch airspace closures and offered pilots more warning of potential trouble spots. The agency said it also required SpaceX to conduct investigations into the incidents and to “implement numerous corrective actions to enhance public safety.” An FAA spokesperson referred ProPublica’s questions about what those corrective actions were to SpaceX, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Experts say the FAA’s shifting approach telegraphs a disquieting truth about air safety as private companies increasingly push to use the skies as their laboratories: Regulators are learning as they go. 

During last year’s Starship launches, the FAA was under pressure to fulfill a dual mandate: to regulate and promote the commercial space industry while keeping the flying public safe, ProPublica found. In his October letter, Jangelis called the arrangement “a direct conflict of interest.” 

In an interview, Kelvin Coleman, who was head of FAA’s commercial space office during the launches, said his office determined that the risk from the mishaps “was within the acceptable limits of our regulations.” 

But, he said, “as more launches are starting to take place, I think we have to take a real hard look at the tools that we have in place and how do we better integrate space launch into the airspace.”

“We Need to Protect the Airspace” 

On Jan. 16, 2025, as SpaceX prepared to launch Starship 7 from Boca Chica, Texas, the government had to address the possibility the giant rocket would break up unexpectedly. 

Using debris modeling and simulations, the U.S. Space Force, the branch of the military that deals with the nation’s space interests, helped the FAA draw the contours of theoretical “debris response areas” — no-fly zones that could be activated if Starship exploded.

With those plans in place, Starship Flight 7 lifted off at 5:37 p.m. EST. About seven minutes later, it achieved a notable feat: Its reusable booster rocket separated, flipped and returned to Earth, where giant mechanical arms caught it as SpaceX employees cheered.

But about 90 seconds later, as Starship’s upper stage continued to climb, SpaceX lost contact with it. The craft caught fire and exploded, far above Earth’s surface. 

Air traffic control’s communications came alive with surprised pilots who saw the accident, some of whom took photos and shot videos of the flaming streaks in the sky:

Another controller warned a different pilot of debris in the area:

Two FAA safety inspectors were in Boca Chica to watch the launch at SpaceX’s mission control, said Coleman, who, for Flight 7, was on his laptop in Washington, D.C., receiving updates.

As wreckage descended rapidly toward airplanes’ flight paths over the Caribbean, the FAA activated a no-fly zone based on the vehicle’s last known position and prelaunch calculations. Air traffic controllers warned pilots to avoid the area, which stretched hundreds of miles over a ribbon of ocean roughly from the Bahamas to just east of St. Martin, covering portions of populated islands, including all of Turks and Caicos. While the U.S. controls some airspace in the region, it relies on other countries to cooperate when it recommends a closure. 

The FAA also cordoned off a triangular zone south of Key West.

When a pilot asked when planes would be able to proceed through the area, a controller replied:

There were at least 11 planes in the closed airspace when Starship exploded, and flight tracking data shows they hurried to move out of the way, clearing the area within 15 minutes. Such maneuvers aren’t without risk. “If many aircraft need to suddenly change their routing plans,” Boley said, “then it could cause additional stress” on an already taxed air traffic control system, “which can lead to errors.”

That wasn’t the end of the disruption though. The FAA kept the debris response area, or DRA, active for another 71 minutes, leaving some flights in a holding pattern over the Caribbean. Several began running low on fuel and some informed air traffic controllers that they needed to land.

“We haven’t got enough fuel to wait,” said one pilot for Iberia airlines who was en route from Madrid with 283 people on board.

The controller warned him that if he proceeded across the closed airspace, it would be at his own risk:

The plane landed safely in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Iberia did not respond to requests for comment, but in statements to ProPublica, other airlines downplayed the launch fallout. Delta, for example, said the incident “had minimal impact to our operation and no aircraft damage.” The company’s “safety management system and our safety culture help us address potential issues to reinforce that air transportation remains the safest form of travel in the world,” a spokesperson said.

After the incident, some pilots registered concerns with the FAA, which was also considering a request from SpaceX to increase the number of annual Starship launches from five to 25. 

“Last night’s Space X rocket explosion, which caused the diversion of several flights operating over the Gulf of Mexico, was pretty eye opening and scary,” wrote Steve Kriese in comments to the FAA, saying he was a captain for a major airline and often flew over the Gulf. “I do not support the increase of rocket launches by Space X, until a thorough review can be conducted on the disaster that occurred last night, and safety measures can be put in place that keeps the flying public safe.”

Kriese could not be reached for comment.

The Air Line Pilots Association urged the FAA to suspend Starship testing until the root cause of the failure could be investigated and corrected. A letter from the group, which represents more than 80,000 pilots flying for 43 airlines, said flight crews traveling in the Caribbean didn’t know where planes might be at risk from rocket debris until after the explosion. 

“By that time, it’s much too late for crews who are flying in the vicinity of the rocket operation, to be able to make a decision for the safe outcome of the flight,” wrote Jangelis, the pilot and aviation safety chair for the group. The explosion, he said, “raises additional concerns about whether the FAA is providing adequate separation of space operations from airline flights.”

In response, the FAA said it would “review existing processes and determine whether additional measures can be taken to improve situational awareness for flight crews prior to launch.”

According to FAA documents, the explosion propelled Starship fragments across an area nearly the size of New Jersey. Debris landed on beaches and roadways in Turks and Caicos. It also damaged a car. No one was injured.

Three months later, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which was evaluating potential impacts to marine life, sent the FAA a report with a map of where debris from an explosion could fall during future Starship failures. The estimate, which incorporated SpaceX’s own data from the Starship 7 incident, depicted an area more than three times the size of the airspace closed by the FAA. 

In a statement, an FAA spokesperson said NOAA’s map was “intended to cover multiple potential operations,” while the FAA’s safety analysis is for a “single actual launch.” A NOAA spokesperson said that the map reflects “the general area where mishaps could occur” and is not directly comparable with the FAA’s no-fly zones. 

Nevertheless Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas, said the illustration suggested the no-fly zones the FAA activated may not fully capture how far and wide debris spreads after a rocket breakup. The current predictive science, he said, “carries significant uncertainty.” 

At an industry conference a few weeks after the January explosion, Shana Diez, a SpaceX executive, acknowledged the FAA’s challenges in overseeing commercial launches.

“The biggest thing that we really would like to work with them on in the future is improving their real time awareness of where the launch vehicles are and where the launch vehicles’ debris could end up,” she said. 

“We’re Too Close to the Debris”

On Feb. 26 of last year, with the investigation into Starship Flight 7 still open, the FAA cleared Flight 8 to proceed, saying it “determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental and other licensing requirements.” 

The action was allowed under a practice that began during the first Trump administration, known as “expedited return-to-flight,” that permitted commercial space companies to launch again even before the investigation into a prior problematic flight was complete, as long as safety systems were working properly.

Coleman, who took a voluntary separation offer last year, said that before granting approval, the FAA confirmed that “safety critical systems,” such as the rocket’s ability to self-destruct if it went off course, worked as designed during Flight 7. 

By March 6, SpaceX was ready to launch again. This time the FAA gave pilots a heads-up an hour and 40 minutes before liftoff. 

“In the event of a debris-generating space launch vehicle mishap, there is the potential for debris falling within an area,” the advisory said, again listing coordinates for two zones in the Gulf and Caribbean. 

The FAA said a prelaunch safety analysis, which includes planning for potential debris, “incorporates lessons learned from previous flights.” The zone described in the agency’s advisory for the Caribbean was wider and longer than the previous one, while the area over the Gulf was significantly expanded.

Flight 8 launched at 6:30 p.m. EST and its booster returned to the launchpad as planned. But a little more than eight minutes into the flight, some of Starship’s engines cut out. The craft went into a spin and about 90 seconds later SpaceX lost touch with it and it exploded.

The FAA activated the no-fly zones less than two minutes later, using the same coordinates it had released prelaunch. 

Even with the advance warning, data shows at least five planes were in the debris zones at the time of the explosion, and they all cleared the airspace in a matter of minutes. 

A pilot on one of those planes, Frontier Flight 081, told passengers they could see the rocket explosion out the right-side windows. Dane Siler and Mariah Davenport, who were heading home to the Midwest after vacationing in the Dominican Republic, lifted the window shade and saw debris blazing across the sky, with one spot brighter than the rest.

“It literally looked like the sun coming out,” Siler told ProPublica. “It was super bright.”

They and other passengers shot videos, marveling at what looked like fireworks, the couple said. The Starship fragments appeared to be higher than the plane, many miles off. But before long, the pilot announced “I’m sorry to report that we have to turn around because we’re too close to the debris,” Siler said.

Frontier did not respond to requests for comment.

The FAA lifted the restriction on planes flying through the debris zone about 30 minutes after Starship exploded, much sooner than it had in January. The agency said that the Space Force had “notified the FAA that all debris was down approximately 30 minutes after the Starship Flight 8 anomaly.”

But in response to ProPublica’s questions, the Space Force acknowledged that it did not track the debris in real time. Instead, it said “computational modeling,” along with other scientific measures, allowed the agency to “predict and mitigate risks effectively.” The FAA said “the aircraft were not at risk” during the aftermath of Flight 8.

Experts told ProPublica that the science underlying such modeling is far from settled, and the government’s ability to anticipate how debris will behave after an explosion like Starship’s is limited. “You’re not going to find anybody who’s going to be able to answer that question with any precision,” said John Crassidis, an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Buffalo. “At best, you have an educated guess. At worst, it’s just a potshot.” 

Where pieces fall — and how long they take to land — depends on many factors, including atmospheric winds and the size, shape and type of material involved, experts said. 

During the breakup of Flight 7, the FAA kept airspace closed for roughly 86 minutes. However, Diez, the SpaceX executive, told attendees at the industry conference that, in fact, it had taken “hours” for all the debris to reach the ground. The FAA, SpaceX and Diez did not respond to follow-up questions about her remarks.

It’s unclear how accurate the FAA’s debris projections were for the March explosion. The agency acknowledged that debris fell in the Bahamas, but it did not provide ProPublica the exact location, making it impossible to determine whether the wreckage landed where the FAA expected. While some of the country’s islands were within the boundaries of the designated debris zone, most were not. Calls and emails to Bahamas officials were not returned.

The FAA said no injuries or serious property damage occurred.

FAA Greenlights More Launches

By May, after months of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency slashing spending and firing workers at federal agencies across Washington, the FAA granted SpaceX’s request to exponentially increase the number of Starship launches from Texas.

Starship is key to “delivering greater access to space and enabling cost-effective delivery of cargo and people to the Moon and Mars,” the FAA found. The agency said it will make sure parties involved “are taking steps to ensure the safe, efficient, and equitable use” of national airspace.

The U.S. is in a race to beat China to the lunar surface — a priority set by Trump’s first administration and continued under President Joe Biden. Supporters say the moon can be mined for resources like water and rare earth metals, and can offer a place to test new technologies. It could also serve as a stepping stone for more distant destinations, enabling Musk to achieve his longstanding goal of bringing humans to Mars. 

Trump pledged last January that the U.S. will “pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” 

But with experimental launches like Starship’s, Jangelis said, the FAA should be “as conservative as possible” when managing the airspace below them.

“We expect the FAA to make sure our aircraft and our passengers stay safe,” he said. “There has to be a balance between the for-profit space business and the for-profit airlines and commerce.”

A More Conservative Approach

In mid-May, United Kingdom officials sent a letter to their U.S. counterparts, asking that SpaceX and the FAA change Starship’s flight path or take other precautions because they were worried about the safety of their Caribbean territories.

The following day, the FAA announced in a news release that it had approved the next Starship launch, pending either the agency’s closure of the investigation into Flight 8 or granting of a “return to flight” determination.

A week later, with the investigation into Flight 8 still open, the agency said SpaceX had “satisfactorily addressed” the causes of the mishap. The FAA did not detail what those causes were at the time but said it would verify that the company implemented all necessary “corrective actions.” 

This time the FAA was more aggressive on air safety. 

The agency preventively closed an extensive swath of airspace extending 1,600 nautical miles from the launch site, across the Gulf of Mexico and through part of the Caribbean. The FAA said that 175 flights or more could be affected, and it advised Turks and Caicos’ Providenciales International Airport to close during the launch.

The agency said the move was driven in part by an “updated flight safety analysis” and SpaceX’s decision to reuse a previously launched Super Heavy booster — something the company had never tried before. The agency also said it was “in close contact and collaboration with the United Kingdom, Turks & Caicos Islands, Bahamas, Mexico, and Cuba.”

Coleman told ProPublica that the concerns of the Caribbean countries, along with Starship’s prior failures, helped convince the FAA to close more airspace ahead of Flight 9.

On May 27, the craft lifted off at 7:36 p.m. EDT, an hour later than in March and two hours later than in January. The FAA said it required the launch window to be scheduled during “non-peak transit periods.”

This mission, too, ended in failure.

Starship’s Super Heavy booster blew up over the Gulf of Mexico, where it was supposed to have made what’s called a “hard splashdown.” 

In response, the FAA again activated an emergency no-fly zone. Most aircraft had already been rerouted around the closed airspace, but the agency said it diverted one plane and put another in a holding pattern for 24 minutes. The FAA did not provide additional details on the flights.

According to the agency, no debris fell outside the hazard area where the FAA had closed airspace. Pieces from the booster eventually washed up on Mexico’s beaches.

Starship’s upper stage reached the highest planned point in its flight path, but it went into a spin on the way down, blowing up over the Indian Ocean.

The Path Ahead

SpaceX launched Starship again in August and October. Unlike the prior flights, both went off without incident, and the company said it was turning its focus to the next generation of Starship to provide “service to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and beyond.”

But about a week later, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said he would open up SpaceX’s multibillion-dollar contract for a crewed lunar lander to rival companies. SpaceX is “an amazing company,” he said on CNBC. “The problem is, they’re behind.”

Musk pushed back, saying on X that “SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry.” He insulted Duffy, calling him “Sean Dummy” and saying “The person responsible for America’s space program can’t have a 2 digit IQ.”

The Department of Transportation did not respond to a request for comment or make Duffy available.

In a web post on Oct. 30, SpaceX said it was proposing “a simplified mission architecture and concept of operations” that would “result in a faster return to the Moon while simultaneously improving crew safety.”

SpaceX is now seeking FAA approval to add new trajectories as Starship strives to reach orbit. Under the plan, the rocket would fly over land in Florida and Mexico, as well as the airspace of Cuba, Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, likely disrupting hundreds of flights. 

In its letter, the pilots’ union told the FAA that testing Starship “over a densely populated area should not be allowed (given the dubious failure record)” until the craft becomes more reliable. The planned air closures could prove “crippling” for the Central Florida aviation network, it added.

Still, SpaceX is undeterred. 

Diez, the company executive, said on X in October, “We are putting in the work to make 2026 an epic year for Starship.”

---

The post “We’re Too Close to the Debris” appeared first on ProPublica.

Paul Windle for “Inside the AI Prompts DOGE Used to ‘Munch’ Contracts Related to Veterans’ Health.” Art direction by Lisa Larson-Walker.

Photography by Sarahbeth Maney for “Nike Says Its Factory Workers Earn Nearly Double the Minimum Wage. At This Cambodian Factory, 1% Made That Much.” Photo editing by Peter DiCampo.

Photography by Sarahbeth Maney for “We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days.” Photo editing by Cengiz Yar.

Design and development by Anna Donlan for “Sick in a Hospital Town.” Visual editing by Alex Bandoni. Videos by Katie Campbell and Almudena Toral. Additional video editing by Gerardo del Valle. Graphics by Lucas Waldron.

Illustration for “How a Global Online Network of White Supremacists Groomed a Teen to Kill.” Art direction by Lisa Larson-Walker.

Photography by Annie Flanagan for “This Storm-Battered Town Voted for Trump. He Has Vowed to Overturn the Law That Could Fix Its Homes.” Photo editing by Andrea Wise.

Illustration by Jacqueline Tam for “Portland Said It Was Investing in Homeless People’s Safety. Deaths Have Quadrupled.” Art direction by Peter DiCampo.

Illustration by Sophi Miyoko Gullbrants for “Look Up Where Your Generic Prescription Drugs Were Made.” Art direction by Lisa Larson-Walker. Development by Brandon Roberts, Ruth Talbot and Nick McMillan. Additional design and development by Jeff Frankl. Additional development by Pratheek Rebala, Andrea Suozzo, Al Shaw and Alec Glassford.

Photography by Maddie McGarvey for “What the U.S. Government Is Dismissing That Could Seed a Bird Flu Pandemic.” Graphics by Chris Alcantara.

Video illustration for “Trump’s War on Measurement Means Losing Data on Drug Use, Maternal Mortality, Climate Change and More.” Art direction by Alex Bandoni and Lisa Larson-Walker.

Illustration and art direction by Shoshana Gordon for “ICE Sent 600 Immigrant Kids to Detention in Federal Shelters This Year. It’s a New Record.”

Direction, production and editing by Gerardo del Valle for “‘An American Nightmare’: Three Men Deported to CECOT and Their Families Reflect on Their Monthslong Ordeal.” Cinematography by Alejandro Bonilla Suárez and Edwin Corona Ramos.

Photography by Adriana Loureiro Fernández for “What I Witnessed as I Photographed the Disappearances and the Homecomings of My Countrymen.” Photo editing by Cengiz Yar.

Direction, production, filming and editing by Mauricio Rodríguez Pons for “Status: Venezuelan.”

Photography by Roberto “Bear” Guerra for “Wealthy Ranchers Profit from Public Lands. And Taxpayers Pick up the Tab.” Visual editing by Cengiz Yar. Design by Allen Tan. Illustrations by Shoshana Gordon. Graphics by Lucas Waldron.

Ceramics, video and art direction by Lisa Larson-Walker for “The Price of Remission.” Videography by Gerardo del Valle and Katie Campbell.

Paintings by James Lee Chiahan for “The Price of Remission.” Art direction by Lisa Larson-Walker.

Illustrations by Dadu Shin for “The H-2A Visa Trap.” Design and development by Zisiga Mukulu. Visual editing and art direction by Shoshana Gordon.

Video illustration by Sean Dong for “Slow Pay, Low Pay or No Pay.” Art direction by Alex Bandoni.

Illustration by Rui Pu for “Beyond Showerheads: Trump’s Attempts to Kill Appliance Regulations Cause Chaos.” Art direction by Alex Bandoni.

Graphics by Lucas Waldron for “The Drying Planet.” Visual editing by Alex Bandoni. Additional design and development by Anna Donlan. Illustrations by Olivier Kugler for ProPublica.

Illustration by Chris W. Kim for “Louisiana Made It Nearly Impossible to Get Parole. Now It’s Releasing Prisoners to Deport Them.” Art direction by Peter DiCampo.

Direction and production by Nadia Sussman for “Before a Breath.” Produced and filmed by Liz Moughon and edited by Margaret Cheatham Williams.

Illustration by Nicole Rifkin for “Anchorage Police Say They Witnessed a Sexual Assault in Public. It Took Seven Years for the Case to Go to Trial.” Art direction by Peter DiCampo.

Direction, production, filming and editing by Nadia Sussman for “This Family Will Return Home After Helene. Their Onerous Journey to Rebuild Shows Why Many Others Won’t.” Cinematography by Dillon Deaton.

Photography by Greg Kahn for “Citing Trump Order on ‘Biological Truth,’ VA Makes It Harder for Male Veterans With Breast Cancer to Get Coverage.” Photo editing by Andrea Wise.

Illustrations and art direction by Shoshana Gordon for “How Paul Newby Made North Carolina a Blueprint for Conservative Courts.”

Animation and editing by Mauricio Rodríguez Pons for “Who Is Russell Vought? How a Little-Known D.C. Insider Became Trump’s Dismantler-in-Chief.” Video produced by Lisa Riordan Seville, Katie Campbell and Andy Kroll. Cinematography and additional editing by Katie Campbell.

Illustration by Ricardo Tomás for “The IRS Is Building a Vast System to Share Millions of Taxpayers’ Data With ICE.” Art direction by Alex Bandoni.

Illustrations by Justin Metz for “Trump Canceled 94 Million Pounds of Food Aid. Here’s What Never Arrived.” Design and development by Ruth Talbot. Anna Donlan contributed design. Art direction by Andrea Wise. Photography by Stephanie Mei-Ling for ProPublica.

Photography by Juan Diego Reyes for “Helene’s Unheard Warnings.” Graphics and development by Lucas Waldron. Design by Anna Donlan. Visual editing by Shoshana Gordon and Anna Donlan.

Photography for “DOGE Targeted Him on Social Media. Then the Taliban Took His Family.” Design and development by Allen Tan. Visual editing by Alex Bandoni and Cengiz Yar.

Graphics by Chris Alcantara for “Trump Officials Celebrated With Cake After Slashing Aid. Then People Died of Cholera.”

Photography by Peter DiCampo, left, for “Trump Officials Celebrated With Cake After Slashing Aid. Then People Died of Cholera.” and Brian Otieno, right, for “The Summer of Starvation: Amid Trump’s Foreign Aid Cuts, a Mother Struggles to Keep Her Sons Alive.” Photo editing by Peter DiCampo.

---

Visual Storytelling Department
Boyzell Hosey, senior editor, visual storytelling

Visuals
Lisa Larson-Walker, art director
Andrea Wise, visual strategy editor
Alex Bandoni, visuals editor
Peter DiCampo, visuals editor
Cengiz Yar, visuals editor
Shoshana Gordon, visuals editor
Sarahbeth Maney, visual fellow

Graphics
Lena V. Groeger, graphics director
Anna Donlan, interactive story designer
Zisiga Mukulu, interactive story designer
Lucas Waldron, graphics editor
Chris Alcantara, graphics editor

Video
Almudena Toral, executive producer
Lisa Riordan Seville, senior producer
Katie Campbell, video journalist and filmmaker
Mauricio Rodríguez Pons, video journalist and filmmaker
Nadia Sussman, video journalist and filmmaker
Margaret Cheatham Williams, video and film editor
Gerardo del Valle, video journalist and filmmaker 
Liz Moughon, video and film fellow

Product
Ben Werdmuller, senior director of technology
Allen Tan, director of design
Alanna McLafferty, senior product engineer
Artemis Sparks, principal engineer, devops
Dan Phiffer, senior engineer
Jeff Frankl, editorial experience designer
Jesse Browning, data integrations engineer
Katie Antonsson, audience data and insights analyst
Melody Kramer, product manager
Sarah Glen, product manager
Aaron Brezel, AI engineering fellow
Dana Chiueh, AI engineering fellow

News Apps
Ken Schwencke, senior editor, data and news apps
Kevin Uhrmacher, deputy news apps editor
Al Shaw, senior news apps developer
Alec Glassford, senior engineer, news apps and product
Sergio Hernandez, news apps developer
Nat Lash, news apps developer
Andrea Suozzo, news apps developer
Ruth Talbot, news apps developer
Brandon Roberts, news apps developer

The post Our Year in Visual Journalism appeared first on ProPublica.

Despite a slew of reforms enacted last year to rein in the practices of towing companies, more needs to be done to protect consumers whose cars face removal and possible sale, the commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles said Tuesday.

DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera laid out five recommendations he plans to make for the legislature to consider during its session that begins in February. The recommendations follow a Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica investigation that exposed how state law for decades favored towing companies at the expense of low-income consumers. They also follow months of meetings with a group of industry and consumer representatives.

The recommendations would require towing companies to make more effort to notify owners that their cars have been towed and streamline the process by which the firms can sell unclaimed vehicles.

The commissioner announced his proposal at the last scheduled meeting of a working group of towing and consumer representatives. The group was created as part of a towing reform law passed last year after the news organizations showed how towing companies were seeking the DMV’s permission to sell some cars after as little as 15 days, one of the shortest time frames in the country. Many low-income residents were towed for minor violations, sometimes from their own apartment complexes, only to lose their cars when they couldn’t afford to get them back before they were sold.

If the legislature adopts the recommendations, towing companies would no longer place values on vehicles that they tow, which now determines whether a tower can start the sales process in 15 days or 45 days. Instead, all cars would be sold at a public auction after 30 days, Guerrera said.

Other recommendations include requiring towing companies to send two letters to the registered owner of the vehicle after it’s towed, one certified and one not. If the car isn’t claimed, towers would have to send a third letter to the owner after 30 days to inform them when and where the auction will be held. The towing companies would be required to either advertise the auction on their websites or publish legal advertisements in local newspapers.

The DMV would also be required to set up a portal on its website listing every towed car so that people can find out which tower has their vehicle, when it was towed and when the auction will be.

If a vehicle receives no bids and the car owner shows up, the towing company would be required to offer the car back to them at whatever their costs are before selling it for scrap.

There was little pushback from industry leaders or consumer advocates on Tuesday even though towing representatives had previously complained that the changes would add costs and consumer lawyers had objected that the recommendations didn’t go far enough to protect drivers.

The proposal also didn’t address the initial task the legislature assigned to the group: how to handle the profits from the sales of towed cars. Currently, towing companies are supposed to hold onto proceeds for a year so owners or lenders can claim them. After that, any unclaimed funds, minus towing fees, are required to be turned over to the state. But CT Mirror and ProPublica found that hasn’t happened in part because the DMV never set up a system to collect the money.

Guerrera said after the meeting that the DMV has set up a process to monitor whether towing companies are turning funds over to the state. He said they won’t know if the system is working until October because the money from sales of towed cars must be held for a year.

After Guerrera finished outlining his proposal, Eileen Colonese, secretary of the industry group Towing & Recovery Professionals of Connecticut, said Guerrera’s plan doesn’t address a key issue: The last registered owner of the vehicle is not necessarily the owner when it’s towed.

“I still believe that until the state of Connecticut comes up with a process to figure out who really owns the vehicles, all of this stuff that we’re doing is pretty much nonsensical because we’re still not notifying the current owner of the vehicle,” Colonese said.

Consumer advocate and attorney Raphael Podolsky said Guerrera’s recommendations are a “step in the right direction, but there’s still a lot of issues that need to be addressed until the system is fixed.”

Guerrera said his plan was “inspired” by the discussions during the previous four committee meetings. He said he hopes the portal on the state’s website will also help DMV personnel better track what towing companies are doing with vehicles.

Under the revised law, which went into effect on Oct. 1, towing companies must now give people warning before removing vehicles from apartment parking lots unless there’s a safety issue. They also must accept credit cards, let people retrieve their belongings and be available on weekends for people to pick up their cars. And although the sales process can begin after 15 days for vehicles worth less than $1,500, towers must wait 30 days before selling them.

Guerrera said he expects that the working group will keep meeting.

“I want to have continuous meetings, whether it’s quarterly or twice a quarter, to try and narrow down any issues that come up or that need to be fixed so that we can create a system that works for everybody,” Guerrera said.

The post “Step in the Right Direction”: Connecticut DMV Commissioner Calls for More Reforms to State Towing Law to Protect Drivers appeared first on ProPublica.

Ethylene oxide was once considered an unremarkable pollutant. The colorless gas seeped from relatively few industrial facilities and commanded little public attention. 

All that changed in 2016, when the Environmental Protection Agency completed a study that found the chemical is 30 times more carcinogenic than previously thought.

The agency then spent years updating regulations that protect millions of people who are most exposed to the compound. In 2024, the EPA approved stricter rules that require commercial sterilizers for medical equipment and large chemical plants to slash emissions of ethylene oxide, which causes lymphoma and breast cancer.

It was doing what the EPA has done countless times: revising rules based on new scientific knowledge.

Now, its ability to do that for many air pollutants is under threat. 

In government records that have flown under the radar, President Donald Trump’s EPA said it is reconsidering whether the agency had the legal authority to update those rules. 

Chemical companies and their trade organizations have argued that the EPA cannot reevaluate hazardous air pollution rules to account for newly discovered harms if it has revised them once already.

It doesn’t matter if decades have passed or new information has emerged. 

If the EPA agrees, environmentalists fear that the decision could have wide implications, significantly curbing the EPA’s ability to limit nearly 200 pollutants from thousands of industrial plants. The next time new science reveals that a chemical is much more toxic, or that the amount of pollution released from a factory had been underestimated and would cause legally unacceptable health risks, the agency would not be able to react.

“It’s a poor reflection on this administration’s claim that they are actually interested in clean air,” said Ana Baptista, a professor of environmental policy and sustainability management at The New School. “By saying we’re no longer going to consider science, it’s abdicating your mission.”

The EPA didn’t address ProPublica’s questions about the ethylene oxide reevaluation or its broader implications. Instead, the agency pointed to a March press release about how it was reconsidering multiple air pollution rules issued by President Joe Biden’s administration, including the ones for chemical plants and commercial sterilizers. “EPA is committed to using the gold standard of science during these reviews,” a spokesperson said in an email. “Since day one, EPA has been clear that providing clean air, water, and land for all Americans is a top priority.” 

The EPA’s reconsideration focuses on the Clean Air Act, the country’s most powerful air quality law, which regulates hazardous air pollutants for different types of industrial operations. There’s a specific rule for oil refineries, for instance, and another for steel mills. Within eight years after each rule is published, the EPA is required to conduct an assessment, called a residual risk review, to decide if an update is necessary. 

These assessments use detailed data on the quantity of emissions coming from each facility, the toxicity of each chemical and other information on how the chemicals are released and dispersed in the air. The combined data reveals how the emissions put local residents at risk of cancer, respiratory diseases, reproductive harm and other health problems. 

If the EPA determines the overall risks exceed what’s allowed under the law, the agency must tighten the rules.

The Clean Air Act doesn’t say whether the EPA is required to conduct additional residual risk reviews after the first one. Nor does it specifically prohibit the agency from doing so.

As far back as 2006, the EPA under President George W. Bush asserted that the agency had the right to revisit and revise the rules based on risk. 

The issue became newly relevant in 2021, when the EPA’s Office of Inspector General cited the new conclusions about the toxicity of ethylene oxide. The office estimated that nearly half a million Americans were exposed to unacceptable cancer risks from industrial emissions by chemical plants, commercial sterilizers and other facilities pumping out ethylene oxide.

In its report, the inspector general’s office advised the agency to “exercise its discretionary authority to conduct new residual risk reviews” as needed when “new data or information indicates an air pollutant is more toxic than previously determined.” (The inspector general was a Trump appointee.)

The EPA had already conducted the first, mandatory risk reviews for large chemical plants and commercial sterilizers in the early 2000s. In response to the inspector general report, the agency launched additional reviews using the updated science on ethylene oxide. Ultimately, the EPA determined the health risks were unacceptable and revised the rules to lower them. The agency asserted that the Clean Air Act “does not limit our discretion or authority to conduct another risk review should we consider that such review is warranted.” 

According to the EPA’s estimates, the new regulations for chemical plants under the 2024 revised rule would cut the number of nearby residents who are exposed to unacceptable cancer risks from 90,000 to 3,000. 

But the chemical industry opposed the stricter rules. Industry representatives disagreed with the EPA’s new assessment of ethylene oxide, contending that it overestimated the risk the chemical posed, and argued the agency didn’t have the authority to conduct those risk reviews. In a 2023 letter, the American Chemistry Council said “the Agency has erred in conducting a new risk review,” as “the plain text” of the Clean Air Act “indicates that EPA actually lacks this authority.”

Similarly, the Louisiana Chemical Association submitted public comments on the chemical plant rule stating the “EPA has no statutory authority to conduct a second risk review” and that doing so was “arbitrary and capricious.”

David Cresson, president and CEO of the association, told ProPublica that the trade group supports “protecting the public’s health through regulatory frameworks that are lawful, while remaining based in sound science.” 

Brendan Bradley, a spokesperson for the American Chemistry Council, said the organization had no further comment on the issue.

After Trump was inaugurated, one of his appointees to the EPA let the industry know the agency was conducting a “reconsideration” of the two rules focused on ethylene oxide emissions. Last spring, Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator Abigale Tardif, a former oil and gas lobbyist, hinted at how the EPA might challenge those rules.

In letters addressed to trade groups representing commercial sterilizers and chemical plants, Tardif said the agency was reconsidering multiple issues related to the rules, including the “EPA’s authority and decision to undertake a second residual risk review” under the Clean Air Act, as well as “the analysis and determinations made in that review, and the resulting risk standards.”

Tardif didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

The agency also filed a regulatory notice about its plans to revise the 2024 chemical plant rule. Citing the part of the Clean Air Act that deals with the updated rule assessments, the notice said the EPA had “identified items for reconsideration around its CAA section 112(f)(2) residual risk review authority.” 

While the stricter ethylene oxide rules are technically still in effect, the Trump administration has exempted dozens of large chemical plants and sterilizer facilities from following them as the agency works through a formal process that is widely expected to result in watered-down standards.

If the Trump EPA does decide it lacks the legal authority to conduct multiple risk reviews, the agency might still have the authority to strengthen hazardous air pollution rules by using a separate part of the Clean Air Act, said Abel Russ, a senior attorney at the Environmental Integrity Project, an advocacy group. That section of the act allows the EPA to update a rule if agency scientists conclude that better pollution-control technology is affordable and available. But limiting the agency’s ability to conduct residual risk reviews would be a serious blow to the act, Russ said, “kneecapping” the agency’s authority over these toxic pollutants. 

Environmental groups will almost certainly sue if the EPA concludes it does not have the legal authority to revise hazardous air pollution rules more than once based on risk. Russ called industry’s comments absurd and said they don’t account for the reality that our knowledge of industrial pollution is changing all the time. 

As ProPublica reported in October, the agency recently received clear evidence that many industrial facilities are leaking far more pollution than the companies that own them previously reported. In 2023, researchers who conducted their own air monitoring in the industrial corridor of Louisiana known as Cancer Alley found much higher concentrations of ethylene oxide than expected. For more than half the areas they sampled, the local cancer risk from ethylene oxide would be unacceptable if residents were exposed to these concentrations over a lifetime.

If the EPA decides it lacks the legal authority to conduct multiple risk reviews, it would find itself in the position of not being able to take action even if the agency confirmed similar results.

“The whole premise of risk assessment is that it’s based on the best available science,” said Kimberly Terrell, a research scientist at the Environmental Integrity Project. As our knowledge grows, researchers tend to find that chemicals are linked to additional health effects, she added, so blocking these updates “pretty much ensures” the EPA is underestimating the risks.

The post Trump’s EPA Could Limit Its Own Ability to Use New Science to Strengthen Air Pollution Rules appeared first on ProPublica.

Kaitlin spent the first weeks of her newborn son’s life in a panic. The hospital where she gave birth in October 2022 had administered a routine drug test, and a nurse informed her the lab had confirmed the presence of opiates. Child welfare authorities opened an investigation.

Months later, after searching her home and interviewing her older child and ex-husband, the agency dropped its investigation, having found no evidence of abuse or neglect, or of drug use.

The amount of opiates that upended Kaitlin’s life — 18.4 nanograms of codeine per milliliter of urine, according to court documents — was so minuscule that if she were an Air Force pilot, she could have had 200 times more in her system and still have been cleared to fly.

But for Kaitlin, the test triggered an investigation with potentially life-altering consequences. (ProPublica is using Kaitlin’s first name because her full name has been redacted from court documents. She declined to be interviewed for this story.) 

The ordeal “tempered what was otherwise supposed to be a joyous occasion” for the family, according to a lawsuit filed in 2024 by New Jersey’s attorney general against the hospital system, Virtua Health.

The hospital said in a statement that it has “a relentless commitment to evidence-based, equitable care for every family.” In court documents, it denied the lawsuit’s allegation that it discriminated against pregnant patients and noted that Kaitlin consented to the test. It also said that New Jersey law mandates it to submit reports of “substance-affected infants” to the state’s Division of Child Protection and Permanency. The lawsuit is pending and a judge has referred it to mediation.

Drug-testing labs typically report results in black and white: positive or negative. But a little-known fact about the industry is that those results are often based on standards that are wholly discretionary. For example, nearly all states use a threshold of 0.08% blood alcohol content to decide if a motorist is intoxicated. But for other drugs detected in urine, saliva and hair, cutoff levels vary from test to test and lab to lab — including Kaitlin’s test for opiates.

There’s no consensus among labs on what level should confirm the presence of codeine in urine, said Larry Broussard, a toxicologist who wrote an academic journal article on “growing evidence” that poppy seeds in bagels and muffins provoke positive test results. (Kaitlin ate a bagel shortly before taking her drug test, according to court documents.) There’s more consensus for some other drugs, but labs still disagree on appropriate cutoff levels for common drugs such as THC (the compound in marijuana that creates a high) and meth, said Broussard.

In 2022, the same year Kaitlin tested positive for codeine, the Department of Defense noticed a surge in personnel on military bases blaming positive tests on poppy seeds. Scientists at the military’s labs concluded that a change in the manufacturing process of some poppy seeds had led to contamination, causing service members to be falsely accused of abusing drugs.

So far, 62 positive tests for codeine have been “overturned and adjusted in Army records,” an Army spokesperson told ProPublica. In response, the Department of Defense in March 2024 doubled the military’s cutoff level for codeine tests to avoid false positives triggered by poppy seed muffins, bagels and other foods. Service members are now cleared for duty with up to 400 times more codeine in their urine than is used to justify child welfare investigations in some states, ProPublica found.

ProPublica reviewed cutoff levels used to confirm the presence of common drugs, including opiates, meth, THC and cocaine, as cited in court records, labs’ contracts with government agencies and scientific journals, as well as in interviews with toxicologists. We found that the cutoff levels used by the child welfare systems vary widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. One large state agency, Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services, contractually required a lab to use levels that it later acknowledged were “scientifically unsupportable.” 

Ted Simon, an expert toxicology witness and a board member of the nonprofit Center for Truth in Science, which advocates for objectivity in research, said agencies are better off consulting with labs to set cutoff levels. That’s because “some labs do validation testing to ensure the accuracy of their cutoffs based on knowledge of human biology.” But even when labs set levels, they don’t always get them right. Some labs “just use the sensitivity of the chemical analysis to measure vanishingly tiny concentrations with no way to assess the relevance to humans,” Simon said. This can result in situations like Kaitlin’s, where the hospital’s cutoff was near the lower limit of what sophisticated lab instruments can detect, he said after reviewing her case.

Meanwhile, “labs tell their clients what they want to hear and are hesitant to disclose the uncertainty inherent in their methods,” Simon said.

There’s no industry consensus on what, or if anything, should be done about the differing standards. Some experts see a need for uniform levels but acknowledge it would require lengthy vetting before toxicologists and other stakeholders agree on what’s appropriate. Others maintain that as long as labs are transparent and support their decisions with research, they should continue choosing their own levels. “The labs do what works for the instruments that they have,” said Simon.

---

Child welfare agencies employ a patchwork of drug testing standards, according to contracts and procurement documents.

Some, like Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services, require labs to use high cutoff levels that protect against false positives. Other agencies’ contracts with their drug testing services do not specify cutoff levels, leaving the decision to the lab.

A few large agencies require labs to use ultra-low levels, which catch more users but come with risks. Incidental exposure to a substance in the environment and over-the-counter medications can trigger positives. “The smaller the concentration that you try to detect, the more likely you are to get false positive results,” said toxicologist Paul Cary, who wrote a guide to testing for drug courts, which aim to address the addictions of people accused of drug-related crimes and avoid incarceration.

The federal government sets standards for drug testing 14 million people. These include public-sector employees as well as workers whose performance affects the safety of others, known as safety-sensitive roles, like airline pilots, truck drivers and those working in nuclear facilities. For decades, the program was known for a rigorous scientific review and inspection process to ensure accuracy. 

In 2025, President Donald Trump’s second administration overhauled the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the federal agency responsible for the testing standards program, and dismissed half of its staff. It also disbanded the expert panel that proposed scientifically valid cutoff levels, the Drug Testing Advisory Board. “There could be issues for national security or safety sensitive issues that might be impacted given the recent changes,” said Hyden Shen, former regulatory and policy oversight lead at the health agency’s division of workplace programs. In the spring, Shen resigned alongside almost half of his division. He spoke to ProPublica after leaving federal employment.

Private labs have long been free to set their own standards, independent of the federal government’s recommended levels. The CEO of a laboratory company specializing in testing for probation departments, child welfare agencies and courts testified in a lawsuit that in 2018 the lab had lowered cutoff levels for cocaine in hair follicle tests by a factor of five without amending its contract with the state child welfare agency. The company said that the change was to align its levels with scientific updates and that state agencies were made aware of the new cutoffs when it reported test results. The lawsuit was settled with the lab denying wrongdoing.

Federal workers who test positive for drugs can’t be punished until their results are scrutinized by medical review officers, physicians who verify that positive drug test results aren’t being triggered by legitimate medications. (For example, without a special follow-up called an isomer test, over-the-counter Vicks VapoInhaler is indistinguishable from street drugs in multiple types of drug tests.) But medical review of test results is expensive, and few state agencies require it for child welfare cases or for testing people on probation. One lab competing for a contract to test probationers and juveniles in a residential facility in Kansas discouraged the use of medical review officers, saying it would “result in extra expense and extra time for results delivery.” Other state agencies, especially those that oversee parole, probation or prisons, skip confirmation testing entirely and rely instead on cheaper, less accurate immunoassay tests, unless someone contests their result and can afford to pay out of pocket for a follow-up, according to contracts between state courts and labs. 

Agencies “are effectively saying, ‘Most of these people probably did use drugs. And, yeah, OK, there’s a handful that didn’t. But it would bankrupt us to have to confirm all of these,’” said Karen Murtagh, executive director of Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York, which has represented inmates in drug testing cases.

---

In the spring of 2019, Marie Herrera was working to reunite with her four kids in Michigan’s foster care system. (ProPublica is referring to Herrera by her middle name at her request, to maintain her privacy as she moves forward with her life.) At a hearing on her case, a foster care worker testified that it was going well, according to a filing from her attorney: “Mother had attended all eleven parenting times, had procured employment, was in therapy, lived in three-quarters housing, and tested negative for illegal drugs during the current reporting period.”

Then that July, Herrera’s saliva tested positive for cocaine. Herrera admitted to being in recovery from an addiction but denied using the drug. Over the next eight months, two more of her drug tests were confirmed positive for cocaine by the state’s lab. She sought testing from an outside lab, which didn’t detect illegal drug use.

According to her test results from the state’s lab, which Herrera shared with ProPublica, the levels of cocaine and its metabolite in her system ranged from 1.065 to 1.774 ng/ml, just above the state’s cutoff of 1 ng/ml in saliva. If the positive-test threshold for federal workers had been applied to Herrera’s tests, she could have had more than four times as much of the drug in her saliva and still been cleared to fly a plane.

But Herrera’s positive test from December 2019 caused the judge to take away her unsupervised parenting time, according to court records.

“The positive drug tests turned my world upside down and ruined my life,” said Herrera. What she didn’t know is that behind the scenes, Michigan’s child welfare agency was reviewing — and preparing to raise — its cutoff levels.

Michigan’s levels for cocaine and other drugs in saliva had been set by its drug testing vendor, Forensic Fluids, in 2018, according to public records. (Forensic Fluids did not respond to a request for comment.) Michigan contractually required the same levels when it signed with a new lab, Averhealth, in 2019. 

But the child welfare agency noticed conflicting results between its tests and those ordered by law enforcement agencies, according to public records. Some individuals who tested positive for a drug with one agency tested negative with another.

In November 2020, at the urging of its new lab, the agency raised its levels. Communications between the agency and Averhealth show both were concerned that low cutoffs might not be “forensically defensible” due to “uncertainty around environmental exposure.”

“Current levels … are scientifically unsupportable,” Michigan’s child welfare agency wrote in a memo about the change.

In a statement, Averhealth, the lab that processed Herrera’s tests, said the mismatch in results  that concerned Michigan administrators “in no way calls into question the accuracy or reliability” of its testing. “Inconsistencies occurred when different types of tests were conducted (saliva or hair) or when the individual was tested days later,” the company said, noting that “different types of testing have different limitations.” The company said its test results “simply attest to whether a drug is present in a specimen and, if so, in what quantity. It is left to the courts to decide what, if any consequences, follow.”

In Herrera’s case, the lab said, low-level cocaine positives “likely represent ingestion of cocaine” and that “passive exposure as an explanation is highly doubtful.” The company also pointed out that Herrera had several high-level positive tests for methamphetamine in the fall of 2020, nine months after the court took away her unsupervised parenting time. 

Herrera admits she’s relapsed at times. But she also says that being labeled a cocaine user early on in her case, when she says she wasn’t using, derailed her recovery. Herrera believes it set her up to fail by creating an adversarial relationship with her caseworker and judge. “I wasn’t grateful about what they were doing to me,” she says.

Herrera’s parental rights were terminated in 2021, less than a year after Michigan raised its cutoff levels for cocaine in saliva. In denying Herrera’s appeal, a judge cited her refusal to participate in further drug tests, additional failed tests when she did comply, and her lack of housing and income, among other things.

When Herrera was told she could never again see her kids, she said, she was devastated and relapsed again. “Fuck it, if they say I’m an addict, then I’ll numb the pain.”

“I think about my kids every single day,” she said. “It’s affected me completely.”

Even after raising its cutoffs, Michigan’s levels were still far lower than those used for federal workers. The state declined to comment, but a memo stated that officials considered the federal levels inappropriate because they “do not assess the impacts of how those substances may affect a person’s behavior” or “how that use may impact child safety.”

Drug testing policy experts say it’s not possible for any test, no matter the cutoff level, to reliably predict child safety.

“A drug test doesn’t tell you if a person has a substance use disorder, if they are in recovery, or whether a child is safe,” said Nancy K. Young, executive director of Children and Family Futures, which consults for child welfare agencies, and co-author of a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration policy paper on drug testing for child welfare agencies. Young said administrators should consider test results as “just one data point” and rely more on “casework and a relationship with the family” to determine whether a child is safe and well.

The post Her Parenting Time Was Restricted After a Positive Drug Test. By Federal Standards, It Would’ve Been Negative. appeared first on ProPublica.

What happened: Judge Jennifer Green, who oversees the Maricopa Superior Court’s criminal department, has quietly rolled out a program to facilitate quicker resolutions to death penalty cases in Arizona’s most-populous county.

The court has begun issuing orders for the prosecution and defense to participate in settlement conferences two years after a notice to seek the death penalty is filed, according to a statement from the court. The orders are meant to “encourage” settlement talks in capital cases, which often drag on for many years only to end with prosecutors reducing the charges.

Court officials said current and retired judges will conduct the hearings. 

Why it’s happening: An investigation by ProPublica and ABC15 Arizona in June found that prosecutors in the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office have frequently pursued the death penalty but rarely secured death sentences.

In nearly 350 such cases over 20 years, just 13% ended in a death sentence. The outcomes raised questions about the office’s judgment in pursuing the death penalty, said former Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, who called for a review of capital charging decisions after the news organizations shared their findings with him.

“Once you allege death, the whole game changes,” Romley told ProPublica and ABC15 at the time. “So many more resources go into that particular case.” 

Capital cases can be litigated across the terms of multiple county attorneys and cost more than a million dollars each to prosecute. In the hundreds of Maricopa County death penalty cases pursued since 2007, the cost of furnishing the accused with an adequate defense alone has totaled $289 million. That figure did not include the costs of the prosecution, which the county attorney’s office said are not recorded in a way that can be tracked separately.

Romley applauded the court for implementing the settlement conferences. “The courts have recognized this isn’t the right way to be doing this,” he said, adding that the orders could speed up other aspects of the cases, such as discovery. Victims could also benefit from quicker resolution, he said. “If I was county attorney, I would be embracing it,” he said.

Arizona resumed executions in 2025 after a two-year pause. Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, in 2022 ordered a review of the state’s lethal injection process, but she dismissed the retired federal magistrate judge she had appointed to conduct the analysis after he determined that lethal injection is not humane, he said.

There are 107 people on Arizona’s death row. 

What people are saying: Rosemarie Peña-Lynch, director of public defense services for Maricopa County, said in a statement that public defenders are committed to a process that “offers an opportunity to explore potential case resolutions while safeguarding the constitutional rights of our clients.”

Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, a Republican, said at a news conference in November that she is “for anything that would speed up this process.” But, she added, prosecutors seek death in cases “where we think the death penalty is warranted.”

Asked about holding settlement conferences two years into such cases, she said: “It’s not typically a situation where the death penalty is dropped … on a whim of a plea agreement. It’s dropped because maybe evidence changes, or, for example, witnesses die, or something like that. Whether it will help or not, I don’t know, but if it does that’s great.”

What’s next: Last month, Green issued an order in a death penalty case to schedule a settlement hearing within two years. Green’s order, in a case against two men accused of murdering a Tempe woman, cites a criminal procedure rule mandating capital cases be resolved within 24 months of the state’s notice to seek death.

On Dec. 3, Mitchell announced that her office would seek the death penalty against 

Cudjoe Young and Sencere Hayes, who were previously charged with the April 17, 2023, murder of 22-year-old Mercedes Vega. Young and Hayes have pleaded not guilty. 

An autopsy report showed Vega, who was still alive when she was left in a burning Chevrolet Malibu, died of blunt force injuries and had been shot in the arm. A medical examiner also found bleach in her throat, according to ABC15.

“We will continue to pursue justice for Mercedes Vega and her family,” Mitchell said in a statement.

The post Arizona Judges Launch Effort Seeking Quicker Resolutions to Death Penalty Cases appeared first on ProPublica.

President Donald Trump signed into law this month a measure that prohibits anyone based in China and other adversarial countries from accessing the Pentagon’s cloud computing systems.

The ban, which is tucked inside the $900 billion defense policy law, was enacted in response to a ProPublica investigation this year that exposed how Microsoft used China-based engineers to service the Defense Department’s computer systems for nearly a decade — a practice that left some of the country’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary.

U.S.-based supervisors, known as “digital escorts,” were supposed to serve as a check on these foreign employees, but we found they often lacked the expertise needed to effectively supervise engineers with far more advanced technical skills.

In the wake of the reporting, leading members of Congress called on the Defense Department to strengthen its security requirements while blasting Microsoft for what some Republicans called “a national betrayal.” Cybersecurity and intelligence experts have told ProPublica that the arrangement posed major risks to national security, given that laws in China grant the country’s officials broad authority to collect data.

Microsoft pledged in July to stop using China-based engineers to service Pentagon cloud systems after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth publicly condemned the practice. “Foreign engineers — from any country, including of course China — should NEVER be allowed to maintain or access DoD systems,” Hegseth wrote on X.

In September, the Pentagon updated its cybersecurity requirements for tech contractors, banning IT vendors from using China-based personnel to work on Defense Department computer systems. The new law effectively codifies that change, requiring Hegseth to prohibit individuals from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea from having direct or indirect access to Defense Department cloud computing systems.

Microsoft declined to comment on the new law. Following the earlier changes, a spokesperson said the company would “work with our national security partners to evaluate and adjust our security protocols in light of the new directives.”

Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican who serves on the House Armed Service Committee, celebrated the development, saying it “closes contractor loopholes … following the discovery that companies like Microsoft exploited” them. Sen. Tom Cotton, the GOP chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence who has been critical of the tech giant, also heralded the legislation, saying it “includes much-needed efforts to protect our nation’s critical infrastructure, which is threatened by Communist China and other foreign adversaries.”

The legislation also bolsters congressional oversight of the Pentagon’s cybersecurity practices, mandating that the secretary brief the congressional defense committees on the changes no later than June 1, 2026. After that, such briefings will take place annually for the next three years, including updates on the “effectiveness of controls, security incidents, and recommendations for legislative or administrative action.”

As ProPublica reported, Microsoft initially developed the digital escort program as a work-around to a Defense Department requirement that people handling sensitive data be U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

The company has maintained that it disclosed the program to the Pentagon and that escorts were provided “specific training on protecting sensitive data” and preventing harm. But top Pentagon officials have said they were unaware of Microsoft’s program until ProPublica’s reporting.

A copy of the security plan that the company submitted to the Defense Department in 2025 showed Microsoft left out key details of the escort program, making no reference to its China-based operations or foreign engineers at all.

This summer, Hegseth announced that the department had opened an investigation into whether any of Microsoft’s China-based engineers had compromised national security. He also ordered a new third-party audit of the company’s digital-escort program. The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment on the status of those inquiries.

The post Trump Signs Defense Bill Prohibiting China-Based Engineers in Pentagon IT Work appeared first on ProPublica.

A few months ago, Oregon’s green energy outlook was bleak.

The state Legislature and Gov. Tina Kotek had repeatedly failed to address a huge obstacle that has held back wind and solar projects in the Northwest for years: aging electrical lines too jammed up to handle more renewable power.

A series of articles by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica identified barriers in the federal and state bureaucracies that delayed improvements to beef up the grid. The failure to complete upgrades is the main reason Oregon, like its fellow progressive state and neighbor Washington, has lagged most of the nation in the growth of clean energy despite an internal mandate to go green.

Bills to tackle the transmission problem continued to languish and die in the Oregon Legislature as recently as this spring.

But there has been a groundswell of urgency since the stories were published.

Kotek, a Democrat, has now issued two executive orders mandating that state agencies speed up renewable energy development by any available means, including fast-tracking permits and directly paying for new transmission lines.

Those efforts could eventually be backed up by money. The state’s energy department, in a first, recommended lawmakers consider creating a state entity to finance, plan and build transmission lines. A lawmaker whose bill to create such an authority failed this year suddenly has hope for getting it done, and he said the governor’s office is working with him to make it happen.

What was essentially an unacknowledged problem among many Oregon policymakers now has the full attention of the governor and the key agencies that report to her. There has been new attention on electrical transmission in Washington state, as well.

The shift comes as President Donald Trump has created new obstacles to ramping up renewable energy. This year, he removed tax credits that made wind and solar cheaper to build, blocked new wind permits and fired employees of the federal agency that reviews them.

This was the year “where you’ve seen all these factors coming together — we know that our outdated grid is choking our ability to grow across the state, and we’re already paying more for electricity,” Kotek said in an interview last week.

Kotek acknowledged the role of OPB and ProPublica’s reporting when asked what prompted the changes.

“You’ve been doing some great stories,” she said.

In May, OPB and ProPublica showed that the state ranked 47th in renewable energy growth over the past decade. Washington is 50th.

An analysis by the news organizations found that Northwest wind and solar farms face the longest odds in the country for successfully connecting to the power grid, under a process heavily controlled by the Bonneville Power Administration. The federal agency’s transmission lines and substations constitute 75% of the region’s electrical network.

Out of 469 large renewables projects that have sought access to Bonneville’s system since 2015, only one was successful. Backers of the other projects either abandoned their requests or were still waiting on studies and necessary upgrades to power lines and substations.

Northwest utilities fear rolling blackouts within the decade unless transmission capacity is expanded to meet surging energy demand, particularly from data centers that support artificial intelligence.

Kotek said she hadn’t seen the numbers on Oregon’s stagnant renewable energy growth before OPB and ProPublica reported them.

“I hope — and we will be planning — to make our numbers look better and better in the coming years,” she said.

In 2021, when lawmakers enacted Oregon’s plan to eliminate the use of fossil fuels in electrical generation by 2040, they failed to account for transmission and the glacial pace set by Bonneville for improvements. (The agency has said previously its project approval decisions are guided by financial prudence.)

Oregon leaders also did not address the state’s slow process for evaluating energy projects, with appeals that can prolong permit decisions on new power lines or wind and solar farms for years. The rules originated with the 1970s antinuclear movement. Foes say rural transmission and wind projects blight the landscape, and they have used the permitting system as a means of delay.

Bills to smooth out the state permitting process, even those supported by rural interests, went nowhere. Efforts to bypass Bonneville also withered. Advocates proposed a state financing authority for new transmission lines and substations as recently as this year. The legislation, which lacked the endorsement of either Kotek or the Oregon Department of Energy, died.

Emily Moore, director of climate and energy for the Seattle-based think tank Sightline Institute, called OPB and ProPublica’s reporting “invaluable” in prompting change.

“It has motivated policymakers and advocates alike to try to find solutions to get Oregon and Washington unstuck and is recruiting new people to the effort,” Moore said.

Kotek’s latest executive order calls for a wide array of state agencies to recommend ways to overcome obstacles to clean energy development. This followed her October order for state agencies to take “any and all steps necessary” to fast-track solar and wind permits.

Separately, the energy department recommended lawmakers look into creating a new entity like state authorities in Colorado and New Mexico, which plan transmission routes, partner with transmission developers and issue bonds to finance construction. The agency’s strategic plan, finalized in November, said the state must streamline clean energy development and take a more active role in getting regional transmission lines built.

Similar findings emerged in a Dec. 1 report by a state working group created by Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson, which called for a dedicated state entity focused on increasing transmission capacity. The authors cited OPB and ProPublica’s 2025 coverage in stating that Washington is falling behind on infrastructure needed to hit its green energy goals. (Ferguson requested the report following reporting by The Seattle Times and ProPublica last year on the energy consumed by data centers, which receive generous state tax breaks.)

“This would be something that could potentially really help move the needle,” said Joni Sliger, a senior policy analyst with the Oregon energy department.

The governor has also ordered the department and Oregon utilities regulators to designate physical paths through the state in which permitting for transmission lines can be streamlined and to gather financial support for projects that serve the public interest.

Kotek cited the Boardman to Hemingway transmission line in Eastern Oregon that got caught in permitting limbo for nearly 20 years, an episode highlighted in OPB and ProPublica’s reporting. The governor called the state’s handling of the project a “red flag.”

“We have to get out of our own way,” she said.

Kotek’s executive orders drew praise from a range of organizations who appeared with the governor when she announced her most recent moves in November.

“It makes our energy system stronger and more reliable, enhancing grid resilience, expanding storage and bolstering transmission to keep electricity affordable and dependable for every Oregonian,” Nora Apter, Oregon director for the clean energy advocacy group Climate Solutions, said at the time.

The head of Oregon Business for Climate, which represents interests including real estate developers, wineries and coffee roasters, also spoke at the event.

Tim Miller, the group’s director, said that although Oregon has put in place an energy permitting system to ensure siting is done right, Kotek’s order “reminds the state that we also have to get things done.”

Lawmakers now are working on a plan to enact a state transmission financing authority during the next full legislative session, in early 2027.

Rep. Mark Gamba, the Portland-area Democrat whose effort to create such an agency last year failed, said the governor’s office is in discussions with him about the new legislation and that he expects it to pass thanks to her involvement.

“Her leaning in the way she has is what we needed,” he said.

Gamba said he’s seeing newfound support for expanding transmission from across the political spectrum.

“I’ve gotten calls from interests that typically I’m on the other side of the fight with,” Gamba said, “because they recognize that this is an economic development issue as well.”

The post Oregon Faced a Huge Obstacle in Adding Green Energy. Here’s What Changed This Year. appeared first on ProPublica.

Over the past year, ProPublica has published hundreds of investigations. 

In January, Kyle Hopkins of the Anchorage Daily News examined why a sexual assault case took seven years to go to trial in Alaska. In March, our video journalists told the stories of three mothers fighting to address America’s stillbirth crisis. In August, a team across the newsroom calculated how deeply President Donald Trump’s administration cut federal health agencies. And in December, Megan Rose and Debbie Cenziper reported how the Food and Drug Administration’s lax generic drug rules put a lung transplant patient’s life at risk.

Here are 25 long-reads to add to your end-of-year reading list. You can also explore our most-read stories of the year.

1. Anchorage Police Say They Witnessed a Sexual Assault in Public. It Took Seven Years for the Case to Go to Trial.

By Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News. Co-published with Anchorage Daily News.

Published Jan. 7.

In Alaska, where the time to resolve most serious felony cases has nearly tripled over the past decade, one case was delayed so long that both victims died. A former prosecutor called it “a travesty of justice.”

2. Dozens of People Died in Arizona Sober Living Homes as State Officials Fumbled Medicaid Fraud Response

By Mary Hudetz, ProPublica, and Hannah Bassett, Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting. Co-published with Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting.

Published Jan. 27.

Arizona officials acknowledged that a fraud scheme targeting Indigenous people with addictions cost taxpayers $2.5 billion. But they haven’t accounted publicly for the number of deaths tied to the scheme.

3. What a $2 Million Per Dose Gene Therapy Reveals About Drug Pricing

By Robin Fields

Published Feb. 12.

Taxpayers and charities helped develop Zolgensma. Then it debuted at a record price, ushering in a new class of wildly expensive drugs. Its story upends the widely held conception that high prices reflect huge industry investments in innovation.

4. How a Global Online Network of White Supremacists Groomed a Teen to Kill

By A.C. Thompson and James Bandler, ProPublica, and Lukáš Diko, Investigative Center of Jan Kuciak. Co-published with FRONTLINE. 

Published March 8. 

The murders of two people outside an LGBTQ+ bar at first looked like the act of a lone shooter. A ProPublica and FRONTLINE investigation shows they were, in fact, the culmination of a coordinated, international recruiting effort by online extremists.

5. Before a Breath: America’s Stillbirth Crisis

By Nadia Sussman, Liz Moughon, Margaret Cheatham Williams and Lisa Riordan Seville 

Published March 20.

More than 20,000 stillbirths occur in the U.S. each year, but 1 in 4 may be preventable. “Before a Breath” sheds light on three mothers fighting to change those statistics.

6. “A Wholly Inaccurate Picture”: Reality Cop Show “The First 48” and the Wrongly Convicted Man

by Jessica Lussenhop, photography by Sarahbeth Maney

Published March 29.

Edgar Barrientos-Quintana spent 16 years behind bars wrongly convicted for a shooting featured on “The First 48.” The Minnesota attorney general’s office effectively alleged that the show shaped the case instead of the case shaping the show.

7. An Algorithm Deemed This Nearly Blind 70-Year-Old Prisoner a “Moderate Risk.” Now He’s No Longer Eligible for Parole.

By Richard A. Webster, Verite News. Co-published with Verite News. 

Published April 10.

A Louisiana law cedes much of the power of the parole board to an algorithm that bars thousands of prisoners from a shot at early release. Civil rights attorneys say it could disproportionately harm Black people — and may even be unconstitutional.

8. How a Chinese Prison Helped Fuel a Deadly Drug Crisis in the United States

By Sebastian Rotella

Published April 23.

While China enforces strict laws against domestic drug trafficking, state-supported companies have openly shipped fentanyl to the U.S., investigators say. One prison-owned chemical company boasted online: “100% of our shipments will clear customs.”

9. Nike Says Its Factory Workers Earn Nearly Double the Minimum Wage. At This Cambodian Factory, 1% Made That Much.

By Rob Davis, photography by Sarahbeth Maney. Co-published with The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Published April 25.

Nike has made an expansive effort to convince consumers, investors and others that it is improving the lives of factory workers who make its products, not exploiting them. A rare view of wages at one Cambodian factory tests this claim.

10. Threat in Your Medicine Cabinet: The FDA’s Gamble on America’s Drugs

By Debbie Cenziper, Megan Rose, Brandon Roberts and Irena Hwang

Published June 17.

A ProPublica investigation found that for more than a decade, the FDA gave substandard factories banned from the United States a special pass to keep sending drugs to an unsuspecting public.

11. He Was Accused of Killing His Wife. Idaho’s Coroner System Let Clues Vanish After a Previous Wife’s Death.

By Audrey Dutton 

Published July 16.

Clayton Strong had a history of domestic unrest in two marriages. The women’s families say a more thorough investigation of Betty Strong’s death in Idaho might have saved the life of his next wife, Shirley Weatherley, in Texas.

12. He Came to the U.S. to Support His Sick Child. He Was Detained. Then He Disappeared.

By Melissa Sanchez, ProPublica; Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune; Mica Rosenberg and Jeff Ernsthausen, ProPublica; Ronna Rísquez, Alianza Rebelde Investiga; and Adrián González, Cazadores de Fake News. Co-published with Alianza Rebelde Investiga, Cazadores de Fake News and The Texas Tribune. 

Published July 18. 

Like most of the more than 230 Venezuelan men deported to a Salvadoran prison, José Manuel Ramos Bastidas had followed U.S. immigration rules. Then Trump rewrote them.

13. The Drying Planet

By Abrahm Lustgarten, graphics by Lucas Waldron, illustrations by Olivier Kugler for ProPublica 

Published July 25. 

A new study finds that freshwater resources are rapidly disappearing, creating arid “mega” regions and causing sea levels to rise.

14. Middle School Cheerleaders Made a TikTok Video Portraying a School Shooting. They Were Charged With a Crime.

By Aliyya Swaby. Co-published with WPLN. 

Published July 28. 

Social videos, memes and retweets are becoming fodder for criminal charges in an era of heightened responses to student threats. Authorities say harsh punishment is necessary, but experts say the crackdown has unintended consequences.

15. “We’ll Smash the Fucking Window Out and Drag Him Out”

By Nicole Foy and McKenzie Funk

Published July 31.

We’ve documented nearly 50 incidents of immigration officers shattering car windows to make arrests — a tactic experts say was rarely used before Trump took office. ICE claims its officers use a “minimum amount of force.” You can judge for yourself.

16. Gutted: How Deeply Trump Has Cut Federal Health Agencies

By Brandon Roberts, Annie Waldman and Pratheek Rebala, illustrations by Sam Green for ProPublica

Published Aug. 21.

More than ‎20,500 workers have left or been pushed out of federal health agencies, a ProPublica analysis found. Staffers say the cuts will leave their agencies less equipped to conduct studies, perform inspections and combat deadly outbreaks.

17. “Material Support” and an Ohio Chaplain: How 9/11-Era Terror Rules Could Empower Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

By Hannah Allam

Published Sept. 9.

The U.S. government was trying to deport Ohio children’s hospital chaplain Ayman Soliman, alleging tenuous connections to terrorism. If DHS had succeeded, experts say it could have handed the Trump administration a “sledgehammer” to use on mass deportations. A few weeks after this investigation was published, Soliman was freed.

18. “Just Let Me Die”

By Duaa Eldeib, photography by Sarah Blesener for ProPublica 

Published Sept. 10. 

After insurance repeatedly denied a couple’s claims, one psychiatrist was their last hope.

19. These Activists Want to Dismantle Public Schools. Now They Run the Education Department.

By Megan O’Matz and Jennifer Smith Richards

Published Oct. 8.

Under Trump, the Department of Education has been bringing in activists hostile to public schools. It could mean a new era of private and religious schools boosted by tax dollars — and the end of public schools as we know them.

20. How Paul Newby Made North Carolina a Blueprint for Conservative Courts

By Doug Bock Clark

Published Oct. 30.

Paul Newby, a born-again Christian, has turned his perch atop North Carolina’s Supreme Court into an instrument of political power. Over two decades, he’s driven changes that have reverberated well beyond the borders of his state.

21. She Begged for Help. This State’s Probation Gap May Have Put Her in Danger.

By Paige Pfleger, WPLN, and Mariam Elba, ProPublica. Co-published with MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, Tennessee Lookout and WPLN.

Published Nov. 11. 

Tennessee probation officers pause in-person visits and home searches for offenders facing an arrest warrant. That reduced supervision can last for months. Temptress Peebles was one of six mothers who died during this gap. 

22. What the U.S. Government Is Dismissing That Could Seed a Bird Flu Pandemic

By Nat Lash, graphics by Chris Alcantara

Published Nov. 18. 

Egg producers suspect bird flu is traveling through the air. After a disastrous Midwestern outbreak early this year, we tested that theory and found that where the wind blew, the virus followed. Vaccines could help, but the USDA hasn’t approved them.

23. Under Trump, More Than 1,000 Nonprofits Strip DEI Language From Tax Forms

By Ellis Simani, design by Zisiga Mukulu

Published Dec. 17.

As the Trump administration ordered agencies to eradicate “illegal” diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, we identified more than 1,000 nonprofits that removed such language from the mission statements in their tax filings.

24. Inside the Trump Administration’s Man-Made Hunger Crisis

By Brett Murphy and Anna Maria Barry-Jester, photography by Brian Otieno for ProPublica

Published Dec. 17.

“Brutal and traumatizing”: Interviews and a trove of internal documents show government officials and aid workers desperately tried to warn Trump advisers about impending disaster and death.

25. Fighting for Breath

By Megan Rose and Debbie Cenziper, photography by Hannah Yoon for ProPublica

Published Dec. 19.

Lung transplant patient Hannah Goetz’s life depended on the generic version of a critical drug. It was supposed to be equivalent to the brand-name medication — but the FDA doesn’t always ensure that’s the case.

The post 25 Investigations You May Have Missed This Year appeared first on ProPublica.

When President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, ProPublica’s reporters set out to cover how his second administration would reshape the government and the country.

Our reporters detailed what happened when the Department of Government Efficiency, initially led by Elon Musk, slashed federal agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Social Security Administration. We wrote about the people caught up in the administration’s immigration crackdown, including the more than 170 U.S. citizens who had been detained by immigration agents. We profiled key figures in the administration, including the 22-year-old picked to lead terrorism prevention and the man who has been described as Trump’s shadow president. 

Our newsroom also focused beyond the White House. Ginger Thompson wrote a five-part series, with research by Doris Burke, that told the story of American health care through the only hospital in Albany, Georgia. Ellis Simani and Lexi Churchill uncovered a Texas charter school superintendent who makes $870,000. And David Armstrong sought to understand why a single pill of his cancer drug cost the same as a new iPhone.

Those were all among the investigations that readers spent the most time with this year. In the new year, ProPublica will keep reporting on these storylines — and new ones. 

In the meantime, revisit our most-read stories of 2025, as measured by the total amount of time spent reading them across several of our publishing platforms.

1. The Militia and the Mole

By Joshua Kaplan

Outraged by the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell family or friends. The one person he told was a ProPublica reporter.

2. Sick in a Hospital Town

By Ginger Thompson, with research by Doris Burke

Why were the people in Albany, Georgia, so sick, when the town’s most powerful institution was a hospital?

3. Inside ICE Air: Flight Attendants on Deportation Planes Say Disaster Is “Only a Matter of Time”

By McKenzie Funk

Current and former flight attendants for GlobalX, the private charter airline at the center of Trump’s immigration crackdown, expressed concern about their inability to treat passengers humanely and to keep them safe.

4. The Untold Saga of What Happened When DOGE Stormed Social Security

By Eli Hager 

DOGE has ignored urgently needed reforms and upgrades at the Social Security Administration, according to dozens of insiders and 15 hours of candid interviews with the former acting chief of the agency, who admits he sometimes made things worse.

5. Trump’s Own Mortgages Match His Description of Mortgage Fraud, Records Reveal

By Justin Elliott, Robert Faturechi and Alex Mierjeski

The Trump administration has argued that Fed board member Lisa Cook may have committed mortgage fraud by declaring more than one primary residence on her loans. We found Trump once did the very thing he called “deceitful and potentially criminal.”

6. Getting “DOGED”: DOGE Targeted Him on Social Media. Then the Taliban Took His Family.

By Avi Asher-Schapiro and Christopher Bing

Afghan scholar Mohammad Halimi, who fled the Taliban in 2021, had worked to help U.S. diplomats understand his homeland. Then DOGE put his family’s lives at risk by exposing his sensitive work for a U.S.-funded nonprofit.

7. “The Intern in Charge”: Meet the 22-Year-Old Trump’s Team Picked to Lead Terrorism Prevention

By Hannah Allam

One year out of college and with no apparent national security expertise, Thomas Fugate is the Department of Homeland Security official tasked with overseeing the government’s main hub for combating violent extremism.

8. The Price of Remission

By David Armstrong

When Armstrong was diagnosed with cancer, he set out to understand why a single pill of Revlimid cost the same as a new iPhone. He has covered high drug prices as a reporter for years. What he discovered shocked him.

9. “Incalculable” Damage: How a “We Buy Ugly Houses” Franchise Left a Trail of Financial Wreckage Across Texas

By Anjeanette Damon and Mollie Simon

Charles Carrier is accused of orchestrating a yearslong Ponzi scheme, bilking tens of millions of dollars from both wealthy investors and older people with modest incomes. Despite signs of trouble, the houseflipping chain HomeVestors of America didn’t step in.

10. The White House Intervened on Behalf of Accused Sex Trafficker Andrew Tate During a Federal Investigation

By Robert Faturechi and Avi Asher-Schapiro

Federal authorities were chided for seizing electronic devices from Tate and his brother, and told to return them, records and interviews show. Experts said the intervention was highly inappropriate.

11. This County Was the “Model” for Local Police Carrying Out Immigration Raids. It Ended in Civil Rights Violations.

By Rafael Carranza, Arizona Luminaria. Co-published with Arizona Luminaria.

Under Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Maricopa County was one of the first testing grounds for ICE’s 287(g) program, which lets local police enforce immigration laws. Many Arizonans say those abuses parallel what’s playing out now under Trump.

12. The H-2A Visa Trap

By Max Blau, ProPublica, and Zaydee Sanchez, for ProPublica, with illustrations by Dadu Shin for ProPublica

Sofi left behind her child in Mexico for the promise of providing him a better life. She ended up a victim of an operation that is alleged to have exploited the H-2A visa program — and the workers it brought to America.

13. “Ticking Time Bomb”: A Pregnant Mother Kept Getting Sicker. She Died After She Couldn’t Get an Abortion in Texas.

By Kavitha Surana and Lizzie Presser, photography by Lexi Parra for ProPublica

ProPublica has found multiple cases of women with underlying health conditions who died when they couldn’t access abortions. Tierra Walker, a 37-year-old mother, was told by doctors there was no emergency before preeclampsia killed her.

14. To Pay for Trump Tax Cuts, House GOP Floats Plan to Slash Benefits for the Poor and Working Class

By Robert Faturechi and Justin Elliott

A menu of options being circulated by congressional Republicans also includes new tax cuts for corporations and the ultrawealthy.

15. Kristi Noem Secretly Took a Cut of Political Donations

By Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski

A dark money group paid $80,000 to Noem’s personal company when she was governor of South Dakota. She did not include this income on her federal disclosure forms, a likely violation of ethics requirements, experts say.

16. We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days.

By Nicole Foy, photography by Sarahbeth Maney

The government does not track how often immigration agents grab citizens. So ProPublica did. Our tally — almost certainly incomplete — includes people who were held for days without a lawyer. And nearly 20 children, two of whom have cancer.

17. Trump Officials Celebrated With Cake After Slashing Aid. Then People Died of Cholera.

By Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy, photography by Peter DiCampo

Behind closed doors in Washington, top advisers made a series of decisions that had devastating repercussions for the poorest country on earth. We went to South Sudan and found people who died as a result.

18. “The President Wanted It and I Did It”: Recording Reveals Head of Social Security’s Thoughts on DOGE and Trump

By Eli Hager

In a recording obtained by ProPublica, acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek portrayed his agency as facing peril, while also encouraging patience with “the DOGE kids.”

19. This Charter School Superintendent Makes $870,000. He Leads a District With 1,000 Students.

By Ellis Simani, ProPublica, and Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Co-published with The Texas Tribune.

On paper, Salvador Cavazos earns less than $300,000 to run Valere Public Schools, a small Texas charter network. But taxpayers likely aren’t aware that in reality, his total pay makes him one of the country’s highest-earning superintendents.

20. What You Should Know About Russ Vought, Trump’s Shadow President

By Andy Kroll

Vought is the architect of Trump’s broader plan to fire civil servants, freeze government programs and dismantle entire agencies. Here are some key things to know about the D.C. insider who wants to take a hatchet to the federal government.

21. “Slow Pay, Low Pay or No Pay”

By T. Christian Miller

Blue Cross authorized mastectomies and breast reconstructions for women with cancer but refused to pay the full doctors’ bills. A jury called it fraud and awarded the practice $421 million.

22. “We’re Broken”: As Federal Prisons Run Low on Food and Toilet Paper, Corrections Officers Are Leaving in Droves for ICE

By Keri Blakinger

Many of the problems the agency is facing now are not new, but staff and prisoners fear an exodus of officers could make life behind bars even worse.

23. He Spent Funds Meant for Native Hawaiians on Polo and Porsches. The Federal Government Failed to Stop Him.

By Nick Grube, Honolulu Civil Beat. Co-published with Honolulu Civil Beat.

A small business program allowed Christopher Dawson to win big contracts if he promised to uplift Native Hawaiians. Instead, federal prosecutors allege, he used the money to line his own pockets.

24. Young Girls Were Sexually Abused by a Church Member. They Were Told to Forgive and Forget.

By Jessica Lussenhop, ProPublica, and Andy Mannix, Minnesota Star Tribune, photography by Leila Navidi, Minnesota Star Tribune. Co-published with Minnesota Star Tribune. 

In Minnesota, leaders of an Old Apostolic Lutheran Church community enabled a child abuser by telling his victims that once the sins were “washed away in the blood of reconciliation,” they could never speak of them again.

25. Texas Banned Abortion. Then Sepsis Rates Soared.

By Lizzie Presser, Andrea Suozzo, Sophie Chou and Kavitha Surana

ProPublica’s first-of-its-kind analysis is the most detailed look yet into a rise in life-threatening complications for women experiencing pregnancy loss under Texas’ abortion ban.

The post The Most-Read ProPublica Stories of 2025 appeared first on ProPublica.