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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Families say it hasn’t improved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

211 operator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They’d need to be gone by 6 a.m.

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