Nearly a decade ago, a British court ordered a man named Sam Westrop to pay the equivalent of more than $173,000 in libel damages after he published an article on his website calling the founder of a London-based Islamic TV channel a “convicted terrorist.”

Westrop eventually admitted the underlying evidence for the claim was not reliable, according to court filings, and corrected the story on his website.

“There simply was no evidence to support the allegation of terrorism,” the judge in the case wrote.

Years after that ruling, Westrop made similar claims about a group of Islamic private schools in Texas that had applied to the state’s new voucher program. He alleged the school leaders had connections to Islamic extremist or terrorist groups, such as Hamas. Westrop shared his research as early as last fall with the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, which oversees the voucher program that awards eligible families taxpayer dollars for private education or homeschooling.

In December, acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock asked the state’s top lawyer if the agency could exclude from the voucher program an unnamed number of schools with supposed ties to the Chinese Communist government or that had hosted events for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil-rights group. A month later, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ruled that it could.

Westrop’s allegations, along with claims made by several others, were among the primary reasons the comptroller’s office investigated the schools and delayed their admittance in the voucher program, according to new legal filings.

The scope of the investigations was also far broader than what was previously known, the filings show. The state used taxpayer money to contract with two investigators to dig into the histories of nearly 50 private schools across the state with alleged ties to radical Islamic organizations and the Chinese government — a number that far exceeds what has been reported.

The extent of the state’s probe and Westrop’s involvement are detailed as part of a new trove of legal filings in a lawsuit four Islamic private school campuses filed against the state comptroller in March after the agency initially kept them out of the program. It draws heavily on an eight-hour deposition of Murl Miller, the comptroller’s chief counsel for general litigation, taken in May as part of the lawsuit.

While the comptroller has since accepted all of the investigated schools into the voucher program, the schools that pursued the legal action are still asking the judge to certify a class-action lawsuit to ensure the comptroller can’t discriminate against certain private schools in the future.

“Religious liberty is not a temporary pass issued after a lawsuit,” said Eric Hudson, an attorney representing the Islamic schools. “We’re pressing on so equal treatment is the rule — not an exception granted under pressure.”

The comptroller’s office, which declined to comment for this story, has objected to certifying the lawsuit as a class action, saying it shouldn’t be allowed to continue since the four Islamic campuses were ultimately allowed into the voucher program. The state’s lawyers also maintain that a class-action claim is outside the jurisdiction of the current court and case.

“Plaintiffs received not only the initial approval they sought, but also the continuing ability to participate in the Program on the same footing as all other approved providers and families,” the state’s June 26 filing said.

The debate over whether to allow the schools into the voucher program has come amid a wave of anti-Muslim rhetoric among some elected officials and prominent political candidates in Texas and across the country. At the state Republican Party convention last month, members tried to remove Muslims as delegates. Dr. Rick Scarborough, a former Southern Baptist pastor, told a Muslim attendee he wanted him to leave the event. (Scarborough later clarified to The Texas Tribune he wanted him to leave the country and admitted he had some regrets about the interaction.) In November, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott designated CAIR a foreign terrorist organization. Florida’s governor soon followed with his own accusations. CAIR is part of a lawsuit against Abbott and Paxton challenging the enforcement of the governor’s designation, saying he issued it “without due process and in violation of federal law.” The case is ongoing.

In the months since the Islamic schools’ lawsuit was filed, the comptroller’s office has maintained that its leaders did not purposefully single out certain schools. Instead, agency officials said that the Islamic schools were swept up in a wider review of some 700 private schools that were accredited by Cognia, a nonprofit that vets tens of thousands of schools worldwide. The agency has said it did not know which schools had Islamic connections but instead set aside the entire group after discovering not all had up-to-date accreditations, which are mandated to qualify for the Texas voucher program. Cognia could not be immediately reached for comment.

Miller’s deposition, however, contradicts the state’s claim.

In the deposition, Miller said the agency began receiving information as far back as last summer that identified almost 50 schools with alleged links to the Chinese Communist Party or extremist groups. He also confirmed that the third-party researchers hired by the comptroller only examined those particular campuses out of the more than 2,600 private schools now approved for the voucher program.

The filing also said the comptroller initially approved at least one of the Islamic schools represented in the lawsuit for the voucher program, Bayaan Academy, then later removed it two hours after Westrop shared some of his research in January via email.

Miller’s deposition cited a range of sources that prompted the comptroller’s investigations into the schools, including Westrop, a regional Homeland Security Task Force launched last summer to “combat emerging threats from transnational criminal organizations in Southeast Texas,” congressional hearings probing potential terrorist activities in Texas and the RAIR Foundation, an activist and investigative journalism organization combating “the threats from Islamic supremacists, radical leftists and their allies.”

Miller spoke with Westrop on the phone at one point this year. He told lawyers Westrop appeared credible.

“Did you Google Mr. Westrop?” Hudson asked during the May deposition.

“I did not Google, no,” said Miller, who added that the investigators the state hired confirmed his credentials.

“Did they make you aware of a defamation judgment against him for falsely accusing someone of being a terrorist?” Hudson asked.

“No, they did not,” Miller replied.

Westrop, who could not be reached for comment, was hired this year by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential conservative think tank based in Austin. He has continued raising allegations on at least one podcast that extremist groups will take advantage of the school voucher program funding.

Westrop later published his research, which he had shared with the comptroller, on Middle East Forum, a website founded in 1994 that “promotes American interests in the Middle East and protects the West from Middle Eastern threats.”

Miller said in his deposition that the comptroller’s office is “not readily prepared to do investigations and to do deep research into foreign terrorist organizations or any other accusation.”

The comptroller, instead, handed over the list of accused schools provided by Westrop and others to two third-party counterterrorism researchers, Reuben Katz and Lara Burns, a retired FBI agent who now works with George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

Katz and Burns, who could not immediately be reached for comment, provided the agency with dossiers on each school. Their research included cross-referencing accused school leaders against government terrorism and extremist group databases.

The comptroller ultimately allowed in all of the schools alleged to have Islamic terrorist or Chinese Communist Party ties.

The Islamic school plaintiffs have said their inclusion in the program is still not guaranteed long term and they hope a class-action suit could help change the comptroller’s processes that allowed the agency to delay their admission in the first place.

The filing pointed to a March 24 letter Hancock sent the state attorney general, in which he continued pushing claims linking the Houston Quran Academy’s principal to the Muslim Brotherhood. In the letter, he says the school had been “temporarily” approved for the voucher program but called for its removal. (The school could not be immediately reached for comment; the Houston Chronicle previously reported that Principal Hamed Ghazali said the school has no ties to CAIR and is “purely academic.”) Hancock asked Paxton, whom the comptroller had been feuding with over the attorney general’s legal strategy in the investigation, to highlight what he called the school’s “terror ties.” He urged the attorney general to strip the school, “and any other school with documented ties to terrorism,” of its corporate charter. (Hancock has since announced he will step down from his position as acting comptroller at the end of this month.)

Of Hancock’s comments, Miller said in his deposition, “There’s a lot of mistakes and misstatements in this particular letter, but again, I’m not the acting comptroller.”

“We,” Miller said, had determined the accusations of terrorist ties were not accurate. “This letter came completely out of the blue, and — and so this was a surprise to all of us.”

An attorney for the plaintiffs asked whether the comptroller has the authority to remove a school from the approved list, overriding the agency’s own internal research. Miller opposed the notion multiple times before conceding at one point.

“It’s possible, yes,” Miller said.

The post How a Man Once Ordered to Pay Libel Damages Helped Launch an Investigation Into Islamic Private Schools appeared first on ProPublica.

For decades, the U.S. Department of State gave money to groups protecting free speech, human rights and persecuted minorities in poor and authoritarian countries. 

To decide what to fund, staffers with deep expertise typically pored over reams of information on abuses under the most repressive regimes and held an open competition to fund groups to work in those countries. 

This year, Trump administration officials presented State Department workers with their own list of organizations that should be funded. To the shock of many staffers and lawmakers, they proposed at least a dozen grants that would bypass the normal open bidding process. They also sought to give taxpayer dollars to groups aligned with conservative and anti-immigration movements in Europe as well as advocates for white South Africans, according to interviews and documents reviewed by ProPublica. 

Among the organizations appointees have considered funding in recent months are a British free-speech organization that has fought against bans on “gay conversion therapy” and an Afrikaner group run by a controversial figure who has called for self-governance of the white ethnic minority within South Africa. 

This type of giving would mark a stark departure from the traditional aid that helped torture victims and documented rapes, political violence and other abuses in some of the most oppressive countries in the world, according to more than a dozen former State Department employees. One new program with $4.9 million of competitive funding available to groups to develop “civilizational self-confidence in Europe” is slated for “research, conferences, cultural engagements, and support for civil society” in wealthy democracies. The call for proposals says recipients should “not attempt to reform the legislative processes,” but experts and lawmakers have expressed concern that the U.S. is seeking to influence politics in allied countries.

That emphasis on Western nations was evident in a grant the State Department has been working on for months to a fledgling British American think tank dedicated to “renewing our Judeo-Christian culture and civilisational mission.” After pushback from Congress, the State Department abandoned those plans in recent days.

“I’ve never before seen U.S. government funding for such groups,” said William Allchorn, a senior research fellow at Anglia Ruskin University and an expert on radical-right extremism in the United Kingdom. “It’s crossing the Rubicon, isn’t it?”

A review of proposed grants shows several are being directed to more traditional human rights purposes, but even some of those have raised concerns in and outside the State Department.

Strict agency rules have long required an open bidding process whenever possible to guard against waste, fraud and abuse. Generally, the State Department is allowed to offer awards directly to a single entity or to a small group of potential grantees in rare instances, such as when only one organization is capable of the work or an emergency necessitates providing money so quickly that open competition is impossible. It has also used such “sole-source” and “limited-source” awards, which are not publicly announced, in highly sensitive countries where openly working on human rights can be dangerous.

None of those justifications appear to apply here, according to contracting experts and former staffers consulted by ProPublica. The situation is all the more concerning, they said, because Trump officials handpicked the potential recipients, decisions previously made by a panel of government experts who evaluated applicants based on the organizations’ experience and qualifications. 

“It’s not good governance to have political appointees give grants to individuals for unknown reasons,” one former bureau staffer said.

Directing awards to organizations in high-income countries further complicates the funding. The practice is so unusual that an internal waiver justifying the choice is typically required. 

The State Department did not answer when asked whether it had sought waivers for the grants to high-income countries. 

During private briefings this month, members of Congress expressed concern over both the list of potential recipients and the plan to award no-bid or limited-bid grants, according to officials familiar with the closed-door meetings who weren’t authorized to publicly discuss them. 

In response to a detailed list of questions about this story, the State Department sent a short written response, noting that “programs are still in active deliberation and receipt of a grant is not guaranteed to any organization that does not meet all requirement and standards for federal grants.” A State Department official who declined to be named stressed that the process for awarding grants was ongoing and that multiple offices provide input. They also said the administration has serious concerns about the human rights situation in South Africa that need to be addressed. 

Asked about the potential grants, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire and the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said Congress expects the State Department “to invest resources to advance human rights, democratic institutions, civil society, freedom of expression and worker rights” and that the proposals are “an appalling departure from that practice and an affront to our democratic allies.”

“These awards suggest that the Department intends to select awardees for federal funding based on their political ideology,” Shaheen said, “not in the interest of American taxpayers or national security.” 

Internal records and interviews show one of the key figures involved in the grants is Samuel Samson, a 27-year-old deputy assistant secretary of state who previously worked as a fundraiser for a group that aims to bring people with an “America first” worldview into government. 

On the day of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Samson started work as a senior adviser to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, also known as DRL, the State Department unit that selects and distributes the human rights grants. 

Over the past 18 months, he has courted far-right leaders in Europe, an area with which he believes the U.S. shares a “common civilizational struggle.” In recent weeks, Samson has defended the agency’s grantmaking plans during private meetings with lawmakers.

One group expected to receive a no-bid grant is the Free Speech Union, a British organization founded in 2020 to counter “cancel culture.” The group often steps in to defend people accused of being transphobic and has created a petition opposing the U.K.’s proposed ban on discredited therapy practices that attempt to convert gay people to heterosexuality. It’s unclear if the grant would go to the British-based organization or its international offshoot. The $5 million grant is to be used to combat “digital overregulation,” provide support for individuals facing “deplatforming” and advocate against “restrictive online safety and hate speech laws,” according to a document reviewed by ProPublica. Trump officials met with the group during a European tour late last year, according to Politico. 

Scholars said the U.S. government’s support for these groups could give them a layer of legitimacy they wouldn’t otherwise have. 

“We see them as intellectualizing or sanitizing radical-right ideas that are then taken up by the parties in power,” said Allchorn, the U.K. extremism expert.

The Free Speech Union’s website says it is nonpartisan and does not take government funds. In response to questions from ProPublica about the potential grant, the organization’s founder, Toby Young, said, “We have neither applied for nor been awarded a grant from the US State Department or any other branch of the US Government.” He did not respond to criticisms about the award or his organization.

The largest award the bureau has put forward this year, $40 million, is for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was created by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The foundation’s goal is to memorialize those killed by communist regimes and pursue freedom for people still living under totalitarian rule. 

The proposed sum is staggering to people familiar with the State Department’s allocation practices and would dwarf the organization’s budget. Victims of Communism has received a handful of government grants in the past, but for much smaller sums. Its most recent publicly available tax forms, from 2024, show its total assets come to about $12 million. Four sources familiar with the foundation’s previous U.S.-funded work questioned its ability to manage such a large award. 

Samson has a personal connection to the organization. The foundation’s board chair, Elizabeth Spalding, is a visiting fellow at a graduate school branch of Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C.; Samson was enrolled in the same small graduate program of the Christian conservative college as recently as this year, according to his LinkedIn profile (which is no longer publicly available). Spalding’s husband, Matthew, is that graduate school’s dean, and Samson has taken classes with one or both of them, according to a State Department official.

The State Department official who declined to be named said Samson’s relationship with the Spaldings had nothing to do with the grant.

The foundation’s proposed award is to “amplify the voices of dissidents and political prisoners while educating global audiences about the dangers of communist and authoritarian regimes,” according to a document reviewed by ProPublica. 

In response to questions from ProPublica about the award and concerns about its ability to manage it, the foundation said it was not aware of the proposed funding, but “if true, the 100 million victims murdered by communism in the past, and another 1.5 billion men, women, and children still enduring communism today will rejoice.”  

The State Department declined to comment on awards in process but noted that Victims of Communism has long worked with the State Department. “As President Trump has said, communism is a mortal threat to American liberty — and as Secretary Rubio has repeatedly emphasized, America will not allow radical extremists to undermine our sovereignty and national security,” the agency said in a statement. “Our foreign assistance programming is aligned to support our strategic priorities.” 

Trump officials are also planning to finance at least one organization to research crime and atrocities against minority populations in South Africa. This spring, DRL staff were initially told to begin the process of awarding funds to Lex Libertas, a South African organization founded by a prominent member of the nation’s white Afrikaner movement. The group, which claims that white South African farmers are victims of racial discrimination and violence, is fundraising to place 3,000 white crosses on the National Mall in remembrance of attacks on South African farmers. 

The proposed award to fund the South African crime research was later widened to allow other invited groups to apply for a $1 million grant, according to people with knowledge of the process. The State Department declined to say whether Lex Libertas will be among those invited to compete, saying the grant is still under deliberation.

Extensive research shows white South African farmers are not victims of crime at higher rates than other groups. But Trump has argued there is a genocide of white South Africans and is using claims that white people are subjected to disproportionate violence to justify cutting off South Africa’s funding for HIV treatment and research. 

Former diplomats told ProPublica that it makes little sense to focus on the victimization of white South Africans given the enormous suffering elsewhere in the region. “It’s laughable to suggest that on the African continent, the prime issue of human rights concern is whites in South Africa,” one former agency official told ProPublica.

Lex Libertas did not respond to questions.

One of the most controversial grants that officials singled out for funds was recently dropped, the State Department official told ProPublica. The decision came after Democratic lawmakers raised objections during briefings last week about the months-old organization and its agenda. That grant was to 878, a British American think tank created this year focused on “existential threats to Britain, to America, and to our shared Judeo-Christian civilisation,” according to its website. The sole-source $7 million grant aimed to advance “Anglo-American values” in the U.K., Europe and “allied partner countries,” according to a document ProPublica reviewed.

878 did not respond to questions.

Since creating a bureau to focus on human rights in 1977, the State Department has championed human rights and democracy in more than 100 countries. Its awards have sought to support documenting and investigating rapes committed during political violence in Burma; preventing torture in Tunisia and rehabilitating torture survivors in Syria; and combating pervasive sexual violence in Mauritania. 

Since at least 2011, as anti-LGBTQ+ laws and violence spread globally, the bureau added a specific focus on people persecuted for their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Throughout most of its existence, DRL has enjoyed bipartisan support. Democrats applauded its championing of international labor standards and marginalized communities, while Republicans favored its defense of democratic freedoms in China, North Korea, Cuba and other communist countries. As a senator, Marco Rubio was a strong supporter of the bureau and human rights broadly, once arguing from the Senate floor that safeguarding the freedoms of gay men who were persecuted in Chechnya — and all people — was in the national interest. In 2018, he urged the president to appoint an assistant secretary to oversee DRL, a post Trump had left vacant for over a year. 

But after Rubio became secretary of state in January 2025, the fate of DRL dramatically changed. Trump suspended all foreign aid in his first week in office. Within months, cuts by Trump’s newly installed Department of Government Efficiency decimated the bureau, and Rubio closed most of its offices. In April 2025, Rubio published a Substack post smearing the bureau he once championed as “a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against ‘anti-woke’ leaders.”

Samson also sent shock waves through the bureau. In March, he traveled to the U.K., meeting an anti-abortion protester and the anti-immigration politician Nigel Farage. In his own essay on the State Department’s Substack, Samson lashed out at the U.K. for arresting anti-abortion protesters and at Germany for labeling its hard-right Alternative for Germany party “extremist,” likening the countries’ actions to the “censorship, demonization, and bureaucratic weaponization” used against Trump.

Meanwhile, DRL’s remaining skeleton crew was tasked with removing trigger words from documents. “We would try to talk about human rights defenders in talking points, only to have them struck,” said one former bureau employee, requesting anonymity for fear of retribution. 

“We went from having a real, dynamic appreciation for individuals and their human rights and fundamental freedoms to erasing that, especially if individuals were part of an underrepresented group or marginalized community,” the former employee said.

The bureau is working with a severely reduced budget — about $190 million compared with over $500 million in 2024. Now the administration is preparing to put money behind its new priorities.

“We’re just implementing the agenda of the president as we’ve been directed through the national security strategy and the White House,” the State Department official told ProPublica.

The post Trump Officials Want to Use Human Rights Aid to Advocate for White South Africans and Right-Wing Causes in Europe appeared first on ProPublica.

The upstate New York city of Syracuse seems at odds with itself when it comes to a notorious miscarriage of justice. Nearly five years ago, the district attorney of Onondaga County, William Fitzpatrick, stood up in court and excoriated his county’s decision decades earlier to prosecute Anthony Broadwater for the rape of author Alice Sebold. With the DA’s support, the conviction was thrown out. Today, the same county government and that of its main city, Syracuse, continue to fight a lawsuit filed by Broadwater that seeks financial damages for the years he lost behind bars.

The conflicts, it seems, aren’t simply between criminal authorities, who view Broadwater as a wronged man, and civil authorities, who defend the original prosecution. A key expert for the city and county seems to be experiencing an internal conflict of his own — or, at minimum, a dramatic change in opinion.

Syracuse’s paid expert, a veteran Pace University law professor named Bennett Gershman, filed a report in the civil suit in December 2025 asserting that the city’s prosecutors “did not engage in misconduct” in the Broadwater case. But a little over a year before that, Gershman told me that prosecutors had “manufactured a case” against Broadwater, calling it “the most heinous kind of prosecutorial misconduct — when the prosecutor is creating guilt.” He went on to say, “‘Misconduct’ is kind of glib in this case. … It’s so much worse than plain misconduct. This is tyranny.”

In an interview for this article, Gershman said he changed his mind after delving deeper into the case. “The facts,” he said, are more “complex” and “nuanced” than how he initially understood them.

Lawyers on both sides of the Broadwater litigation declined to comment for this article.

Certainly, lawyers retain paid experts of every stripe for all sorts of actions. But it’s rare to see an expert take a position in court after expressing a different one to a reporter. “It’s not unethical to change your mind,” said Stephen Gillers, an emeritus professor and ethics expert at New York University School of Law. But, he added, Gershman’s reversal is “an embarrassment and it’s going to undermine his credibility going forward.” A potential jury in the case might wonder what he truly believes.

Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at New York Law School, who specializes in criminal law and ethics, offered a similar view. She called it “odd” that Gershman would “be willing to give such a strongly worded comment and then take a position as an expert on behalf of one of the parties. That in itself is problematic. It raises concerns.” She said she views the role of being a commentator for a news story as different from being an expert in a legal case. Commentators should approach the task from a starting point of neutrality, she said. Being an expert, by contrast, has an inherently partisan aspect. “I think it gets confused if you do both,” Roiphe said.

ProPublica recently published an in-depth narrative investigation of the original criminal case that examined multiple lapses in the prosecution of Broadwater and uncovered a broader failure in the criminal justice system in Syracuse at the time, which allowed one or more serial rapists to continue their assaults — many of which bore similarities to the one that Broadwater had been convicted of — for years.

The original case dates back to the early hours of May 8, 1981, when Sebold, then a Syracuse University freshman, was brutally raped in a park near campus. Initially, the police did not believe her, even though a medical examination and physical evidence supported her account. Five months later, Sebold spotted Broadwater on a busy street and believed him to be her rapist. She reported the sighting to police, and Broadwater was arrested.

From the beginning, the case hinged on Sebold’s testimony. But at a lineup, she identified a man other than Broadwater as her rapist. What happened right after that misindentification is at the heart of the current litigation.

In the view of the current DA, Fitzpatrick, the prosecution should have halted the moment Sebold picked somebody else: “You know, she didn’t pick out the wrong guy. She picked out the guy,” Fitzpatrick told me for the earlier article. “She picked out the guy that she thought had raped her. And it wasn’t Anthony. Case is over. Stop.”

But the prosecution continued. Sebold identified him as her rapist at trial. Broadwater was convicted and ultimately served 16 years in state prison, and lived as a registered sex offender for nearly 23 more.

How Sebold described what happened after the failed lineup identification has remained broadly consistent over the years. But there have been different shadings in the account presented in her 1999 memoir about the case and in her 2025 deposition testimony in the civil suit. Her memoir suggests she was influenced by police officers and a prosecutor. In “Lucky,” she wrote that after the lineup she “searched the eyes of the uniformed man for whether I had chosen the right one.” After that, she “felt a wave of nausea” and became convinced she had “chosen the wrong man.”

In her June 2025 deposition, Sebold testified that she knew before she spoke to officers or the prosecutor, Gail Uebelhoer, that she had gotten the lineup selection wrong. But she also testified that “there was no way for me to be sure at that time, and then certain things happened that kept reinforcing” that she had picked the wrong man, she said, including a look of disappointment from a detective and Uebelhoer’s remarks to her.

These distinctions matter because if police or prosecutors influenced Sebold, it could constitute misconduct. And what happened in those moments is particularly relevant because the prosecution made no attempt to pause the case or investigate further after the failed identification.

Uebelhoer had Sebold write an affidavit in which she explained that she picked the man who had been standing next to Broadwater because he was looking at her. They looked “almost identical,” she stated in the affidavit. Uebelhoer then told her, according to “Lucky,” that she had been duped by Broadwater, who had requested that another prisoner be included in the lineup because all the others differed from him noticeably in height or weight. “He uses that friend or that friend uses him, in every lineup they do,” Uebelhoer said. (Both men maintain they had never been in a lineup before. Uebelhoer declined to be interviewed by ProPublica. In a 2025 deposition, she testified that she had little memory of the Broadwater case.)

Sebold’s memoir later became a bestseller, and through a tangled series of events that began when producers decided to make a film version of the memoir, the book ultimately helped lead to Broadwater’s exoneration in 2021.

After his conviction was vacated, Broadwater sued the state of New York for wrongful imprisonment. The state agreed to pay $5.5 million in March 2023 to settle the case. The city of Syracuse and its surrounding county, by contrast, have so far resisted Broadwater’s claims in a separate lawsuit alleging that they violated his constitutional rights through a malicious prosecution.

Broadwater’s attorneys contend that the detective and prosecutor engaged in misconduct by making “false and highly suggestive statements to [Sebold] that led her to identify Mr. Broadwater in court,” and then kept those statements to themselves, which further undermined his defense.

That’s where Gershman comes in. As author of a textbook called “Prosecutorial Misconduct,” he is one of the nation’s foremost experts on the subject. The textbook catalogs the ways prosecutors can abuse their powers. He has also warned prosecutors to be wary of eyewitness identifications, citing them as “the largest single source of wrongful convictions.”

I had previously interviewed Gershman for a series I wrote on prosecutors who suffered no consequences when they withheld evidence or committed other transgressions. It seemed natural that he’d have insights on the Broadwater case.

When I spoke to Gershman in August 2024, I sent him the transcript of the original trial and the motions to vacate Broadwater’s conviction and asked if he could help me identify whether there were any elements of prosecutorial misconduct.

After he reviewed the materials (and also read a lengthy New Yorker story about the case), Gershman seemed beside himself. He told me that he had never seen anything quite like it in his 60-year legal career. “I can’t think of a case where a prosecutor has so clearly manipulated the witness into testifying against the person accused of a crime,” he said. “I haven’t seen anything so blatant; so grotesque as what I see here.”

That was 2024. Then came his assignment for the city and county and his 2025 report. (Gershman said he notified them at the outset that he had spoken to me.)

In his 2025 report, Gershman wrote that Uebelhoer had merely “expressed her opinions” about the lineup and was under no obligation to disclose what she said to the defense. She “behaved properly and professionally, and there is nothing in the record that could remotely be used to undermine her integrity and professionalism.”

When I called Gershman recently to ask about his reversal, he insisted that he knew “absolutely nothing about the case” when we first talked and had no recollection of reading the transcript. He noted that he had not yet read Sebold’s memoir at the time of our conversation.

His thinking, he said, had evolved as he studied the case more closely. Most important, he said, Sebold hadn’t yet testified in a deposition for Broadwater’s suit. “I don’t think it’s fair to say that I may have made contradictions between what we talked about way back then and what I later learned,” he said.

His new opinion fixates on the portion of Sebold’s 2025 testimony where she said she recognized her erroneous lineup pick on her own. In our most recent conversation, Gershman dismissed the account Sebold gave in her memoir and downplayed the parts of her testimony that were more ambiguous.

In Gershman’s view today, Uebelhoer’s remarks had no impact on Sebold or the verdict. Anything that the prosecutor or officers said after the lineup was “totally, almost, gratuitous. It didn’t have any bearing on her identification,” Gershman said. He noted that Sebold was asked at trial about her botched identification.

A few hours after our interview last week, Gershman called me again, unprompted. He offered what seemed like another zigzag. This time, he told me that Uebelhoer did, in fact, commit misconduct, but that it hadn’t affected the outcome.

When I pointed out that his report explicitly stated that the “prosecution engaged in no misconduct,” he said he now wanted to qualify that: “The prosecutors did not engage in misconduct, as I see it, which prejudiced the defendant’s constitutional rights. That’s what I intended to say.” As he summarized it, “She shouldn’t have said what she said, but it didn’t matter.” (Deeper in his report, he also referred to the statements from the detective and prosecutor as “irrelevant and incompetent.”)

Gershman emphasized that he had been asked to assess legality, not ethics. His assignment, he said, was to ascertain whether Uebelhoer should’ve disclosed her remarks to Broadwater’s lawyers before trial, not to render a judgment on whether it was appropriate to make them.

“I took a legal position that they didn’t have to be disclosed because they didn’t constitute Brady evidence,” he said, referring to the landmark Supreme Court ruling Brady v. Maryland, which requires prosecutors to disclose favorable evidence to the accused.

“I don’t do this for the money,” Gershman testified in his deposition, explaining that he was paid $10,000 for the assignment. “I do this because I’m interested in this kind of work. I’m an educator.”

Should Broadwater’s civil suit ever reach trial, Gershman will likely be questioned about his evolving positions. If that happens, one challenge will be to convince a jury that his current view is more believable than his previous one.

The post How a Paid Expert Reversed His View of a Notoriously Flawed Prosecution in the Rape of a Bestselling Author appeared first on ProPublica.

Dallas-area Democrats are demanding that Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton be investigated for illegal voting after ProPublica and The Texas Tribune revealed that he has repeatedly voted while registered at an address where he appears to no longer live.

In a complaint filed Tuesday, the Collin County Democratic Party asked the Texas secretary of state to investigate whether Paxton committed election fraud by voting in the May primary runoff. Paxton beat longtime incumbent John Cornyn in that race, securing the Republican Party’s nomination for U.S. Senate.

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Ken Paxton Vowed to Crack Down on “Illegal Voting.” He May Have Violated Texas Election Law.

Mary Higbe, vice chair of the Collin County Democratic Party, noted in the complaint that Paxton’s office, as recently as February, warned voters that “it is illegal to misrepresent your residence on election records.”

“For someone who’s made a stand against voter fraud, it’s unconscionable (yet not surprising) that Paxton engages in this behavior,” Higbe wrote. She added, “I ask that he be held to the same standards he wishes to hold others to.”

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reported last week that Paxton has voted six times in the past two years while registered at an address in Collin County where he previously lived with his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton.

Paxton moved out of the Collin County home in June 2024 and has not returned, according to a divorce filing by his wife and a source close to the Paxton family. It is unclear where Paxton has lived for the past two years, but reporting by ProPublica and the Tribune has linked him to a home in neighboring Denton County since February.

Three election officials told ProPublica and the Tribune that Paxton may have broken state election law, which requires voters to be registered where they live. Voters may temporarily cast ballots using an address where they do not reside, so long as they intend to return. The experts said it is unclear whether Paxton could make such an argument given his ongoing public and contentious divorce.

The day after Collin County Democrats filed the complaint, the Texas Democratic Party issued a news release that accused Paxton of ignoring “bombshell voter fraud accusations.”

It’s unclear what will happen with the complaint. Under the current system, the secretary of state conducts an “initial review and, if appropriate, refers it to the Office of the Attorney General,” said Alicia Pierce, spokesperson for Secretary of State Jane Nelson, whose last day in the position is Friday. Pierce did not respond to a question about whether the office would handle a complaint against Paxton differently. She instead pointed to the state law that requires the secretary of state to “promptly” refer complaints to the attorney general if “there is reasonable cause to suspect that criminal conduct occurred.”

Paxton’s situation seems to meet that threshold, and the attorney general should seek outside help, given the conflict of interest in investigating himself, said San Antonio election lawyer Joaquin Gonzalez, who previously led the voting rights program at the Texas Civil Rights Project.

“The ethical and sort of best practice would be for the attorney general’s office to hire an independent special investigator to look into the complaint,” Gonzalez said.

Paxton did not answer questions from the newsrooms in early July about his voter registration and residency.

Neither he nor the attorney general’s office responded to questions about the complaint or how they would handle the case should the secretary of state refer it to his office.

Paxton campaign spokesperson Madison Cercy sent the newsrooms a broad statement unrelated to Paxton’s voter registration that accused the “political elite” and reporters of digging through the attorney general’s private life to “draw the most damning conclusion.” The campaign did not answer a question about Cercy’s previous statements to other news outlets that Paxton “is a lawful, registered Texas voter in full compliance with the law.”

Higbe said in an interview that the complaint tests Texas’ system of checks and balances, adding that this is “an opportunity to see if that system still works.” Still, she said she doubts the attorney general would permit a fair investigation of his own conduct.

“But pointing out hypocrisy from the state’s top cop is necessary,” Higbe said.

The post Texas Democrats Ask for Investigation Into Ken Paxton After Our Reporting Found He May Have Violated Election Law appeared first on ProPublica.

The Department of Homeland Security is investigating a sophisticated network of scammers who target people caught in immigration proceedings, bilking them of their savings and causing some to be deported, following a ProPublica report that complaints of such fraud doubled under the second administration of President Donald Trump.

Homeland Security Investigations, the subagency known for tracking international crimes such as human trafficking, has asked about specific cases detailed in the story, including the tale of a woman who, fearful of Trump’s nationwide immigration sweeps, enlisted someone she thought would help her keep her legal status. After the scammers got her money and caused her to miss a court date, she was deported to Nicaragua.

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Fear and Opportunity: Immigration Scams Surged as Trump’s Sweeps Lured Desperate People to Eager Defrauders

That was one of thousands of cases in which scammers lured their marks through social media posts and sent them through fake court hearings and other official-looking steps, charging large sums along the way. Now, the federal government is ramping up its efforts to track the scams, according to sources involved in the investigation.

A DHS statement said the agency was “declaring an all-out war” on the scammers.

“Immigration scammers contribute to a lawless environment, undermining our immigration system and posing risks to national security and public safety,” the statement said.

DHS is looking for URLs, WhatsApp numbers and identifying information on the payment app Zelle that might trace back to scammers, said sources knowledgeable about the inquiry. The department’s investigation is ramping up as such scams skyrocket.

ProPublica analyzed Federal Trade Commission data and found that victims and advocates reported at least $94.4 million was stolen over five years. The more than 6,200 complaints included everything from fake Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents demanding personal details and threatening deportation to fraudsters asking international students for money by exploiting their visa status.

Scammers often pretend to be lawyers offering ways to avoid in-person court hearings, taking advantage of anxieties among even lawful residents after ICE officers began rounding up people during immigration proceedings.

Experts say the scammers often advertise on places such as Facebook and TikTok before shifting the conversation to the encrypted messaging platform WhatsApp, asking for money in exchange for real-looking immigration filings. Sometimes known as “notario fraud,” these scams often rely on a mistranslation of the word “notary,” which implies legal credentials in many Latin American countries.

In recent weeks, agencies including the New York Department of State, Florida Bar and local police departments issued warnings about these scams. The American Bar Association, which has also warned about impersonators, has recently been in contact with DHS investigators.

In South Florida, immigration attorney Angel Leal encountered hundreds of AI-generated videos of his likeness offering aid on WhatsApp. His office had to hire an anti-piracy agency to remove the content and over 6,000 fake profiles, according to local news reports.

The videos, hundreds across Instagram, are strikingly realistic. “Leal” sits on an office chair, his facial hair and expressions matching that of the real attorney. The AI-generated figure speaks fluent Spanish with enthusiastic hand gestures, a potted plant or mug in the foreground and a law degree behind him. Slight details betray the ruse: some mouth movements don’t match the words, gibberish text appears on documents and objects meld together.

Advocates and law enforcement say people targeted should document all ads, text conversations and payment information. And DHS warns consumers to be wary of lawyers advertising directly on social media, operating on WhatsApp and taking payments over Zelle.

In April, ProPublica spoke to several victims who attended fake court hearings via WhatsApp, recounting their stories to “agents” wearing phony government uniforms. Spanish speakers are the primary targets, experts say, and the scammers often pretend to be affiliated with prominent advocacy groups such as Catholic Charities USA, which has been inundated with reports of fraudsters using their brand to find potential marks.

“Directly reaching out to people via an ad or via WhatsApp and asking for money over Zelle, that is not something Catholic Charities agencies would ever do,” said Kevin Brennan, vice president for media relations at Catholic Charities USA.

Such groups have found it difficult to get imposter ads and accounts removed. Even when they do, it’s cheap and easy for scammers to create new websites and accounts.

“It’s Whac-a-Mole,” said Charity Anastasio of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, another group whose staff and image have been impersonated.

The post DHS Plans “All-Out War” on Immigration Scammers as Fraud Complaints Double appeared first on ProPublica.

If you’re considering sending a child to private school, you’ve likely seen some glossy photos and lofty mission statements. But marketing brochures and admissions websites rarely tell you the bad stuff — like a principal with a concerning history, lawsuits filed by families, or financial instability that could shutter a school in the middle of the school year.

Parents have told us they assume authorities conduct safety and quality checks of private schools like they would for public ones. Our reporting shows that is often not the case. Many states take a hands-off approach, essentially leaving it to you to figure out if a school has problems. Advocates for systems that send public money to private schools have said the best accountability check on private schools is that families can leave if they are dissatisfied.

This is why our team at ProPublica — a nonprofit newsroom focused on investigative journalism in the public interest — has spent months digging into the expanding private school landscape. We’ve used data, public records, court cases and countless interviews to investigate hundreds of schools, and we’ve uncovered some with serious issues. These include a school in Arkansas that’s still operating after its founder was accused of running a “makeshift ‘Fight Club,’” and a former superintendent fired for mismanaging charter school money in the Midwest who was able to receive public funds in Florida. 

(The Arkansas school founder did not respond to interview requests and questions from ProPublica, and the school’s new education director said the founder is no longer involved in school operations. The former charter school superintendent told a reporter she had acted with board approval and spent money on kids and to develop and retain staff, saying auditors created a “false narrative” of her actions.)

We’ve learned from experience that it’s difficult to piece together a complete picture of any school, even if you’re an investigative reporter. Some states have stronger laws and provide better information than others. But we’ve also found that no matter where you live, there are free public records, databases and verification techniques that can prove useful. We’ve written this guide to pass on a few lessons we’ve learned. We hope it will help you spot red flags and make informed decisions for your family.

If you end up finding something interesting in your research, please let us know. We’re still reporting!

How do I begin?

Where you live will determine what private school records are available. Before starting to examine a specific school, it’s good to get a sense of local regulations. 

• Check your state’s education agency website. You can find a link through the U.S. Department of Education. Note that states may refer to private schools as “nonpublic” or “independent” schools, and some state education agencies have no authority over private schools. If your state has a page on private schools — like these ones from Pennsylvania, Tennessee, New Hampshire and Florida — give it a read. Look for school lists, the types of schools available in your state, and any relevant regulations mentioned.  
• Take a look at what information schools need to report. EdChoice, a group that advocates for voucher systems and other programs that make public money available for private education, has a useful guide to some of the requirements schools must meet to open in each state. This can give you an initial sense of what your state is and is not asking schools to report. 
• Look at voucher rules. If your state offers public money to private school attendees through vouchers, savings accounts or tax credits, check to see if those programs set additional rules for schools. EdChoice has a list of program names. Here’s an example of a voucher-specific state website for Indiana. 

Who runs this private school?

It’s important for you to know who makes the decisions about a school’s operations. This could be the principal, or it might be a different person or a board. The school could also be run by a larger organization. To find out:

• See if your state education department has a directory. Some places, including North Carolina, Texas and Florida, maintain directories of private schools that name each school’s main contact. Not all states collect or provide such information. 
• Look up the business registration. This can show when a school was founded and by whom, and whether it has changed its name. You can locate registrations by visiting OpenCorporates, which gathers this information on many businesses across states.
  
  In some cases, the school may not register as an independent entity because it operates as part of a larger organization, such as a church. Be aware that the school may also have a legal name that differs from the name it is known by, or it may use a company to help manage its paperwork, in which case you may see that company’s name listed rather than the school administrator’s.  
• Look for employee reviews. Some schools have a profile on an employment website like Glassdoor, where workers can post reviews. It’s worth searching there to try to get a sense of school culture, but keep in mind that anonymous reviews should not be considered verified information.
• Search for news articles. Once you have names of some administrators, Google them to find news articles or references to their history, being mindful that if someone has a common name, you might get results about other people. Basic as it may seem, this type of search has been one of the most powerful tools behind our investigations. In 2024, we reported on a private school founder whose prior charter school had its charter revoked — a fact that had been previously reported in the news. 

Who will be teaching my student?

The requirements — if any exist — for becoming a private school teacher vary by state. ProPublica recently reported on an example of a woman who pled no contest to felony child abuse in Florida and lost her teaching license, but was still able to then open a private school. Community members called attention to her history, which was findable online. 

• Identify names. Look for teachers listed on the school’s website or its social media accounts, such as Facebook or LinkedIn. It’s also good to directly ask the school for teachers’ names, as online information could be outdated. 
• Examine certifications. Check your state’s teacher licensure database to see whether someone is certified and what subjects or areas they are qualified to teach, including special education and gifted endorsements. International Schools Services has a list of these databases, but check your state’s education agency website to see if they offer anything more up to date.
  
  Some state voucher programs require at least some school employees to be certified. For instance, Ohio requires principals of schools participating in its scholarship program to be licensed. In other states, there are no such private school certification requirements. Further, private schools in some places, like Utah and Arizona, are not legally required to fingerprint teachers or run criminal background checks before hiring them. 
• Find employment histories. You may be able to find teachers’ resumes on LinkedIn or through their own personal sites. If you can find names of schools they previously worked at, search for their names in conjunction with those schools. The social media accounts for prior schools might also help you learn more about them. 
  
  You’ll also want to Google for news articles that mention them, bearing in mind that common names might mean you get results for other people. Consider putting quotation marks around names to search for them as exact phrases, and use city or state names and the subjects the person teaches to help narrow your search results. 
• Check for past discipline. If an employee does have a license to teach, you may be able to determine whether they have ever been disciplined by the state. In some cases, this information is listed in the same database as their license information, but in other states, you’ll need to look for a separate disciplinary database, like this one in Arizona, to get full details on disciplinary actions. Texas also maintains a list of teachers who are ineligible to be hired at public schools. Not all states make disciplinary information accessible to the public, and it can be challenging to get details on cases, as ProPublica and KQED have reported on in California. 

Is the private school financially stable?

If a school has money trouble and closes, it could leave you in the lurch midyear. Some states require private schools participating in voucher programs to demonstrate some form of financial soundness. If a state doesn’t require such information, it can be difficult for families to gain visibility into a school’s financial situation. 

• Locate nonprofit filings. Many private schools operate as nonprofits. Depending on their size, they may need to file annual financial information with the IRS. ProPublica maintains a database of such filings called the Nonprofit Explorer. These can be daunting to review, but they can offer some basic information: For example, in prior years, was the school generally bringing in enough money to cover its costs? You can assess this at a high level by comparing whether its revenue was greater than its expenses. Schools operating at a loss for multiple years could be at risk of closure.
  
  Additionally, such filings show how much some of the highest-paid employees of an organization are making. Is most of the school’s income going toward one person’s salary? Does the school cover its costs through tuition, or is it reliant on donations? Does the school have debt from investments like purchasing a building? Does it spend substantial chunks of revenue on outside vendors?
  
  ProPublica and The Texas Tribune used nonprofit filings to report on conflicts of interest at private schools in Texas. For example, the newsrooms found at least six private schools that awarded contracts to companies with ties to their board members.

How can I assess the quality of the education?

• Look for accreditation. Accreditation is meant to provide an outside assessment of whether a school is meeting certain educational standards. It can affect college applications and whether a school is eligible to receive public money through vouchers. If a school does not name an accreditor on its website or it isn’t reported in your state’s directory (such as Florida’s), you may need to ask directly whether it is accredited and by which organization.
  
  Not all private schools are accredited and not all accrediting agencies are equally rigorous. Some accreditors may visit the school in person, while others only use virtual site visits. If a school claims to be accredited by an agency, check the website for the accreditor to confirm the school is listed and in good standing. Here are examples of such directories. Where possible, ask the school if you can see any accreditation review reports, which assess the learning environment. Here’s an example from a Catholic school in Nebraska. 
• Consider enrollment and staffing. Some state education departments, like California’s, collect and report this information for certain schools. 
• Look for retention data. One indicator of whether families are happy with a school is whether they choose to stay from year to year. This information is not readily available in most places, but you can ask a school whether voucher users who were eligible chose to return. 

How will my student’s learning be assessed?

Under federal law, public schools are required to assess student performance in reading, math and science and must inform parents about the results. There’s no such federal law for private schools.

• Identify testing requirements. In 2024, the Education Commission of the States logged testing requirements for states’ voucher programs. Voucher advocacy group EdChoice has also collected such information for each state. Note that legislatures are actively shaping state programs and these requirements may change over time. 
• Check for posted test results. While some voucher programs, like North Carolina’s, require participating private schools to administer nationally standardized tests (meaning you can compare your student to other test-takers), the results of such tests are not usually posted online for prospective families.
  
  There are a few exceptions. For example, in Ohio and Indiana, you can look up a private school and see whether test-takers demonstrated proficiency in core subjects. In Arkansas, you can see how students performed on tests on average for each school. Wisconsin posts annual report cards for private schools participating in the state’s voucher program, using test scores and other measures to gauge whether the school is meeting expectations.
• Contact the school. If this information is not readily available where you live, you can ask a school about any tests it administers. 

Has this school been sued?

If something goes wrong at a private school, families may turn to the courts. The existence of a lawsuit or complaint does not confirm wrongdoing, but suits can help you learn more about other people’s experiences and potential concerns. We’ve found examples of court cases showing criminal history, broken financial contracts and complaints from prior employees. 

You might also find lawsuits where schools are the ones pursuing families, which can give you a lens into how they handle enrollment contracts. For instance, The Washington Post reported on cases of schools suing families over tuition disputes. 

• Locate cases and documents. Lawsuits might be filed in state, local or federal courts. If you navigate to your state and then county on the website BRB, you can see what records may be searchable in your location. Some states like Texas, Kansas and Georgia have court databases that let you search for free across multiple jurisdictions. CourtListener provides another avenue for checking federal court cases. Depending on where you live, there may be a way to search court cases from home, or you might need to call the local clerk or visit a courthouse. Look for judges’ orders and jury verdicts, which can be useful to see how a court weighed claims.
  
  Lawsuits are notoriously difficult to track down, as cases might be filed under multiple relevant names or locations. Try searching the school’s name, the name of the school’s leaders and teachers and any other names you can find.
• Keep context in mind. On the flip side, the lack of lawsuits doesn’t mean things are operating perfectly. Lawsuits usually cost money to file, and some private school contracts may prevent families from suing. You can ask the school if they have any such clause in the agreements that families sign. 

How does the school’s student body compare to the community? 

If you are trying to get a sense of the student body of a school, check ProPublica’s Private School Demographics database. This data is based on the federal Private School Universe Survey, which is voluntary, so not all schools have participated. Note that the survey is only conducted every two years, so the information may not be current. Our database also compares private schools’ demographics to those of their local public school districts. 

Some state departments of education, like Louisiana’s, also maintain demographic data by school. 

School handbooks may also provide information on whether a school serves all students or may exclude some groups, like those with disabilities or LGBTQ+ parents from admissions.

What have other families said about this school?

In investigative reporting, there is no substitute for talking to people. As you try to vet a private school, one of the best resources will be past and current families or alumni. 

• Check for online reviews. It’s always worth checking for reviews from past families on Google or on the school’s Facebook page. Also check Niche and GreatSchools. Use a critical eye when reading. People posting may not need to confirm their identity, might have no connection to the school or could even be school employees. 
• Look at social media. Check your community’s local social media pages, such as Facebook and Nextdoor, for additional comments. Search for the school’s name in WhatsApp groups and on Reddit. 
• Understand what families are and aren’t allowed to say. Some schools put their handbooks and admissions policies online. Read through these and see if they have rules about how enrolled families are allowed to speak about the school on social media. You’ll want to know if a school bars parents and guardians from sharing criticism. 
• Ask people who work with families. If your child has a disability and you work with advocates, therapists or other specialists, you could see what they’ve heard about the schools you’re considering.

Could government agencies have records available to the public? 

Even in states that do not regulate private schools, families may turn to the government when things go wrong, creating records you might be able to locate. 

• Look for federal documents. It’s worth checking with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which fields discrimination-related claims from across the country, to see if there have been any complaints (though the agency has stopped posting them online). This would only pertain to certain private schools that have received federal dollars. You might also find inspection information from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. 
• Ask the state to see complaints. You could reach out to your state’s education agency and request any documented complaints it has received regarding a school by making a public records request. Arkansas, for example, maintains a hotline and an email address where people can report concerns about suspected financial misconduct.
  
  Or there may be another department that would take complaints. For example, Colorado directs people to the Attorney General’s Consumer Fraud Unit.
  
  Records requests can take some time to process, and there may be a cost associated with asking for such documents. You can learn more about asking for public records from MuckRock.
• Consider unique state records. Your state may also provide additional procedural documents. For example, in Georgia, you can see if a school is regularly conducting and reporting fire drills. Or if Florida tries to remove a school from scholarship eligibility and an owner appeals the decision, you might find records through the state’s Division of Administrative Hearings.

The post How to Research Private Schools Like an Investigative Reporter appeared first on ProPublica.

A decade ago, the state of Florida stripped a teacher of her license for sexual abuse of a 16-year-old boy. Last year, she opened a private school there with ease. 

Her name and photo were on her new school’s website and details of her case were easy to find with an online search.

The state also knew that a transplanted Midwesterner had been fired from her Cincinnati charter school, following felony charges related to misuse of public funds, and had been banned from teaching or running schools in Ohio. Yet Florida did not stop her from starting a private school and collecting public money.

As private schools proliferate in Florida and across the country, fueled by taxpayer dollars, states are choosing not to closely regulate who is operating them or to oversee student safety and achievement, a ProPublica investigation found.

The backgrounds of school founders and employees often simply don’t matter. In Arizona, for example, “state law prohibits our department from a role overseeing private schools,” a spokesperson for the state Department of Education told ProPublica.

In 2024, Arizona’s top education official lauded Mike Tyson, the heavyweight boxer who served time in prison for rape, for his involvement in launching a private school that bore his name, calling Tyson “a champion of education.”

Some states, including Arizona, cannot say how many private schools exist or where they operate despite spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on voucher-style programs. The federal government also does not keep a comprehensive accounting. 

ProPublica analyzed data from 13 states of varying sizes that do publish private school directories and offer public funding to these types of schools, and found that at least 1,500 more are listed today than were five years ago — bringing the total to more than 9,600. The numbers provide a rare look into the growth catalyzed by friendly legislatures and government money, while public school districts are losing students and closing schools. 

When public money is available, most private schools take advantage of that funding. In several states, all or nearly all students at some private schools pay tuition with public dollars. For instance, public funds subsidized 99% of all private school students in Iowa this past school year, the third year the program was available. 

An average of 100 new private schools have launched in Florida each of the last five school years. West Virginia, a state with fewer school-age students than are enrolled in Chicago Public Schools, has gained about 40 new private schools. 

And in the three years since Arkansas began allowing students to get about $7,000 annually toward tuition, about 120 new private schools opened. ProPublica detailed the consequences of the rapid growth and meager oversight in Arkansas in a previous story, spotlighting a school where students were subjected to menial labor and violence. The owner there was convicted of permitting child abuse, a felony. The state has said student safety is its top priority, but the school remains eligible to receive state money after a temporary stop.

Many States Across the Country Have Seen Rapid Growth in Private Schools

It has been a conservative goal for decades to diminish the role of public schools and privatize American education. A surge in private-school funding programs since the pandemic represents significant progress toward that goal. Now about 30 states have some version of a program that allows families to spend public money on private school tuition. 

EdChoice, a group that advocates for these plans, estimated that more than 1.5 million students are taking advantage of them. And that number is expected to rise further as a federal tax-credit program signed into law by President Donald Trump provides the first-ever federal plan to fund K-12 private schools.

The vouchers have allowed some students to access private or religious schools they previously could not afford. But others — often students with disabilities — are finding that they’re excluded from private schools, which, unlike public schools, do not have to admit them. So they’re unable to exercise the educational freedom politicians have touted. 

Even when every single student in a private school pays tuition with public money, that school still operates without the same accountability applied to public schools, where everything from finances to curriculum to student achievement is open to public inspection. The contrasting standards vex those worried for the future of public education. 

“I’ve got the West Virginia codebook, which governs public education, which is over 1,300 pages long,” said Paul Hardesty, the president of the West Virginia Board of Education and a critic of the state’s permissive private school regulations. 

“It’s thicker than two Sears catalogs. Rules that govern home school and private school in West Virginia — those will fit on an index card.”

So when things go badly inside the opaque world of many private schools, it can be left to parents, police, journalists and amateur sleuths to find and expose wrongdoing. With state officials lacking oversight authority in Florida, for instance, concerned parents and citizens in Citrus County began posting online about the prior sexual misconduct of the founder of Crystal River Learning Academy. 

Even the police chief of the public school system weighed in. Her post included a mug shot of the now-leader of the Crystal River school in an orange jumpsuit. 

She exhorted: “Please do your research!” 

Barns, Go-Karts and Mike Tyson

For many, private school evokes images of elite academies, manicured campuses and plaid Catholic-school uniforms.

“But that’s not the vast majority of private schools,” said Douglas Harris, a Tulane University economist who studies voucher programs and has expressed skepticism that a free-market approach works well for schools. “They’re all over the place and sometimes in places you don’t even realize — they’re not even advertised. It’s important to understanding the potential of where this is and where it is going.”

In this recent expansion, private schools have opened in farms and barns, addiction treatment centers, co-working spaces, people’s homes and parks, ProPublica’s review of 13 states found. A West Virginia family opened a school at the family fun center they operate. It’s next to the waterpark, mini golf course and go-kart track. 

Tiny new Christian schools, often operating in Sunday school spaces in churches, are proliferating. At the same time, small fly-by-night schools have been opened by profiteers and people with problematic pasts or no educational experience. 

And while the majority of American students still attend public schools and the largest share of funding goes to public districts, EdChoice estimated that last year alone, states allocated $10.6 billion to programs that can be used to pay for private schools — a 29% increase over the previous year.

One Michigan-based company that launched last year to encourage churches to tap into public funds refers to these programs in its promotional videos as “God’s new gold mine.”

In Phoenix, the Mike Tyson-branded Tyson Transformational Technologies Academy, operating in a strip mall, was opened as part of a chain of schools for foster children, unhoused or expelled students created by former MMA fighter and WWE wrestler Daniel Puder. 

Tyson lent his name to the academy for $1 a year, has appeared at ceremonies for the school and given motivational speeches to students. “This visionary project reflects Tyson’s commitment to providing quality education and opportunities,” a 2024 news release for the school stated. He was described as a co-founder of the school.

Tuition is free to families: The state of Arizona paid the school $231,973 in fiscal year 2025, according to the state education department.

Puder explained in a podcast interview that his own journey from fighter to motivational speaker to private-school operator began when he and a friend were musing about Puder’s efforts to help address bullying at a local school district.

“My buddy looks at me and I’m like, ‘Dude, the turnover in public schools is crazy,’” Puder said.

“And he’s like, ‘Start a school.’ And I’m like, ‘Jamie, what are you talking about? I’m a special ed kid.’ I’m like, ‘I didn’t graduate college.’ … He’s like, ‘No, start a school.’ I’m like, ‘OK.’” 

In addition to the Tyson academy, Puder now has eight schools in Florida and one in West Virginia, according to the website for ELEV8 School, the umbrella company under which the academies operate. 

After a recent rebranding, the Phoenix school Tyson helped launch is now simply called ELEV8. Puder told ProPublica that Tyson is never left alone with students. ProPublica reached out to Tyson through ELEV8 and his Florida publicist but did not get a response.

In West Virginia, ELEV8’s school advertises that tuition is “completely covered” by the Hope Scholarship, the state’s Education Savings Account program that provides each family with about $5,400 a year in public funds that can be spent on tuition, tutoring or homeschooling supplies. 

Puder’s schools provide tutoring, mentoring and flexible scheduling for teens who may have jobs or are parents themselves. He told ProPublica that he wants to transform lives and guide students to college, trade school or the military. 

Puder has ambitious plans to expand the enterprise, with more schools and related components in real estate, school security, artificial intelligence and school health clinics. He’s sought investors in a variety of forums, including a webinar called “Discover the Investment Model Behind Our State-Funded Private Schools — with Mike Tyson.”

Up until five years ago, states provided an opportunity for only a small segment of students — such as those who have disabilities, come from low-income families or would otherwise attend poorly performing public schools — to tap into public money for private school tuition. West Virginia adopted the nation’s first program to make those funds universally available in 2021 and today, 18 states are inviting any student to partake, regardless of family income or existing private school enrollment.

Once schools are open and accepting tax funds, few states then regulate what is taught, what qualifications employees should have or what funds may be spent on. But it’s not just the oversight that private schools get to avoid. They also are free to adopt policies — such as discriminatory admissions — that public schools cannot.

Several private schools in Ohio and Virginia permit paddling as discipline even though those states outlaw corporal punishment in public schools. As a condition of being tax-exempt, nonprofit private schools must attest that they won’t discriminate based on race, color, or national or ethnic origin. But they’re free to refuse admission to students for a range of other reasons. 

It’s common, for example, for both new and established religious schools to refuse to admit (or to expel) students who say they’re gay, who condone homosexuality or whose parents are gay. One school noted on its website that it is “permitted to discriminate on the basis of religion in accordance with our Statement of Faith.” Many schools decline to enroll students with disabilities. An Alabama school that opened this past fall says it will expel students who have HIV, gonorrhea or syphilis.

Advocates of private-school voucher programs argue against restrictions on how the schools operate and push back against the type of oversight enforced on public schools. They fear that any strings attached to the public money will make many private schools balk at taking it.

“You try to not take the private school system and make it the public school system. Parents are looking for an alternative. They’re looking for something that operates differently and, they hope, serves their child better,” said Patrick Wolf, who studies vouchers and similar funding models at the University of Arkansas. His research often highlights the benefits of the systems.

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This Private School Had Students Scrub Floors and Attack a Fellow Classmate. The State Still Funds It.

Earlier this year, a handful of West Virginia legislators pushed to add some “bumpers” to the program to safeguard public funds. One provision would’ve required private schools accepting public money to give a common standardized test and report results to the county superintendent, allowing more insight into the schools’ educational quality. 

The proposals didn’t pass. And then legislators who had supported them were ousted in the state’s May primaries, rebuked by the pro-voucher governor and then by voters who sided with candidates the governor had backed.

A Conviction, Then a Fresh Start 

The lack of private-school oversight is built straight into the law in most of the states ProPublica studied.

Florida, for example, advertises: “The Florida Department of Education does not have jurisdiction over private schools. Legislative intent not to regulate, control, approve, or accredit private educational institutions, churches, their ministries, religious instruction, freedoms, or rites, is explicit.”

As a result, the state takes few steps to protect students from private school educators with troubled pasts.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been a passionate proponent of “educational freedom” in the state, endorsing an aggressive push to catalyze the growth of private schools. But contacted for this story and asked about the state’s oversight of those schools, his office offered no comment while referring reporters to the Florida Department of Education.

The department responded to questions about the state’s record on regulation with a statement that emphasized it requires schools to conduct background screening for owners and employees who have direct contact with students.  

In addition, ProPublica reached out to four leading lawmakers who were key to Florida’s 2023 bill that extended public money to all families opting for private education. None commented.  

In conducting background research on private schools in Florida, ProPublica discovered that a woman named Lisa Helton running a private school in Tampa was once named Lisa Hamm — the former superintendent of Cincinnati College Preparatory Academy charter school in Ohio.

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State audits alleged that Hamm misspent public funds in Ohio for years, using school funds for extravagant staff development trips, arena suites for students to attend Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber concerts and a Cirque du Soleil show, Nutrisystem weight loss meals for staff lunches, theater tickets and dry cleaning.

She and the school’s treasurer were fired in 2013 after being indicted on 26 felony counts of theft in office, unauthorized use of property, tampering with evidence and tampering with records. Hamm entered into an arrangement where she would accept conviction on three counts of unauthorized use of property while maintaining her innocence and avoiding prison.

After she was sentenced in 2014, then-Ohio Auditor Dave Yost, whose office had investigated Hamm’s spending practices, issued a statement: “This was a looting that would make even a pirate blush, with children and taxpayers as victims. I suppose walking the plank was out of the question. However, the court’s decision will prevent her from ever stealing from students again.”

The state permanently revoked her educator license. Hamm moved to Tampa, Florida, changed her name to Helton — taking a relative’s name — and tried to get a Florida educator license. The state, aware of the misconduct findings in Ohio, granted a temporary one that has since expired.

Helton founded American Education International in 2022 and registered it as a private school with Florida. She said she planned to enroll international students who want to learn English online and earn an American high school diploma. But then Florida homeschoolers tried to enroll, so Helton transformed the business to also offer in-person teaching two days a week for homeschool students out of a sleek coworking space. 

She applied for her school to participate in Florida’s voucher-like program as a tutoring service and was approved.

Step Up For Students, a nonprofit that manages scholarship money distribution for the state, did not know about Helton’s trouble in Ohio, according to a spokesperson. But “we are not aware of any determination by Florida authorities that would have prohibited her from founding or operating the school” and there have been no complaints in Florida about Helton, the spokesperson said. Step Up said it follows statutory requirements in administering funds and reports “any complaints or reports of fraud” to the state education department. 

Over three years, Helton’s business has collected $291,165 in public scholarship funds, Step Up said.

Helton was working on her computer on her back porch when visited by a ProPublica reporter. She said auditors in Ohio created a “false narrative” about her charter school and her actions, and that she took a plea deal only after being exhausted emotionally and financially by a drawn-out investigation. She said she acted with board approval and spent school money on kids and for staff development and incentives to retain valued personnel in a challenging inner-city environment. 

“I have no background issues at all, criminally,” she said, saying her case was “erased after so many years.” There is no longer any public trace of Helton’s criminal case in the Ohio county court system; certain nonviolent cases are allowed to be sealed or expunged after a set amount of time has passed. Helton, who has a doctorate in education, said she is highly skilled and trustworthy.

“The concern is not me,” she said. “It’s people running schools with no educational background.”

The Teacher, the Teen and the Detective

About 80 miles north in Crystal River, Florida, the stir over the local educator who’d lost her license over sexual abuse began in March after a retired detective named Kat Powers posted online — at first, just to her Facebook friends. She used the pseudonym “Petera Falk,” a reference to the actor who played TV detective Columbo. 

She had recognized the name of a woman who’d just opened her own private school in the fall of 2025: Tara Salute. 

“I don’t do a lot of social media, it’s all about grandbabies and recipes for me,” Powers said. But she couldn’t let this go; her colleagues had handled Salute’s case, and she remembered it well. A 40-year-old vice president of the local Little League at the time, Salute in 2012 had been charged with unlawful sexual activity with a minor after a drunken night at her home with her son’s friend, a sophomore in the district where she recently had taught elementary school. After intercourse, the teenager had snapped photos of her naked body on a futon as evidence.

Salute pleaded no contest to a lesser charge of felony child abuse, the state took her educator license, and she served about a year and a half of probation. The judge “withheld” a formal conviction, a form of leniency in Florida. Salute did not respond to repeated outreach by ProPublica for comment. 

When Powers — posting as Falk — came upon the Crystal River Learning Academy’s Facebook page and saw people from the community liking the page and supporting Salute, she was stunned.

“I’m like, how do people forget the background of this woman?” Powers said. “If she’d have gone to Lowe’s or Home Depot, it wouldn’t bother me. But you’re opening a school? That bothered me.”

The detective’s Facebook friends urged her to make her post public, so she did — screenshots of Salute’s court records, her mug shot and her new school photo. The Facebook post tagged news outlets, and soon the Citrus County Chronicle, the local newspaper, wrote a story. 

Following the revelation, the state took action to protect state money. 

The Florida Department of Education found that Crystal River had qualified for scholarship money despite not registering with the state as a private school and after Salute had uploaded someone else’s teaching certificate for her application. It called the use of the license “fraud.”

Crystal River had received a total of $150 at that point for a curriculum packet it sold. Florida’s education commissioner then revoked the school’s eligibility for state funds. 

Opening a school without registering is a misdemeanor under Florida law. Asked how Salute is able to run a school in Florida despite her past and not registering, the state Education Department did not provide a direct answer. Instead, it pointed to the scholarship revocation action as evidence of its oversight. 

On its website, however, Crystal River still is providing information on the Step Up scholarship for parents while inviting students to enroll for next school year. Tuition for middle and high school students will be $12,000.

In May, Crystal River’s Facebook page posted a photo of Salute posing between two teens at a local high school graduation ceremony. 

“CRLA is incredibly proud to have been part of your journey,” the congratulatory message read.

The post Barns, Go-Karts and Strip Malls: The Wild West of Private Schools That Collect Taxpayer Dollars appeared first on ProPublica.

The FBI has explored using artificial intelligence to assess the validity of signatures on tens of thousands of mail-in ballot envelopes seized from Fulton County, Georgia, the latest push in the Trump administration’s unprecedented reinvestigation of the 2020 vote.

The effort, according to internal communications reviewed by ProPublica and an agency tech specialist familiar with the work, focuses on comparing signatures on ballot envelopes with signatures on other election documents, such as registration forms. President Donald Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

In particular, he has repeatedly claimed that there was voter fraud in Georgia, where he lost to Joe Biden by just 11,779 votes. In January, the FBI raided Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, collecting about 700 boxes of election materials, including about 150,000 mail-in ballots, of which roughly 116,000 went for Biden. Trump is set to deliver a speech Thursday about national election security and voting machine vulnerabilities, but it is unclear whether he will address the Fulton County investigation.

The signature-matching initiative was under discussion as recently as late June, but its current status is uncertain. A White House spokesperson declined to answer questions from ProPublica, referring them to the FBI. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

The effort comes at the same time as the FBI has mandated that 260 analysts be redirected from field offices nationwide to focus on the Fulton County probe, according to an agency memo reviewed by ProPublica. The New York Times and MS Now previously reported the memo. MS Now has reported that some FBI analysts have been fired rather than work on the effort. Their work also includes comparing a spreadsheet of 175,000 voters with a commercial database to see, among other things, if they are still alive.

Whether done by people or technology, the accuracy of signature matching remains controversial. 

Experts have raised serious concerns in legal cases and after analyzing recent election results about how accurately signature matching can identify voter fraud through practices like examining the size and slant of letters made in different circumstances. 

The FBI technology specialist told ProPublica that the bureau has technology to compare images and that if it starts with a large enough dataset, then a signature-matching analysis could be “somewhat accurate.” 

Ultimately, the tech specialist said, its results would turn on the threshold set for evidence of fraud: “It’s up to the builder of the system to define the guidelines.”

Some FBI staffers developing that strategy are trying to mitigate the political pressure to prove fraud in Fulton County by highlighting the limitations of broad signature analysis, arguing that though signature comparisons have been used in individual voter fraud investigations, they haven’t been done on this scale, according to the source. But agency leaders have continued to push forward. 

There are grave concerns within the FBI that the results of the examination will reflect political influence, building on previous efforts by the administration to break longstanding guardrails meant to keep the federal government from interfering with elections. “Everyone is of the opinion that, whether they find anything or not, they are going to continue” to pursue proof of fraud, the source said. 

Signature matching attracted controversy during and after the 2020 election and COVID-19 pandemic when more Democrats than Republicans used mail-in ballots. Trump promoted false claims that Georgia officials’ failure to match signatures on mail-in ballots had led to his loss by allowing fraud. “Must have signature check on envelopes now,” he wrote in late November 2020 on the social media platform Twitter, now X. “Far more votes than needed for flip” of the election to him. 

Conservative lawmakers then pushed strict signature-matching laws across America, including Georgia’s Election Integrity Act of 2021, which they justified by pointing to “many electors concerned about allegations of rampant voter fraud,” including “subjective signature-matching requirements.” The bill replaced signature matching with stricter forms of verification, such as requiring mail-in voters to provide their driver’s license number or copies of licenses. 

While signature-matching procedures vary by jurisdiction, officials typically have only seconds to make a determination about whether a signature on a mail-in ballot envelope is the same as in other government records, sometimes relying on nothing more than comparing the shape or proportions of letters. Research shows that signatures can change over time, as people age or experience health events such as a stroke, and signatures made in differing circumstances can vary, such as one performed carefully in a government office versus one dispatched quickly on a mail-in ballot envelope at home. 

Investigations by journalism organizations and research have shown that signature matching leads to disproportionately high levels of rejected ballots for voters of color, as well as those who are new, young, old, politically unaffiliated or disabled, for varied reasons. Signature-matching efforts sometimes disqualify more legitimate than illegitimate ballots. A political scientist testifying as an expert witness in 2020 for a lawsuit challenging an Ohio signature-matching law said his analysis suggested that 32 legitimate ballots were blocked for every illegitimate one. 

“Signatures are one of the most difficult forensic sciences, and I don’t think AI is going to be able to do this,” said Linton Mohammed, a former president of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners, a professional association for forensic document examiners. “Signatures vary — unlike DNA or fingerprints.” 

A 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences examining the state of forensic sciences found, “The scientific basis for handwriting comparisons needs to be strengthened.” 

Defenders of signature matching say that computer analysis has become increasingly accurate and provides a practical and necessary check against fraud. However, even they caution that the technique is only as good as the people using it.

Signature-matching technology is now good enough to “make your head explode,” said David Gerber, the senior vice president at ParaScript, a company that sells such technology to banks and numerous entities conducting elections. But he still suggests that trained human specialists should be prepared to review about 10% of the cases as a check on the machines. He said signature matching in elections needs “the right technology with the right people managing the process. Both of those pieces are equally important. If you have bad people running a bad process, I don’t care how good the technology is.” 

Using AI to examine signatures on ballot envelopes is a relatively new frontier, according to most experts consulted by ProPublica and the FBI tech specialist. The tech specialist said the bureau had discussed how to employ it with experts across the government and weighed whether to use commercial products such as those sold by OpenAI or Anthropic. “This is a new and novel approach” for the bureau, the source said, one reason “they are shopping it around.” 

Gerber, Mohammed and other experts on signature-matching technology said nonspecialized AI software was unlikely to be able to perform accurately enough to do such work. 

Experts said that while an AI system could conceivably offer some advantages over humans, its accuracy would ultimately depend on the quality and quantity of signatures available for comparison. Internal communications reviewed by ProPublica suggest the FBI analysis would compare only the signature on a voter’s registration form with the one on the ballot envelope — a limited sample that experts said would significantly increase the likelihood of discrepancies. The source said, however, the analysis could also incorporate additional records, such as driver’s license signatures. Certified specialists and high-confidence computer systems for industries like banking typically compare numerous signatures. 

“There’s a high degree of noise” in the materials the FBI has, said Max Palmer, a professor at Boston University who has studied mail-in ballot signature matching. “I’m not sure there’s enough information, enough signal, to do better.”  

Conservative activists have long lobbied for a closer examination of 2020 mail-in ballots from Fulton County, claiming in a report that local election officials “willfully” ignored signature verification procedures. Their claims were instrumental in leading to the FBI’s ballot seizure in January, ProPublica has reported. 

Reports by an independent monitor and the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit organization working to protect the integrity of elections, concluded the activists’ claims about signature matching and other irregularities were false.

The post FBI Has Looked at Using Questionable AI Tech to Review Signatures on Seized Mail-In Ballots appeared first on ProPublica.

At her private school just beyond the city limits of Jonesboro, Arkansas, Mary “Tracy” Morrison demanded the attention of the 19 students seated on the floor in a circle. She then directed a skinny 13-year-old boy wearing a cartoon Mario shirt to sit in the center.

“Raise your hand if he’s ever been mean to you — ever,” Morrison, the owner, prompted the other middle schoolers, and some hands shot up.

“Most people don’t think you’re a nice kid. You lie. You lie all the time,” she told the boy. She encouraged his classmates to name things they don’t like about him.

Morrison’s voice got louder. She knelt inside the circle just inches from the boy and swatted him. On the head. On the neck. At first he flinched and started to raise his hands to block her. But she snapped at him to keep his arms down: “You don’t have the right!”

“Come over here and put your hands on him, however you want,” Morrison told the students. 

A boy volunteered. “I’ll do it,” he said, and the other students cheered and clapped.

That student entered the circle, looped his arm around the boy’s neck and choked him. Morrison gave him a high-five. The boy in the center cowered. Then other students took turns slapping, pinching and punching the boy. Morrison picked up a footlong plastic cylinder — it resembled a pipe — and thwacked him over and over, calling him a liar.

The attack went on for nearly 40 minutes. At the end, Morrison made the boy apologize to his classmates for mistreating them. Three other school employees were in the room that day in April 2025 but didn’t intervene. The whole thing was captured on video.

Morrison had founded her school, The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain, the year before, soon after Arkansas legislators decided to allow families to use public money for private school tuition through its Education Freedom Account program. 

Delta Institute joined a surge of new private schools in Arkansas, mirroring a national proliferation. New schools are opening at a fast clip as state legislatures set aside more public money for parents to spend at private schools, without meaningful oversight. 

There were about 100 private schools in Arkansas in 2023, state records show. Now there are about 220. That doesn’t count the 100 or so microschools in the mix — a version of the one-room schoolhouse that wasn’t tracked or publicly funded previously.

But even with that boom, Arkansas largely has chosen not to regulate private or microschools or monitor what’s happening inside them. Arkansas is so hands-off that the state only requires that private schools conduct regular fire drills, keep immunization records and have an American flag and a flagpole. It doesn’t review schools’ curriculum or the backgrounds and capabilities of their operators. Anyone is free to open one, including Morrison.

Known to parents and students as Dr. Tracy, she wasn’t a licensed educator and had never run a school before. Her resume says she has a doctorate in occupational therapy and cognitive neuroscience from Washington University in St. Louis. The university said that degree is only in occupational therapy.

The Delta Institute didn’t look much like a school — it operated in a white colonial house set down a gravel driveway off a country road, its bedrooms transformed into classrooms. But it had seemed like the answer that parents of students with disabilities, including autism, were desperately seeking. Families said they put their faith in Morrison, who presented herself as an expert in autism and ADHD. “I am the best,” she texted one parent. 

Morrison did not respond to interview requests and questions from ProPublica. 

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has said she wants to be known as the education governor, and state education officials didn’t respond to specific questions from ProPublica about the state’s oversight of private schools or how it responded to revelations about the Delta Institute. Her spokesperson said the governor championed the state’s Education Freedom Accounts because they give students more and different educational opportunities.

Both the governor’s office and the Arkansas Department of Education emphasized that the state intervenes to ensure students are safe and taxpayer dollars are spent responsibly. “Student safety is ADE’s number one priority,” Education Department spokesperson Kaelin Clay wrote in an email.

The day after Morrison and the children assaulted her son, the boy’s mother walked into the Craighead County Sheriff’s Office to write out a report in neat, looping cursive. It was not the first report about Morrison’s treatment of children at the Delta Institute that the sheriff’s office took.

Another mother had reported abuse about three weeks earlier.

More Money Fuels Growth 

Before Arkansas’ LEARNS Act passed in 2023, creating its voucher-style program, state schools secretary Jacob Oliva promised that “there is going to be accountability for the schools that participate.”  

But the oversight role his department gave itself was related primarily to finances. The department has the power to conduct random financial audits of private schools, mandate that the schools report their tuition and fees and require schools to measure student achievement with tests of their choosing, but little else.

Under pressure to tweak the rules this spring, the department again declined to monitor school quality and tinkered only with how parents can use the funds on items other than tuition, banning them from paying for travel sports teams, for instance. Even that was controversial; some lawmakers argued there should be less government interference. They argue the onus is on parents to decide whether their children are safe and learning, and if they’re not, the families can go somewhere else.

This upcoming school year, Arkansas expects that nearly 55,000 students will use their Education Freedom Accounts for tuition and other expenses. 

With most students getting about $7,000 each, the program cost about $310 million in taxpayer funds this past school year. Most of the students who used EFA money in Arkansas the prior year were already attending private school or being homeschooled, or were just starting kindergarten. Only 12% of participants reported that they’d previously attended a public school. 

When the program began, the department set up a hotline and an email address for people to report suspected fraud or misuse of the EFA funds. About a dozen emails raised concerns about student well-being.

But several complainants told ProPublica that they did not hear from state officials after sharing their concerns. One teacher said she got no response after she emailed in April that students who transferred to her school had been deprived of a “basic education” at the microschool they previously attended, according to state records. She said first and second graders reported that they had spent the majority of their time playing.

Contacted by a ProPublica reporter, she said: “I don’t mind that you are reaching out but it is very concerning and in a way aggravating that I have an investigative reporter reaching out instead of my own state.” She requested that her name not be made public because she works at a different microschool. 

Jazzmin Little said she hasn’t heard back from state officials either, after telling them in February that the school where she sent her two children might be misusing state funds. The department told her it would review the information, according to emails, but she said she heard nothing more. 

“All kinds of red flags I sent to them and they never got back to me,” Little said. “I don’t even know if anyone has looked at it.” The school’s founder confirmed that the Education Department did not reach out to her after receiving the parent’s complaint, which she described as a billing discrepancy. She said the issue would have been resolved sooner if the state had intervened.

In order to accept EFA money, private schools have to agree to meet some requirements, including that they have or are seeking accreditation, have operated for a year and promise to perform background checks and fingerprinting on all employees. (There’s no requirement that employees have no criminal history.) Schools affirm they’ll teach English, math, science and social studies and administer a standardized test of their choosing once a year. There’s no requirement to report students’ individual test scores to the state or to parents.

The bar is lower for microschools, some of which operate like smaller versions of private schools while others provide programs for homeschoolers. They don’t need to be accredited or wait until they’ve been open for a year to get funding.

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The contrast with what is required for public schools is striking. Arkansas’ Education Department monitors public schools, and state law regulates nearly every aspect of them, from teacher qualifications to what’s on district websites. Every district is required to post a tranche of “state-required information” online that must include breakdowns of monthly expenses and even a list of every dyslexia intervention program used. 

State Sen. Bryan King, a Republican, said he supports school choice but said he voted against the LEARNS Act because there wasn’t enough accountability given the amount of public spending. He proposed legislation this spring that would have required all schools receiving EFA funds to administer the same standardized test — and for funding to be tied to student performance on that exam.  

“We can’t afford this and my concerns were about financial responsibility, accountability, transparency, everything about it,” he said. 

The proposal did not advance. King was attacked in the primary this year for being against “education freedom,” and Sanders backed his opponent. King still prevailed.

None of the legislators who were the lead sponsors of the LEARNS Act responded to questions from ProPublica about how the state is overseeing student achievement and safety.

Several Arkansas groups recently tried to get an amendment on the November ballot that would require all schools that accept EFA funds to follow the same rules and minimum academic requirements as public schools. The groups, however, failed to gather enough signatures.

“If you are going to take public money, then you should meet public standards and be publicly accountable for how that money is spent,” said Bill Kopsky, executive director of the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, a nonprofit that was formed in the 1960s and focuses on social justice.

He said the state’s recent voucher expansion has led to “this whole new industry of pop-up, subprime private schools that have almost no regulation. They go into shopping malls or the basements of churches,” he said. 

In the three years of the EFA program, the state has only intervened at two schools, records show. And it’s never permanently blocked a school from taking public money, including at the Delta Institute — even after it became clear that terrible things had happened there.

“You Are in the Biggest Trouble”

Craighead County Sheriff’s Detective David Bailey, a Jonesboro native who patrolled the area often, didn’t even know there was a school set back off the country road.

He discovered the Delta Institute in the winter of 2025 after a student ran off and the school asked for help finding him. He didn’t know it at the time, but police and child-welfare records show the boy had allegedly fled after Morrison sprayed him in the face with water and held his legs down. He jumped out a window, barefoot, to get away.

The Craighead County Sheriff’s Office encountered the school again in March 2025 when Renee Johns, whose children Jacob and Addison went to the Delta Institute, reported abuse there. 

Johns had moved her family to Jonesboro from about an hour away to attend the school. But things had unraveled. Jacob wasn’t getting the therapy he needed, and he and his sister were falling behind academically. But Johns said she was most troubled by a video Morrison had texted her one day to explain why Jacob was being kept after school.

It showed Jacob, a 10-year-old with autism, and two other boys scrubbing the floor and walls inside the school with rags. Morrison berated them: “This doesn’t get to be about fun. Go!”

“Both hands, cleaning!” she barked like a drill sergeant to one boy on his hands and knees. “You’re working like a slug! Get at it! Get at it! You are in the biggest trouble.”

The sheriff’s office alerted child-welfare authorities. Then, three weeks later, a second mother walked in to report her son’s assault within the circle at school. Bailey got a warrant for that video.

Teacher and counselor Ashley Williams was standing by while another employee copied the footage of Morrison berating, hitting and directing other students to assault the 13-year-old boy. Horrified, she excused herself, hustled down the stairs of the house, out to the gravel parking area, and vomited.

Less than 12 hours earlier, Williams had filed a detailed report with welfare authorities based on what some students had told her about Morrison’s “circle time.” She had written, “This is not the first time abuse like this has happened.” Months earlier, she continued, Morrison had taped two children together by their arms.

More came out in Bailey’s interviews with parents and current and former employees and in interviews that child advocates conducted with the students, documents show: allegations of “waterboarding” a child and cutting another’s hair as punishment. Slapping a student. A wooden paddle named Fred.

Some parents, meanwhile, defended Morrison and praised her “unorthodox methods,” according to interviews and police records. 

Morrison worked to keep parents on her side. She texted a large group of staff members, some whose children attended the school, to say she had made a mistake during the “group discussion” but blamed the violence on the students.

She warned that the floor-scrubbing video she had sent Johns would likely be made public and that she and the other employees would be arrested. “You can expect our mug shots on social media,” Morrison said, and apologized for letting everyone down. But she also called it a “witch hunt.”

“My mug shot will have me with a middle finger,” she wrote. 

Flimsy Investigations

Within days of the April 2025 incident that the prosecutor called a “makeshift ‘Fight Club,’” Morrison was charged with 11 felony counts of permitting child abuse and other related crimes. Three other employees were charged with permitting child abuse and failure to report child maltreatment.

The day news broke about Morrison’s arrest, the state Education Department stopped EFA payments to the Delta Institute. Nearly half the students there were using the EFA program to pay tuition, and the school had collected more than $300,000 so far.  

There are no records of a visit to the school or an investigation by the state Department of Education. When asked if the department had gone to The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain, officials did not answer. Instead, a spokesperson said that complaints or suspicious activity triggers a review and “often results in a site visit,” though they declined to say how often that has happened.

Reporters again asked the department directly if it had visited the school. The spokesperson responded: “We have addressed the Developing Brain’s suspension from the EFA program multiple times, including in statements sent to your outlet.”

At Delta, public money flowed again two days after it was stopped. An assistant education commissioner who oversees the EFA program told a colleague he was convinced that the school had implemented “appropriate safeguards,” according to an email. He wrote that Morrison had resigned as the head of the school and a new school board had been formed.

In the three school years of the EFA program, records show, state education officials have temporarily suspended funding to one other school, a Christian-based microschool called Homestead Academy that focuses on outdoor and individualized education. It rents space from a church near Hot Springs. Outside, there’s a playground and hammocks, as well as a red-and-white striped shed painted with “In God we trust” where fireworks are sold in the summer.

Over a month last fall, the state got a series of concerning calls and emails from parents and at least one former teacher, records show.

Some shared safety concerns or described children playing unsupervised in a wooded area. Others shared concerns about insufficient academic instruction. One caller said Homestead felt more like a daycare than an organized school. In the first few months of the school year, 13 of the 46 students withdrew, state records show.

“Please stop” funding the school, one parent pleaded.

Oliva, the state education secretary, heard directly from a Homestead parent who said the school did not follow a curriculum and had not adhered to the education plan for her daughter.

“Why are there not stronger regulations and accountability measures for EFA-funded programs?” she wrote in bold letters. (The parent asked that her name not be used because she works in education and fears retaliation.)

“This sounds like a serious and dire situation,” Oliva wrote back to her. “We will review immediately.” 

A state education employee reached out to Homestead’s owner in late October and told her that the department would be stopping by the next day for a “brief visit.” 

While there, Education Department employees watched students say the Pledge of Allegiance and then observed 10 to 15 minutes of instruction before meeting with owner Lindsey McCollum.  

When asked for student work, progress reports and discipline policies, McCollum said she would send them later. “In hindsight, we should have said we were happy to wait while they made copies for us, but we did not,” according to an employee’s written report about the visit.   

Afterward, the state suspended EFA funding to the school. Oliva told McCollum in a letter: “Your actions have jeopardized the welfare of students and the responsible use of public funds.”

It took 10 weeks for EFA funds to flow again. The state required that McCollum provide certain documentation and was satisfied by her response: a financial review of the school, policies on student supervision, curriculum plans and student worksheets. Several parents also sent letters in support of the school, describing it as a nurturing environment where their students enjoyed learning.

“We were compliant and transparent,” McCollum said in an interview. She noted that both she and the other teacher at the school are certified educators and stressed that “student safety is of utmost importance and our school has procedures in place.” 

The school, she said, is almost entirely funded through the EFA program, with about 30 students from kindergarten to ninth grade. She said almost all students have returned year after year. “Families have the option to choose and still are choosing us,” she said. 

“We have families who know that their kids who hated learning are now loving to read and write and loving to learn,” McCollum said. “That is our heartbeat.” 

The state Education Department said it “wastes no time” in suspending private schools from receiving public money, and that both Homestead and Delta convinced the state that they were worthy of being reinstated. “In both instances, we worked vigorously to ensure operations were flipped in the right direction before families were allowed to spend taxpayer dollars on either school,” according to the department’s statement to ProPublica.

The parent who emailed Oliva said that she had enrolled her 10-year-old daughter at Homestead hoping for something different than the public school. But she said her daughter fell behind academically. Last fall, she pulled her from the school and reenrolled her in public school. 

She didn’t know that the state had restored funding to Homestead until told by a reporter. 

“No way,” she said. “This has to be happening with other microschools. That upsets me for the children of Arkansas.”

Still Open for Business

Enrollment at the Delta school dropped to about 60 students for last school year, about half the size it was the year before. 

“There was a lot of loss because of the negative media,” Adrian Sportsman, who has worked closely with Morrison at the school, said when a ProPublica reporter visited this spring. “I feel like it was blown way out of proportion.”

Some students came back, she said: “They’d say, ‘There’s no school like this school.’”

In March, the mother of the boy who was assaulted in the circle at school sued Morrison, her school, her therapy business and her insurance companies seeking compensatory and punitive damages for what happened to her son. In court filings, Morrison’s attorney denied the allegations and said “the video speaks for itself.”  

The criminal cases were set to go to trial in May and June. None did. Charges were dismissed for two employees who authorities felt were less culpable as they’d been in the classroom only briefly. The two employees did not respond to a reporter’s outreach.

A third staffer, Kathrine Lipscomb, who is an Arkansas-licensed teacher, interjected at times to direct the children to listen to Morrison and raise their hands to speak. In response to a reporter’s question about her role in the incident, she explained in an email: “For part of the time, I was off behind the teachers desk planning for another class and not paying attention to the circle.” 

The prosecutor and Lipscomb agreed to a pre-trial diversion program in which Lipscomb would serve six months of probation. She must do 40 hours of community service with disabled children and complete anger management classes to avoid a conviction. 

She is now director of education at the school.

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Morrison pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 days in jail, 120 days on house arrest and five years of probation. She had to surrender her Arkansas occupational therapy license. And she agreed to not work with kids in any professional capacity during her probation.

Nobody seemed happy with Morrison’s punishment. But the prosecutor said the state decided the plea deal was the best option to make sure Morrison was held accountable. Under Arkansas law, the state would have to prove substantial physical harm to the victim in order to convict on a charge of permitting abuse to a minor, and juries can judge that differently, said Sonia Hagood, who prosecuted the case for the state. For instance, she said, a recent jury decided not to convict a defendant because the victim did not suffer serious physical injury.

As part of her deal, Morrison got to pick where she served her time — the Greene County Detention Center, which is newer than Craighead County’s jail and gave her a private cell. And she’s serving house arrest on her boyfriend’s Missouri ranch, where she can ride horses.

She passed the time while incarcerated on the phone and on video calls from a personal tablet. It’s standard for all communication from jail to be recorded, and ProPublica obtained more than 500 recordings. They show she was still involved with the administration of the school while jailed. 

She spoke frequently to Sportsman about school finances, including telling her to make sure the EFA money still was coming in. Sportsman, who owns Delta Therapy Group, the occupational therapy practice that works with Delta Institute students, said that the jail conversations were “informal conversations between friends” and disputed the idea that Morrison was running the school while incarcerated.

Morrison chatted for hours with her new board members and school employees and gave them to-do lists. She asked how some kids were doing. In a call with the teacher who also entered a plea deal, she called the victim’s mother “evil” for going to the police.

She also spoke with a documentary filmmaker who is interested in the school’s story and plans to pitch a project to a big streamer, like Netflix or HBO. In one call with the documentarian, Morrison described the abuse she’d been jailed for as a “restorative” technique to try to help the children treat one another more respectfully.

“It was never about, like, ‘Go hit him,’ right?’’ she said. “And the concept is so sophisticated that it’s like, if the prosecuting attorney wanted to know my story, if the detective — they would’ve interviewed me. They would have couched it like, ‘Oh, this is an intervention of individuals who are high risk, who will end up in prison themselves if they behave this way.’ They didn’t do that.”

Both the prosecutor and detective tried to interview Morrison during the investigation but she refused to speak with them.

Morrison was released from jail June 1.

“I think she should be prevented from teaching anywhere in the United States of America and having children around if she’s going to try to influence them the way she did,” Bailey, the detective on the case, said. “If we can’t protect our kids, who can we protect?

The Latest Complaint

There’s nothing in state law that prevents Morrison from still owning Delta or another private school and benefiting from public funding. 

Records still list Morrison’s family business as the owner of the Delta Institute property. State business records also show that she still is the registered agent for a private school at the same address. The school recently took a new name: North Star Academy. 

Lipscomb said the school’s board changed the name “as part of the process of healing for our community of families and students that are here and still trying to make sense of the world as we know it now.” Lipscomb said Morrison has “zero involvement” with the school right now.

She said she expects as many as 35 students to attend this upcoming school year. 

Renee Johns said Jacob has never recovered from his traumatic time at the Delta school. He has grown increasingly aggressive. He’s used martial arts moves that the school taught children in lieu of P.E. to punch holes in the wall of her home and lash out at her. 

Her daughter, Addison, returned to public school. She loves her new school, but was so far behind that she needed to repeat third grade. “School is for helping, not for hurting,” the 10-year-old recently told a ProPublica reporter.

Johns said parents who chose Morrison’s school and went along with her methods were sold lies. “We honestly thought we were doing the best for our children.”

The public keeps filing complaints about private and microschools with the Education Department. In late March it received a new request to investigate The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain. It came from a woman who had heard concerning reports from a family with a child at the school.

“Given the population served by this program, ensuring a safe, structured, and educationally appropriate environment is especially important. I would greatly appreciate your office’s attention to reviewing these concerns,” the woman wrote to the state’s hotline.

Lipscomb said she’s not aware of any active complaints. The state won’t comment on whether it’s investigating. 

The post This Private School Had Students Scrub Floors and Attack a Fellow Classmate. The State Still Funds It. appeared first on ProPublica.

The rich and famous who filed into the Kennedy Center’s opera house in December were there to enjoy one of the nation’s most exclusive celebrations of the performing arts: the center’s annual honors gala.

The black-tie event, hosted by President Donald Trump, prioritized tickets to people who donated more than $75,000 to the center. This year, it feted Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone, the legendary glam rock band Kiss and the Grammy Award-winning disco pioneer Gloria Gaynor.

Among the attendees that evening were two lower-profile government officials whose regulatory decisions had been crucial to the future of the gala’s broadcast sponsor, CBS, and its parent company, Paramount.

Five months earlier, Federal Communications Commissioner Olivia Trusty cast a decisive vote approving Paramount’s historic $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. Now, the commissioner and a guest enjoyed the star-studded celebration thanks to tickets gifted to her by Paramount worth more than $12,000, according to ethics disclosure records obtained by ProPublica.

The other commissioner who approved the merger watched from a prized perch. FCC Chair Brendan Carr and his wife sat in a private skybox with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other executives from Paramount and CBS. Such seats sold for $125,000 a ticket, according to Kennedy Center guidelines.

It’s unclear if Paramount gifted Carr the premium seats because the FCC has yet to make public his financial disclosure for last year.

However, past disclosures show Carr and Trusty are among seven FCC commissioners who have accepted Kennedy gala tickets from CBS or its parent company over the last decade. Ethics experts told ProPublica this poses a blatant conflict of interest since the commission regulates the network. Carr’s previous financial statements show he has accepted tickets at least seven times since his 2017 appointment, totaling over $63,000 in gifts.

Last December’s ceremony attended by Trusty and Carr took place as Paramount was launching a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, a move that would later result in a merger agreement that requires FCC approval.

Federal ethics rules ban employees from taking gifts from any entity that does business with, is regulated by or seeks official action from their agency.

Four ethics experts told ProPublica that by accepting the premium tickets Trusty and Carr compromised the FCC’s impartiality and should not take part in any upcoming decision on the merger.

“There’s no way that any top federal regulator should ever, ever accept a gift from a regulated company with interests their work will foreseeably affect,” said Walter Shaub, who led the federal Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017. “The appearance of taking gifts like that is terrible. What’s at stake is nothing less than the public’s trust in government.”

Virginia Canter, who served as an ethics lawyer at the White House, Treasury Department, and Securities and Exchange Commission during the presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said the commissioners who accepted tickets cannot participate in this matter without damaging the integrity of the government’s decision-making process.

“This is shocking. Pretty disturbing, that’s what I would say. I just don’t understand what they were thinking,” said Canter, who now works as chief counsel for ethics and anti-corruption at the nonpartisan government watchdog group Democracy Defenders Fund.

The FCC’s review of the merger is one of the final hurdles facing a historic $110 billion consolidation of two of the five largest film studios in Hollywood. The deal would unite Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros., bringing under the control of one company Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services; CBS and CNN; and scores of other major broadcast channels, cable networks, and digital platforms.

The new megacorporation, which could reshape how millions will access news, movies, sports and video games, faces fierce opposition from inside and outside Hollywood. More than 5,000 actors, producers and entertainment workers — including stars such as Robert De Niro, Javier Bardem, Joaquin Phoenix and Glenn Close — signed an open letter decrying how the consolidation would eliminate jobs and compromise “the integrity, independence, and diversity of our industry.”

On Monday, California, New York and 10 other Democratic states filed a lawsuit seeking to block the merger under federal and state anti-monopoly laws.

American and international regulators are evaluating the deal for its potential national security implications and impacts to consumers worldwide. Last week, the British government signaled it planned to investigate whether the new entertainment titan that would emerge from the union would unfairly stifle competition. The FCC’s ongoing review includes examining the Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds backing the deal, including from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

The FCC usually has five commissioners — all appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate to serve five-year terms — but the agency currently has only three. Any vote by the full commission would likely be decided by Republicans Carr and Trusty over Democrat Anna Gomez. Gomez was not at the December 2025 show but has accepted tickets from Paramount in the past. Because the FCC requires a three-commissioner quorum for a vote, any recusal could leave the panel unable to decide on the merger. Carr could decide to ask staff to approve the deal rather than bring it to a commission vote, but the ethics experts said he should recuse himself from any decisions affecting the Paramount merger.

The experts warned the commissioners’ gifts might become central in legal challenges and said the Justice Department should investigate potential violations of federal rules or laws.

Neither Carr nor Trusty responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment. Gomez said in a statement that she followed agency advice when she attended the event in 2023 and 2024. Her statement did not elaborate or otherwise address why taking gifts from Paramount did not pose a conflict of interest.

An FCC spokesperson said agency ethics officers have for years cleared commissioner appearances, finding it consistent with ethics law.

“FCC Chairs and officials have attended the same event, in the same ways, consistently from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration to the Obama Administration,” the FCC said in a statement. “There has been no change in recent years.”

Shaub called the justification outrageous.

“It’s no excuse to say that you took the gift because everyone else was doing it or that your agency has had a bad habit of indulging in gift taking for a long time,” Shaub said. “That kind of explanation doesn’t work for school children, and it sure as hell doesn’t work for government officials who are supposed to have better judgment than a fifth grader.”

Despite their oversight role, FCC members have long enjoyed a night out at the Kennedy Center courtesy of CBS or its parent company. Seven of the 10 commissioners who served since 2016 accepted tickets worth more than $260,000, according to a ProPublica analysis of ethics disclosures.

Carr’s predecessor, Jessica Rosenworcel, who was appointed FCC chair by President Joe Biden and stepped down in January 2025, attended regularly.

Rosenworcel and several other former commissioners who accepted the tickets did not respond to requests for comment. The one commissioner who didn’t accept a single gift, Nathan Simington, said he received the Kennedy Center invites from CBS and Paramount but turned them down because it “wasn’t my cup of tea.”

A review of 10 years of disclosures shows commissioners accepted paid trips from various sponsors to appear at banquets and speak at conferences. Some of those gifts came from other media companies regulated by the FCC. NBCUniversal, ABC-Disney and Fox News, for instance, paid for commissioners to attend White House Correspondents’ Association dinners, records show. The total value of the combined gifts topped $308,000. But the vast majority came from CBS and its parent company.

Melissa Zukerman, Paramount’s chief communications officer, said it was a decades-long “CBS practice to invite government officials from both parties” to the Kennedy Center show. She didn’t address why the practice continued after new ownership took over last year, the purpose of the gifts or whether the tickets posed a conflict of interest.

Carr, who joined the FCC as a staffer in 2012 and rose to become the agency’s general counsel, was appointed to serve as a commissioner by Trump during his first term. Since then, Carr has accepted tickets annually, except when the 2020 event was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to his public disclosures.

Carr did not respond to an email request from ProPublica for his latest ethics report, which would indicate whether Paramount also paid for him to attend last December’s gala. The FCC referred us to the Office of Government Ethics, which told us that the FCC had not yet provided the disclosure. The FCC did not respond to our subsequent requests for the record.

A 2009 Office of Government Ethics memo gave federal employees the right to attend Kennedy Center events but explicitly said officials cannot accept free attendance “offered by persons other than the Kennedy Center and its trustees, officers and employees.” In 2016, the ethics office tightened its gift requirements, warning officials to avoid any appearance “of loss of impartiality.”

There is an exemption to the gift rules that allows free entry to gatherings that are widely attended and paid for by third parties, but only if certain conditions are met.

The event must “further agency programs or operations,” and the agency’s interest in an official attending must outweigh “concern that the employee may be, or may appear to be, improperly influenced in the performance of official duties,” according to the federal rules.

As an example, the Office of Government Ethics said an industry-wide seminar attended by more than 100 people could be allowed if the employee’s participation would be in the agency’s interest. But those attending should “represent a range of persons interested in a given matter” and the event must provide a “structured opportunity” to exchange ideas and views among invitees.

The office clarified in a 2007 memo that performing arts presentations would not count even if they, like the honors gala, have a reception before or afterward at which officials can mingle with other attendees.

Canter, the former White House ethics lawyer, said it would be a “stretch” for the FCC to argue the exemptions apply to the Kennedy Center’s annual show, where famous musicians perform and celebrities laud those who are being honored. “It’s not what we would consider a widely attended gathering,” she said.

Kedric Payne, general counsel and senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group, noted that federal rules also require agencies to weigh the market value of the attendance, its relevance to the agency, any sensitive pending matters involving the donor and whether accepting free tickets creates an appearance of preferential treatment.

“The ethics rules are designed to prevent this exact situation,” he said, adding that it is an “obvious conflict of interest” for an official to “accept expensive gifts from anyone with decisions pending before the agency. This matters because it makes the public question whether official decisions are free from the improper influence of wealthy special interests.”

An FCC official familiar with the legal guidance given to the commissioners said they were told the event met the criteria for the “widely attended gathering” exception. (The source was not authorized to talk publicly about agency legal discussions.)

Shaub, the former Office of Government Ethics head, disagreed, saying it would be “hard to understand what compelling interest the FCC could think it had in letting its commissioners” attend the gala.

“What possible reason could have outweighed the obvious ethics concerns?” he asked.

Federal rules require written authorization for an official to accept free entry to a widely attended gathering. The FCC did not respond to our requests to provide the authorizations for the Paramount tickets or say who authorized them. Two senior ethics officials at the agency, Kathleen Fulp and Lauren Northrop, did not respond to requests for comment.

While December’s event came at a particularly sensitive time for Paramount and the FCC, it wasn’t the first.

More than a year earlier, in September 2024, Paramount had filed paperwork seeking the commission’s approval for its merger with Skydance Media. A month later, the FCC launched an investigation of CBS after a conservative group complained about a “60 Minutes” interview with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Trump later filed a lawsuit alleging the network deceptively edited the interview — an accusation CBS denied.

Then in November, less than two weeks after his election victory, Trump declared he would appoint Carr as FCC chair. Almost immediately, Carr accused CBS of biased election coverage and said it would be an obstacle to approving the Paramount-Skydance merger.

That December, Carr and three other commissioners — Rosenworcel, Gomez and Geoffrey Starks — accepted Kennedy Center gala tickets from Paramount worth a combined $48,156.

On Jan. 16, 2025, just days before Rosenworcel stepped down from the commission, she announced the agency was dismissing the election complaint against CBS. She and Gomez called the outcome a victory for the First Amendment.

But days later, Carr, the incoming FCC chair, reopened the investigation.

To resolve Trump’s lawsuit, CBS agreed to pay the president $16 million, a decision criticized by legal experts who decried Trump’s claims as baseless.

Two days after Trump posted on social media that he had received the settlement money, the FCC took up the Paramount-Skydance merger. To meet Carr’s demands, Paramount agreed to appoint an independent ombudsperson who would evaluate claims of bias. The company also pledged to eliminate its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

By then, Starks and Simington had unexpectedly stepped down from the commission. Trusty, a Trump appointee, had been confirmed by the Senate the previous month.

Trusty and Carr voted in favor of the merger. Gomez voted against, blasting the approval for requiring “never-before-seen forms of government control over newsroom decisions and editorial judgment.”

Experts said that while Trusty had no conflict yet, Carr and Gomez did. The fact that Gomez voted against Paramount did not mean she didn’t face a conflict under the rules, Shaub said.

Federal rules only require those who accept improper gifts to make a prompt reimbursement, but Shaub and the other experts said Carr and Gomez should have abstained from the vote.

“If you repay the face value of the ticket, the gift rules don’t require you to recuse — though common sense and any kind of conscience might lead you to recuse voluntarily for the good of the country,” Shaub said. “But if you refuse to repay the donor, I don’t see how anything short of recusal could remotely remediate the problem.”

With the Paramount-Skydance merger greenlit by the FCC, Ellison, the new company’s CEO, then set his sights on acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery.

Warner at first rebuffed Paramount’s overtures and on Dec. 5 — two days before the Kennedy Center gala — accepted a bid from Netflix to buy its studio and streaming assets. Ellison responded by making numerous calls to administration officials and had a long talk with Trump, according to The Wall Street Journal.

On the night of the gala, Trump told reporters the Netflix deal “could be a problem” and that he planned to get directly involved with the regulatory approval. Inside the Kennedy Center, Carr and his wife sat with Ellison in an exclusive skybox, Bloomberg reported. (Gomez said in her statement to ProPublica that she declined Paramount’s “invitation because of serious concerns about press independence connected to conditions Paramount agreed to as part of its merger transaction before the FCC.”)

Hours after the gala ended, Paramount announced it was launching its hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery.

About three months later, Carr publicly endorsed Paramount over Netflix on CNBC, promising swift approval.

If one or more commissioners choose to abstain from a merger vote because of ethical concerns, what would happen next is unclear. Under federal conflict of interest rules, an agency designee could theoretically permit commissioners to vote after considering several factors, including “the difficulty of reassigning the matter,” the nature of the relationship between the commissioners and Paramount, and the “effect that resolution of the matter would have upon the financial interests” of the firm.

Carr could bypass a full commission vote entirely, as he did with the recent acquisition of Tegna by Nexstar Media Group. In that case, Carr delegated authority to FCC staff to approve the takeover.

But any decision on the Paramount deal — whether by the full commission or by staff at the direction of the chair — is likely to be challenged.

Richard Painter, a former White House ethics attorney in the administration of George W. Bush, said while courts often defer to the government’s judgment, they also can become skeptical if a regulatory agency is shown to have violated ethics rules.

“A judge may very well say that the merger decision of the FCC isn’t worth jack because the process was corrupted,” he said.

The post FCC Officials Took Pricey Gifts From Paramount as the Company Needed Approval for Billion-Dollar Deals appeared first on ProPublica.

The Trump administration has launched a national crackdown on how school districts handle accusations of sexual misconduct by teachers, following a KQED-ProPublica investigation into California’s teacher disciplinary system.

In guidance issued last week, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon cited the news outlets’ reporting in May that California’s teacher licensing agency has not revoked the professional credentials of at least 67 educators who school districts determined had sexually harassed students or committed other types of sexual misconduct. At least 14 of those educators were rehired by other schools.

McMahon threatened to withhold federal funding from public schools that fail to protect children from teacher sexual misconduct. She called on states and school districts to scrutinize their laws and regulations to prevent educators who have engaged in sexual misconduct involving students from obtaining new positions elsewhere. Citing previous reports by the Government Accountability Office and other studies, McMahon said the Department of Education has observed a “troubling and recurring pattern” of credible reports of sexual abuse and harassment by school employees going uninvestigated. 

“Unfortunately, many administrators and State educational regulators have apparently preferred to sweep these incidents under the rug and have ‘pass[ed] the trash’ to another school,” McMahon wrote in an open letter to state schools chiefs on Friday, referring to teachers who go on to work in different schools after findings of sexual misconduct.

McMahon said the Department of Education intends to increase its monitoring of school systems to ensure that they comply with federal law. The Trump administration will also examine states’ laws and regulations to determine their effectiveness in protecting students, she said. 

The department is investigating 20 school districts over their data collection practices and handling of allegations of staff sexual harassment of students, McMahon announced. Two of the districts — Tulare City and Wilsona — are in central and Southern California, according to a list the department provided to KQED and ProPublica. The Tulare City superintendent has not responded to a request for comment. Wilsona Superintendent Steve Doyle said the district will cooperate fully with the federal review and “is committed to providing a safe and inclusive learning environment for every student.” 

The list, which the Trump administration said was built on 2023-24 civil rights data, also includes districts in Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Connecticut, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Missouri, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Washington. 

A spokesperson for Tony Thurmond, California state superintendent of public instruction, said he was not available to comment on the Trump administration’s letter.

California law requires public school teachers who resign or are fired for misconduct to be reported to the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, the state’s educator licensing agency. That agency then decides whether teachers will be disciplined further, including by losing their professional credentials. 

Our look at California’s teacher disciplinary process revealed a pattern of delays and inaction, combined with a lack of transparency, that has allowed educators to continue teaching after school districts reported them to the state for sexual harassment or other sexual misconduct.

That disciplinary process, which is hidden from public view, stands out compared with how California oversees other professionals. The fact that a teacher has been disciplined is noted — along with a red flag icon next to their name — on a state website of credentialed educators, but the database does not explain why. California law prohibits the teacher licensing agency from sharing that information publicly. In contrast, the licensing bodies governing dozens of other professions in California, including doctors, nurses, police officers and lawyers, make the reasons behind disciplinary actions easily accessible on their websites. And at least 12 states, including Oregon, Washington and Florida, do the same for teachers.

California’s system also makes it difficult for school districts to learn the details of prospective employees’ disciplinary histories. Only after the state licensing agency recommends educators be disciplined can prospective employers request a summary of the case and the agency’s findings — if the request is made within five years.

California law does require teaching candidates to provide prospective employers with their complete educational job history and mandates that school districts ask previous employers whether candidates have ever been reported to the state for egregious misconduct. But no state agency is enforcing whether teachers are sharing their full employment records, whether districts are checking for previous misconduct or whether schools are providing the records. 

“Prospective employers have the tools at their disposal to assess whether an individual is fit to be in the classroom,” Anita Fitzhugh, a spokesperson for the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, previously told KQED and ProPublica. “However, the Commission has no legal authority to compel employers to use these tools.” 

Fitzhugh said Monday that state law prevents the agency from formally reviewing allegations of sexual misconduct that districts report to the state unless it also receives an affidavit from alleged victims. “The Commission stands ready to implement any additional public protections that the Legislature authorizes,” she said.

A new California law mandates the creation of a database by next summer that will allow employers to search the names of school support staff, such as bus drivers, custodians and teaching assistants, who are under investigation for or have substantiated complaints of egregious misconduct. But the law does not apply to public school teachers. 

Some critics characterized McMahon’s latest guidance as political rhetoric and grandstanding, given the Trump administration’s gutting of the Education Department and routine dismissal of civil rights cases.

“Staff-on-student predation occurs less frequently than student-on-student harassment and assault. This letter is silent on that,” said Heidi Goldstein, a personnel commissioner of the Berkeley Unified School District and advisory board member of Stop Sexual Assault in Schools, a national nonprofit. “I look at something like this as a wedge issue you’re going to take to schools to weaken union power overall.”

In her letter, McMahon singled out teachers unions as obstructions to legislative reforms to protect children.

“This is yet another example of the Trump administration weaponizing and distorting an issue for political purposes while also systematically dismantling the very offices of the Department of Education that were established to protect the safety and civil rights of students across the nation,” said Maggie Sisco, a spokesperson for the California Teachers Association. 

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McMahon also noted that the Trump administration recently opened an investigation into the Los Angeles Unified School District for an agreement it made with the teachers union to reassign educators accused of sexual misconduct instead of removing them while district officials investigate. But Christy Hagen, a spokesperson for Los Angeles Unified, said “reassignment means an employee is assigned away from students and schools during an investigation.” 

The district “takes all allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment with the utmost seriousness,” Hagen said, and reported allegations are reviewed promptly through a “thorough and impartial process.” 

Los Angeles Unified, California’s largest school district, has yet to release public records requested by KQED reporter Holly McDede two years ago. The First Amendment Coalition, a California nonprofit that advocates for free speech and government transparency, filed a lawsuit on behalf of McDede in May. Hagen said Monday that the district “has responded to requests in accordance with the California Public Records Act.”   

Steve Hilton, the Republican candidate for California governor, said if elected, he would “end the loopholes that let dangerous teachers move from one school district to another.” 

“Agencies will share information, act quickly and put student safety first, not the system,” Hilton said. “If you abuse a child, your teaching career is over.”

Jonathan Underland, spokesperson for Xavier Becerra, the former U.S. health and human services secretary, former California attorney general and the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, said Becerra “will make sure this state has a system that acts swiftly and keeps educators who harm students out of the classroom.”

“Protecting students from predators demands real action — but this president is demanding it from the very office he’s spent years tearing down,” Underland said. “California won’t wait on Washington.”

The post Trump Administration Launches Crackdown on Teacher Sexual Misconduct Following KQED-ProPublica Investigation appeared first on ProPublica.

There’s one indisputable fact about the events of the night of May 8, 1981: Alice Sebold, who had earlier that day just completed her freshman year at Syracuse University, was brutally raped while walking home through a park.

Anthony Broadwater was arrested several months later and subsequently convicted of the assault. He’d spend 16 years in prison, repeatedly being denied parole because he refused to admit guilt. Upon his release in 1998, he was required to register as a sex offender.

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Sebold would go on to write and speak about the attack, culminating in the publication of “Lucky,” a memoir about the rape. The book would become a bestseller after the success of Sebold’s first novel, “The Lovely Bones.”

But 40 years after the assault, a court vacated Broadwater’s conviction after the Syracuse district attorney joined a motion to clear him and said in court that Broadwater should never have been prosecuted. While the exoneration made headlines around the world, we wondered how many other victims in Syracuse had been left behind and what else the police might have missed.

What we discovered: No part of the system in Syracuse at the time could be depended on. Police brushed off rapes. Prosecutors bungled confessions or were defeated at trial. Judges overlooked irregularities. And Syracuse University seemed more interested in suppressing news of a rape epidemic than solving it.

Here are some of the key findings from our yearslong investigation into what went wrong after that night in May 1981. You can read the full story of how ProPublica reporter Joaquin Sapien reinvestigated the notorious case — and rapes surrounding it — decades after the fact here.

As Rape Cases Piled Up in Syracuse, Police Failed to Investigate

At the time of Sebold’s rape in the spring of 1981, Syracuse was experiencing a rash of sexual assaults. Hers was the third such attack in the city’s Thornden Park in about seven months. A fourth had occurred a block away. Like the police report in Sebold’s assault, those cases had also been quickly consigned to the inactive file.

Beyond the park, women in Syracuse were being sexually assaulted in their dorm rooms and homes. A nursing student was later attacked at the same spot as Sebold, on the same day that her roommate was raped in their shared apartment. A freshman was raped in a sorority house by a man who broke in through a window. The descriptions of the perpetrators, many of whom carried a knife, were often eerily similar; several were roughly the same height, weight and race.

And yet there were no apparent signs of urgency from law enforcement.

Syracuse University Quashed Media Coverage of Rape and Other Crimes

In addition to Syracuse police appearing to deprioritize rape cases in the early 1980s — a time when few survivors reported their assaults — documents and testimony indicate that the city’s namesake university actively quashed media coverage of these attacks.

If a police report was labeled “NO PRESS,” a former detective in the Sebold case explained in a 2025 deposition, it meant that the university “put their foot down and said no press for any kind of rape, robbery, burglary that’s anywhere in the area of Syracuse University.” He testified that seeing this designation on police reports at the time was not unusual.

A spokesperson for Syracuse University said in an email that “we are not in a position to speak to the actions or decisions of prior administrations,” but the university is now equipped with “comprehensive policies, a steadfast commitment to preventing sexual and relationship violence and robust support structures to help every survivor that comes forward.”

Police and Prosecutors Botched the Lineup and Rushed the Case to Indictment

It was not police work or media coverage that led authorities to Broadwater. His arrest only occurred after Sebold saw him on the street months after the assault and believed he was her rapist. Police arrested the 20-year-old, and he agreed to appear in a lineup.

But at the lineup, Sebold did not identify Broadwater as her attacker. Instead, she selected a man standing to his left.

Police had no other evidence linking Broadwater to the assault aside from a pubic hair sample he had volunteered for comparison to one found on Sebold, which, in a world before DNA testing, could essentially tell investigators only that both Broadwater and the rapist were Black.

The current DA says the case should have ended then and there. “Case is over,” he told ProPublica. “Stop.”

But rather than release Broadwater and continue gathering evidence, an assistant district attorney, Gail Uebelhoer, asked Sebold to draft an affidavit on the spot, explaining what had happened. Sebold wrote in the affidavit that she had picked the man in the No. 5 position because he had been looking at her.

In “Lucky,” her bestselling memoir about the rape, Sebold said Uebelhoer tried to allay concerns about picking the wrong man by claiming that the man she picked and Broadwater were “dead ringers” for each other and implied that the two men coordinated their appearance in the lineup to confuse Sebold. Both men have adamantly denied ever appearing in another lineup together.

Hours after the lineup, Uebelhoer presented the case against Broadwater to a grand jury. In a 2025 deposition, she said she could not remember many of the key details in Sebold’s case but asserted that she had done her job by presenting it to a grand jury without hiding its flaws.

Broadwater’s Decision to Forgo a Jury Trial Backfired

When his case moved forward, Broadwater and his lawyer hoped he’d be better off by opting for a bench trial, in which a judge, not a jury, would decide his fate.

But the judge seemed to have a soft spot for Sebold. In her memoir, she recalls how the judge spoke privately to her during a break in the proceedings, expressing concern about how she was holding up and asking about her family. If a juror had asked such questions of a witness, they would likely have been kicked off the jury and a mistrial might’ve been declared.

The judge also allowed Uebelhoer — then visibly pregnant and no longer handling the case — to take the stand as a witness for the prosecution, where she appeared to imply that Broadwater was responsible for Sebold’s botched identification at the lineup.

Immediately after the prosecutor finished his closing argument, the judge found Broadwater guilty without leaving the bench to deliberate.

The Rapes Continued After Broadwater’s Conviction and a Possible Suspect Emerged

Broadwater’s conviction did not end the rash of sexual assaults in Syracuse. Only four months after the trial, a high schooler named Thomas Weakfall admitted raping five women, four of them within a mile of Thornden Park. He told police his spree had begun in late 1981.

While there’s no evidence that Weakfall attacked Sebold, he did match key elements of the description she gave of her rapist: Black, 16 to 18 years of age, about 5’7” and 150 pounds. Weakfall was Black, 16 years old, 5’9” and 140 pounds, according to police reports. Broadwater was 20, stood 5’6” and weighed about 175 pounds.

But the rape case against Weakfall collapsed because his confession was deemed inadmissible. Officers had taken his statement without a defense attorney present, unaware that Weakfall was already represented by an attorney on an unrelated burglary charge. He ultimately pleaded guilty to second-degree burglary, got five years probation and was released.

Weakfall Confesses Again, but Not to the Sebold Rape

Records show police arrested Weakfall for an attempted rape of a woman inside her car in October 1983. He was released from custody for four months, before pleading guilty to a lesser charge of attempted sexual misconduct. He received a sentence of one year.

During those same four months, Sebold’s roommate was raped in their apartment. She was one of five women attacked in the same cluster of blocks over a five-month period, according to contemporary news accounts. Police suspected that one man had committed the crimes.

While police reports in these assaults suggest an older, taller attacker, elements of the crimes — burglarized homes; women raped at knifepoint and beaten; some bound and gagged — matched Weakfall’s methods.

Sebold’s roommate also told police that, after the assault, she tried to get her assailant to leave by yelling out that her roommate was coming home. He replied: “I know her, we had a thing, we had a deal in the past.”

In 1985, after being spotted using a stolen ATM card, Weakfall confessed to additional rapes, saying he’d assaulted at least three women in the previous few months. This time, his confession stuck and he ultimately served 12 years of an 18-year sentence.

While Weakfall did confess to committing rapes that occurred indoors, he has denied assaulting anyone outdoors. In interviews with ProPublica, he admitted “violating” women but also said he did not commit all the assaults he’d confessed to.

Producers Trying to Make a Film About “Lucky” Sparked the Unraveling of Broadwater’s Conviction

In 2013, a movie producer tasked with writing a screenplay based on “Lucky” contacted Paul Clapper, a retired detective who had played a tangential but important role in the Sebold case. According to the producer, he replied, noting that there were a number of questions in the case: Was the right person arrested? Was Sebold a good witness? If DNA testing had been available, would there have been the same outcome? However, the producer said Clapper never elaborated on this list, and ultimately this attempt to film “Lucky” fell by the wayside.

Years later, a second producer endeavored to make a movie of Sebold’s memoir. His concerns about the story were such that he hired a private investigator to dig deeper. The investigator, Dan Myers, met with Clapper and came away with the impression that Clapper believed Broadwater was innocent of the crime and Weakfall was guilty. Myers brought his concerns to a pair of Syracuse lawyers, who filed a motion to vacate Broadwater’s conviction in 2021. More than 40 years after the rape, and after more than two decades of living as a registered sex offender, Broadwater was exonerated.

The Aftermath: “I’ll Never Write Anything Good Enough”

Five years after the court vacated Broadwater’s conviction, Sebold has no doubt he is innocent and told ProPublica she now questions her decision to report her rape to the police: “None of this would have happened.”

Despite his exoneration, Broadwater said the stigma of being a convicted rapist was still hard to shake, even with his record cleared and a multimillion-dollar settlement from New York state. “I’m still embarrassed that I was convicted and sent to prison for rape for 16 and a half years,” he said. The city of Syracuse and county of Onondaga are contesting Broadwater’s claims. He explained that his life “still ain’t normal. Ain’t never gonna be normal. How could it be normal?”

Sebold and Broadwater have discussed through intermediaries the possibility of meeting in person. But their shared reluctance to travel has made plans difficult.

Sebold said she did recently write a letter to Broadwater in which she takes responsibility for her role in his wrongful conviction. The letter describes, she said, “the deep sorrow I hold for what happened.”

“I’ll never write anything good enough,” Sebold said about the three pages that took four years to compose. It is “probably, in my mind, the most important thing I’ll ever write.”

The post What We Uncovered About the Sexual Assault of Alice Sebold and a City’s Buried Rape Crisis appeared first on ProPublica.

Indigenous and Hispanic students are suspended more often and for longer periods than their white classmates who commit similar infractions at Gallup-McKinley County Schools — a pattern of “substantial racial disparities,” an investigation by the New Mexico attorney general’s office found.

Indigenous students lose eight to 10 times more classroom days to suspensions than white students, while Hispanic students lose three to four times as many, according to the 47-page report released by the state’s Department of Justice last week.

Gallup-McKinley, a sprawling district twice the size of Delaware, straddles part of the Navajo Nation and has the largest Native American student population of any public school district in the country.

The investigation was ordered by state Attorney General Raúl Torrez in 2023, after reporting by New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica exposed the district’s high rates of harsh punishment for Native and Hispanic children. The news organizations found Native students in New Mexico are expelled far more often than any other group. The district has a quarter of New Mexico’s Native students, but it accounted for at least three-quarters of Native student expulsions during the four school years ending in 2020.

That disparity was evident even in kindergarten and elementary grades, often for ambiguous infractions such as “disorderly conduct.”

At the time, former district Superintendent Mike Hyatt called the news organizations’ reporting “completely false” and suggested the findings were a result of the district’s own data entry errors and its broad definition of expulsion.

But, state Department of Justice investigators said in last week’s report that neither explanation accounted for the racial disparities. Hyatt has retired and could not be reached for comment.

Their report calls on Gallup-McKinley officials to “acknowledge the facts” and work with the community “in remedying its excessive reliance on exclusionary and discriminatory discipline.”

Among the report’s recommendations: District officials should clearly define infractions and penalty ranges, make punishments proportional and limit suspensions. The report also called for Gallup-McKinley to adopt restorative justice alternatives such as talking circles, in which students discuss how their misbehavior impacted others, why they broke a school rule and other choices they could have made instead. The Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission called for similar reforms in its own March 2026 report on discrimination at Gallup-McKinley schools. Wendy Greyeyes, the commission chair, noted that neighboring districts already use such alternatives, but she said in an interview that the district might have difficulty building trust with its students and their families.

Until the district fixes its discipline policies, investigators wrote, “children in and around Gallup, along with their families and communities, will remain negatively affected by educational, social, and emotional challenges that stem from the District’s current practices.”

That harm goes beyond the academic, investigators wrote, saying that out-of-school suspensions also deny students access to free meals and participation in extracurricular clubs and volunteer activities.

National research links suspension and expulsion to lower academic achievement, a higher risk of contact with the criminal justice system, isolation, poor health and lower wages, the report said.

Investigators also called on the district to create a clear and accessible complaint process for students and families, and to publish regular audits of discipline data.

In 2023, after New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica published their reporting, the district provided a contract auditor with discipline data that was “inexplicably different” from what it reported to state and U.S. departments of Education, with thousands of disciplinary records missing, the state Department of Justice investigators said. The news organizations’ own reporting on the audit could not verify the district’s assertions that it had dramatically reduced out-of-school suspensions.

“Instead of taking steps to rectify these problems, leadership denied that they exist and pushed a misleading and flawed counter-analysis,” the new AG report said.

In addition to district reforms, the new report also called on state lawmakers and the New Mexico Public Education Department to strengthen oversight of student discipline statewide. Audits at the state level should be conducted at least once a year and be made public, it said.

Such audits are needed to prevent disparities from becoming as “extreme and systemic as in Gallup-McKinley,” said Anjana Samant, one of the report’s authors and a deputy director in the state Department of Justice.

The state Department of Education should also require that students who are suspended or expelled receive instruction and other educational services while they are out of school. The department is reviewing the report, spokesperson Janelle Garcia said.

In addition to specific disciplinary policy changes, the new report urged state lawmakers to revisit legislation that would have given the AG’s office stronger investigative tools to “identify and root out” civil rights violations. That legislation passed in 2023, but Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, let the bill die without her signature in what’s called a pocket veto.

The governor, a spokesperson said in an email on Wednesday, stands by her decision, saying it’s unclear whether the new powers in the legislation “would have trumped federal student privacy protections and allowed the AG to access confidential student records.”

What matters now is ensuring the report’s findings are addressed quickly, wrote Michael Coleman, Lujan Grisham’s communications director.

The district is reviewing the report’s recommendations, Gallup-McKinley Superintendent Jvanna Hanks II told New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica.

“I am leading a period of transition that prioritizes community voices and renews our focus on every student,” Hanks wrote in an email provided by a public relations firm the district has hired. “The School District will be using this report and current student data as part of our review. Our focus is that students should be in school, supported in school, and treated fairly in school.”

The post New Mexico AG Calls for Reform After Report Finds “Substantial Racial Disparities” in One School District appeared first on ProPublica.

After months of U.S.-Mexico tensions sparked by the Trump administration’s threats to strike unilaterally at Mexican drug traffickers, the two governments are heading for a potentially more serious confrontation over President Claudia Sheinbaum’s refusal to arrest Mexican officials charged in the United States with drug corruption.

U.S. Justice Department officials have yet to present a full picture of their evidence against 10 current and former Mexican officials, whose indictments were announced on April 29. They include the governor of Sinaloa state, Rubén Rocha Moya, an ally of the president and a prominent figure in her leftist political party.

But as the Trump administration steps up its efforts to target Mexican government figures who are accused of protecting the drug trade, Sheinbaum is taking a hard-line stand against extraditing Rocha and the others charged in a New York federal court, Mexican officials said.

“She is very clear about this,” a senior Mexican official said of the U.S. request for Rocha’s extradition. “She has decided no.”

The impasse presents the Trump administration with a potentially critical test of its aims in Mexico, raising questions about how far it will go to challenge the corruption that has long sustained Mexico’s trade in illegal drugs.

By elevating the importance of the drug issue and threatening harsh economic penalties if Sheinbaum did not join forces to combat it, the administration has pushed Mexico to dramatically escalate its fight against organized crime.

After years in which Sheinbaum’s political mentor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, withdrew from confrontation with the drug mafias, her security forces have worked with U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies to destroy clandestine drug labs, seize large caches of drugs, and kill or capture ranking crime bosses.

Sheinbaum also circumvented the two countries’ extradition treaty to hand over at least 92 accused traffickers sought by the United States — voicing none of the concerns about U.S. evidence that she has cited in refusing to arrest the Sinaloa officials.

Still, U.S. officials acknowledge privately, the two countries’ intensified counter-drug campaign has emphasized tactical strikes and short-term gains rather than a coherent, longer-term strategy to undermine organized crime groups, confront endemic corruption or strengthen Mexico’s criminal justice system.

To many senior Trump administration officials, particularly in the Justice Department and the White House, attacking the high-level corruption that sustains the drug trade represents a crucial next step. They have argued it is a step that U.S. prosecutors should take aggressively if Mexico will not do so, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Some diplomatic and intelligence officials, however, are wary of pushing Sheinbaum too hard, seeing her position as precarious. They fear that demanding she take on her own party’s old guard might prompt her to pull back on Mexico’s cooperation with U.S. drug enforcement and immigration policies, the officials said.

The U.S. policy debate also turns on a question that continues to obsess Mexico’s political class nearly two years into her presidency: How much independence does Sheinbaum really have from her political patron López Obrador, who remains a commanding figure within their National Regeneration Movement?

After keeping largely silent on Mexico’s changing relationship with Washington, López Obrador thrust himself back into the public debate on June 3 with a blistering attack on the New York indictments. U.S. officials were simply using drug corruption as a pretext, he claimed, to undermine Morena, as the leftist party he founded is known.

“To be clear,” the former president wrote, “some U.S. officials are plotting to weaken Morena and strengthen the rightist opposition in Mexico with the idea of once again having a submissive, corrupt, mafioso and cruel government.” Such a regime, he added, would be more amenable to Washington’s “interventionist designs.”

Sheinbaum did her best to respectfully downplay the significance of the former president’s screed. But current and former Mexican officials noted that López Obrador’s missive, while supportive of her, did nothing to dispel suspicions that he continues to pull strings in her administration.

To many analysts of Mexican politics, the source of Sheinbaum’s unyielding response to the Rocha indictment seems plain: her fear that if some accused officials cooperate with the U.S. authorities in the Sinaloa case and possibly other investigations, the Trump administration could target other Morena leaders, including key allies of López Obrador.

“I think the message from Andrés Manuel was, ‘Claudia, you have to stop this or they are going to destroy us,’” a Mexican security expert, Eduardo Guerrero, said in an interview. “But the longer she waits to turn Rocha over, the tougher the punishment from the United States is going to be.”

Trump administration officials have done little to assuage such concerns.

Asked two weeks after the Sinaloa indictment about the administration’s plans for dealing with Mexican corruption, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Terrance C. Cole, told the Senate Appropriations Committee, “I can assure you this is just the start about what’s to come in Mexico.”

Turning Themselves In

When Rocha was elected in 2021 as governor of Sinaloa, a stronghold of Mexico’s drug trade for almost a century, the former teachers’ union organizer was known as a skilled political operator and a close friend of then-President López Obrador. But his campaign was assailed for what opposition parties and civic groups called the blatant role that criminal gangs played on Rocha’s behalf — intimidating voters, stuffing ballot boxes, and kidnapping and threatening numerous opposition candidates.

Despite detailed complaints to Mexico’s elections authorities, López Obrador and Sheinbaum strongly defended Rocha. Rocha insisted he had nothing to do with the mafias but suggested that it would be impossible to govern the state without somehow coordinating with them. “You have to find a way to do it,” he said in a television interview during the campaign.

Questions about Rocha’s links to the traffickers exploded again in July 2024, after a son of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the imprisoned drug boss known as El Chapo, kidnapped his father’s longtime partner in the Sinaloa cartel, Ismael Zambada García. The son, Joaquín Guzmán López, then flew Zambada across the U.S. border, delivering him to U.S. agents on an airstrip in New Mexico and surrendering himself.

In a statement released by his lawyer, Zambada said he was kidnapped outside Culiacán, the state capital, when he went to meet Rocha and a Sinaloa congressman, Héctor Cuén, who supposedly wanted the drug boss to mediate a dispute between them. Instead, Zambada claimed, he was betrayed by Guzmán while Cuén, whom he described as “a longtime friend,” was murdered.

Rocha at the time denied any involvement in the episode, saying he was traveling in Los Angeles. A spokesperson for the state government, from which Rocha has taken a leave of absence, said it would not comment on the accusations against him. Rocha could not be reached for comment.

Both Guzmán and his brother Ovidio, who was extradited to the United States in 2023, have since provided federal prosecutors with extensive accounts of their relationships with Mexican government figures, as has at least one of their former lieutenants, law enforcement officials said. Investigators in New York also obtained detailed ledgers of the gang’s bribe payments, which were referenced extensively in the Rocha indictment.

After Zambada’s kidnapping, three U.S. officials said López Obrador’s government made repeated requests for information on what Zambada and the Chapitos, as Guzmán’s sons are known, might have been telling U.S. investigators. But the prosecutors answered those queries only when they finally laid out their case: “As he had promised, since he was elected governor, and in exchange for the Chapitos’ support in his election, Rocha Moya has allowed the Chapitos to operate with impunity in Sinaloa,” the indictment stated.

It also said Rocha had met personally with the Chapitos’ leaders and allowed them to name corrupt law enforcement officials to his government. Rocha’s aides took the traffickers’ bribes, allowed them to operate with impunity, arrested their rivals, freed them from jail when they were arrested themselves and warned them of law enforcement operations supported by the United States, the prosecutors said. Rocha has denied the allegations.

Barely a day after a federal court in New York unsealed the indictment of the 10 men, Sheinbaum dismissed that evidence as insufficient. She said the suspects could be investigated in Mexico but that she would not act without “overwhelming and irrefutable proof” of their guilt.

Such provisional arrest requests are often granted as a matter of course; by treaty, the country asking for extradition has 60 days to present more detailed evidence after the initial arrest is made. But Sheinbaum has argued that the indictment and various other Justice Department documents given to Mexico did not come close to justifying the U.S. request.

Some U.S. diplomats were initially skeptical of the New York prosecutors’ apparent reliance on imprisoned traffickers as primary witnesses in such a politically sensitive case, officials familiar with the matter said.

More recently, though, at least one of the accused Mexicans has changed that calculus. The former Sinaloa secretary of public safety, Gerardo Mérida, turned himself in to U.S. marshals at the Arizona border on May 11. Mérida — a retired army general accused of taking more than $100,000 a month from the cartel while in office — pleaded not guilty in New York. But he later indicated to the prosecutors that he might be willing to cooperate with their investigation in return for leniency, one official familiar with the matter said. Mérida’s court-appointed attorney, Sarah Krissoff, did not respond to calls and emails asking for comment on his status.

A second suspect in the case, former Sinaloa finance secretary Enrique Díaz Vega, is also believed to have turned himself in to the U.S. authorities, but the Justice Department has not confirmed that. Nicholas Biase, a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, declined to comment on the status of either suspect, and Vega could not be reached for comment.

Months ago, current and former U.S. officials said, Sheinbaum’s powerful security chief, Omar García Harfuch, told American diplomats privately that the Mexican president was determined to take on the country’s corruption problem and would prove her bona fides by prosecuting officials of her own party. Since the Rocha indictment, however, she has taken a very different tone, accusing Washington of egregious meddling in Mexico’s affairs.

“An action of this magnitude has no precedent in the history of our bilateral relationship,” Sheinbaum said at a political rally in late May. “When they dictate from abroad who is guilty and who is not, that is no longer cooperation. We are talking about interference!”

Aides to Sheinbaum have begun to suggest that she could indeed scale back anti-narcotics cooperation if Washington pushes too hard on the Rocha case, two U.S. officials said.

Whether she has the wherewithal to follow through remains to be seen. But such threats have worked for Mexico in the past. When U.S. agents arrested Mexico’s former defense minister, Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, in Los Angeles in late 2020, former Attorney General William Barr abruptly dropped the case after López Obrador threatened to limit Mexico’s counter-drug cooperation.

Despite the American concession, López Obrador still seized on the arrest to shut down several joint counter-drug programs and push through a new national security law curtailing the work of U.S. agents in Mexico. With the Biden administration focused on preserving Mexico’s cooperation on immigration, López Obrador later abandoned the so-called Mérida Plan, the two countries’ 14-year campaign to jointly fight drug trafficking and strengthen the Mexican criminal justice system.

“But these guys are not Biden,” a former Mexican foreign minister, Jorge G. Castañeda, said of the Trump administration in an interview. While Sheinbaum’s predecessors could almost always rely on U.S. leaders to prioritize Mexico’s stability above other interests, he added, “Trump just doesn’t care.”

The post A U.S.-Mexico Impasse Will Test How Far the Trump Administration Will Go to Fight Drug Trade appeared first on ProPublica.

When Rafael Enrique Gámez Salas crossed the Mexican border in late 2024, U.S. Border Patrol agents first thought he was like hundreds of thousands of other Venezuelan migrants fleeing their country’s devastating economic and political crises.

But today the 40-year-old sits in a federal jail in Los Angeles awaiting extradition to Chile, where prosecutors accuse him of being a boss of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan street gang. Chilean authorities say Gámez organized a kidnapping that resulted in the killing of an exiled Venezuelan dissident there. Even more troubling, they believe he acted at the behest of Venezuela’s authoritarian government.

And for the past six months, the Trump administration has been working directly with the powerful Venezuelan official under investigation for allegedly ordering the crime: Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello.

The unlikely alliance with Cabello began in January, when U.S. special operations forces swooped into Caracas, captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and brought him to New York to stand trial on drug trafficking charges. While critics called the operation a blatant violation of Venezuelan sovereignty, the Trump administration declared it was restoring law and order in a strife-torn region and began to restructure Venezuela’s ruined economy and exert control over its massive oil industry.

Yet the Trump administration has left Cabello in place — despite longtime U.S. accusations that he has led the repression of political opponents and enriched himself in illicit partnerships with criminal groups. Cabello has had a seat at the table during visits to Caracas by senior U.S. officials, including Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, for negotiations over issues such as Venezuela’s lucrative mining sector. Before Maduro’s capture, U.S. authorities had charged Cabello and a top leader of Tren de Aragua in the same drug trafficking indictment as Maduro and offered a $25 million reward for him.

Cabello and other U.S.-backed Venezuelan leaders have come under fire in recent days for their response to the devastating earthquakes on June 24 that killed more than 3,600 people, injured more than 16,000 and left thousands more missing. In an internationally televised confrontation, Cabello exchanged tense words with members of a U.S. search-and-rescue team en route to aid victims in a heavily damaged area. Critics of the sluggish Venezuelan response to the disaster, including U.S. congressional representatives in Miami, accused Cabello of interfering with rescue operations and repeated their calls for his arrest on the pending U.S. charges. But a State Department spokesperson downplayed the incident as “an unfortunate misunderstanding.”

Early this week, Cabello participated in a meeting with Gen. Francis Donovan, the head of U.S. Southern Command, which leads U.S. military operations in Latin America. Donovan visited Venezuela to discuss relief operations, according to press reports and Venezuelan officials.

In Chile, authorities are investigating Cabello as the alleged mastermind behind the killing of a former Venezuelan military officer, Lt. Ronald Ojeda, who had unsuccessfully attempted an uprising against Maduro. Chile’s attorney general and other senior officials have said that Cabello became an investigative target based on testimony of captured suspects.

The 32-year-old Ojeda had been granted asylum in Chile. Authorities say they suspect that Cabello paid Tren de Aragua’s top leadership and that they, in turn, commissioned gang members in Chile, led by Gámez, to kidnap the former soldier. Chilean prosecutors believe Ojeda died while his captors were torturing him to get information about the Venezuelan political opposition.

After President Donald Trump returned to office last year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials asserted that the killing in Chile demonstrated Tren de Aragua’s ties to the highest levels of the Venezuelan government and the gang’s reach across the Americas. The president designated the gang as a terrorist group and said Maduro had sent it to invade the United States, although some law enforcement officials say the administration exaggerated the threat to justify mass deportations.

As Chile seeks the return of Gámez and prosecutors prepare to bring 20 suspects to trial, the Trump administration has been silent on the alleged role of the regime and Cabello in Ojeda’s death. U.S officials have aided Chilean counterparts with the extradition process, but they have not used the case to press Venezuelan authorities to oust, arrest or hand over Cabello, current and former U.S. officials said.

Asked at a press conference in May if the U.S. still considers Cabello a narcoterrorist, Rubio gave a brief answer. “The policy of the United States on that topic has not changed, and when it changes we will let you know,” he said.

Todd Robinson, a retired senior U.S. diplomat who served as ambassador in Caracas, said Cabello’s continuing power raises questions about whether the stated U.S. commitments to advancing the rule of law in the hemisphere are real or a cover for its interests in exploiting Venezuela’s oil.

“It’s just a horrible, horrible idea to leave him in place,” said Robinson, who was expelled from Venezuela in 2018 after criticizing human rights abuses. “I don’t know what their aim is in doing that, unless it really is about oil, not democratic transition.”

Another retired U.S. diplomat, Brian Naranjo, who served three tours in Venezuela, said the administration seems more interested in appeasing corrupt actors than uprooting them. In addition to controlling the security forces as minister of the interior and justice, Cabello maintains alliances with guerrillas in neighboring Colombia and other criminal groups that make him a danger to political stability, according to Naranjo, other officials, dissidents, and U.S. and Chilean court documents. As a result, critics say, Washington sees Cabello as a necessary evil.

“As long as he figures out a way to keep handing over things the Trump administration wants, I think he endures,” Naranjo said.

In response to a list of questions from ProPublica, a spokesperson for the Department of Justice declined to comment on any ongoing investigations. The White House referred questions to the Department of Justice. The State Department and Venezuelan government officials did not respond to requests for comment. 

Although Cabello could not be reached for comment, he has publicly denied allegations of involvement in the killing of Ojeda. Responding on his television show in 2024, he said: “Venezuela has nothing to do with this kidnapping. Nothing. Resolve your problems there, in Chile.”

As for Gámez, ProPublica found no information indicating that the Venezuelan ex-convict had been charged with a violent offense during the nearly two years he lived in the United States. Interviewed by telephone and email from the federal jail in Los Angeles, he said he worked hard at a restaurant and as a deliveryman to support his family in Utah. He denied any role in Ojeda’s death or being a member of Tren de Aragua. He also said he has no connections to Cabello.

Gámez said that, like the dissident whose kidnapping he’s accused of organizing, he left Venezuela in part because he was an opponent of the former regime. He said the governments of Chile and the United States are making him a scapegoat.

“If only I was everything they say I am,” he said. “Obviously any leader boss has money to burn and I don’t have a penny to my name.”

Hundreds of pages of Chilean and U.S. court records paint a much darker portrait of his activities and detail his alleged role in the Ojeda case and other crimes. Interviews with current and former officials from the United States, Chile, Venezuela and Spain; Ojeda’s friends and family; Gámez; and others, along with the court records, provide one of the fullest accounts of the case.

The Crime

On Feb. 21, 2024, a stolen Nissan sedan arrived at an apartment tower in Santiago, the capital of Chile, one of the safest and most prosperous nations in Latin America. It was 3:05 a.m.

Four masked men disguised as Chilean police officers got out. On the 14th floor, three of them broke into Ojeda’s apartment, handcuffed him in front of his terrified wife and son, and dragged him out, according to court documents and security video. He was barefoot and wearing only underpants.

The kidnappers rushed Ojeda to a slum hideout, where they tortured him to death, court documents say. Then they buried his partially dismembered remains in a suitcase beneath a newly laid cement floor, documents say.

Weeks earlier, the Maduro regime had publicly declared Ojeda a traitor.

In 2017, Ojeda and other young dissident officers had been jailed and tortured in Venezuela. Ojeda alleged in a posthumously published memoir that his ordeal had been ordered by Cabello.

Ojeda took refuge in Chile. But in late 2023, he went to Colombia’s border with Venezuela to try to instigate a military rebellion and narrowly escaped capture. During his final days, Ojeda feared the regime was coming for him, according to his friends and family.

“Ronald and his wife had thought about what would happen if there was a knock on the door,” said his family’s lawyer, Juan Carlos Manríquez. “They had even rehearsed for it. They had agreed to protect their son at all costs by not offering any resistance.”

A tip led Chilean police to Ojeda’s buried remains nine days after his abduction. Fingerprints recovered from the abandoned Nissan had already been traced to a member of Tren de Aragua, authorities say.

In addition to the evidence of the gang’s involvement, Chilean investigators quickly came to suspect a political crime orchestrated by the Maduro regime, which had openly declared the victim an enemy of the state.

“Ojeda had already escaped from them at least once before,” said Héctor Barros, the chief prosecutor in the case. “The regime took that personally. He was a high-priority target.”

Delivering for DoorDash

Before his odyssey across the Americas, Gámez grew up in the Caribbean port city of Maracaibo, Venezuela.

After high school, he fell into petty crime and was sentenced to four years and three months in prison for robbery and other charges in a home invasion, according to Venezuelan court records and his own account.

Nonetheless, there is no indication that he became a member of Tren de Aragua until years later, according to court documents and law enforcement officials. It is not clear when and how he joined the gang, Chilean investigators say.

About a decade ago, Gámez left Venezuela as part of what has become the largest mass exodus in the hemisphere. Maduro had been elected after the death of populist President Hugo Chávez. In 2014, the price of oil had plummeted, causing inflation, unemployment and food shortages. In addition to economic necessity, Gámez said he migrated because he belonged to a political party that opposed the increasingly repressive regime.

Gámez spent years in Chile, where he worked in bread and clothing factories and as a barber. There are no indications that he had a criminal record during that period, according to interviews and court documents.

In 2021, Gámez and his family joined a record number of immigrants who headed north to the United States during the Biden administration. They surrendered to U.S. border agents in Arizona and were released pending the outcome of immigration proceedings.

“All the people who came here said there was more work and better quality of life,” Gámez said. “I also thought about the future of my children and their security because I thought this was a safe country.”

The family settled in Salt Lake City. Gámez said he found jobs in a restaurant kitchen and delivering for DoorDash, sometimes working as many as 15 hours a day.

“The whole time I was here I worked,” he said. “I never had a problem.”

Until December 2022, when a Texas state trooper patrolling near the Mexican border pulled him over for driving with expired plates and discovered that his Venezuelan passengers were undocumented. Gámez admitted that he had agreed to take the family of three to Utah, court records say. He told ProPublica he was doing a favor for a friend who is related to the family. But state prosecutors charged him with smuggling of persons and smuggling of a minor, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported him back to Venezuela in August 2023.

It’s from that period when Chilean police say they recovered an early clue about Gámez’s links to Tren de Aragua. The Venezuelan government sent some 11,000 troops to Aragua state to take back control of the notorious Tocorón prison, the center of operations of Tren de Aragua. Gang bosses had enjoyed surreal luxuries inside — a zoo, a discotheque, a cockfight arena — while directing rackets that had spread across the hemisphere as Tren de Aragua took control of smuggling routes and victimized Venezuelan immigrants.

Although the government declared victory, critics said the authorities had tipped off the top gang bosses, including Hector Rusthenford “Niño” Guerrero, who managed to flee the raid.

Gámez was not involved, and Chilean authorities believe he had already left Venezuela en route back to Chile. But investigators say their later search of his communications found a post after the raid in which he appeared to celebrate Guerrero’s escape.

“They toppled the castle, but not the king,” read his WhatsApp status, according to court documents. “So the game continues.”

Authorities said the message suggests that Gámez may have had contact with the gang during his first stay in Chile or in Utah.

Citing communications and witness testimony, investigators say he was back in Chile about two months after the raid on the prison. The Venezuelan gang rapidly put him in charge of its offshoot in Santiago, called the Pirates of Aragua, according to court documents and interviews.

“There is no way he moves up that quickly when he returns to Chile unless he’s already connected,” said a former U.S. federal law enforcement official.

In early 2024, Chilean investigators say they started hearing chatter about a new gang boss, known as el Turko, who was overseeing a wave of extortion and kidnappings of immigrants.

Angered by public attention to the Ojeda case, senior Tren de Aragua leaders ordered the kidnappers to leave Chile, according to court documents and interviews. Investigators say Gámez also left, spending time in Peru and Colombia as he used his phone to oversee crimes by members of the crew still in Santiago, according to court documents and interviews.

Six weeks after Ojeda’s killing, Gámez was communicating by text with them when they attempted a carjacking that led to a gunfight with an off-duty Chilean police officer, court documents say. The officer and one of the suspected gang members were killed. Recovered text exchanges reveal that an agitated Gámez gave real-time instructions to the accused killers as they fled the scene, according to court records and interviews.

“The clothes you had,” he wrote, according to court records. “Dump them…right away the shoes…everything.”

Police arrested three suspects for killing the police officer and found data in their phones that identified Gámez as el Turko, according to documents. It included a trove of telltale communications in which Gámez, acting on instructions from senior gang bosses outside Chile, allegedly directed the plot to kidnap Ojeda, according to interviews and court documents.

“The order comes from above and they are putting their trust in me,” Gámez told his crew in a text, according to court documents.

By mid-2024, the police knew who they were looking for. But they didn’t know where he was.

End of an Odyssey

On Dec. 30, 2024, U.S. Border Patrol agents arrested Gámez after he crossed near Brownsville, Texas.

He was carrying a Colombian passport with an alias to hide his previous deportation and hoping to rejoin his wife and children in Utah, according to officials and his account. But fingerprint checks revealed his true identity.

Gámez pleaded guilty to a charge of being illegally in the country after deportation and received a sentence of 13 months in prison. He also pleaded guilty to a reduced charge in the 2022 smuggling case and was sentenced to 120 days, according to court records.

In Chile, the sprawling investigation had gathered momentum. Chilean police tracked down other fugitives abroad with the aid of U.S. and Latin American law enforcement agencies. And a number of witnesses, including accused kidnappers, implicated Gámez and the Venezuelan regime, court documents show. Three of them pointed the finger at Cabello, according to sources close to the case.

“Diosdado Cabello, who is a Venezuelan politician, gave the instruction to do the kidnapping,” said an admitted kidnapper. Cabello allegedly paid Guerrero, the top boss of Tren de Aragua, according to that testimony.

Another alleged gang member testified that one of Ojeda’s kidnappers told him the crime was “ordered by the Government of Venezuela, planned by the leaders of Tren de Aragua, and executed by the members of the gang who were in Chile,” court documents say.

“The money was paid by the government,” the alleged gang member said.

So far, authorities said they do not have other evidence that directly connects Cabello to the crime — like communications between the Venezuelan leader and gang bosses. But last year, Chile took the extraordinary step of going to the International Criminal Court to accuse the Maduro regime of being involved in Ojeda’s death. That case is in the preliminary investigation stage as part of the court’s probe of human rights abuses in Venezuela.

Gabriel Boric, who was Chile’s president at the time, said, “Dictatorships and authoritarian leaders cross borders to impose fear when they think they can do it with impunity.”

The Venezuelan government responded to Chile’s charges with a statement that the case “doesn’t just lack a legal basis, but is sustained by a vicious hate towards Venezuela, showing the desperation to please the agendas ordered by the United States.”

The U.S. agenda in Venezuela has come under increasing scrutiny. Venezuela’s opposition, which has long counted on the United States for support, continues to call for Cabello’s ouster and democratic reforms. But an unspoken bargain between Cabello and the Trump administration prevails, according to dissidents and current and former U.S. officials. The administration exploits the leverage of the U.S. indictment to ensure Cabello’s cooperation, while Cabello shields himself with his power to upend Venezuela’s stability, critics said.

Naranjo, the former diplomat, said Cabello’s willingness to accommodate Washington suggests that he is “going to be around far longer than anybody wants. He’s always demonstrated his ability to react and adapt, operationally and tactically, to the circumstances in front of him.”

In a recent and dramatic sign of the evolving partnership with the United States, Trump announced June 13 that a U.S. missile strike had killed Guerrero, Tren de Aragua’s leader, in Venezuela’s lawless mining region. Trump said the strike had been “coordinated closely with our friends in Venezuela, with whom we are working very well.” 

Guerrero’s death will make it more difficult for Chilean investigators to pursue the allegations that Cabello hired the gang to target Ojeda, former officials said. But Ojeda’s family and other dissidents hope that the trial in Santiago will show that the Venezuelan regime, like other authoritarian governments, enlisted organized crime to send a terroristic message to its foes at home and abroad.

“Diosdado Cabello is the person we want punished,” said Javier Ojeda, the victim’s brother.

Chilean authorities say Gámez and other suspected gang chiefs who have been captured could provide further evidence about the alleged links to Cabello. Gámez has consented to extradition, according to court documents, but the process could still take weeks. Gámez told ProPublica he decided to return voluntarily to Chile because he wants to fight the charges against him in the Chilean courts. 

Gámez questioned the credibility of witnesses against him, saying one of the admitted gang members “is looking for an escape … by any means, like lying and inventing things.” He didn’t respond to some questions about the voluminous court file against him, including his alleged communications.

Gámez asserted that he’s being set up as a fall guy for political reasons. Both the Chilean and U.S. governments, he said, have exploited the Ojeda case in their persecution of Venezuelans.

Chilean authorities have arrested many Venezuelans “to use that as a strategy so they leave Chile,” he said. “The same as the president here did…everyone they caught they connected to Tren de Aragua to arrest them and throw them out of the country.”

The post He’s Suspected of Hiring a Venezuelan Gang for a Political Killing. Trump Officials Still Work With Him. appeared first on ProPublica.

Two members of Congress have called on federal officials to address what they described as “a growing and preventable public health crisis” of families refusing the long-standard vitamin K shot for their newborns, which has led to some of those babies suffering uncontrollable bleeding and even dying. 

“We write to urge the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to take immediate action,” two Democrats, Rep. Kim Schrier, from Washington, and Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, from Maryland, wrote in a letter last week to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who is acting as director of the CDC. 

The letter followed a ProPublica investigation that found babies were dying after families refused the vitamin K shot, a critical and inexpensive injection given at birth to help the blood clot, and that federal and state agencies were not tracking vital data. 

“Recent reporting from ProPublica has highlighted a major problem: the federal government does not currently track vitamin K shot refusal, vitamin K deficiency bleeding, or the preventable deaths related to vitamin K deficiency,” Schrier and Alsobrooks wrote in the letter. 

The vitamin K shot has been routine in the U.S. since the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended it for all newborns in 1961, but some families in recent years have declined the shot — which is not a vaccine — amid a rising mistrust of medical institutions and false information online. 

No federal or state agencies track refusal rates or subsequent bleeding.

“It was ProPublica’s reporting that gave us this additional information and led to us writing this important letter, and asking, of course, that CDC take action,” Alsobrooks said in an interview. 

She called on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to publicly voice his support for the shot. He has previously refused to do so and instead stated that he has never said anything about the injection.

“There are so many who are hanging on the word and advice of a person in his position,” said Alsobrooks, who has called for Kennedy’s resignation. “I think he has a moral obligation to state in clear and no uncertain terms that this is safe and effective, and that families should be giving this shot to their babies.”

An HHS spokesperson, reiterating a previous comment, said that the CDC recommends that parents allow newborns to get the vitamin K shot within six hours of their birth to prevent vitamin K deficiency bleeding. She also said that uptake of the shot has declined in recent years “as public trust in health care institutions has fallen, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic amid heavy-handed mandates and inconsistent messaging during the Biden administration.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics applauded the lawmakers and ProPublica for bringing attention to the issue, which Dr. Andrew Racine, AAP’s president, said the organization has been concerned about for some time. 

One function of government, he said, is to provide clinicians and the public with data that will allow them to make informed decisions. If a sick baby comes into a hospital, doctors should know if they are in an area with a high vitamin K refusal rate so they can quickly diagnose and treat them. He likened it to tracking measles cases. 

“We depend upon the CDC to let us know about that,” Racine said. “And this is essentially a medical condition that is affecting newborn babies that pediatricians or people who look after children need to be aware of.”

He said, too, that HHS leadership should be vocal in their support for the shot and in communicating what could happen if a baby who did not receive the shot starts bleeding. 

“It’s not simply to track it,” Racine said. “It’s to message it.”

Research shows babies who don’t get the vitamin K shot are 81 times more likely than those who do to develop late vitamin K deficiency bleeding, which can lead to bleeding in the brain. According to the CDC, 1 in every 5 babies with vitamin K deficiency bleeding will die.

A national study of more than 5 million births found a rise in the rate of babies not receiving vitamin K at birth, which topped 5% in 2024. Some hospitals have told ProPublica that their refusal rates have more than doubled in recent years.

Schrier and Alsobrooks wrote in their letter that historically there wasn’t a need for robust monitoring systems to track cases of vitamin K deficiency bleeding. But now, without a solid understanding of the scope, experts can’t determine the extent of the problem or develop a public health campaign. The CDC, they wrote, has the tools needed to understand and address the crisis and should use them.

“I believe that the best way to set the record straight for parents is to be able to provide modern-day, accurate information,” Schrier said. “Once you stop doing these things that are preventative, cases rise.”

Read more

Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth

The post Lawmakers Call for CDC to Track Vitamin K Shot Refusals, Cite ProPublica Report appeared first on ProPublica.

President Donald Trump has pushed out the three remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, leaving the bipartisan agency in limbo as he rushes to remake how elections are run before this year’s midterms.

Trump fired Benjamin Hovland and Thomas Hicks, the Democrats on the commission, multiple sources familiar with the matter told ProPublica, which was the first to report the actions on its social media accounts. Christy McCormick, the Republican, was allowed to resign, the sources said.

The commission’s unprecedented dismantling alarmed voter advocacy groups and Democratic state election officials, who called the move “reckless and irresponsible.”

“The EAC plays a critical role in supporting state and local election officials,” Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s secretary of state and chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said in a statement, “and it will again fall on Secretaries of State and other election administrators to fill the gap.”

A White House official wouldn’t confirm the specific actions taken but said in a statement to ProPublica that the president “reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted.”

“The Administration from the start has been working across all agencies and local partners to safeguard elections from fraud and abuse, and investing in a strong infrastructure to sustain that mission especially in the midterm elections,” the official said.

Hicks and McCormick did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

Hovland, who had been a commissioner since 2019, said in an interview that it was a privilege to serve in the role, and he is hopeful that staff will continue the good work being done at the agency.

In response to the White House’s comments, he said the commission had been working in a bipartisan way “to find constructive solutions to support election officials in maintaining the security and integrity of our elections.”

Hovland was in Missouri on Thursday visiting a local election office and an early voting location when he got an email from the White House telling him that he had been fired. He was visiting the office to learn about new measures put in place to protect election workers.

He said he is proud of the new resources the EAC has created for election workers recently, such as social media templates to communicate with voters and decks of cards that help train workers on how to respond to Election Day scenarios.

The commission was established in 2003 to set standards for state voting systems and to provide funding for upgrades.

Its four-member board is designed to be evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, all nominated by the president at the recommendation of congressional leadership and confirmed by the Senate. The fourth commissioner, Don Palmer, a Republican, resigned in April. By dismissing the commission’s remaining members, Trump can try to put forward replacements who may be more amenable to his demands.

In March 2025, Trump issued a sweeping executive order that directed the EAC to change the national voter registration form — which serves as the template for the forms in each state — to require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote. Currently, voters in almost all states attest to their citizenship under penalty of perjury, but they are not required to provide proof.

The Trump-aligned law firm America First Legal had petitioned the EAC to change the form. The EAC posted a notice seeking comments, receiving hundreds of thousands of them in response, but had not yet held a vote.

The Bipartisan Policy Center, a group that advocates on election issues, said the departures are a “significant loss for one of the federal government’s few institutions explicitly designed around bipartisan governance.”

The commission has been plagued by partisan infighting and ineffectiveness, as well as chronic vacancies and a lack of funding. It’s made some progress in recent years, however, passing new standards for voting machines and creating new resources and recommendations for election officials. Often, the commission’s decisions were unanimous despite its partisan split.

The post Trump Pushes Out Remaining Members of Bipartisan Election Commission Ahead of Midterms appeared first on ProPublica.

New York makes an unusual promise to its residents: Its constitution says the state must provide “aid, care and support for the needy.”

But for at least the fourth time in almost 40 years, the state is being sued for failing to live up to this commitment by putting impoverished families at risk of homelessness.

A new lawsuit filed last month argues New York is failing for the same reason it has in the past: The welfare allowance it provides for housing, known as a shelter allowance, doesn’t come close to the cost of the state’s rents, which are among the highest in the country. The Legal Aid Society and Empire Justice Center, both nonprofits, are demanding that the state increase the allowance and provide enough financial assistance to keep families and individuals housed.

“I don’t want to sleep in the street. I don’t want to go to the shelter,” said 54-year-old Minerva Pacumio, a plaintiff in the lawsuit who is facing eviction. “I don’t want to lose everything.”

New York’s shelter allowance doesn’t cover rent for modest private housing anywhere in the state, according to the lawsuit and an independent analysis performed by New York Focus and ProPublica. The state hasn’t raised the monthly allowance for families with children since 2003 — when it was set at $450 for a family of four in New York City. And the amount has barely budged for adult-only households since 1988.

Pacumio receives a $250 monthly allowance to cover the one-bedroom apartment she rents in Queens for $1,900. She lives with her two adult daughters, one of whom is disabled; Pacumio handles her care herself five days out of the week. The other, Pacumio said, has mental health issues and has been unable to find work.

Pacumio said she owes thousands in back rent.

“When you don’t change your shelter allowance amounts for 40 years for single people and 20 years for families, I think there’s a reasonable argument that could be made that you’re not even really trying to meet your constitutional obligations to provide aid and care to the needy in New York State,” said Pavita Krishnaswamy, a supervising attorney for the Legal Aid Society’s Civil Practice Law Reform Unit.

The lack of aid pushes people toward an emergency shelter system that cannot meet the demand of rising homelessness: New York Focus and ProPublica last year found that nearly half of the state’s unhoused families and individuals outside of New York City are placed in hotels with minimal support to help them return to permanent housing. The state regularly pays more to put someone up in a hotel than it would have cost to cover rent for modest housing, the news organizations found.

Read More

Her Family Needed Housing. They Spent Months in New York Hotels, Left to Fend for Themselves.

The Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, the agency responsible for setting shelter allowances, has responded to past calls for an allowance increase by saying the Legislature would have to allocate more funding in the state budget. The budget is already projected to run multibillion-dollar deficits in coming years.

Over the past several legislative sessions, state lawmakers sponsored bills that would have pinned the allowance to fair market rent, the federal government’s estimate of how much it costs to rent modest private housing. Those bills have repeatedly failed, and their sponsors say little will change without the governor’s backing.

“The governor controls — any governor of New York state controls — the budget process. We can’t just fund things that the governor would not agree to,” said Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal, a Democrat who chairs the housing committee and repeatedly sponsored the failed legislation in the state Assembly.

The office of Gov. Kathy Hochul, also a Democrat, did not respond to multiple requests for comment or to written questions. An Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance spokesperson did not respond to questions from New York Focus and ProPublica about whether the agency had ever requested additional funding for shelter allowances. He declined to comment for this story, citing the pending litigation.

In past litigation, the state has argued that the constitution doesn’t command the state to meet all of poor families’ needs.

A “Kafka-esque Situation”

For Legal Aid, this is familiar ground. This is at least the fourth lawsuit it has filed against the state accusing New York of failing to provide enough welfare assistance for rent. In the late ’80s, the nonprofit filed a landmark case on behalf of Barbara Jiggetts, a single mother of three who was renting an apartment in Queens. Jiggetts was receiving $270 a month to help cover $381 in rent — about 70% of what she owed each month. Legal Aid argued that the state was shirking its obligation to keep her and her children safely housed.

In the Jiggetts case, the court ordered the state to temporarily cover rent for New York City families with children facing eviction until the establishment of “a lawful” shelter allowance that would keep them housed together.

But the state waited until 2003 to raise the shelter allowance, blowing past the court’s original deadline by five years.

The state has also created a permanent supplement to fill the gap between the allowance and rent. But the supplement offered in the city is only available to families with children. So, when Pacumio’s youngest turned 18, she lost the supplement, which constituted the majority of her housing assistance. Outside New York City, that supplement is optional, and just 15 of 57 counties choose to offer it to families with children, according to the Empire Justice Center.

The new lawsuit seeks either an increase in the shelter allowance or a mandatory expansion of the supplement statewide, regardless of household composition — or both.

Since 2003, the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance has reviewed the allowance four times — every five years, as required. During its last review in 2023, more than 100 comments poured in, many imploring the agency to increase the benefit. Some shared personal stories from unhoused New Yorkers who said the shelter allowances weren’t enough to prevent homelessness, according to the state register.

Pleas also came from the counties themselves. Michael Iapoce, the social services commissioner for Ulster County, wrote at the time that there wasn’t a single habitable apartment available for rent that would be covered by the shelter allowance.

“The shelter allowance is totally irrational and arbitrary,” he said. “There is no reasoned justification to keep the shelter allowance and supplements so low.” His comments on the regulations were attached as an exhibit to the lawsuit.

As it stands, people poor enough to qualify for public assistance and looking for a place to rent find themselves in a “cruel Dickensian or Kafka-esque situation,” said Susan Antos, the managing attorney for public benefits at Empire Justice Center. The shelter allowance is too low to allow them to afford even a modest place, but under the rules, recipients may have their benefits cut if they stop looking.

State Sen. Brian Kavanagh, the Democratic chair of the Senate’s housing committee, said it’s hard to tease out how much it would cost to increase the shelter allowance because of how public assistance caseloads may change over time. As of June 2025, the most recent month for which figures are available, nearly three-quarters of a million people were receiving public assistance.

Kimberly Maldonado is one of the recipients. She has lived in the same rent-stabilized apartment in Brooklyn since she was 22. Now 55 and living alone, she said that she was forced to stop working in June of last year because of ongoing health issues and relies on her daughter to cover her rent. Maldonado receives $215 a month to help cover $1,114 in rent, doesn’t qualify for a state supplement because she doesn’t have minor children, and receives no other financial assistance for housing from the state.

Maldonado, a plaintiff in the new lawsuit, told New York Focus and ProPublica she was afraid that the state would never provide the help financially desperate New Yorkers need.

“As long as people are quiet and we don’t try to speak up and get help and get them to change the laws, the rules, or whatever it may be, we’re never going to get help, we’re never going to get nothing changed.”

The post New York Hasn’t Raised Housing Allowances for Needy Residents in Decades. That’s Unconstitutional, a Lawsuit Says. appeared first on ProPublica.

The government agency that collects property taxes in Puerto Rico inadvertently exposed the Social Security numbers of approximately 1 million people, Centro de Periodismo Investigativo and ProPublica learned.

It was the latest cybersecurity lapse for the Puerto Rico government, which in the past three years has seen technology breaches interrupt government services, take websites offline and lead to citizens’ personal information being published on the dark web.

CPI and ProPublica became aware of the vulnerability related to the Municipal Revenue Collection Center’s interactive property map, known as the Catastro Digital, and notified the agency in mid-June.

The online tool provides information, such as size, boundaries, tax assessment, sale price and owner’s name, for every registered property on the island.

While a simple search of the map wouldn’t reveal sensitive information, anyone who understands how websites request data could download unprotected personal information such as Social Security numbers without a username or password.

The news organizations were able to verify the security hole and provided the agency, known by its Spanish initials, CRIM, with a detailed description of the issue that included the specific server and folders that contained the compromised data.

Despite the notification, CRIM has repeatedly denied there were any problems with its system.

“Following a review of the Catastro Digital platform, it was determined that there was NO breach of confidential personal taxpayer information, as the Catastro Digital does NOT contain or display the type of information alluded to,” CRIM Executive Director Javier García Cintrón said.

But a few days after CPI and ProPublica contacted CRIM, the news organizations were able to see that the security holes had been patched.

García denied that, saying there was no need to fix any problem. A Puerto Rico law requires any entity, including government agencies, to promptly notify users if their personal information has been breached. But García said the agency would not reach out to users to tell them that their Social Security numbers were potentially exposed, as “no protected information was at risk.”

CRIM also did not notify the Puerto Rico Innovation & Technology Service, known as PRITS, which oversees all government information technology systems. The government’s cybersecurity protocol requires informing PRITS of “any suspected security incident.”

A PRITS spokesperson declined to answer questions and said they had to be submitted under Puerto Rico’s public information law, which is meant to allow citizens to get government records and not to answer press questions.

So far this year, more than 2 million attempted cyberattacks have been recorded within the Puerto Rico government, PRITS data shows. Half of these were deemed critical incidents, which involve “severe impact on critical operations, the compromise of sensitive data, or an imminent threat to agency security or government data,” according to the agency.

In March, citizens saw their driver’s license and registration appointments postponed after an attempted cyberattack on Transportation Department systems. Last year, Puerto Rico residents could not verify their criminal record status, which they need for employment, for almost a week because of an “unauthorized access” to the local Justice Department’s criminal records database. In 2023, Puerto Rico water utility clients and employees saw their personal information published on the dark web after a ransomware attack.

An increase in attacks prompted Puerto Rico lawmakers in 2024 to approve a comprehensive cybersecurity law, Act 40, which mandated all government agencies implement minimum cybersecurity standards and principles. It also established penalties for noncompliance and required all government agencies to conduct a risk assessment at least once annually.

But three cybersecurity experts said agencies have failed to fully implement the security standards set out under the law, even as attacks become more frequent and sophisticated. Instead of periodically assessing and tackling vulnerabilities that prevent these attacks, agencies are reactive, they said.

A Puerto Rico Inspector General Office report released late last year found deficiencies across 90 local government agencies, with 60% of them failing to conduct vulnerability assessments of their IT systems.

The government would be in “much better shape” if it focused on employee training and implemented tools like multifactor authentication on the front end, said Carlos Pérez, a cybersecurity expert in Puerto Rico who is director of security intelligence at TrustedSec, a company that consults with governments and private companies.

“We are addressing the symptom but not the disease,” he said.

In most cases, the cybersecurity law falls short of requiring unified standards across the government, said a former government IT employee, who asked not be named because he feared professional repercussions. That lack of a single set of standards has allowed agencies to decide on their own how they protect personal data.

García explained that, as part of CRIM’s security measures, the agency uses passwords, usernames and text messages to validate identity. He denied that anyone could access the Catastro Digital database without a password except to conduct individual searches through the public website.

The ability to access Social Security numbers through CRIM’s property map raises concerns given the proliferation of private companies that sell Puerto Rico real estate information, obtained from public databases such as Catastro Digital. Any of those companies could have accessed the data, including personal information.

At least three property listings companies contacted by CPI and ProPublica said they were not aware of any vulnerability and did not access the sensitive data.

The post A Puerto Rico Government Agency Exposed 1 Million Social Security Numbers appeared first on ProPublica.

The senior legal counsel to the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — the principal military adviser to President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — is stepping down nearly a year before his term is over, the latest in an exodus of the military’s top leaders and lawyers over the last 18 months. 

Brig. Gen. Eric Widmar told ProPublica he did not take his decision to retire lightly and that he did so “for personal reasons.” 

“Earlier this year, my wife and I reflected on the demands of this role, which have required me to live apart from my wife for the past two years and created additional challenges for me and my family,” Widmar said in an emailed statement. “After careful consideration, I decided it was time to place my family at the center of my life and focus on our next chapter together.”

Widmar’s departure follows those of Gen. Chris “C.D.” Donahue, head of Army forces in Europe and Africa, earlier this month, about halfway through the typical term; Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George in April, about a year and a half short of the customary four-year term; and Admiral Alvin Holsey, who retired with two years remaining in his term late last year as the leader of Southern Command, which is overseeing the controversial drone strikes on boats in the Caribbean. Widmar’s exit also follows Hegseth’s firings of top lawyers for the Army, Air Force and Navy last year. 

“A person in that position is a rising star,” said one senior ranking former judge advocate, a military attorney, who did not want to be named for fear of reprisal. “He’s certainly high-ranking in the legal community and well-thought-of and trusted. It’s a pretty important job.”

Military experts and current and former senior ranking military officials called Widmar’s early retirement from such a vaunted post a marked departure from military precedent and said it was especially concerning as part of a pattern of well-respected senior leadership exiting under Hegseth with little explanation. Uniformed military leadership, particularly legal advisers, generally remain in place across administrations to preserve the military’s commitment to nonpartisan professionalism. 

“That is centuries of high-priced talent that are being cashiered without any explanation for why their service was untenable,” said Kori Schake, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “It creates a command climate in which people are hesitant to take initiative. And that’s how countries lose wars.” 

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Dan Caine, said in a statement that Widmar “is deeply respected and admired by all” and thanked him for his “remarkable” service. “We will miss his legal counsel, incredible expertise and experience, and his understanding of our responsibility to always speak truth to power.” 

The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment from Hegseth.

Experts on military personnel matters as well as current and former senior ranking officers say the departures raise serious questions that Congress ought to be asking of all key leaders leaving in the current environment. 

“What is striking is how far Congress has let Hegseth go in shaping the force without demanding a clear explanation of what he’s doing,” said Peter Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University who has long taught senior ranking officers the importance of not using retirement or resignation to stir public controversy.   

A West Point graduate who advised operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Widmar departs after more than 28 years in the service. Prior to his most recent role, he was staff judge advocate for Central Command in support of U.S. interests across the Middle East and Asia. 

The Senate confirmed Widmar as legal counsel to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2024. In an announcement at the time, the Army’s then-top lawyer, Lt. Gen. Joseph Berger III, praised his “strategic vision and moral courage.” 

Berger has since been fired by Hegseth.

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