On the night of the military-style raid at a Chicago apartment complex, a loud boom woke the Nigerian man who lived in Unit 215. Tolulope Akinsulie stood up from his bed and saw heavily armed federal agents rushing into his apartment. He then felt the jaws of a large dog biting into his right ankle, knocking him to the floor. Akinsulie screamed as the dog tore the flesh from his ankle, thighs, hip and wrist. 

Down the hall, agents took a Venezuelan mother and her 16-year-old son from their apartment at gunpoint to another unit. There, they saw agents hit a man with what looked like the butt of a  rifle and kick another who was lying on the floor. As he watched, her son began to hyperventilate.

“Here is another one,” agents said about a Mexican man who lived in Unit 502, before zip-tying his hands behind his back and marching him out of the building. Agents told the man he wasn’t welcome in the United States, took his city of Chicago identification card and ripped it up in front of him. 

While much has been documented about the Sept. 30 raid by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, new accounts from 17 men, women and children detained that night paint a violent and terrifying portrait of how the federal agents conducted the operation.

Their descriptions form the basis of administrative claims filed on their behalf Tuesday against DHS and several other federal agencies that took part in the midnight raid in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood.

The claims mark the tenants’ first step toward seeking accountability, their lawyers said, as well as millions of dollars in damages, for federal agents’ actions during the raid, a key moment in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Chicago. The claims allege that agents didn’t have warrants before entering apartments.

“There was no reason to do me like that,” Akinsulie said in an interview with ProPublica. His body still bears the dark scars from the dog bites. The complaint, he said, is meant to send a message that officials are not above the law. “Everybody can get a check and balance,” he said. “People have to learn how to act right.”

The claims allege that federal agents caused physical injuries, emotional trauma, “brutal detention” and financial loss. Each of the claimants — 15 are immigrants, and two are U.S. citizens —  is seeking about $5 million, an amount the attorneys believe is comparable to similar court judgments in Chicago.

“There is no amount of damages that will compensate our clients for the trauma they experienced that night,” said Susana Sandoval Vargas, the Midwest regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a national Latino civil rights organization that is representing some of the tenants. “It is about holding the federal government accountable for their unlawful actions.”

A DHS spokesperson said Wednesday that the “operation was performed in full compliance of the law” and that tenants are not owed compensation. “DHS is taking appropriate and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers and the public from dangerous criminal illegal aliens.”

The spokesperson did not respond to questions about Akinsulie’s injuries. But federal immigration agents have said they issued verbal warnings as they entered Akinsulie’s unit and believed he had been trying to hide and evade arrest, according to documents filed in an unrelated lawsuit. Akinsulie said he was in a deep sleep and did not hear any warnings or the dog barking.

Within DHS, the South Shore tenants’ claims also were submitted to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In addition, they were sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, neither of which responded to questions from ProPublica.

An 18th claim also was filed Tuesday on behalf of a tenant who was detained outside the building a week before the raid and lost property.

The Federal Tort Claims Act provides one of the only avenues for people who believe they were harmed by federal employees acting unlawfully and allows for compensation for emotional distress, property damage, injury or death. If the agency does not respond or settle a claim within six months, or if it denies a claim, individuals can then file a lawsuit. 

DHS would not say how many claims have been filed since last year. But already there have been dozens across the country: A pregnant woman in California said she went into premature labor after being detained and shackled. A Marine Corps veteran said he was tackled by federal agents while protesting in Oregon. A Chicago alderperson said agents swore at her, shoved her and handcuffed her after she questioned their presence in a hospital emergency room. The DHS spokesperson said the three individuals were obstructing or interfering with law enforcement.

In interviews, a half dozen attorneys said they expect to see more claims in the coming months. “Hopefully this case and others will be a check against the most aggressive and reckless forms of (immigration) enforcement,” said Mark Fleming, an attorney with the National Immigrant Justice Center, which worked on the case along with MALDEF, the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago and the MacArthur Justice Center.

During the South Shore raid, some 300 heavily armed agents stormed the dilapidated, five-story building; some descended from a Black Hawk helicopter. They hurled flash grenades, broke down apartment doors and zip-tied dozens of immigrants and U.S. citizens who lived in the building. The drama was captured by a television crew that accompanied agents.

The Trump administration repeatedly justified its actions by claiming it had intelligence that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had taken over the building, and that there were guns, drugs and explosives inside. ProPublica journalists, who over the past several months have interviewed 16 of the 37 immigrants detained that night, previously reported that there was little evidence to back the government’s claim. To this day, federal prosecutors have not filed criminal charges against anyone who was arrested.

The tort claims detail what families, including those with young children, allegedly experienced during the raid. A Venezuelan mother and father huddled together in their apartment with their four children, the youngest a 1-year-old U.S. citizen, who “screamed and cried in terror” while agents pointed guns at them. Agents marched them outside in their pajamas and separated the father. One of the boys, now 9, had a panic attack, according to the claim.

DHS officials previously insisted children were not zip-tied, but the account from the 16-year-old boy who hyperventilated at the sight of agents assaulting immigrants said he and his mom were zip-tied outside the building. DHS called that an “abject lie” and said no children were handcuffed or restrained. 

While the tenants were detained, the records allege, many of their possessions were stolen or lost: shoes, Playstations, smartphones, jewelry, mattresses, a backpack with $1,300 in cash and toys. Several reported losing their vehicles, too.

The raid upended tenants’ lives. Many of the immigrants, mostly Venezuelan, have already been deported. Many U.S. citizens who lived in the building, including some on public housing assistance, were forced to relocate late last year after a judge ordered the building shuttered for safety issues and code violations.

José Miguel Jiménez López, 42, the Mexican man who lived on the fifth floor, worked as a welder in Chicago before the raid disrupted his life. Jiménez said he wasn’t a gang member or involved in criminal activity. So even when agents pointed guns at him, zip-tied his hands and told him to go back to his country, he thought they would let him go. They didn’t.

Over the next four months, he was shuttled to detention facilities in Indiana, Kentucky and Louisiana before being released at the Mexico border in February. He is now living in his childhood home in the state of Guanajuato. “I have friends and family who are still there, and they are afraid,” he said in an interview. “I wouldn’t like to see them go through what I had to go through.”

His claim details harsh conditions at the facilities, including insufficient food and water, constant air conditioning during winter and little time outside. Others described getting sick from the drinking water, a lack of adequate medical care and a constant worry that they would never see their loved ones again. The DHS spokesperson said the “safety and well-being of detainees are prioritized” and that detainees have access to medical care and nutritious meals.

In his claim, Jiménez alleged that “ICE officers treated him and other detainees as if they were sub-human and not entitled to basic dignity or respect.” He said he lost $3,000 worth of property, including a TV and a drill. 

Meanwhile, the Venezuelan woman and her 16-year-old son were transferred to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas. They spent three weeks there until they were released into the U.S. on electronic monitoring. The woman now has trouble sleeping, while her son sees a psychiatrist to process what happened that night. 

Akinsulie, 42, said he is grateful to be alive. A devout Christian, he finds peace reading the Bible and in prayer. But while he was in detention, he had so many nightmares that he needed to see a psychiatrist. He dreamed about dogs barking behind him. Chasing him. Talking to him.

“The one that really baffled me was when the German shepherd was chasing me. Then I was running,” Akinsulie said. “The German shepherd was about to bite me. That really scared me because I don’t want no more bites.”

The nightmares stopped after he was released in March; the government had conceded that he and others had likely been arrested unlawfully. Akinsulie, who said he has lived in Chicago since 2007, has no criminal history, according to the arrest report from the night he was detained. 

He is back in Chicago now, staying with a friend and doing odd jobs. He finds it difficult to stand for a long time, and sometimes pain shoots from his hip to his right foot. Once an avid soccer player, he said he can’t kick the ball or run like he used to. He worries that the injuries might be permanent, but he can’t afford to see a doctor.

The post Immigrants Detained in Chicago Military-Style Raid Seek Millions in Damages appeared first on ProPublica.

Estelle, who’s long held permanent resident status in the U.S., is a veteran at navigating the reentry process when she returns from visiting relatives in her native France.

But on her most recent trip through customs in mid-March, officers detained the 57-year-old Lawrence, Kansas, resident for 30 hours, forced her to spend the night in a holding cell on a concrete slab and threatened her with deportation.

Why? Because she acknowledged under questioning by customs officers that she’d once voted in a local election, despite not being a U.S. citizen. A small number of cities in the U.S. allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, but Lawrence is not one of them. Kansas and federal law both require U.S. citizenship to register to vote.

Immigration and election experts say her case, which hasn’t previously been reported, marks a new escalation in the Trump administration’s efforts to find and prosecute instances of noncitizen voting, despite voluminous evidence showing it is rare. (Estelle asked that her last name not be used because of safety concerns.)

Historically, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has played no part in election-fraud investigations. But the transcript of Estelle’s interview, which was provided to ProPublica by her attorney, makes clear that the agency had flagged her for special scrutiny and that officers knew her voting history. Estelle told the officer during questioning that she thought she could vote in local elections because a state motor vehicles department employee had told her when she renewed her driver’s license that she was eligible.

Kerry Doyle, a deputy general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security in the Biden administration, said she’d never heard of someone being detained at a port of entry on suspicion of voting illegally.

“It took them a whole lot of energy and effort to sift through all these things to find this needle in the haystack,” said Doyle, a longtime immigration attorney. “And it is a needle in the haystack.”

A CBP spokesperson confirmed that officers detained a woman matching Estelle’s description at the Detroit airport, placing her in removal proceedings. The official didn’t answer questions about whether the agency is now routinely questioning noncitizen travelers about voting at ports of entry but emphasized that voting illegally is a deportable offense.

“The Trump Administration will continue to enforce our nation’s laws,” the spokesperson said in an email. “Those who violate these laws will be processed, detained, and removed as required.”

Estelle’s attorney, Matthew Hoppock, said she had no prior criminal history and hadn’t otherwise violated the terms of her green card. He said she registered to vote as part of renewing her driver’s license in 2023. Estelle voted in a November 2023 election that included races for city council and school boards, according to Douglas County records. She did not vote in any subsequent election, including the 2024 presidential election.

An immigration judge granted a request from Estelle to cancel her removal proceedings, after Hoppock spoke with DHS officials about her case. It’s unclear whether she will face any future criminal charges. (CBP declined to comment about whether there are any pending.) Still, Hoppock said, CBP had overstepped in its aggressive handling of the matter, which he called “really something.”

“It’s clear as day she wasn’t trying to break the law,” he said.

Though Trump has repeatedly claimed that millions of noncitizens vote, data shows there are few such cases and that, of these, most involve people like Estelle, who register in error, said Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit voting rights organization.

“My concern is about the publicizing of these kinds of incidents as a tool to frighten people,” Weiser said.

When these rare cases do happen, they are typically identified by local and state election officials who refer them to law enforcement. They often do not move forward, according to several election lawyers, because the voter often was registered by mistake by an elections clerk or voted without knowing it was illegal. Depending on the charges, prosecutors may have to prove that it was intentional.

Trump has made it clear he wants the federal government to do more to prevent and punish election fraud, despite the paucity of evidence that it’s a widespread issue.

He pushed unsuccessfully for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would have required Americans to provide documentary proof of citizenship when they registered to vote. In March 2025, he issued an executive order that, in part, directed federal agencies to use their resources to help find and prosecute noncitizen voters. His Justice Department began demanding that states hand over their voter-roll information, and DHS revamped a tool to allow states to check registered voters’ citizenship status en masse.

As ProPublica has reported, the tool proved highly error-prone. But despite its flaws, it appears DHS is still using the tool to pursue noncitizen voting prosecutions. DHS said in a recent statement that a branch of the agency, Homeland Security Investigations, will look into more than 24,000 voters flagged by SAVE as potential noncitizens.

A former CBP official, who spoke anonymously because their current job doesn’t permit them to comment publicly, said it is likely that potential noncitizen voters have been flagged in the system that customs officers use to check the records of international travelers, such as passports. If that’s the case, officers would see in the person’s file that they should be questioned further on their voting histories.

Hoppock said Estelle was detained on a layover, as she traveled home from visiting her ailing father in France. According to the transcript of her interview with a customs officer, the official asked Estelle if she had ever registered to vote or voted, and she told him yes, she had voted once. The officer then asked if she had voted in the Nov. 7, 2023, local election, which she had.

After questioning Estelle, officers put her in the cell with a thin mattress on top of the concrete slab and a blanket donated by an airline, Hoppock said. She heard officers talking about Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, he said, and worried she might be moved there next. Instead, she was released after more than 30 hours in custody.

Jamie Shew — the clerk for Douglas County, Kansas, where Estelle was registered — said in an interview that he found out about Estelle’s case on March 23, when he received an administrative subpoena from CBP asking for her voter registration application and voting records.

Shew said he didn’t have the application, just data passed on by the secretary of state’s office showing she’d registered in September 2023 and wasn’t affiliated with a political party.

Shew said he’s only supposed to be given registrations to process if the would-be voter attests they are a U.S. citizen, as federal law requires. Estelle insists she told the employee at the motor vehicles department she was not a citizen.

Shew said Estelle reached out shortly after he received the CBP’s subpoena. She asked him to cancel her voter registration, he said, and he did on March 31.

Hoppock worries that by moving straight to deportation proceedings, the federal government has found a way to skip prosecuting and convicting.

“You’re going to get people like Estelle,” he said, “who haven’t meant to do anything wrong, getting detained in a jail cell in Michigan.”

The post A Noncitizen Says She Was Told She Could Vote. Then Customs Detained Her at the Airport and Threatened to Deport Her. appeared first on ProPublica.

Jason Agan was impossible to miss at Angelo Rodriguez High School. The San Francisco Bay Area teacher was loud and gregarious, a fixture on campus since the Fairfield school opened in 2001. He ran the student government and called himself the man behind the curtain, organizing pep rallies and prom. He taught AP calculus, so advanced math students ended up in his classroom, jostling for his approval and letters of recommendation. Some considered him a mentor who inspired a love of math — and even a second father.

But for years students also whispered about Agan’s behavior, according to interviews with 14 Rodriguez High graduates, most of whom he had taught. He touched some of them in public in ways that made them uncomfortable, they said, including hugging students and massaging their shoulders. And he seemed fixated on enforcing the dress code, calling out girls whose shorts were too short. 

Nearly two decades into Agan’s tenure, and on the heels of the #MeToo movement, students had enough. At least 11 students and one parent submitted written complaints about his behavior to school administrators in 2018, drawing at least two warnings to stop, a KQED and ProPublica investigation found. By January 2019, the Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District had taken steps to fire him, suspending him without pay.

Agan pushed back, and nearly a year later an independent panel convened by the state to hear his case deemed him “unfit to teach.” The panel’s decision meant that the popular educator was officially out of the job where he had spent his entire teaching career. 

But the panel’s review only addressed his employment at this one school district, and its finding was not shared publicly. It would be up to the state’s teacher licensing agency to determine whether additional discipline would be imposed, including whether Agan could keep teaching in California public schools. 

Over the next three years, Agan was hired at a second school and then a third. During that period, the state issued a one-week suspension of his teaching license for his behavior at his first school. Then, Agan faced another accusation of unwanted touching — this time, by an eighth grader at his second school, according to school records. The state’s teaching credentialing agency did not inform the other schools or the parents of students in Agan’s classes of the full extent of what went on at Rodriguez High. 

Agan, now 47, did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, and someone at his address hung up when a reporter rang his apartment buzzer and identified herself. Nor did he respond to questions sent via email or certified mail to his home about students’ accusations and his job history. He previously denied any sexual motivation in touching students, telling the independent panel that he was simply offering students support and encouragement — not massaging them, according to records obtained by the news outlets.

A broad look at California’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing by KQED and ProPublica shows a pattern of delays and inaction, combined with a lack of transparency, that have allowed educators to continue teaching after school districts reported them to the state for sexual harassment or other misconduct of a sexual nature. Agan’s case is one of at least 67 in which the state has not revoked the professional licenses of educators after school districts determined they had sexually harassed students or committed other types of sexual misconduct, according to a review of available records from 2019 through 2025 obtained by the news outlets. At least 14 of those educators were rehired by other schools, and of those, at least 12, including Agan, still work in education, according to a review of school websites and employment records provided by schools. 

Anita Fitzhugh, a spokesperson for the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, said the state automatically revokes teachers’ credentials when they are convicted of sexual criminal offenses, but not necessarily when a district determines they have committed sexual misconduct. She said the state Legislature — not the licensing agency — determines the type of misconduct that results in automatic revocation. 

The agency appoints a committee to assess noncriminal cases of misconduct, she said. Agan has not been accused of a crime. 

“The Commission’s authority balances protecting students as well as the legal rights of educators who have been accused but not convicted of specific crimes,” Fitzhugh said in a written statement. 

The agency’s disciplinary process is unique among licensing bodies in California in how much is kept secret, Fitzhugh said. The fact that a teacher has been disciplined is noted on a state website of credentialed educators, but the database does not explain why.

In contrast, the licensing bodies governing dozens of other professions in California, including doctors, nurses, police officers and lawyers, make the reasons that disciplinary actions were imposed easily accessible on their websites. And at least 12 states, including Oregon, Washington and Florida, do the same for teachers.

“If our job as teachers is to keep children safe, we have to be held accountable for things we do that could harm them,” said Alicia DeRollo, a longtime teacher who served as one of 19 commissioners on California’s teacher licensing agency from 2011 to 2020.

Amid this gap in oversight, Agan found two new jobs and remains in the classroom.

Student Complaints Start Piling Up 

For 17 years, Agan taught at Rodriguez High, a sprawling open-air campus nestled alongside rolling hills where cows graze. The school serves the racially diverse commuter town of Fairfield, halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento.

Then in 2018, several sophomores in his accelerated math class reported him to school administrators. 

One girl alleged that he took her phone out of her back pocket while she was sitting down taking a test and that he would massage girls’ shoulders in class, according to school records. Assistant principal Gary Hiner cautioned Agan to be careful, sharing that students had told him they were uncomfortable when the teacher walked around class and touched them, according to a summary Hiner wrote about the spoken warning.

In March 2018, a father emailed another administrator after Agan wore a shirt to school that used the Pi symbol to spell out “Pimp.” The father wrote that a teacher should not be wearing a shirt making light of someone who “sexually exploits people for profit.”

This time, assistant principal Allison Klein emailed Agan, reminding him that school was not the place for “physically touching students, inappropriate innuendo, or jokes in poor taste.” 

But the next school year, more students complained, records show. In October 2018, a student told her school counselor and then Hiner that Agan had come up behind her and started massaging her neck beneath her long hair. The student said she felt violated and froze, unsure of what to do, records show. She talked to her peers about Agan to see if others had similar experiences, and told Hiner those classmates said he also made inappropriate comments and touched students in his leadership class.

The student was so distraught she asked to transfer out of the math class and had a panic attack two days later in the school psychologist’s office, school records show. Neither Hiner nor Klein agreed to be interviewed.

Within weeks, at least nine more students submitted written complaints, alleging that Agan had massaged their shoulders and singled out female students for what they wore.

“This was a case of someone overstepping boundaries, and we’re not afraid to call this person out,” said Julia Steed, who was a 15-year-old sophomore when she wrote to school administrators alleging that Agan “had tendencies to touch students,” including palming her head during class. “We were like, ‘Oh no, we’re not dealing with this.’”

Steed, now 23, told KQED and ProPublica that she and her classmates were emboldened by the #MeToo movement to speak out as teenagers across the country were gaining more awareness of boundaries and consent. By the end of 2018, the Fairfield-Suisun school board approved the superintendent’s recommendation to fire Agan.  

Agan objected and demanded a hearing, something tenured California public school teachers facing termination are entitled to. His case would be evaluated by an independent panel, which would decide whether to uphold the district’s recommendation. 

School districts rarely fire tenured teachers because losing a case is expensive and the teacher can wind up back in the job. Instead, many districts negotiate settlements that allow teachers to resign.

But in Agan’s case, Kris Corey, the Fairfield-Suisun superintendent at the time, said she and the school board believed they had a strong case for termination. 

“The board said, ‘We don’t care how much this costs. We are going to a hearing,’” Corey said. “It’s the principle of the matter. This is not OK.” 

For eight days in the Fairfield-Suisun district office beginning in July 2019, the three-member panel, including a teacher selected by Agan, heard testimony from students, teachers and administrators. 

Seven students, three administrators, a former guidance counselor and a parent spoke against Agan. Six of the students told the panel that Agan made them uncomfortable by touching them or commenting on their clothing, including calling one girl “short shorts.” Four of them, including Steed, said they did not feel comfortable going to Agan for extra help with math because they did not want to be alone with him. Several also said they refrained from speaking in class to avoid attracting his attention.

Four former students, three teachers and a staff member spoke on Agan’s behalf. The former students described Agan as a supportive mentor and caring teacher and said they felt at home in his classroom. All four students said he squeezed, rubbed or touched their shoulders, but that his actions did not make them uncomfortable. 

One of those students told KQED and ProPublica that her opinion about the teacher’s behavior has changed in recent years. She said she had considered his physical contact normal while in high school. But her perspective shifted as she got older, she said.

“I went to college and talked to people and realized it wasn’t normal,” said the former student, now in her 20s. “Looking back at it, I would have jumped to the other side, to be quite honest.”

During the hearing, Agan testified that he would have stopped touching students’ shoulders if he had been clearly warned, according to a summary included in the panel’s decision. He said he became comfortable with his leadership students, and his actions carried over to math students even though he wasn’t as close with them. He denied massaging students’ shoulders and said students misinterpreted “squeezes or shakes” as massages. He said he did not intend to make students feel uncomfortable and regretted that some students did not feel safe in his class. 

One of the administrators, former director of human resources Mike Minahen, told the panel that the details students shared with him during his investigation “weighed heavy” on him. He said it was unusual for high school students to “break the code” and come forward to make a complaint about a teacher, “especially a leadership teacher who has influence over student activities throughout the entire school.” Minahen, who has retired, declined to comment.

In November 2019, the panel unanimously decided Agan should lose his job. Even the teacher chosen by Agan agreed. 

“The likelihood of recurrence is high,” the panel wrote in its decision. “Over time he has shown that he cannot or will not exercise good judgment.” 

One of the panelists told KQED and ProPublica that she voted to terminate Agan’s employment in part because his alleged behavior continued even after administrators issued warnings. 

“His actions were making students, particularly young women, want to not take advanced math classes. They didn’t want to be touched,” said the panelist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize her job in education. “All that directly impacts their access to good colleges because he was a calculus teacher.”

In December 2019, school district officials sent documentation of Agan’s firing, along with details of their investigation, to the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, California’s educator licensing agency, as state law requires for public school teachers who resign or are fired for misconduct. The educator licensing agency would decide whether Agan would be disciplined further, such as receiving a public warning, facing a suspension or losing his license to teach in a California public school.

The disciplinary process typically takes one year, according to the agency. 

It would take the state licensing board nearly 500 days to decide what to do in Agan’s case. 

How Agan Returned to the Classroom 

As the state considered the matter, Agan applied for a job at a Sacramento middle school about an hour away from Rodriguez High in May 2020. It was a time of heightened teacher shortages, especially in subjects like math, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Agan provided stellar letters of recommendation from former teaching colleagues in his application, which school representatives provided to KQED and ProPublica in response to a public records request.

Any school searching Agan’s name on California’s credentialing database would have seen a clean record and valid credentials indicating he was legally fit to teach. That’s because while the state licensing agency knew Agan had been fired for what the district described as sexually harassing students, California law prevented the agency from disclosing information about the case. Nowhere in the online public records did it say that Agan remained under investigation by the agency — let alone any details of his employment record. 

In his application for the middle school job, Agan acknowledged that he had been fired after being “accused of inappropriately touching students on the shoulders during class.” He wrote that he disagreed with the dismissal and explained that he would often place his hands on students’ shoulders while helping them. 

“Math is a difficult subject for many and my actions were meant as a means of encouragement; a way to say, ‘It’s ok that you’re having trouble, keep trying,’” Agan wrote, adding that he recognized his actions “made some students feel uncomfortable.”  

Agan started teaching at Ephraim Williams College Prep Middle School that fall. The 175-person school is part of the Fortune network of charter schools. Administrators at Ephraim Williams at the time of Agan’s hiring did not respond to questions about how the school vetted him.

Former Fortune human resources consultant Rick Rubino, who helped the middle school recruit, interview and hire candidates at the time Agan was applying, said the school was not aware that Agan’s former employer concluded that he had sexually harassed multiple students. “Do you think any reasonable school district or principal would hire that person?” Rubino said. “No. So clearly, Fortune School did not get that information.”

Rubino said he “would guarantee that somebody at Fortune called the principal at the school where Jason Agan was teaching in Fairfield and got a good report.” He said he does not remember making that call himself. 

The former principal at Rodriguez High did not respond to questions about a reference check. But a Fortune School spokesperson, Tiffany Moffatt, said school officials follow “​all​ ​state​ ​guidelines​ ​and​ ​regulations​ ​and​ ​conduct ​thorough​ ​vetting,​ ​making​ ​decisions​ ​based​ ​on​ ​the​ ​information​ ​available​ ​to​ ​us.​”

It wasn’t until near the end of Agan’s first school year at Ephraim Williams that the state licensing agency issued its decision regarding his actions at his first school. In May 2021, the state suspended Agan’s license for seven days; two of those days fell on a weekend. The sanction — along with a red flag icon — appeared in the state’s public database of credentialed educators. This would be the only visible clue schools would have of anything amiss in Agan’s work history. 

Corey, the former superintendent of Fairfield-Suisun Unified, told KQED and ProPublica that she was “flabbergasted” that he had only been suspended for seven days. 

“It was a real mismatch of what happened,” Corey said. “What a disservice it was to those girls.” 

Steed, one of Agan’s accusers, said students had done the right thing and shared their concerns about Agan with their school, only for adults at the state level to give him the opportunity to teach elsewhere. 

“What’s even the point of going through this whole process?” she said. 

A Middle School Student Details Unwanted Touching 

In September 2021, a month after Fortune students returned to in-person learning, an eighth grader at Agan’s second school complained about his conduct. 

The student told her doctor during a routine physical that Agan had touched her lower back, according to a summary of the complaint. 

The girl’s mother told KQED and ProPublica that she reported the incident to the principal, who connected mother and daughter with Rubino, Fortune’s human resources consultant. The mother told Rubino that Agan was giving her daughter a disproportionate amount of attention. 

The girl, who is now 17, spoke to KQED and ProPublica on the condition that only her middle name, Sherelle, be used because she is a minor. Leslie, the student’s mother, is also being identified by her middle name to protect her daughter’s identity.

In that same meeting, Sherelle told Rubino that Agan removed his hand from her lower back after she asked him to stop, and he returned to the front of the classroom. But he came back moments later and placed his hand on her shoulder, according to a letter of warning Rubino wrote to Agan after interviewing the girl. 

“I felt disrespected. I felt uncomfortable. I felt mad,” Sherelle told the news outlets about the incident. “I felt like even speaking up didn’t matter.” 

In his letter, Rubino directed Agan to stop touching students and “dial back” his praise for the girl. Rubino also cautioned that failure to comply could result in further disciplinary action, up to suspension or termination. 

Agan denied the allegations in a written response to Rubino obtained by KQED and ProPublica. “I would like to be on record that I dispute it being listed as a ‘fact’ that I touched [the student] on the lower back,” Agan wrote. “I have been extremely diligent in avoiding personal contact with scholars due to my previous experience.” 

Leslie had texted Rubino expressing concern about how Agan was vetted for the job after she said she saw online posts by students at his former school alleging that he had touched them inappropriately.

“Actually, I was the one who investigated the matter in the Fairfield Suisun School District when Mr. Agan was a candidate,” Rubino texted back that same day in messages reviewed by KQED and ProPublica. “I also checked social media and Google to see if I could find any information about the incident in Fairfield, but I did not find anything.” 

Rubino did not answer subsequent questions about the details of his investigation or how much he knew about Agan’s conduct at the teacher’s previous school.

After the state licensing agency recommends educators be disciplined, California law allows it to release its findings, which include a summary of the case, to current supervisors and prospective employers who request it within five years. Fortune appears never to have asked for such findings, according to the logs of these requests between 2020 and 2024 provided by the agency to KQED and ProPublica. A Fortune spokesperson did not say why the charter school did not ask for the information.

Leslie said her daughter’s experience at Ephraim Williams only worsened after she reported Agan. Math has always been Sherelle’s favorite subject. But as the school year went on, her grades in Agan’s class plummeted. She needed help but said Agan ignored her. 

With just weeks left in the school year, Leslie pulled her daughter out of Ephraim Williams to finish eighth grade at another school. 

She only learned about Agan’s disciplinary history when KQED and ProPublica contacted her in January. “The whole education system would rather protect him,” Leslie said. “You let him loose on all these kids.” 

Fitzhugh, spokesperson for the teacher licensing agency, said the commission is “committed to keeping all students and schools safe” but is bound by the law in how it disciplines teachers. “The Commission stands ready to implement any additional public protections that the Legislature authorizes,” she said. 

Starting the following year, in 2022, records show that Fortune offered Agan a role supporting new teachers rather than assigning him his own classroom. Fortune administrators did not respond to questions about why he was offered the position, which he declined because he had received another job offer in the Bay Area. 

“Thank you for the last two years,” Agan wrote, resigning from the school. “It has meant more to me than you could ever know.” 

By August 2022, Agan would begin teaching at Clifford School, which serves students in pre-K through eighth grade in Redwood City. He received tenure in 2024.

Wendy Kelly, deputy superintendent at the Redwood City School District, declined to answer questions about Agan’s hiring or say whether the school district was aware he had been accused of misconduct at two previous schools. She told KQED and ProPublica that the district, when hiring, typically calls candidates’ immediate supervisors and checks the database of licensed educators. 

She said school districts rely on decisions by the Commission on Teacher Credentialing to “put the best people in the classroom.”

“I was pleased to see that the suspension was only seven days,” Kelly said of Agan’s discipline. “I have to trust that when the CTC reinstates the teacher that the issue has been either resolved, learned from, there’s been consequences in place, which is why they’re employable to the next organization.”

How We Reported This Story

KQED and ProPublica obtained detailed teacher disciplinary records from school districts after filing public records requests with the 300 largest districts in California. We asked for records of sexual misconduct complaints from 2019 through 2025, including any reports to the Commission on Teacher Credentialing. More than 150 districts provided records. If the district determined that an educator had committed misconduct that it characterized as sexual, including sexual harassment by unwanted touching, sending sexual electronic messages and making sexual remarks, we checked the state licensing database to see whether the state had revoked the teacher’s license or imposed other discipline. 

The post He Was Fired for Sexually Harassing Students. California Allowed Him to Keep Teaching Anyway. appeared first on ProPublica.

KQED has teamed up with ProPublica to report on how California handles cases of alleged teacher misconduct. 

The state’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing releases few details about cases, leaving the public largely in the dark. From our interviews with former commission members and students, as well as a review of records, we found dozens of cases in which the state did not revoke teachers’ licenses after findings of sexual misconduct.

We know there are other issues with this system, and we need your help to get a full picture. We want to hear about your experience with the disciplinary process, whether you’re a student, parent, teacher, administrator or credentialing commission member, or you have other insight. Your perspective will help guide our reporting, ensuring we understand the issues from all sides.

You can fill out a brief form or contact KQED reporter Holly McDede on Signal at hollymcdede.68 or via email at hmcdede@kqed.org. 

We take your privacy seriously and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of your story.

We’re gathering these stories for our reporting, which can take several weeks or months. We may not be able to follow up with everyone, but we will read everything you submit and it will help guide our project. With your permission, we may share your response with a partner newsroom interested in following up.

As journalists, our role is to write about issues. We cannot provide legal advice or other support. However, there are resources available. We know these cases can stem from painful experiences, and mental health support is available if you need it:

• The National Sexual Assault Hotline is available online, by calling 800-656-4673 or by texting “hope” to 64673.
• The National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available online or by calling or texting 988.
• The Trevor Project provides support to LGBTQ+ youth. You can connect online, by calling 866-488-7386 or by texting 678678.

If you would like to reach out about a case outside of California, you can contact ProPublica engagement reporter Asia Fields.

The post Help Us Report on Teacher Misconduct in California appeared first on ProPublica.

A Georgia congressman running for one of the country’s most competitive U.S. Senate seats has vowed in social media posts and interviews to make America’s roads safer — by taking commercial driver’s licenses away from noncitizens.

“If you can’t read English road signs,” Mike Collins, a Republican, posted on Facebook in April, “you don’t belong behind the wheel. Period.”

Collins, the owner of a trucking business and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives’ transportation committee, is one of the loudest champions of the Trump administration’s effort to revoke licenses from nearly 200,000 noncitizen commercial drivers, including thousands of truckers. The Trump administration has pushed the policy forward even though its own officials have written that there’s no empirical evidence to show that foreign truckers cause more crashes than truckers who are American citizens.

At the same time, however, Collins has opposed rules that experts say actually would reduce the odds of serious crashes. Those rules could have required that Collins’ family business sink substantial money into new safety measures for its fleet.

Over the past 25 years, crashes involving truckers for Collins’ business killed five people and injured more than 50 people — including one woman who now needs around-the-clock care due to a severe brain injury — according to federal data, court filings, plaintiffs’ attorneys and police records.

Drivers and passengers who were injured in those crashes later claimed in lawsuits that truckers for Collins’ business have caused them to collectively incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical expenses. The figure the business has paid out is not known because the settlements it reached with crash victims have been confidential, as is common in such suits.  Court filings in one suit state that both parties agreed to a $1 million payout from the business’s insurer. Collins’ business denied wrongdoing by truckers and the business itself in those cases.

ProPublica’s analysis of federal motor vehicle data from the past two years shows that Collins’ business has a higher rate of unsafe driving and speeding violations per mile than the majority of trucking companies with substantial mileage. The analysis also shows that the company’s recent crash rate sits around the median of similar companies, while the rate of injury from those crashes sits in the top fifth.

Safety experts told ProPublica that some of the technologies opposed by Collins, which include devices on semitrucks to limit their speed and sensors on big rigs to automatically brake in the face of a potential collision, reduce the odds of crashes leading to serious injuries and deaths. The country’s largest trucking trade group — a group that Collins’ family business is a member of, according to the company’s website — has supported mandates for those technologies.

“These are proven technologies,” said Zach Cahalan, executive director of the Truck Safety Coalition, which advocates on behalf of crash victims and their families. He added that the technologies would “protect those we hold dear on our roads from horrific tragedy.”

Neither Collins’ campaign nor his congressional office responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment or to questions about his family business’s safety record or his policy positions on trucking safety. His campaign manager declined to make him available for an interview. The business did not respond to questions sent by ProPublica; an employee told ProPublica that press inquiries about the business are handled by Collins’ congressional office.

In recent years, Collins has described his efforts to keep foreign truckers off the roads as “purely a safety issue.” He has also questioned the effectiveness of other safety measures and said that they would have saddled his industry with extra costs.

“We want to be safe,” Collins said in one congressional hearing. “I don’t know of a trucking company out there that doesn’t want to be safe. And when they are not safe, they are taken off the road.”

Toward the end of 2023, his first year in Congress, Collins had one of his first chances to support a measure that experts believed could make the roads safer. The Biden administration had proposed a rule that would require the installation of devices to limit the speed of trucks, capping it as low as 60 miles per hour.

But Collins questioned the need for the rule. He told officials at a transportation committee hearing that the federal government shouldn’t require the safety measure. He said insurance companies already serve as a sufficient speeding deterrent, because they have the ability to cut off coverage to truckers with unsafe driving records. He also said the rule wasn’t needed because of yet another deterrent that had long been in place.

“They are called speed limit signs,” he said. “They are enforced by law enforcement.”

Collins’ position stood at odds with the industry’s largest trade group, American Trucking Associations, which that year had expressed support for capping the speeds of trucks between 65 and 70 miles per hour. Collins did not respond to questions about why his views are at odds with ATA, which represents the interests of 37,000 members, including Collins’ family business.

In 2025, the Trump administration withdrew the speed limiter proposal. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy celebrated the decision as one that would get “D.C. bureaucrats OUT of your trucks.”

Collins also pushed back against a different proposal, which would have required trucks to have automatic emergency braking systems. That technology can force a truck to slow down if the potential for a collision is detected.

Federal officials had estimated that the braking system mandate could prevent more than 8,000 injuries a year. ATA supported much of the proposal, too. Yet Collins, whose family business has used those systems in some trucks, explained at recent congressional hearings that the technology was “very expensive” and didn’t work that well. “People don’t understand that these things are actually hurting more than they’re helping right now,” Collins said at a hearing last year.

Some of Collins’ truckers have been involved in crashes because of their alleged failure to slow down, according to citations and police reports obtained by ProPublica. Over the past five years, three people hurt in those crashes have sued Collins’ fleet because its truckers allegedly failed to maintain a safe distance, leading them to cause crashes. The plaintiffs claimed that they sustained serious injuries that cost five to six figures in medical expenses.

The truckers and Collins’ business denied wrongdoing in the cases. The three cases were dismissed. Lawyers for two plaintiffs said the cases ended in a settlement; a lawyer for the third plaintiff did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the dismissal of the case.

The fate of automatic emergency braking requirements is now up in the air, too. The Trump administration has delayed the rule from going into effect and, according to ProPublica’s reporting last year, may narrow the scope of it.

Collins has said that his decades in the business make him especially attuned to safety measures that work, compared with bureaucrats who have “beaten to death” his industry with too many regulations. In the late 1980s, Collins became the head of the family’s trucking company before he had graduated college. He took over for his dad, Mac Collins, who served as a congressman from 1993 to 2005.

Shortly into Mike Collins’ time as president, one of his company’s truckers lost control of his trailer. The crash that followed sent a 19-year-old woman to the hospital. The trucker later pleaded guilty to driving under the influence of cocaine. The business drew scrutiny because that trucker had pleaded no contest to drunk driving earlier that year but was allowed to stay on the road. A political opponent later aired a TV ad that accused the family’s trucking business of being cited for “more than a hundred” safety violations.

At the time, Mac Collins blamed the company’s insurer for missing the drunk-driving conviction in a background check. He said the ad contained “falsehoods” but didn’t specify what was wrong. The company ultimately fired the trucker after the crash, Mac Collins told the Ledger-Enquirer in 1994.

The larger the Collins trucking fleet grew — into one of about 100 trucks, hauling timber for Georgia-Pacific as well as tires and steel — the more traffic citations and inspection violations its truckers received. The data ProPublica reviewed showed that truckers have gotten into more than 90 crashes that have led to at least 51 injuries and five deaths since 2001.

In 2007, one Collins trucker veered into oncoming traffic on a North Carolina highway and hit a white Honda CR-V. The CR-V’s driver, Bridget Murphy, and the trucker both died. Murphy’s estate and two of Murphy’s passengers filed a lawsuit and, according to a court filing in 2009, agreed to a $1 million payout from the company’s liability insurance coverage. The company wrote in a filing that the trucker had been “stricken by a physical impairment beyond his control.”

In 2021, another trucker switched lanes on an Indiana highway and collided into a car driven by Larkin Cooper. She claimed in a lawsuit that the trucker’s “negligent and reckless” driving caused injuries that forced her to drop out of nursing school and switch to a lesser-paying career. Her lawyer wrote that the total damages were likely to exceed $75,000.

In 2023, a trucker failed to stop quickly enough while approaching a red traffic light on a northeast Georgia highway, causing a four-vehicle crash, according to court records. Drivers in two vehicles later said in lawsuits that they had sustained serious medical injuries. One of them claimed that the costs to treat his back, knee and neck totaled more than $120,000.

Collins did not answer ProPublica’s questions about the lawsuits. Lawyers for the family’s business denied wrongdoing in the suits in Indiana and Georgia. Soon after, the business settled for undisclosed sums.

During a televised debate in April, just weeks before the May 19 Republican primary for the U.S. Senate race, Collins told viewers that his time in the trucking business had taught him how to work across the aisle in Washington, D.C. His political ads feature him behind the wheel of a rig, and his yard signs have a logo of an American flag in the shape of a semi.

Yet his messaging about making roads safer centers on one main idea: getting noncitizen truckers off the road.

In one social video from November, Collins was on one side of a split screen, speaking about a sign on the other screen.

“You know what this sign says?” Collins asked. “Nah, neither do I.”

“Y’all, It’s a road sign from Uzbekistan, which is exactly why I’m able to drive a truck in Georgia, but not Uzbekistan,” he continued. “But somehow, y’all, that common sense, well, it didn’t apply to one man on our roads.”

Collins then replaced a photo of the sign with a mug shot of an undocumented trucker named Akhror Bozorov. Collins said he had been “wanted in Uzbekistan for terrorism and spreading Jihad.” After Bozorov was arrested last year, the Department of Homeland Security published a press release that criticized Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s transportation department for issuing a license to Bozorov and President Joe Biden’s administration for granting the trucker his work authorization.

Collins went one step further and used the trucker’s story to attack the politician he’s trying to unseat, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., for not being tough enough on immigration.

He also cited Bozorov’s story as justification to strip noncitizen truckers of their licenses — but failed to present evidence that noncitizen truckers make the roads less safe.

In March, the Trump administration enacted its rule that could eventually revoke commercial licenses from nearly 200,000 noncitizen drivers. But according to the administration’s initial analysis of its own rule last year, “There is not sufficient evidence, derived from well-designed, rigorous, quantitative analyses, to reliably demonstrate a measurable empirical relationship” between a trucker’s citizenship status and safety outcomes.

A letter from nearly 20 Democratic state attorneys general pointed out that the Trump administration cited only five fatal crashes last year that were caused by noncitizens with commercial driver’s licenses, out of more than 4,000 deaths involving CDL drivers nationwide. The letter said that the Trump administration’s rule presented “no facts” to support the claim that revoking thousands of licenses would “benefit public safety.”

Public interest lawyers have also filed a legal challenge to the rule. The challenge is pending.

“The notion that immigrant drivers are less safe than other drivers is not supported by the facts,” said Wendy Liu, one of the lawyers who filed the challenge.

The same week that Trump’s rule was enacted, Collins doubled down on his calls to restrict commercial licenses for noncitizens, writing in an Instagram post that “this isn’t some game. Lives are at stake. Deport these thugs now.”

The post A U.S. Senate Candidate Says Foreign Truckers Are Making America’s Roads Unsafe. His Own Truckers Have Caused Harm. appeared first on ProPublica.

More than a decade ago, a federal court found that the New York City Police Department had been unconstitutionally stopping and frisking Black and Hispanic residents. The ruling laid out required fixes, including something quite basic: The NYPD would review officers’ stops to make sure they were legal.

But for most of the past three years the nation’s largest police department failed to do that for a key part of an aggressive and politically connected unit as it stopped New Yorkers.

The lack of court-required review was recently discovered and disclosed by the NYPD’s federal monitor, which oversees the department’s compliance with the 2013 stop-and-frisk decision.

In all, more than 2,000 stops weren’t properly reviewed, according to data from the monitor.

The failure involved the Community Response Team, or CRT. A ProPublica investigation last year found that the unit had often sidestepped oversight as it went after so-called quality-of-life issues, such as unlicensed motorbikes and ATVs. The team’s tactics, including high-speed car chases, and its opaque operations disturbed some NYPD officials, but the unit expanded significantly amid the support of then-Mayor Eric Adams.

The lack of reviews is part of a pattern of the NYPD failing to deliver on its obligations under the long-standing court order. Officers across the department, for instance, have often not documented stops.

The importance of reviews is particularly critical for aggressive teams like the CRT, which has a record of unconstitutional stops. It has also drawn hundreds of civilian complaints since it was created three years ago. More than half of the officers assigned to the team have been found by the Civilian Complaint Review Board to have engaged in misconduct at least once in their career, according to a ProPublica analysis of board data last year. That compares with just a small fraction of NYPD officers overall.

Prior to its latest discovery, the federal monitor had raised alarms about the unit’s behavior. A report last year said that only 59% of stops, searches and frisks by CRT officers were lawful, a far worse rate than the NYPD’s patrol units. Nearly all of the stops involved Black or Hispanic residents.

In a letter to the court, the federal monitor said the newly discovered failure means the monitor’s own figures on the CRT’s rate of compliance with the Constitution is probably wrong. The actual rate, the monitor wrote, is “likely lower” than reported.

The court-appointed monitor, Mylan Denerstein, lambasted the NYPD and its failure to review the stops.

“The failure to audit these stops means unconstitutional stops, frisks and searches went undetected,” Denerstein said in a statement to ProPublica. “This is unacceptable. The City must do more and prevent this from happening.”

In a statement to ProPublica, the NYPD said it moved to fix the issues: “Under Commissioner (Jessica) Tisch the NYPD has taken significant additional steps to increase oversight and accountability. The Monitor and the NYPD identified this error, and the NYPD is working collaboratively with the Monitor to address it.”

For the first two and a half years after the unit was created in 2023, the failure to properly review stops affected just part of the unit, which was led by top brass.

But last fall, the issue became more widespread after the NYPD restructured the CRT to put officers stationed across the city under a central command. The move was intended to increase oversight of the team, which had new commanders. But in the process, stops for the entire unit, which had grown to about 180 officers, went unaudited.

One of the unit’s former commanders, John Chell, defended its record.

“This team really changed the game,” said Chell, who retired as the department’s top uniformed officer last year. “Did we make mistakes? Sure. But we stabilized the city. We did our job.”

Lawmakers and civil rights advocates, however, have long criticized the CRT’s aggressive policing and said the latest reporting failure underscores a need to disband the unit.

“The Community Response Team has operated with too little oversight and caused too much harm,” said state Sen. Jessica Ramos, who has recalled being wrongfully stopped and frisked by the NYPD more than a decade ago. “A unit with this record should not continue.”

Lawyers at the New York Civil Liberties Union, one of the original litigants in the stop-and-frisk case, also called for the CRT to be shuttered.

“These units have a long history of aggressive policing against people of color. There is no basis for them,” said Daniel Lambright, the organization’s director of criminal justice litigation. “They do more harm than good and they need to go.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who took office in January and pledged during his campaign to reimagine public safety, has endorsed shuttering another unit that has drawn scrutiny for its heavy-handed approach to protests, but his office declined to address the rising calls to disband the CRT.

“We’re aware of issues raised about the Community Response Team, as well as the steps the NYPD has taken to address them,” a mayoral spokesperson said in a statement to ProPublica. “The Mamdani administration is committed to improving public safety in a way that meets the needs and values of New Yorkers.”

When it started three years ago, the CRT focused on Adams’ shifting priorities, such as cracking down on illegal motorcycles. The unit roamed the city proactively looking for crime rather than waiting for calls, the same approach once used by one of the NYPD’s most notorious units.

The CRT quickly developed a reputation for brutality. Just months after the unit started, one officer in an unmarked police car spotted a man on a dirtbike and swerved across a yellow line into oncoming traffic, hitting the motorcyclist head-on and sending him flying. The man later died from his injuries. The NYPD said that it punished the officer by taking 13 days of vacation from him.

Department leaders told ProPublica that even they had a hard time overseeing the unit’s work because it was essentially created off the books — a setup that ultimately led to the dropped reviews of stops. Officers who were part of the unit were often not formally assigned to it, meaning their conduct wasn’t properly tracked.

“It was one of those teams where everyone is a ghost,” one former department official told ProPublica last year.

That approach extended to stop-and-frisk.

When the monitor learned about the CRT in the unit’s early days, the NYPD assured the monitor that it would not do many stops. Only later, the monitor noted in a report last year, it discovered the team was “frequently” doing them.

In 2025, the CRT recorded 1,400 stop-and-frisks, according to data from the monitor and the NYPD. More than 900 were not properly reviewed.

The post Despite Court Order, NYPD Failed to Properly Monitor Stop-and-Frisks by Aggressive Unit appeared first on ProPublica.

Federal and local lawmakers in Puerto Rico, as well as civil rights and advocacy organizations, have called for investigations after ProPublica reported how a federal probe into a drugs-for-votes scheme in Puerto Rico prisons got quashed after the 2024 elections.  

The territory’s representative in Congress, Pablo José Hernández Rivera, called on members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday to join him in a push for a congressional probe into the matter. 

“The report published today by ProPublica details facts that no elected official — whether in Puerto Rico or in Washington — can ignore,” he said in a statement in Spanish.

The same day, Rep. Héctor Ferrer Santiago, a Popular Democratic Party member, introduced a resolution in the territory’s House ordering its Committee on Public Security to investigate, calling the allegations “serious!” and saying the House has “an inescapable duty to investigate.” 

Their requests came the day ProPublica published its investigation detailing how prosecutors had uncovered a drugs-for-votes scheme being run by a violent gang in Puerto Rican prisons and were deep into looking at whether now-Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón or her campaign were involved. In the days following President Donald Trump’s election in 2024, as prosecutors prepared the indictment, they were told by supervisors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico to exclude the voting-related charges against inmates and prison staff, four sources with knowledge of the investigation told ProPublica. Then, once Trump took office, they were told to abandon the probe into potential political ties entirely, the sources said.

González-Colón, a longtime Republican and member of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party, has declined repeated requests for interviews by ProPublica. In a statement Tuesday, she denied any wrongdoing and said she “has stood firmly against corruption” throughout her career and political campaigns. 

“I categorically reject any attempt to link me to unlawful conduct,” she wrote. González-Colón has not been charged with any crime.

She told local news outlets Wednesday she doesn’t think any investigation into the matter is warranted. “There is nothing here,” she said in Spanish. “And, if they have research from the past four years, let them do it, let them bring it to a successful conclusion. But I have absolutely nothing to do with the things that are pointed out there, much less my campaign.”

On Wednesday, leaders of the Puerto Rican Independence Party also called for an investigation. Sen. María de Lourdes Santiago, vice president of the party, said on social media that the questions of partisan intervention in prison spaces should not be ignored considering their “severe implications.” 

Read More

Prosecutors Had a Drugs-for-Votes Scheme “Locked Up.” Under Trump, They Were Told Not to Pursue Charges.

Thomas Rivera Schatz, president of the Puerto Rico Senate and a member of González-Colón’s party, initially told local news outlets that government officials in Puerto Rico should investigate thoroughly. But at a press conference on Thursday, he backed away from that assertion, saying of ProPublica’s report: “I do not lend it any credibility whatsoever. … It appears to follow a specific editorial line — one directed against the Republican Party and against Trump.”

An indictment filed in December 2024, while Joe Biden was still president, charged 34 members of a gang, known as Group 31 or Los Tiburones, and associates with crimes including drug distribution resulting in at least four overdose deaths, money laundering and possessing a firearm. Prosecutors also alleged that the gang made connections with government officials “for the purpose of reducing prison sentences” and that the gang mandated both the prisoners’ political affiliations and “who to vote for in primary and general elections,” but included no charges related to the drugs-for-votes scheme.

Sources familiar with the investigation said gang leaders forced inmates to vote for González-Colón or face brutal beatings and being cut off from a supply of drugs. Many of the inmates are addicted to illicit drugs. Prosecutors said they had evidence that González-Colón had spoken with one of the prison gang leaders on WhatsApp during the primary campaign and were pursuing other potential ties when they were instructed not to look any further, people with knowledge of the investigation told ProPublica. 

González-Colón said in her statement that she engaged with all sectors of society during her campaign. “That included meeting with families of incarcerated individuals concerned about rehabilitation and reintegration, because public policy must be inclusive and responsive to every community,” she said. She did not address the allegation that she had talked with a gang leader directly. 

W. Stephen Muldrow, U.S. attorney for the District of Puerto Rico, who was appointed by Trump in 2019 and has served continuously since, told ProPublica that his office does not comment on open cases. While a couple of defendants in the drug and money laundering cases have taken plea agreements, most of the cases are still pending. 

“Given the ongoing nature of the case and the importance of maintaining the integrity of active matters, it would not be appropriate for us to comment further in a press setting,” Lymarie Llovet-Ayala, spokesperson for the office, said in an email Wednesday. Previously, she said that charging corrupt public officials “has always been and remains a top priority” of the office.

As Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner in Congress —  a role similar to a U.S. representative — Hernández Rivera has the power to introduce and co-sponsor legislation and vote in committee, but is prohibited from voting on final passage of laws in the House. 

Hernández Rivera, a Democrat and member of the Popular Democratic Party, said he already has support from at least a couple of members from the House Judiciary Committee who are interested in starting the oversight process and are working on a draft letter requesting an investigation.

Political parties in Puerto Rico don’t adhere to a straight divide among Democrats and Republicans. Instead, they center much of their focus on whether Puerto Rico should become a state and so have Republicans and Democrats within each.

Hernández Rivera said the fact that the New Progressive Party has a stronghold on inmate votes is suspicious. “About the prisons in particular, it raises eyebrows from a statistical standpoint, the fact that 83% of inmates vote for the candidate of that party when no other place in Puerto Rico votes by those margins,” he said, citing a ProPublica tally of voter returns from the State Elections Commission’s website. By comparison, González-Colón won 41% of the overall vote in her victory in the five-way general election contest. 

“The issue here is more about whether the processes were followed and whether there was corruption in giving up the case,” Hernández Rivera said. 

U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., a member of the House Judiciary Committee, told ProPublica that while he didn’t yet know the details of the matter, he would support an investigation. He said the allegations aren’t surprising given the suspicions of election fraud across the U.S. and considering “today’s morals.” 

“I hope our committee or another committee does some investigating,” he said. 

Annette Martínez-Orabona, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Puerto Rico, said abandoning an investigation into a fraudulent voting scheme in prisons undermines the trust of those who believe in democracy. 

The ACLU is “advocating for full transparency about what happened with this investigation … what evidence was collected, and what was done with that evidence,” Martínez Orabona said in a written statement. 

The Power 4 Puerto Rico Coalition, a diaspora organization that advocates for more independence for the territory, said it wants answers from González-Colón and the U.S. Department of Justice. 

“Power 4 Puerto Rico calls for Congressional hearings to fully review what happened, who knew, and why the voting-related investigation did not proceed,” Erica González Martínez, director of the group, wrote in a statement. “The Puerto Rican people deserve the truth.”

The post Puerto Rico Lawmakers Call for Investigation Into Alleged Drugs-for-Votes Scheme After ProPublica Report appeared first on ProPublica.

In March 2025, President Donald Trump’s administration made a tantalizing offer to coal-fired power plants, chemical manufacturing facilities and other factories: Their operations could be exempted from key provisions under the Clean Air Act, the bedrock environmental law estimated to have prevented thousands of premature deaths. All they had to do was ask.

No rigorous application was needed. An email, which they had until the end of the month to send, would suffice.

Within two weeks, executives across major industries began flooding an inbox set up to receive and funnel requests from the Environmental Protection Agency to the White House. They asked that their facilities be excused from expensive Clean Air Act requirements, relief that would save their companies money but pollute the air breathed by millions of Americans.

At least 3,000 pages of emails were sent to and from this inbox in the weeks that followed. ProPublica obtained them via public records requests, giving the most complete look to date at a key aspect of what Trump’s EPA calls the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history.”

Richard Shaffer, asset manager at Scrubgrass Reclamation Company, emailed asking for an exemption covering a western Pennsylvania power plant that burns coal waste. A significant portion of the electricity it generates is used to mine bitcoin. Keeping the cost of environmental compliance low was important “for the security of the United States,” Shaffer wrote.

A response came 11 days later in a presidential proclamation. Approved.

A Citgo Petroleum Corporation lawyer, Ann Al-Bahish, sought exemptions for petroleum refineries in Illinois, Louisiana and Texas, which had all been hit with Clean Air Act violations in recent years. The rule at issue, the agency had previously concluded, would “provide critical health protections to hundreds of thousands of people living near chemical plants.” (The company agreed to install new pollution controls to resolve some of its violations.)

Kevin Wagner, vice president of the medical sterilizer company Sterigenics, messaged asking that nine facilities emitting the carcinogenic gas ethylene oxide, including near Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Charlotte and Atlanta, be exempted. More than 45,000 people, most of them not white, live within a mile of these facilities, according to federal data.

Both companies got their response in July proclamations. Approved and approved.

The companies did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

In granting these requests, the White House didn’t seek input from EPA scientists. The administration cited authority under the Clean Air Act that had never before been used.

More approvals followed. All told, more than 180 facilities in 38 states and Puerto Rico have, by Trump’s unilateral decision, been given a two-year reprieve from following the latest Clean Air Act rules. About 250,000 people live within a mile of these facilities, according to EPA and U.S. Census Bureau data collected by the Environmental Defense Fund.

A majority are coal power plants and medical sterilizers. And more than 70 had faced formal enforcement action in the past five years by the EPA for violations such as emitting contaminants above regulatory limits and failing to properly track facilities’ pollution.

Few requests appear to have been denied. The administration hasn’t made public its decisions on requests from three classes of plants that it said it would consider exempting: manufacturers of rubber tires, iron and steel, and lime, which is used in products ranging from metals to concrete. About 55 facilities are covered by those rules, although Republicans in Congress have already repealed the rubber tire updated rule.

In response to ProPublica’s questions, an EPA spokesperson said in a statement: “EPA played no role in the determinations set out in the statute and specifically vested in the President. Any requests sent to the EPA’s electronic mailbox were forwarded to the White House.”

In defending the exemptions, the administration cited two standards in the Clean Air Act that a president must invoke to exercise such powers: The industry must be integral to national security, and the technology needed to meet the EPA requirements must be unavailable. Sticking with Biden-era requirements could shut down businesses, Trump argued.

“The President has provided regulatory relief from certain burdensome Clean Air Act requirements due to national security concerns that critical industries would no longer be able to operate under such stringent standards,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement. “Exemptions were issued due to crushing Biden-era regulations that required large swaths of our industrial base to adopt technologies that don’t exist outside the imagination of Biden’s EPA bureaucrats.”

Numerous policy experts told ProPublica that they do not believe the White House’s justifications for the use of the exemptions.

“It’s being absolutely abused now, and it couldn’t be more obvious,” said one EPA staffer who asked not to be named because they currently work for the agency.

Indeed, multiple utilities have publicly said that they were already implementing pollution controls to comply with the more stringent rules, undercutting the administration’s claim that the technologies necessary to do so don’t exist.

Community groups and environmental nonprofits have sued the administration five times to halt the exemptions. A coalition of 12 organizations labeled the action an “illegal scheme.” (Four of the cases have been consolidated and are ongoing. In a motion to dismiss them, the administration argued that the groups did not have legal standing to sue and reiterated its stance that the law gives the president the authority to grant such exemptions.)

“The cancer risk presented by these facilities is huge,” said Sarah Buckley, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, adding that years of scientific study and public input informed the rules. “With a stroke of a pen, President Trump thinks he can just brush all that away.”

“He Disregards the Checks-and-Balances System”

Freeport-McMoRan’s massive copper mining and smelting operation sits on the hills above the towns of Miami, Claypool and Globe in eastern Arizona. A Clean Air Act rule that was updated in 2024 regulates the smelter’s emissions and, by extension, the air breathed by the 10,000 people who live in these towns.

Nearly two and a half years of fine-tuning passed between publication of a draft rule and the final product. Some of it was spent gathering input from residents, public health groups, Native American governments and companies — feedback the agency addressed in subsequent rewrites. Years of air monitoring data also informed the process. Implementing the updated rule would “reduce emissions of toxic metals, primarily lead and arsenic, by nearly 50 percent” at the country’s several copper smelters, the EPA concluded.

Trump undid that work when he signed a proclamation in October pausing implementation and approving Freeport’s request that its Arizona copper smelter be given a pass on “all the deadlines promulgated under” the rule.

On a sunny morning a few weeks after Freeport received the exemption, white smoke poured from its smelter above a Baptist church and residential neighborhood. The plant’s low rumble reverberated across the surrounding desert, unusually green from a recent rain.

Trina Bunger has lived her life next to this smelter. Decades ago, the air was so polluted that her children wore handkerchiefs over their mouths when they went to school. So many of the family’s cattle fell ill that she no longer believed the sicknesses were a coincidence.

Years ago, on particularly bad days, when the air around the smelter was hazy, “it would choke you out. It was like walking in a cloud,” Bunger said. “If you read the obituaries, ‘Died of cancer. Died of cancer,’” she said of her neighbors. “Well, that’s our destination, so I better get done what I’m gonna get done.”

But she’s seen air quality steadily improve as regulations tightened, following advances in emissions control technology. Freeport spent $250 million on improvements completed in 2017 to better control sulfur dioxide emissions.

“It’s better than in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s,” Bunger said.

Trump paused the requirement that Freeport follow the latest rule, including by installing additional pollution control equipment.

William Cobb and Todd Weaver, Freeport’s vice president and senior counsel, respectively, emailed the EPA in March 2025 to request a reprieve from the Clean Air Act. They argued that complying with the rule governing copper smelters would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, while bringing minimal emissions reductions.

“Significant investments have been made over the smelter’s long history to manage sulfur dioxide, lead and other regulated emissions in accordance with applicable standards, contributing to sustained improvements in local air quality,” Linda Hayes, Freeport’s spokesperson, said in a statement. The company has increased monitoring around the smelter and asked for the additional time to work with the EPA on evaluating “flaws” in the updated rule, she said.

For this conservative county, where more than two-thirds of voters went for Trump, the smelter is an economic blessing. Freeport’s broader copper operation here employs nearly 950 people, according to the company. A brightly painted mural down the road from the smelter reads: “If it can’t be grown, it must be mined.”

Eduardo Sanchez lauds the company’s economic impact and is hesitant to criticize the smelter. But, he said, Trump has no right to unilaterally decide when laws do and do not apply.

“In order to help the rich get richer, he’s deregulating everything,” Sanchez said. “He’s a tyrant. He disregards the checks-and-balances system. He overreaches through executive dictates.”

An Error-Ridden Process

While Trump’s exemptions will affect millions of Americans like those in Miami, Claypool and Globe, the process for granting them has been sloppy.

Because presidents have never previously used this authority to circumvent the Clean Air Act, industries were left guessing how to make the request, experts said.

“Hello, I am a gas company looking for an exemption. How do I start?” one businessman wrote in an email to the EPA.

Others appeared to mock the administration’s regulatory rollback, with one email calling for a coal power plant to be built on a 300-foot-wide mangrove island just offshore of the president’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. “It will produce power so strongly that jobs and power will be the best that people have ever seen,” the email stated.

The American Chemistry Council and American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, two trade groups representing chemical manufacturers, sent a letter requesting a blanket exemption for their roughly 640 member companies. “Without immediate intervention, such as a Presidential exemption,” the groups wrote, referencing the section of law Trump was using to hit pause on Clean Air Act rules, “companies will evaluate whether to shut down units or offshore their operations to prevent the application of an imprudent and unlawful rule.”

It emerged later that the administration had decided that companies must submit requests on their own behalf.

Rank-and-file agency staff also had little understanding of how the process would run, according to hundreds of pages of internal EPA communications obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund. Instead, a political appointee who had previously worked for a utility and a petrochemicals trade group played a key role in creating the inbox where companies sent their requests for exemptions, the records showed.

“There’s certainly no input from experts in EPA,” the EPA employee told ProPublica.

The administration gave notice of approved exemptions by publishing presidential proclamations listing the factories’ locations on the White House’s website. “It is in the national security interests of the United States to issue this Exemption,” Trump wrote when exempting Freeport’s smelter. 

These proclamations at times added to the confusion. In a July proclamation, Trump appears to have granted an exemption to a plant south of Baton Rouge, although he listed it as being located in Alabama, not Louisiana, and to another in Alabama that may not exist at all.

Spelling mistakes and formatting errors throughout the proclamations have made identifying exempted plants a guessing game. The name of an Arkansas coal plant receiving an exemption was misspelled, for instance, as was the name of the company Phillips 66, which was granted exemptions at its oil refineries in Illinois and Texas.

Phillips 66 declined to comment.

In April, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Adam Schiff, both Democrats, introduced a bill to amend the process by requiring the president to obtain Congress’ consent before granting pauses to Clean Air Act compliance. The exemptions, Whitehouse said in a statement, show a willingness to “abuse every loophole available to pollute for free, damn the health consequences for Americans.”

A Sweeping Deregulatory Agenda

Trump’s exemptions give companies an extra two years to comply with updates to nine sets of regulations written under the law’s authority that mandate lower emissions or better monitoring around facilities in specific industries. The rules were slated to take effect this year and next.

This pause is part of a much larger strategy to unwind the Clean Air Act, buying time for the administration to deconstruct large portions of the legislative framework regulating the nation’s air quality — weakening regulations on everything from ethylene oxide emissions to plastics pyrolysis plants. And while the law largely governs toxins, the rollback has also undermined action on climate change, including repealing the legal theory used to classify greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide as regulated pollutants.

The White House has focused these efforts most intently on one industry: coal. Trump has so far granted 71 coal power plants — more than any other category — two-year exemptions to the Clean Air Act rule governing them, called the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards. Then, in February, the administration formalized the rollback of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, in effect making the exemptions permanent.

Among the beneficiaries of these moves is Ameren Corp.’s Labadie Energy Center west of St. Louis. The coal-fired power station is massive — 2.4 gigawatts, enough to power roughly 2 million homes — as are its emissions. It’s one of the nation’s largest sources of sulfur dioxide, which forms haze and harms the respiratory system, and the second-largest source of carbon dioxide, according to EPA data. But due to its age, the plant isn’t equipped with most modern pollution controls and can be linked to more than 300 premature deaths per year, according to a recent Sierra Club and Clean Air Task Force analysis of EPA data.

Patricia Schuba’s family has lived in Franklin County, Missouri, for five generations. From her home, she can see the plant and, emanating from it, “black clouds on an otherwise normal day.” Schuba keeps a mental list of the friends and family members who suffer from cancer, respiratory issues and other diseases and wonders if these health problems are linked to the emissions.

“I’m hopeful that the American public will wake up and elect people who actually put the American public first. And if we can do that, we can unwind some of this and clean up these sites,” said Schuba, who has served as the president of the Labadie Environmental Organization, a nonprofit community group, for about 15 years.

Sunil Bector, an attorney with the Sierra Club, said that heavily polluting facilities will reap overlapping benefits from the assault on the Clean Air Act. Research by his organization suggests that the Labadie power station stands to gain from every major action rolling back coal plant regulations.

“Ameren may expect that these rules are going away,” Bector said, “which means the levers that would force Ameren to internalize the cost of pollution are going away, which means the people who breathe air in St. Louis are internalizing the cost of pollution through their lungs.”

Craig Giesmann, the company’s director of environmental services, said in a statement, “Ameren Missouri’s Labadie Energy Center provides electricity to our customers in a cost-effective manner, operates in compliance with all applicable environmental regulations designed to protect public health and is supported by decades of investment in emissions controls.” Additionally, Giesmann said, the power plant is “critical infrastructure.”

The law requires the president to tie such exemptions to national security, and Trump has declared a national energy emergency over fears that emerging industries, like artificial intelligence, will not have access to the massive amounts of electricity they need. Data center proposals have come to Franklin County, and the county recently voted to recommend one despite the opposition of hundreds of locals. As the Trump administration speaks of an artificial intelligence arms race, Schuba fears Labadie will remain open for years to power data centers.

“There are real human consequences,” Schuba said, “lives that we sacrifice for whatever we think our future should be.”

“Death Started to Come”

Amid the rush to give out passes to the Clean Air Act, communities already saddled with air pollution find themselves affected once more.

An 85-mile stretch of Louisiana, running southeast from Baton Rouge, hosts such a concentration of heavy industry that it long ago garnered the nickname “Cancer Alley.” Studies have shown elevated cancer rates in the region, home to tens of thousands of people, and local chemical plants received passes on Clean Air Act rules. Louisiana hosts 20 of the facilities Trump has exempted. (Texas and Pennsylvania, two other states with histories of heavy industry, rank first and third, respectively, for the number of exempted facilities.)

Tonga Nolan grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood on the north side of Baton Rouge and remembers it fondly as a tight-knit community. She also remembers when “death started to come.” Years later, she can recite the names of more than a dozen neighbors and family members who lived within a few blocks and died of cancer.

Nolan also had cancer. Wondering about a link between emissions from nearby facilities and her own health woes, Nolan moved away after undergoing a hysterectomy, she said. She is now in remission.

Chemical plants mark the western edge of the neighborhood, including a Formosa Plastics facility, which produces the plastic commonly called PVC.

The plant, owned by a Taiwanese chemicals company worth about $300 billion, has a history of violations. In 2003, the company accidentally released 8,000 pounds of carcinogenic vinyl chloride into Baton Rouge, according to the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board. And EPA data shows that its pattern of reported infractions has continued in recent years. (A company spokesperson told ProPublica in a statement that “significant improvements have been implemented” relating to “process safety, monitoring, and operational controls” since the 2003 incident.)

Formosa Plastics’ Baton Rouge plant applied for an exemption to a Clean Air Act rule. Jay Su and Tamara Lasater Wacker, executive vice president and corporate environmental director of Formosa Plastics, respectively, wrote to the EPA in March 2025 to make their case for it. They said that the company needed more time to design and install technology to comply with the rule and that the plastic synthesized at the plant was important to national security because it’s used in products such as blood bags.

“Due to the complexities and challenges that the rule currently presents, we request that the President grant a 2-year compliance date exemption for related emission limits and standards, performance testing, monitoring, recordkeeping and reporting requirements,” Su wrote.

The rule would have mandated better monitoring at the fence lines of Formosa Plastics and other plants. Such facilities can leak toxic gases from pipelines, valves and tanks, and they often vastly underestimate local emissions. But monitoring for leaks has proved effective in other industries; fence-line emissions of benzene, a carcinogen, fell 30% at petroleum refineries after implementation of a similar monitoring program, according to the EPA.

The administration granted Formosa Plastics’ request in July.

“We take our environmental responsibilities seriously and remain committed to safe, compliant, and transparent operations,” Formosa Plastics’ spokesperson said.

Exacerbating historical disparities, about 54% of people who live close to the facilities Trump exempted are not white, according to the federal data the Environmental Defense Fund collected. By comparison, only about 43% of the country is not white.

Polluting facilities “seem to be in the backyards of a lot of African American families,” Nolan said, adding that it’s hard to cope with the reality that many family members and neighbors are lost forever.

“You are hurting,” she said. “It’s like a hole that can never be filled.”

The post Trump Exempted Some of the Nation’s Biggest Polluters From Air Quality Rules. All It Took Was an Email. appeared first on ProPublica.

The children were walking to school in Broadview, Illinois, or leaving a shopping center in Columbus, Ohio. They were at home in Minneapolis, or sitting in a stroller in Chicago, or at an afternoon protest in Portland, Oregon, alongside dogs on leashes and older people pushing walkers.

They were mostly going about their days when federal immigration agents shot tear gas or fired pepper spray near their homes and schools and into their family cars.

The chemicals blew through the air, sometimes for blocks. They seeped into bedrooms, forcing an asthmatic teen to gasp for air. They stuck to the skin of a young girl, who cried, “It burns!” They caused an infant to stop breathing.

ProPublica identified 79 children across the country who have been harmed by tear gas or pepper spray as immigration officers dramatically stepped up their use during President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly defended its use of the chemicals, asserting its agents aren’t to blame. The fault, a spokesperson said, lies with “agitators” in the crowds and parents who put their children in harm’s way.

But videos reveal the way agents use these weapons. One captures them releasing tear gas into a crowd with at least seven kids just before someone yells, “There’s children here.” Another shows them hurling tear gas canisters at protesters without apparent provocation; then, with the streets already flooded with white smoke, a Customs and Border Protection agent wearing a body camera shoots pepper balls before muttering, “Fuck yeah,” and shouting, “Woo!”

A third shows what happened after an officer fired pepper spray through the driver’s side window of a family’s car, hitting a 1-year-old girl in the back seat; a bystander filmed her in tears, and her family later said she was struggling to breathe. A DHS spokesperson called the incident “a disgusting pepper spray hoax.” But a local pastor who was at the scene rebuked the claim, testifying at an Illinois state accountability commission that “there’s literally video evidence.”

Such scenes of billowing gas and tear-stained faces have prompted some historians to liken the scope and intensity of the agents’ deployment of chemical munitions to brutal crackdowns by Southern law enforcement during the Civil Rights Movement.

And the legality of their use has been challenged. In cities across the country, judges have excoriated both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and CBP, saying their officers used excessive force. One judge said the agents showed “deliberate indifference” to the risks, including to children. They ordered officers to limit the use of these weapons in areas that were the focus of lawsuits. But they had no power to curb the practice nationwide — and kids in other communities, ProPublica found, continued to get hurt.

The controversy over the chemicals has highlighted a lack of consistency in their use: No national standard governs the use of tear gas and pepper spray by law enforcement, and agency policies differ widely. As a result, agents working for DHS could more freely use tear gas in targeted cities like Minneapolis and Portland, where local police policies are stricter.

A Portland officer said in a court declaration that he and several colleagues were tear-gassed by federal agents while observing and patrolling a protest he deemed to be mostly peaceful. At another event, in which he served as incident commander, he said the agents’ use of tear gas was “excessive and disproportionate to the threat posed” and “affected hundreds of peaceful protesters.”

These weapons are toxic, especially to children, who breathe more rapidly, pulling in more contaminated air than adults relative to their body weight. That principle is why coal miners once brought canaries underground, as one emergency medicine doctor explained in a recent court declaration. Because of the birds’ quick breaths and small size, they would stop singing or die when the chemicals started affecting them, giving the miners time to escape. Children are also vulnerable because they have narrower airways and stand closer to the ground, where tear gas tends to pool.

The Trump administration’s use of tear gas has been so extreme — with some children exposed multiple times — that the only research ProPublica found that might approximate the impact is a 2018 survey of Palestinian refugees in the West Bank subjected to the chemicals by Israeli security forces. Kids reported rashes and chronic tonsillitis, but no one knows the extent of the long-term consequences.

ProPublica’s tally of kids harmed by tear gas or pepper spray is nearly four times the number cited in a recent congressional report that relied on news stories, yet it is likely still a vast undercount. We verified incidents by interviewing more than 40 victims or witnesses and reviewing officer-worn body camera footage, social media posts and lawsuits. We included only cases in which we spoke to parents or others with direct knowledge, found at least two news accounts confirming the incident or identified an episode from sworn testimony.

In many of the cases where children were harmed, a DHS spokesperson said, the officers were justified in using tear gas or pepper spray, but the agency did not address how the weapons affected bystanders, including children. “DHS does NOT target children,” the agency said in a written statement.

The spokesperson defended the department’s training and said ICE officers are taught to use “the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations.” That includes “considering the totality of circumstances when deploying crowd control measures” and training in “de-escalation tactics,” according to the statement. “But if you assault an officer or attempt to obstruct law enforcement activities you can expect to be met with an appropriate response. … This is why rioters and agitators should stop obstructing law enforcement operations” and “refrain from knowingly bringing their own children into potentially volatile situations.”

The department did not respond to detailed questions asking whether it had investigated or disciplined officers over their use of tear gas or pepper spray since last year. In January, Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, addressed ICE officers in a segment on Fox News, saying, “You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.”

Three former DHS leaders said that the number of children exposed to tear gas and pepper spray indicates something is seriously broken in the department. John Roth, who served as its inspector general under President Barack Obama and for part of Trump’s first term, said ProPublica’s findings are a “bright red flag.”

“This should trigger a serious review of how it is that we train people on use of force,” he said.

“I Can’t Breathe”

Tear gas, a catch-all term for various chemical irritants, exists as a fine powder that settles over every surface, triggering nerve endings to feel like they’re on fire. The chemicals sear your lungs and throat, inflaming your airways until it feels like you’re breathing through a straw, while snot and tears stream down your face. They can cause vomiting, rashes and coughs that last for weeks. Pepper spray is made from compounds found in hot peppers and causes similar effects. 

The limited studies of tear gas use on adults have found lingering eye problems, bronchitis and other respiratory illnesses. Emerging research suggests an association between tear gas and abnormal menstrual cycles and miscarriage. In extreme cases, people have died.

How Tear Gas Affects the Body

Possible immediate symptoms

Possible long-term symptoms

Dr. Sarita Chung, Dr. Rohini Haar, Sven Jordt and Dr. Benjamin Sanders provided scientific expertise for this graphic. Physicians for Human Rights and the American Academy of Pediatrics offer additional information on the health effects of tear gas and pepper spray.

Once the weapons are fired, it’s often difficult to control who gets hit. The canisters can roll along the ground, and the chemicals drift through the air. In Minneapolis, ProPublica found that tear gas traveled at least a quarter mile, entering a McDonald’s.

Families who live near an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, felt the effects inside their homes when officers tear-gassed the protesters who routinely gathered there.

Derrick Nash lives a block and a half east of the facility with his extended family, including four children ages 6 to 17. Each time the tear gas seeped in, the kids coughed, and their throats often burned. The eldest, a high school senior with asthma, would hide out in his second-floor bedroom. One evening, his face turned red as he coughed uncontrollably and sucked on his inhaler without relief.

“He was wigging out, saying, ‘I can’t breathe,’” Nash recalled. The family considered calling an ambulance, but the street was closed.

Nearby, two girls, ages 6 and 10, started wearing layers of surgical masks indoors, but that didn’t prevent their coughing fits.

“It was terrifying. My kids were scared,” said the girls’ mother, who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation. “We felt it instantly. We were coughing. Our eyes were watering. Our noses felt funny.”

She worries the exposure to tear gas and pepper balls might have caused long-term damage. Since October, her youngest, now 7, has been coughing and wheezing a lot, especially at night. She’s taken the girl to urgent care about five times. “She’s been complaining about her throat,” she said. “It gets to the point she can’t breathe.”

Law enforcement officials have been dismissive of the effects of tear gas. In a lawsuit over the officers’ actions in the Chicago area, CBP supervisor Kristopher Hewson testified that the chemical irritant “doesn’t harm people” and that “after you leave it, it stops those effects within 10 seconds.”

But it’s undeniably toxic. A federal scientific panel in 2014 found that people could be harmed at even very low doses. Much of the research on health effects was conducted on men in the military; little is known about what happens to women, children, older adults and people with respiratory illnesses.

In the United States, some have been seriously hurt after a single exposure to tear gas.

In January, a Minneapolis family with six children was driving home from a youth basketball game when they encountered a protest and stopped for a while. As the situation escalated and they tried to leave, a tear gas canister rolled under their minivan, setting off the airbags and hampering their escape. Their 6-month-old son briefly stopped breathing.

“The baby is not responding. … Oh my god, come on,” a 911 caller said. The infant, who was given CPR, spent time in the hospital, along with two siblings who have severe asthma.

“Deliberate Indifference”

As Trump’s immigration crackdown moved from city to city, residents, journalists and protesters sued to stop the bombardments they said violated their constitutional rights.

Among dozens of declarations from Chicago and its suburbs, one witness in Broadview described seeing children covering their faces while walking to school; another in Brighton Park, who was 8 1/2 months pregnant, said she saw kids “coughing, wheezing, and crying” after tear gas was released.

“Tear gassing expectant mothers, children, and babies shocks the conscience,” U.S. District Court Judge Sara Ellis wrote in her ruling in November. She found that ICE and CBP officers used excessive force, deploying the weapons “without justification, often without warning” against people who didn’t pose a physical threat.

She ordered them to stop. But the injunction covered only the areas mentioned in the complaint.

In December, 15 days after Ellis’ written ruling, residents living diagonally across the street from an ICE facility in Portland filed their own suit. For months, they said, tear gas seeped into their apartments as federal officers fired it at the protesters gathered steps away. The residents filed their accounts to the court: While at home, one 12-year-old boy broke out in hives and suffered “chronic respiratory issues,” requiring an inhaler for the first time in his life. Two sisters, ages 7 and 9, slept inside a fort they made in a closet.

One neighbor, Mindan Ocon, told ProPublica that her 3-year-old daughter, Angelise, screamed and cried one night as the gas drifted in, holding her face as it burned her eyes. Over time, Ocon said, they developed a routine. Whenever Angelise coughed and rubbed her eyes, or when Ocon anticipated trouble, she took her daughter into the bathroom for a bubble bath. On certain days, she did this as many as four times. Angelise now prefers showers and says, “No bath!” when Ocon tries to put her in the tub.

Angelise’s cough and eye irritation had subsided by the time she saw Dr. Benjamin Sanders, a pediatrician at Oregon Health and Science University, for treatment. But Sanders said he worried about the long-term effects, both physical and psychological. At this young age, Angelise was “laying down her emotional understanding of the world,” he said, which “includes some pretty dangerous stuff.”

U.S. District Court Judge Amy Baggio ruled that federal officers acted with “deliberate indifference,” a legal standard that means they knew of, but disregarded, a substantial risk of harm. She wrote that the clouds of tear gas made it difficult or impossible for residents inside the complex “to eat, sleep, or simply breathe normally while in their own homes,” and that DHS displayed a “protracted failure even to care.”

Another judge handled a lawsuit regarding what happened on Portland streets on Jan. 31, when thousands attended a Saturday afternoon rally. The event drew families — kids carrying band instruments, parents hoisting small children on their shoulders.

As the protesters marched past the ICE building, up to 50 “agitators” dressed in black tried to tie shut a vehicle gate and threw rocks and eggs at federal officers, according to DHS testimonies. Federal agents said they warned the crowd to move back and, within minutes, began launching weapons. These included Triple Chaser grenades that each separated into three tear gas canisters, dozens of pepper ball projectiles filled with chemical munitions, and “rubber ball grenades” that released stinging pellets, bright lights and loud sounds.

About a half block away, an 11-year-old boy thought those sounds were gunfire; then, the chemicals reached him. “I was coughing and hacking up phlegm and snot,” he told ProPublica. His father, who was with him and his brother, recalled their fear: “I think he really thought we were going to die, and so did I, because of the gas.” The boy’s 15-year-old brother said his eyes were sore for days. (The family asked us not to use names to protect the kids’ privacy.)

Matt Lembo, who went to the protest with his 14-year-old daughter, said the gas gave them sore throats and made their eyes water. “I saw at least a dozen kids,” he said, “getting their eyes washed out … seriously coughing, crying, spitting.”

A judge issued a temporary restraining order that forbade federal agents from using chemical munitions unless targeted at someone who posed “an imminent threat of physical harm.” CBP argued in a court filing that officers needed to be able to use the weapons in certain cases, like to break up a crowd of people blocking their vehicles.

These attempts to get relief in the courts have had limited success. Appellate courts have vacated the federal judges’ rulings in all three cases in Portland and Chicago, removing restrictions on how federal officers can use these weapons.

While DHS appears to have stopped using tear gas in Portland, its officers continued deploying it elsewhere, including in a residential area in South Burlington, Vermont, in March.

“Something Is Wrong”

The DHS policy on force says officers must use tactics that “minimize the risk of unintended injury” and should be guided by “respect for human life.” The CBP policy is more detailed; it says officers “should not use” pepper spray or “less-lethal” chemical munitions against “small children.” ICE’s policy says “the presence of other officers, subjects, or bystanders” are a factor in determining whether an officers’ use of force is reasonable.

Those policies fall short of more concrete reforms on tear gas and pepper spray use that many local police departments have been forced to adopt as a result of lawsuits or laws aimed at curbing excessive force. Portland’s police department requires officers to take into account their proximity to homes when considering tear gas use. Minneapolis forbids officers from using chemical munitions for crowd control unless authorized by the police chief — even when officers fear they will be physically harmed. Police in Akron, Ohio, were recently prohibited from using pepper spray “indiscriminately” to disperse a crowd and face other constraints on tear gas.

DHS officers also have historically been undertrained. In 2017, the department’s inspector general’s office found that agents did not appear to complete required training on weapons including tear gas and pepper spray. Four years later, another IG investigation into agents’ use of force while protecting federal buildings concluded that officers failed to complete required training. The report warned that “without the necessary policies, training, and equipment, DHS will continue to face challenges securing Federal facilities during periods of civil disturbance that could result in injury, death, and liability.”

DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about whether it would examine its training or practices. “The pattern is NOT of law enforcement using force,” an agency spokesperson said in an email. “It’s a pattern of coordinated attacks and violence against our law enforcement.”

ProPublica’s findings make it clear that “something is wrong” with DHS’ use of force practices, said Edward Maguire, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona State University who advises law enforcement agencies on crowd control. “A responsible law enforcement agency … ought to be taking action to make sure these types of things don’t happen anymore.”

Requiring all law enforcement agencies to adopt uniform policies and training methods would go a long way, experts told ProPublica. These should include more extensive consideration of bystanders. When considering the use of tear gas or pepper spray in a crowd, for example, at least one officer should be assigned to conduct a collateral damage assessment to determine who may be inadvertently harmed, Maguire said. Then, the agency needs to be transparent about whether officers are following the policies.

To make that happen, various experts said, Congress would need to pass a bill mandating that federal law enforcement entities adopt such practices and incentivize local police departments to do the same.

Democratic lawmakers have repeatedly reintroduced the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which aims to strengthen use-of-force training and policies alongside more sweeping reforms on local policing. The latest versions, introduced in Congress last year, have not come up for a vote.

More recently, Congress members have drafted two bills narrowly tailored toward DHS and its use of these weapons. Both are with committees and have not been scheduled for hearings.

In the fall, three Democrats introduced a House bill that would strengthen DHS’ use-of-force policy, among other provisions. Notably, the bill would prohibit federal officers from carrying tear gas, pepper spray and other so-called less-lethal weapons unless they are arresting someone trying to enter the country illegally or have prior approval from their supervisor. “They don’t hold them to any standards like we would expect from local law enforcement,” said Rep. Scott Peters, a California Democrat who introduced the bill. “These are the kinds of reforms we need to make to restrain behavior.”

The Trump administration has said that any new restrictions would hamper immigration officers’ ability to carry out their work.

Rep. Delia C. Ramirez, a Democrat who represents Chicago, introduced a separate House bill in January. It would require DHS to publish a report every six months detailing each time officers used force and a summary of whether their actions complied with the department’s policy.

Ramirez said it shouldn’t fall to news outlets like ProPublica to document potential cases of excessive force. That is work “that we Congress members should be demanding from DHS.”

One of her co-sponsors on the bill, Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., called ProPublica’s tally of 79 kids harmed by tear gas and pepper spray a “horrific” finding. “I have two young children myself. I know how fragile young people can be, and not just physically but emotionally and mentally as well.”

Magaziner said Democrats in Congress may have a chance to question Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of Homeland Security, in a future budget hearing. When that happens, Magaziner said, he intends to ask, “When is there going to be accountability for the people who sprayed pepper spray into a moving vehicle that had a 1-year-old in it?”

About Our Findings

We learned that immigration officers stepped up their use of chemical munitions during President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown through a data analysis. The University of Washington Center for Human Rights obtained nearly three years of Significant Incident Report data from the Department of Homeland Security. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are required to fill out such a report each time they use force, which includes deploying chemical agents. ProPublica analyzed the data and found that ICE officers reported a dramatic increase in their use of chemical munitions, comparing the year ending September 2025 with the prior two years.

The post Kids Are Being Harmed by Tear Gas, Pepper Spray Under Trump. There Could Be Long-Term Consequences. appeared first on ProPublica.

They entered the world the way babies should, with piercing cries announcing their arrival. They passed their newborn screening tests. Some made it to their 2-week wellness visits without concern.

Then, without warning, their systems began to shut down. A 7-week-old boy in Maryland developed sudden seizures. An 11-pound girl in Alabama stopped breathing for 20 seconds at a time. A baby boy in Kentucky vomited before becoming lethargic. A brown-haired girl in Texas, not yet 2 weeks old, bled around her belly button.

Desperate to save them, records show, doctors inserted tubes into their airways and hooked them up to IVs. They ordered blood transfusions. They spent half an hour trying to resuscitate one boy until his parents told them they could stop. They shaved another boy’s soft locks to embed a needle directly into his skull to reduce the pressure in his brain.

None of it was enough.

At the morgue, the babies were brought in with their diapers and blankets and with their hospital ID bracelets still wrapped around their tiny ankles. The pathologists’ findings were like those you would typically see in ailing adults, not newborns — the kind of bleeding seen during strokes or brain tissue loss similar to what happens when radiation is administered to treat cancer.

Their autopsies, which took place over the last several years, all came to the same conclusion: The deaths were caused, in whole or in part, by a rare but potentially fatal condition known as vitamin K deficiency bleeding.

In almost every case, the babies’ deaths could have been prevented with a long-standard vitamin K shot. But across the country, families — first in smatterings, now in droves — are declining the single, inexpensive injection given at birth to newborns to help their blood clot.

Many of them are doing so out of a well-meaning but ill-informed abundance of caution. In the hopes of safeguarding their newborns from what they see as unnecessary medical intervention, they have shunned fundamental and scientifically sound pharmaceutical intervention. The trend is also fueled by a contradictory pairing: families’ fierce desire to protect their babies and a cascade of false information infused into their social media algorithms.

Although it is not a vaccine, the vitamin K shot has been swept up in the same post-pandemic tide that has led to a drop in key childhood vaccines, including for measles and whooping cough.

The vitamin K shot is one of the three main interventions, along with the hepatitis B vaccine and an antibiotic ointment in the eyes, that newborns typically receive before leaving the hospital. Leading American institutions and the World Health Organization recommend that newborns get the shot.

In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped recommending that all newborns get the hepatitis B vaccine, which has been highly effective at fighting a virus that can lead to lifelong infections and liver cancer. A federal judge in March temporarily blocked the revised childhood vaccination schedule that included that recommendation. Some families are also rejecting the eye ointment.

Two weeks ago, at a House subcommittee hearing, Rep. Kim Schrier, D-Wash., pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reassure parents that the vitamin K shot is safe. He refused and pushed back.

“I’ve never said, literally never said, anything about it,” Kennedy said.

“That’s exactly the point,” responded Schrier, who is a doctor. “You don’t say anything about it, but the doubt you’ve created about all of medicine and science is causing parents to make dangerous decisions.”

An HHS spokesperson did not respond to questions but in an email blamed the administration of former President Joe Biden for the rise in parents rejecting vitamin K shots. “Vitamin K at birth,” the spokesperson added, “remains the standard of care.”

Meanwhile, families continue to be inundated with advice from self-proclaimed experts using medical terms incorrectly and misunderstanding science to convince parents that getting the shot could put their newborns at risk of grave harm.

Nearly a century’s worth of research and medical advancements shows the opposite to be true.

Babies who don’t get the vitamin K shot, research shows, are 81 times more likely than those who do to develop late vitamin K deficiency bleeding, where in many cases oxygen can’t reach their brains and blood pools around their skulls. Perhaps most alarming is that, according to the CDC, 1 in every 5 babies with vitamin K deficiency bleeding will die.

Determining precisely how many babies have died or suffered severe brain damage because of a lack of vitamin K is difficult. State and federal agencies don’t track data around vitamin K injection refusal or subsequent bleeding, which impedes their ability to quantify and track outcomes, including death.

The number of deaths directly attributed to vitamin K deficiency bleeding appears to be small — fewer than a dozen annually — but has started to climb in recent years, according to death certificate data from federal and state agencies.

But those numbers capture only a fraction of deaths, which often are classified only by other, more immediate causes, such as bleeding in the brain. In 2024, for example, more than 700 newborns died from spontaneous bleeding in their brains, which could have been complicated by liver disease or prematurity. Still, six medical specialists and one official at the CDC said a meaningful portion of those deaths likely were caused by vitamin K deficiency. Many more babies survive the bleeding but suffer massive brain bleeds and lasting injuries.

“A lot of the providers don’t have this on their radar,” said Dr. Jaspreet Loyal, a pediatric hospitalist at Yale Medicine. “The lack of data is almost acting like a reassurance for families that this risk is worth taking.”

Although it is difficult to quantify deaths attributable to vitamin K deficiency, there is clearly a large jump in the number of parents declining the vitamin K shot. Some hospitals have seen refusal rates more than double. A national study of more than 5 million births, published in December, found that the rate of U.S. babies not receiving vitamin K at birth topped 5% in 2024 — up 77% from 2017.

More Newborns Are Not Getting Vitamin K Shots

More than 5% of newborns in the U.S. did not receive vitamin K shots in 2024.

The success of the shot has been so remarkable that it nearly eliminated vitamin K deficiency bleeding altogether. The science was settled decades ago.

“This was not something we even bothered to spend much educational effort on,” said Dr. Allison Henry, the director of newborn medicine service at Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s in Los Angeles, “because there was this simple, safe intervention.”

A cluster of cases 13 years ago was one of the first major signs that something was amiss.

Four babies were rushed to a Nashville, Tennessee, children’s hospital after they suddenly fell ill months apart. Stunned, doctors ran tests that revealed severe bleeding and reached out to Dr. Robert Sidonio Jr., their blood disorder specialist. They learned that the parents had declined vitamin K shots for the babies, each of them between 6 and 15 weeks old.

Once they realized that, the medical team moved quickly to treat them, injecting them with vitamin K and hoping it wasn’t too late. Much to the relief of doctors, they all survived. Only one infant had developmental delays.

The parents explained that they had declined the shot for a number of reasons: a concern, based on long-debunked claims, that the shot could cause leukemia; a belief that the shot wasn’t necessary; and a desire to reduce their baby’s exposure to “toxins.”

The CDC and the state health department opened an investigation and later published a report that found that when the parents declined the shot, their awareness about the risk of bleeding was “incomplete or absent.”

Dr. Anna Morad, a pediatrician at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt in Nashville, said she had witnessed a gradual rise in families refusing vitamin K leading up to the hospitalizations.

She and her colleagues went into the Nashville community to speak at birthing centers and advise families about the benefits of vitamin K. One mother who had refused the shot for her newborn partnered with Morad and described how she came to realize that the shot can save lives.

More than a dozen pediatricians interviewed by ProPublica said they strongly recommend all three of the typical newborn interventions but agreed that the vitamin K shot is the most vital. 

“I’m picking vitamin K every day,” Morad said. “Absolutely.”

With time, the number of families who turned down the shot dropped. As the need for the community outreach waned, Morad lost touch with the mother she had teamed up with and refocused her energy on directing the newborn nursery at Vanderbilt Health.

“I’ll be honest, I thought we had turned the corner,” Morad said. “Naively, I thought that would be enough.”

All newborns lack vitamin K. No matter how much vitamin K a mother consumes, it doesn’t sufficiently pass through the placenta, and breast milk contains only small amounts. That puts babies who are exclusively breastfed at a higher risk for vitamin K deficiency bleeding. Formula is fortified with vitamin K, but even with that, experts agree, babies should still get the shot.

Doctors have yet to understand why some babies who don’t get the vitamin K shot are fine while others bleed uncontrollably. But they do know that the risk increases dramatically. For babies who don’t get the shot, the risk for vitamin K deficiency bleeding from a week after birth to 6 months ranges from 1 in 14,000 to 1 in 25,000 births. With the shot, the research shows, the risk drops to less than 1 in 100,000.

The role of vitamin K is so crucial that researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1943 for their discovery of its ability to form clots and stop bleeding in babies. The official presenting the award called the discovery the vitamin’s “greatest practical importance” and lauded it among the discoveries that have been of great benefit to humankind.

In 1961, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that all newborns in the U.S. get a shot of vitamin K. The CDC has supported newborns getting the shot as well, devoting several pages online to raising awareness around vitamin K deficiency bleeding and writing that babies may bleed “into their intestines, or into their brain, which can lead to brain damage and even death.” For decades, medical textbooks and lectures have presented the vitamin K injection as an example of a public health policy success.

After reports that vitamin K deficiency bleeding was on the rise, the American Academy of Pediatrics updated its policy statement in 2022 to stress the shot’s safety and efficacy. The paper included talking points for pediatricians to help them respond to common misconceptions: “Vitamin K injection does not contain mercury. Vitamin K does not cause cancer. The vitamin K injection used in newborns is safe. The dose is not too high for newborns.”

“We’re a victim of our own success,” said Dr. Ivan Hand, the director of neonatology at Kings County Hospital Center in New York and the co-author of the American Academy of Pediatrics statement. “Since we’ve been treating babies with vitamin K, we haven’t seen much deficiency bleeding, so people think it doesn’t exist.”

Seeing photos online of healthy babies who didn’t get the vitamin K shot and reading comments from parents who felt justified in their refusal, it’s easy to think that the risk of bleeding isn’t real, or at the very least that it’s exaggerated.

On Facebook, comments about the shot include: “Don’t do it!” “Huge lie!” and “It’s a scare tactic.” One person wrote, “Never will I ever inject my baby with poisons from big pharma.”

Families have also pointed to a 2023 episode about vitamin K shots by conservative podcaster Candace Owens, who said, “What Big Pharma is saying is that we realize that babies were born wrong. They don’t have enough vitamin K, and so we’re going to give them what they always needed. God designed us wrong.”

Owens did not respond to a request for comment.

Hidden is the agony of parents mourning the loss of their babies. Some are still in denial.

ProPublica spoke with five of those families, but none of them wanted to be identified publicly.

The obituaries, social media posts and GoFundMe pages capture the utter despair of the families, though none of them reckon with the decision not to get the vitamin K shot.

“No one could’ve prepared us for the heartbreak we faced 6 weeks after our little miracle was born,” one mother wrote. “She had a spontaneous unexplained brain bleed that led to brain death.”

“We miss his sweet smell,” another family wrote.

A third family, who made their decision after reading about vitamin K on social media and talking with their midwife, dismissed the vitamin K shot altogether. Instead, the father expressed outrage at the hospital for not delaying the clamping of the umbilical cord. He said he believed doing so would have allowed his son to be infused with vitamin K from the cord blood, a popular theory on social media. Research, however, shows that while delayed cord clamping can raise the baby’s hemoglobin levels, it does not have the same effect on vitamin K.

“I figured the hospital was already pissy with me because we didn’t vaccinate at all,” he told ProPublica. “They lost out on all the money from that.”

The family’s anger has subsided some since the baby’s death, in part because of their trust in God’s plan.

“I can sit here and be upset and sad, but this brought me closer to God,” the father said. “I just can’t wait to be with him.”

Two of the families who went on to have other children found themselves facing the same decision: Would they decline the vitamin K shot again? Both got the shot for their newborn.

Morad watched as the number of families declining vitamin K climbed over the last year.

In January, she reached out to Sidonio, her former colleague who first recognized the 2013 cluster of cases there, for advice. Sidonio, now a pediatric hematologist oncologist at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and professor at Emory University School of Medicine, said he’s more worried than ever.

During that cluster, Sidonio recognized the need to collect data on how often parents decline the shot and what happens to those babies. But in discussions with the CDC, he said, he was told that it would be too difficult.

More than a decade later, nothing has come of it. In a recent email to ProPublica, federal officials said vitamin K deficiency bleeding has never been submitted for consideration as a notifiable condition.

“If you don’t track it, you don’t document it,” said Sidonio, frustration building in his voice. “They have to make it a reportable health condition, just like a new measles case. That’s the only way it’s going to change.”

Like him, Dr. Kristan Scott, the lead author of the national study that found a jump in the number of babies not receiving vitamin K, also landed on a need for a robust system to monitor vitamin K refusals and any subsequent consequences.

“We don’t have a clean data repository provided by public health systems or the state that would allow us to be able to track this in a more systematic fashion,” said Scott, who is a neonatologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Some doctors failed to recognize the role of vitamin K when a baby came into their emergency rooms, let alone knew how to reverse the damage from the declined shots. Many of them encountered the condition only in medical school textbooks.  

Some hospitals have started to run their own numbers, but the effort is scattershot. The data is also usually kept in house, so there’s not a wider knowledge of the problem. Recognizing the urgency of the matter, officials at a handful of hospitals agreed to share their data with ProPublica.

Doctors at St. Louis-based Mercy, which runs birthing hospitals in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, began noticing an uptick in families turning down the vitamin K shot during the pandemic. Last year, 1,552 babies across all Mercy hospitals didn’t get the injection. In 2021, that number was 536.

And at Idaho’s largest hospital system, the refusal rates have gone up every year since the start of the pandemic, and in some cases have more than doubled. In 2020, 3.8% of families across St. Luke’s Health System declined the vitamin K shot for their babies. In 2025, that figure jumped to 9.8%. One hospital even reached 20% of babies not getting vitamin K shots.

At least two babies treated at St. Luke’s died within the last year from complications related to vitamin K deficiency bleeding, hospital officials confirmed. But Dr. Tom Patterson, a pediatrician who treats newborns at some St. Luke’s hospitals and is among the most vocal in warning about the climbing refusal rates, suspects there may be more.

Patterson recently pleaded with a family to allow their baby to get the shot. The father refused and shocked the doctor by going even further. He approached the nurses to complain about Patterson pushing the matter.

How We Reported This Story

As part of our reporting, ProPublica contacted 55 hospitals and birthing centers around the U.S.; interviewed more than 30 doctors; and filed nearly 90 public records requests with state and local health departments, medical examiners and other agencies. ProPublica also analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and examined hundreds of pages of medical and autopsy records.

The post Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth appeared first on ProPublica.

The sound of construction machinery filled the air as Kylie Nidever walked past properties ravaged months earlier by floodwaters.

Nidever’s home was among those in her Bumble Bee Hills neighborhood untouched by last year’s July 4 flood, one of the deadliest disasters in Texas history. The 35-year-old understood the draw of the tranquil Kerr County subdivision, where she played as a child in a nearby creek that fed the Guadalupe River. But she was taken aback by how enthusiastic most of her neighbors were to rebuild.

Nidever wondered why the government had let people build in any areas long known to be dangerous and whether leaders would intervene now.

“Is somebody going to come in and stop us?” said Nidever, who has considered moving. “If it happens again and it’s worse next time, people will die in this neighborhood.”

After last summer’s disaster, some Texas legislators scolded local officials for their decision not to invest in flood warning sirens and for the chaotic emergency response. Other elected leaders excused the storm as so massive that no one could have prepared for it.

But lawmakers failed to address the underlying problem: They have repeatedly rejected bills that could protect residents in the state’s most dangerous, flood-prone areas, an investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found.

The majority of the 137 people confirmed to have died across five counties in the July 4 tragedy were staying in places identified by the federal government as being at risk for flooding, the newsrooms found. These were places where state lawmakers had a chance to curb development, but didn’t.

The newsrooms reviewed nearly 60 years of legislation and identified over five dozen flood safety bills rejected by lawmakers.

The most consequential measures, experts said, could have saved lives by stopping construction in the areas at greatest risk for flooding, including where people later died on July 4.

“Had the state enacted any of that legislation, we might not have had the excruciating loss,” Char Miller, a Texas environmental historian who now teaches at Pomona College in California, said after learning of the newsrooms’ findings. “The continued inability of the state to pass legislation to protect its citizens means it’s not doing the one thing it’s supposed to do, which is defend the health and safety of those who call Texas home.”

Lawmakers also didn’t pass measures that would have forced buildings in flood-prone areas to be elevated; blocked certain types of structures, such as solid waste facilities, from being built close to bodies of water; or granted local leaders additional authority to curb potentially unsafe development.

Texas has more buildings in flood-prone areas — at least 650,000 structures — than any other state besides Florida, according to a ProPublica and Tribune analysis of Federal Emergency Management Agency data. The analysis shows that only eight other states have a higher share of structures in flood-prone spots than Texas.

More people have died from floods in Texas, and more national flood insurance claims have been paid out here since 1980, than in nearly any state with the exception of Florida and Louisiana. Yet Texas trails at least 29 other states, including Florida, that have passed development standards that force structures to be built higher in flood-prone areas, according to a 2020 FEMA report.

“We need to resist this narrative that this disaster was unpreventable,” said Michael Slattery, director of the Institute for Environmental Studies at Texas Christian University. “The disaster is just shaped by policy choices made over what I thought were just years.” Instead, Slattery said, it was decades.

The need for stronger flood protections only grows more urgent, scientists say, as climate change makes heavy storms previously considered once in a lifetime more likely.

After this latest catastrophe, Gov. Greg Abbott called Texas politicians back for two special legislative sessions and tasked them with addressing aspects of the disaster. The only buildings legislators banned from flood-prone areas were youth camps, and only after intense lobbying by the grieving parents of 25 children and two counselors who died on July 4 at Camp Mystic. (Its executive director also died.)

Some Texas lawmakers over the years have pointed to protecting landowners’ rights to evaluate their own property risk as a reason not to pass additional regulations. At a hearing more than a month after the flood, Republican Rep. Wes Virdell, who represents Kerr County, said rural areas “enjoy the freedom to take our risk and build as we would like to.”

None of the top state leaders — Abbott, Lt. Gov Dan Patrick or House Speaker Dustin Burrows — responded to the newsrooms’ questions about whether legislators should enact stricter statewide building rules. Abbott’s office said he has addressed flooding issues by funding mitigation projects to lessen the storms’ impact.

Burrows’ office declined multiple interview requests, and Patrick’s office didn’t answer the newsrooms’ emails.

Without major changes, the same federal, state and local rules that permitted residents to construct their homes so close to the Guadalupe River in the first place are allowing many to build there again.

That includes 82-year-old Joan Connor and her husband, David Stearns, who live near Nidever in Bumble Bee Hills.

The couple had recently returned from an RV trip when last summer’s flood hit.

Water rose to Connor’s chest as she hollered to her 98-year-old husband. They needed to get out of their house. Connor and Stearns survived by wading and swimming out to their front yard, where the river transported them onto their pergola ledge and they clutched the wood structure’s roof supports.

The river’s muck filled the house. But they’d paid off the home. They didn’t fear another storm.

“It never crossed our mind to not rebuild,” Connor said.

A Critical Juncture

The homes that now belong to Connor and Nidever didn’t exist in the 1960s.

Back then, Kerr County was a small community nestled in the rolling hills of Central Texas, 65 miles northwest of downtown San Antonio. Youth camps operated on the river. Family homes passed through generations. Then, the expansion of Interstate 10 in the following decade helped unlock a wave of development in the area, known as the Hill Country. Homes went up along the Guadalupe River, though longtime residents knew it could flood viciously and with little warning.

A national initiative to address the effects of floods was also just beginning. In 1968, Congress launched the National Flood Insurance Program, which offered federally backed insurance to residents in cities or counties that voluntarily joined. In exchange, the program would require local governments to use federal maps that identified regions at risk of floods. Joining also ultimately meant that cities and counties had to enforce specific development rules in those areas, such as requiring buildings to be high enough to withstand a certain level of flooding.

In Texas, the program triggered skepticism from some state lawmakers, local leaders and landowners. They viewed the flood regulations as an infringement of their property rights and worried flood risk maps would cause their property values to plummet.

Amid this resistance, two Democrats put forward what flood experts characterized as a radical proposal in 1973, after a deadly flood struck the Hill Country. The measure would have prohibited all construction of structures “for use by humans” in the floodway, including the area flanking the river where the most dangerous flooding often occurs. That would not only mean houses but also hospitals, schools and nursing homes. The state proposal would go further than the federal rules, which still allowed people to build in the floodway in some instances.

But when the day arrived to discuss the proposal in its first public hearing, one of the bill’s authors handed out a revised version that removed the strict floodway regulations.

Under the updated measure, the state would still have to create its own flood maps to define what areas were most at risk during a deluge, rather than wait for the federal government to draw them.

State lawmakers scoffed at the price tag, at least $16 million.

“I don’t think there’s a chance in the world that you’re going to get this kind of money and tax all people in the state of Texas to do this kind of work, at least not right now,” said state Rep. John Wilson, a Democrat on the committee considering the bill, which did not pass.

And so homes continued to be built in the floodway.

Today, Kerr is one of the Texas counties with the highest share of buildings in that dangerous zone, according to the newsrooms’ analysis, which ranks it eighth in the state.

Roughly half of those who died during last year’s floods were staying in the floodway, according to the latest FEMA map. Many buildings went up after legislators filed the 1973 bills that could have prevented their construction, a review of county appraisal data found.

“This is the biggest shame, that we weren’t able to pass those back then,” said Rachel Hanes, policy director of the Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance, a nonprofit representing parts of the Hill Country that has pushed for stringent statewide standards. “It would have just made a drastic difference in lives saved and billions of dollars in damage avoided over the past 50 years.”

On one idyllic half-mile stretch that winds along the Guadalupe, at least 27 people died. Sixteen of them were staying in homes in the floodway, the ProPublica and Tribune analysis found.

That part of the river became one of the deadliest spots across the Hill Country that weekend.

It included a home belonging to Beth and Hutch Bryan’s family.

Dan and Martha Crawford, longtime friends of the Bryans, slept in the property’s guesthouse the morning of July 4. The Crawfords loved to spend weekends here, enjoying the peaceful setting away from their Houston home. Martha Crawford considered it her “happy place.” Their daughter and son grew up going to camp down the road, like the Bryans’ kids.

Around 3:30 a.m., the Crawfords were trying to get to safety as the water rushed around their bodies, roaring like an airplane engine. Dan Crawford, a 63-year-old landman, reached for the lattice on a second-floor deck, but his wife of nearly 30 years got swept away.

The lattice broke. Crawford grabbed a bush that gave way and then climbed a neighbor’s tree, which eventually broke on top of him. He fell into the river. He emerged only for the water to rush him toward a nearby home, where he used the gutters to heave himself onto a slick metal roof.

Later, he would have to tell his grown children: “I can’t tell you where Mom is.”

Martha Crawford and the Bryans died. Concrete slabs now line the roadway where homes once stood. Three white crosses mark the spot where the Bryans stayed. When Crawford went back to see the property months later, he drew hearts on each one of the crosses and wrote their names.

“I’m never going to understand this,” said Crawford, who has leaned on his faith in God. “I’ve got to try to just move forward, but it’s still been hard.”

Still, Crawford believes the government shouldn’t stop people from rebuilding altogether.

Behind the Nation

As the turn of the century neared, Texas lawmakers passed up two other major opportunities to strengthen protections in flood-prone areas.

In 1989, after 10 campers died in a flood in the Hill Country, state Sen. Ted Lyon proposed banning youth camps with buildings or tents within 150 feet of a body of water or in areas designated as flood-prone

Lyon believes that had his bill passed, at least some children and staff staying at youth camps on July 4 could have survived. FEMA identified areas of Camp Mystic and Heart O’ the Hills, a camp where one person died, as flood-prone in a 2011 map, its most recent countywide assessment.

“That’s so haunting to me,” the former lawmaker said. He later added, “They should have implemented these rules to protect those kids.”

Former Heart O’ The Hills owner Kathy Ragsdale said the building where the camp’s director — her daughter, Jane Ragsdale — died had never flooded in the more than 50 years that the family owned it. The camp’s new owners plan to relocate to a new site outside the flood plain. 

Camp Mystic declined to comment but pointed reporters to previous statements in which it disputes being in a designated flood-prone area, because it successfully petitioned FEMA to exclude it in 2013. The change meant Lyon’s proposed ban may not have applied to the camp  at the time of the flood. Camp Mystic will not reopen this summer, according to its leaders.

Catastrophic flooding that swept across the eastern half of the state spurred another measure in 1993. Longtime Democratic state Sen. Carl Parker of Port Arthur offered a bill that would have forced all cities and counties to enroll in the federal flood insurance program.

Participating in the federal program meant that all new residential construction in the so-called 100-year flood plain, areas with a 1% chance of flooding in any given year, must be elevated to a certain height above ground. Parker’s bill, however, would have gone even further than the federal standard by requiring buildings to be a foot higher than that.

The bill was quickly tabled in its first public hearing after one county official testified that the decision to raise the height standard should be left to local leaders.

Only in 1999 did Texas legislators pass a law requiring all cities and counties to adopt the federal flood insurance program’s elevation requirement and other minimum standards.

But they didn’t assign a state agency to enforce it. Roughly 1 in 10 Texas cities and counties reported to the state that they still had not adopted those minimum standards or any other related regulations as of 2024.

Lawmakers never passed the higher elevation requirements that Parker’s bill proposed. (Parker died in 2024.)

After Hurricane Harvey devastated the Houston area in 2017, the Legislature, again, chose other solutions. That included a measure requiring Texas to create a statewide plan to study how to better prepare for floods. The plan recommended that buildings be constructed to a higher elevation, as Parker attempted decades prior. To date, state lawmakers have not required it.

“The legislature is very reactionary, not visionary,” said Robert Puente, a former state representative who served until 2008. “We react and try to resolve it, and invariably, we don’t.”

Without a state mandate in Texas, counties and cities must individually decide whether they should require new construction to be built at higher elevations.

Some local governments waited years after Parker’s proposal to pass higher standards. Kerr County, for example, passed its rule by 2011. Most Texas cities and counties have not strengthened their regulations, the 2024 state flood plan found.

“A lot of local communities just don’t have the capacity to undertake all these huge code changes, or the political willpower,” said Joel Scata, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit that has pushed to raise standards at the federal level.

That’s why, experts say, Texas needs statewide requirements.

Most states have implemented additional elevation requirements for buildings in flood-prone areas.

New Jersey passed two major provisions that Texas didn’t: It has blocked development of new homes in floodways since 1975 and required extra building elevation starting in 2007. It also started drawing its own expanded flood maps in the 1980s, long before Texas. Nebraska and Wisconsin banned building habitable structures in floodways and required an extra foot or two of height for homes by 1986.

Sarah Galster, the National Flood Insurance Program coordinator for Wisconsin, said Texas lawmakers should push for stricter regulations in the aftermath of last year’s flood. If they don’t, Galster said, then communities should.

“Now is the time before everybody forgets, while people are still having this conversation,” Galster said.

In the months since July 4, the Texas Legislature formed two new committees to continue investigating the disaster. But at the first joint two-day hearing last week, they only focused on what happened at Camp Mystic.

Some flood experts argue that no regulation short of preventing construction in flood-prone areas would truly guarantee safety. One engineer’s model estimates that the Guadalupe River in Kerr reached more than 30 feet in some places, flowing up to twice the strength of Niagara Falls.

But the flood experts also stress the importance of reducing risk through stronger building standards. The American Society of Civil Engineers has pushed for builders to construct homes more than 2 feet higher than the national standard and design for more ferocious rainstorms.

“The obvious thing is that we shouldn’t be developing in flood plains, but that’s not the answer that anybody wants to accept,” said Kimberly Meitzen, a geography and environmental studies professor at Texas State University.

“Looking back, any legislation we could have passed that could provide at least minimal protection would be helpful,” she later added. “And looking towards the future, this is something a lot of folks are working towards, trying to get this into the next legislative session, but it’s an uphill battle.”

“Not Going Anywhere”

In the absence of stricter state rules after last summer’s devastating floods, some local governments adopted their own, including limiting RV use in flood-prone areas. At least 48 people died in RV campgrounds last July. 

Kerr County, however, has not changed its rules in any significant way.

The county has already allowed more than 100 residents to start rebuilding or renovating in flood-prone areas.

County commissioners and Kerr’s top county executive did not respond to the newsrooms’ interview requests and questions.

Katharine Deely and her husband, Pat, sold their Kerr County home after last summer’s storm. They bought the funky vacation house with hand-me-down furniture and maroon linoleum floors from his father and stepmother, not far from where the Crawfords and Bryans fought the river’s current. Usually, Pat Deely spent July 4 there, but instead, he went fishing with a former law firm colleague — a decision his wife believes saved his life.

The damaged house withstood the flood, but the couple, in their late 70s, didn’t have the heart to fix it up. Katharine Deely said it was as if her husband’s fond memories of the many visits there with family washed away with the disaster.

“I’m amazed people are rebuilding there,” Deely said. “Seems like it’d be like living in the graveyard.”

For many, those memories are part of what makes it hard to leave behind properties — places they’ve invested in, where they’ve delighted in watching the sun rise over the river and cherished time swimming and playing with family.

Joan Connor and her husband moved back into their home in Bumble Bee Hills before Christmas.

Connor only managed to save a few items: her loom, chairs her father made, her mother’s granite table. She left many of the rebuilding decisions to her daughter, like what light fixture to install. Volunteers filled the cupboards with dishes, draped towels in the bathroom and hung pictures on the wall.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Connor said. “We don’t think a thing like that will happen again in our lifetime.”

But if it does, Connor said, they will do what they did before.

They’ll face the flood.

The post Texas Lawmakers Repeatedly Failed to Pass Legislation That Could Have Protected Residents From Deadly Floods appeared first on ProPublica.

You may have noticed things look a little different when visiting ProPublica’s website recently or encountering our work on other platforms, such as Apple News or Instagram. We’ve updated our logo and our typefaces, and we made improvements to the design and functionality of our homepage and how we present our work. We wanted to take a moment to tell you what’s changed and why.

The biggest changes you’ll notice on our homepage are structural. Many of our investigations come with supporting material, including visual explainers, details on our methodology or ways to send us tips. Our new design allows us to package these pieces together, so it’s easier for you to find the full picture. We’re also showcasing more of our best investigations from the archives so readers have a chance to discover reporting they may have missed.

We’ve also made improvements to the presentation of articles, including more details about our journalists and partners, along with their photos and how to contact them securely if you want to contribute to our journalism. Many of our articles are available in other languages or can be listened to with audio narration. These options are now more prominent, but we’re also working to keep the focus on what matters most: our reporting and visual storytelling.

ProPublica’s logo and typefaces are new too. We think they’re bolder and cleaner, while maintaining a connection to the classicism of our name, and do a better job traveling across the many screens where you can find our work. Our previous visual identity was built for a different era, it launched before mobile phones and social media were ubiquitous, and it was due for an update.

What hasn’t changed: our commitment to investigative reporting in the public interest, our independence and the rigor we bring to every story.

More changes will roll out over the coming months. We hope you like what you see, and, as always, if you have thoughts, we want to hear them. Please email info@propublica.org if you notice any bugs or have suggestions for what else we can do. 

Many thanks to those who helped conceive this work, including our partners at Gretel and so many of our colleagues here, especially our design team, led by Allen Tan with Sophie Greenspan and Jeff Frankl.

The post A New Look for ProPublica appeared first on ProPublica.

To the narcotics agents investigating drug smuggling in Puerto Rico prisons, it seemed at first like a typical scheme: associates of an inmate gang sneaking drugs into the prison, gang members distributing them inside and bank records showing the money flowing.

Then the agents discovered something unusual.

Leaders of the prison gang known as Los Tiburones, or the Sharks, were selling drugs to inmates not only for money, but for their votes. Specifically, votes for now-Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón, a longtime Republican and supporter of President Donald Trump, investigators found.

To make sure the inmates — many of whom were addicted — complied, the gang’s leaders threatened violence and to withhold drugs, the investigators learned. Corrections employees in on the plan looked the other way as the gang, formally known as Group 31, ran the enterprise.

What at first seemed like a routine drug case had turned into something bigger. Puerto Rico, along with just a couple of U.S. states, allows inmates to vote. Puerto Ricans living in the territory can vote in all contests except federal general elections. It is a felony to willfully offer money or gifts in exchange for support at the polls. A conviction carries fines of as much as $250,000 and imprisonment of up to two years.

Investigators had gathered solid evidence of election fraud implicating both inmates and staff, and they were working toward determining whether González-Colón or her campaign was involved, four people with knowledge of the case told ProPublica. They requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the case.

But as federal prosecutors prepared an indictment against the inmates and staff in November 2024 — just days after Trump won the election and González-Colón clinched the governorship — they received a surprising directive. Their bosses in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico instructed them to exclude the voting-related counts against the inmates and all charges against the prison staff, an investigation by ProPublica found.

In December, they filed an indictment charging 34 inmates and associates with crimes including drug distribution resulting in at least four overdose deaths, money laundering and possessing a firearm. And while prosecutors described the drugs-for-votes scheme in the court filing, they did not include a single charge related to it.

Soon after Trump took office, the lead prosecutor, Jorge Matos, was told by a supervisor to take the investigation no further, according to four people familiar with the case.

“Before the election, it was definitely full steam ahead,” said one person familiar with the case. “After the election, that all changed.”

Matos, who left the Justice Department in June 2025, did not respond to phone calls or texts from ProPublica or attempts to reach him on social media.

For those working on the case, the decision to scrap the investigation was especially puzzling given the new president’s agenda; Trump issued executive orders in early 2025 aimed at eradicating drug traffickers and declaring election integrity “fundamental” to maintaining American democracy.

“We invested so much effort to make a difference,” said another person. “We’re frustrated, but there’s nothing we can do.”

People close to the case wondered if politics had played a bigger role than law and order. Trump congratulated González-Colón in a letter shared at her January 2025 inauguration saying, “I am so proud of your resounding victory.” That same month, she pushed to erect a statue of him at the Capitol building in San Juan alongside other presidents who’ve visited the island. “He deserves that,” she said, according to an official post from the Federal Affairs Administration of Puerto Rico on X.

W. Stephen Muldrow, the U.S. attorney for the District of Puerto Rico, was appointed by Trump in 2019 and has served continuously since then. His name appears on the indictment along with those of three assistant U.S. attorneys. Muldrow told ProPublica his office does not comment on open investigations other than in press releases or press conferences. While a couple of the inmates have accepted plea deals, most of the drug and money-laundering cases against the inmates and associates are still making their way through the court system.

In a follow-up email, a spokesperson for the office noted the indictment was filed during the Biden administration and under the previous governor of Puerto Rico.

Charging corrupt public officials “has always been and remains a top priority” of the office, wrote spokesperson Lymarie Llovet-Ayala.

“When sufficient admissible evidence exists to charge persons involved in public corruption, as required by the Justice Manual, the Puerto Rico U.S. Attorney’s Office will aggressively pursue such charges,” she wrote.

In court documents tied to a different case, in October 2025, a magistrate judge mentioned “an unrelated white-collar investigation involving the Governor of Puerto Rico.” Muldrow’s office responded in a filing, stating, “There is no white-collar investigation (or any other investigation) of Puerto Rico Governor Jenniffer González-Colón.”

González-Colón has not been charged with a crime. The governor declined ProPublica’s repeated requests for an interview and did not respond to written questions sent to her communications team.

Muldrow had a friendly working relationship with former Attorney General Pam Bondi when she was the state attorney general in Florida and he was an assistant U.S. attorney in the middle district of that state, according to people who know him.

A Department of Justice spokesperson said in an email, “Neither Attorney General Bondi nor Acting Attorney General Blanche was involved in any charging or investigative decision in this Biden administration prosecution.”

The attorney general’s office noted in a statement that the indictment mentioned allegations of voting coercion, and said: “This office did not limit the underlying investigation in any way.”

In May 2025, in a move that federal prosecutors and political observers alike said was highly unusual, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence seized the voting machines from Puerto Rico over concerns about “vulnerabilities,” according to testimony in March by Director Tulsi Gabbard to Congress.

A spokesperson from the office told ProPublica the seizure was at the request of the U.S. attorney’s office in Puerto Rico and was “not about any election in particular.” The goal was to “assess risk to this critical infrastructure, given similar infrastructure is used throughout the United States,” the spokesperson said in an email.

Muldrow didn’t answer questions from ProPublica about the matter.

Lydia Lizarribar, an attorney for Juan Carlos Ortiz-Vazquez, a Group 31 member who prosecutors named as one of the leaders of the drug operation, declined to comment on the case.

A Party “Stronghold”

The Puerto Rican prison system has a long and well-documented history of overcrowding, inadequate medical care and other human rights violations so egregious that in the late 1970s they prompted federal oversight that continued for decades.

The grim conditions spurred inmates to form advocacy groups like Group 31, which was officially created as a nonprofit to lobby corrections officials and lawmakers to improve inmates’ quality of life. Over time, federal prosecutors say, several of these groups operating in the prisons evolved into violent criminal organizations such as Los Tiburones and Ñetas, with memberships in the thousands.

The poor conditions were also the backdrop for a push in 1980 by the New Progressive Party governor at the time, Carlos Romero Barceló, to codify voting rights for prisoners.

Inmates have been aligned with the party ever since, political analysts said. Political parties in Puerto Rico differ dramatically from those on the mainland. They don’t adhere to a straight divide among Democrats and Republicans. Instead, the two main parties center much of their focus on whether Puerto Rico should become a state and so have Republicans and Democrats within each.

It’s not unheard of for politicians of all parties to court the inmate vote, but the New Progressive Party has made it a “stronghold,” said Fernando Tormos-Aponte, a political scientist with expertise on Puerto Rico and an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.

“It’s been a huge advantage for them particularly as elections in Puerto Rico have been decided by small margins,” Tormos-Aponte said of the New Progressive Party. In the 2024 general election for governor, the party won 83% of the inmate vote, according to a ProPublica tally of voter returns on the State Elections Commission’s website.

Inmate votes were especially key in the 2024 gubernatorial primary as González-Colón, a longtime New Progressive Party member, was challenging the incumbent governor of the same party.

She won the primary by fewer than 30,000 votes, according to the State Elections Commission. Local news reports said that an estimated 5,000 prisoners voted territorywide.

In her first months in office, González-Colón signed a law allowing people with criminal records to obtain professional licenses in Puerto Rico.

In July, she signed off on a law expanding inmates’ ability to hold jobs in the private sector, calling it “part of a vision of social justice,” adding “we believe in the second chance, in the value of work and in the capacity for transformation of the human being.”

In March, González-Colón signed a law requiring the parole review board increase the pace at which parole denials are reconsidered. She said in a press release the law is aimed at a “fairer, more transparent system focused on rehabilitation.”

Political analysts said rumors have swirled over the decades about coercive tactics being used to mobilize the prison vote, raising significant questions about the extent to which that support comes in exchange for favors from the ruling party.

This time was different, sources said. They had evidence. Prosecutors had “locked up” the voting-for-drugs scheme among the gang, inmates and staff, and were deep into investigating a potential political connection when Muldrow’s office pulled the plug.

“These are the type of questions you would think an administration that has publicly declared this war on drug trafficking would investigate further,” Tormos-Aponte said of the Trump administration. “You would think it would be a priority.”

For the people familiar with the prison election fraud investigation, it was clear politics were at play in the decision to abandon charges prosecutors were confident they could win. What wasn’t clear, they said, was who was pulling the strings and how. It was “like you’re watching a puppet show but you can’t see the strings,” one person said.

“You know what you’re seeing isn’t telling the whole story,” the person said. “There was some kind of invisible hand.”

Drugs for Votes

Although they excluded drugs-for-votes charges, prosecutors didn’t scrub the Dec. 12, 2024, indictment of how they believed the operation worked.

Outside associates of Los Tiburones, the indictment alleged, primarily used drones to drop drugs on prison grounds. Then staff participating in the scheme helped in the “introduction and distribution” of the drugs inside the prison or acted as lookouts. The employees also allowed the gang members to enforce their own discipline system against those who didn’t do as they asked, including when voting. Punishments included withholding food from inmates or forcing them to sit with their arms folded while they were beaten and kicked. In four cases, the drugs led to overdose deaths, the indictment says.

The indictment also alleged that Los Tiburones made connections with government officials “for the purpose of reducing prison sentences,” and the gang mandated both the prisoners’ political affiliations and “who to vote for in primary and general elections.”

A relative of one of the prisoners told ProPublica that inmates had to show their ballots to gang leaders when they voted to avoid punishment.

Puerto Rico’s Civil Rights Commission, which for decades has sent observers to polls across the territory, reported “serious difficulties” in gaining access to several prisons during the 2024 general election. After being denied entry at multiple locations, the commission successfully sought a court order, but much of the day had already passed by the time the observers were allowed in.

“We strongly condemn the lack of diligence and indifference shown by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in hindering the functions of this Commission on the day of early voting in correctional institutions,” the agency later wrote in a special report on the 2024 elections.

The report said observers witnessed prisoners voting in cramped quarters that didn’t allow for privacy and having to hand their ballots to others to put in the box.

Ever Padilla-Ruiz, the commission’s executive director, told ProPublica that inmates sent written complaints to the office detailing their experiences of being pressured to vote in the primary — some for González-Colón and others for her opponent, Pedro Pierluisi. They did not mention any gangs by name, Padilla-Ruiz said.

He said inmates reported that inmate group leaders were “always sending messages” up until election day, adding that they were too afraid to say much more.

Several people familiar with the case said investigators had evidence that González-Colón had spoken to a Group 31 member, but they had not determined whether she was involved in vote buying.

One of the imprisoned gang leaders had bragged on Facebook about his connection to González-Colón, posting a picture of him talking with her on WhatsApp while the primary campaign for governor was underway, two sources said.

She clearly benefited from the scheme, they said. “There was no doubt about that,” one said, noting that thousands of votes were likely at stake.

The indictment notes that gang members were provided preferential treatment such as relaxed visitation policies and the use of Sony PlayStations, big screen TVs and cellphones, but investigators had not connected the privileges to González-Colón or her campaign.

“Latinos Are Winning”

González-Colón has been a longtime advocate for Puerto Rico statehood and has been engaged in Republican politics for more than 20 years. She was elected chair of the Republican Party of Puerto Rico in 2015 and two years later became resident commissioner, a role similar to a U.S. representative but with limited voting power in Congress.

She’s been an active participant in Latinos for Trump, praising the president over the years as “wise” and in 2019 saying on social media, “Latinos are winning under his leadership.”

As she continues to lobby for Puerto Rico to become the 51st state, González-Colón has also leaned in to her relationships with other members of Trump’s Cabinet, posting well wishes on social media to Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, and congratulating Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security director Trump picked to replace Kristi Noem, calling him “my good friend.”

“I know he will provide strong leadership as he works with President Donald J. Trump to strengthen our nation’s security,” she wrote in a March Facebook post.

Experts on Puerto Rican finance and politics say the relationship between González-Colón and the Trump administration is symbiotic though lopsided.

“I see it more as a situation of unrequited love,” said Alvin Velazquez, an associate law professor at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law and an expert on Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy in 2017.

The territorial island, whose residents were granted U.S. citizenship in 1917, receives less federal funding than most states. Political leaders in Puerto Rico, González-Colón included, have perpetually lobbied for more support.

Republicans in turn have capitalized on González-Colón’s rise as she helped bolster GOP support among the Puerto Rican diaspora and other Latino voters on the mainland. Now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio endorsed González-Colón in her 2024 gubernatorial election.

Polls specifically isolating Puerto Rican voters show that Trump saw at least a 4 percentage point uptick in votes from Puerto Ricans living in states compared to the 2020 election, garnering 45% of the group’s vote in the 2024 election, according to the nonprofit research center Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University.

And perhaps most importantly, experts say, Trump has counted on González-Colón to support his strategic geopolitical initiatives in the region, including the controversial reopening of long-abandoned naval bases in Puerto Rico. González-Colón welcomed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to the island in September and thanked Trump on X for “recognizing the strategic value Puerto Rico has to the national security of the United States and the fight against drug cartels in our hemisphere.”

That’s despite the sentiment among many Puerto Ricans who were angered by Trump’s response to Hurricane Maria in 2017 and a comedian at one of Trump’s 2024 campaign rallies who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” And while Trump has said that González-Colón was “wonderful to deal with and a great representative of the people,” he later called Puerto Rico “one of the most corrupt places on earth.”

The post Prosecutors Had a Drugs-for-Votes Scheme “Locked Up.” Under Trump, They Were Told Not to Pursue Charges. appeared first on ProPublica.

ProPublica and Local Reporting Network partner The Connecticut Mirror won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for what judges described as “an impressive series exposing how the state’s unique towing laws favored unscrupulous companies that overcharged residents, prompting swift and meaningful consumer protections.” It is the ninth Pulitzer for ProPublica. 

A series about how the Food and Drug Administration has for years allowed risky drugs to enter the United States was named a finalist in the investigative reporting category, and a series about the fallout from the destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development was named a finalist in the explanatory reporting category. They are the 13th and 14th Pulitzer finalists in 18 years.

In “On the Hook,” CT Mirror reporters Dave Altimari and Ginny Monk exposed a wide range of abuses committed by towing companies across the state — due in part to a lack of oversight from the Department of Motor Vehicles — and how Connecticut’s laws had come to favor the companies at the expense of low-income residents. Towing companies could start the process to sell people’s cars in as little as 15 days if the company deemed the car to be worth less than $1,500. The window was one of the shortest in the country, CT Mirror and ProPublica found, and meant many people who couldn’t afford to quickly pay the towing fees frequently lost their cars.

Through a long public records battle, complex data analysis by Sophie Chou and Haru Coryne, and innovative engagement reporting, the reporters discovered that tow truck companies were drastically undervaluing cars compared with the book value, allowing them to sell vehicles more quickly. They revealed that towing companies often held on to people’s belongings, including work equipment and mementos that had sentimental value, as leverage to get them to pay exorbitant fees. The companies were also not abiding by a law that requires them to hold onto the profits of sold cars and turn them over to the state so owners can claim the money — because the DMV never set up a system to collect it.

Within 24 hours of the first story, Connecticut DMV leadership announced it was reviewing towing practices, and lawmakers quickly proposed a bill overhauling the state’s century-old towing statutes. Nearly every issue Altimari and Monk wrote about was included in the bill, which passed in May 2025 with nearly unanimous bipartisan support. Towing companies must now give people warning before removing vehicles from apartment parking lots unless there’s a safety issue, accept credit cards for fees, let people claim their belongings and wait at least 30 days before selling cars. A DMV task force created by the legislature to study how towing companies handle profits has expanded its scope to other parts of the law, and just last week, the state Senate passed a bill that would create an online portal so Connecticut drivers can track their towed cars and require towing companies to consider the age of towed vehicles before they’re sold.

“Our investigation of Connecticut towing companies is exactly what we envisioned when we created the Local Reporting Network,” said Charles Ornstein, ProPublica’s managing editor for local.  “Start with strong local journalists who have good ideas, give them the time and resources to pursue them to their fullest potential, add to the mix ProPublica’s top-notch editing and specialty teams and watch what happens.” Since the Local Reporting Network’s launch in 2018, ProPublica has partnered with nearly 100 newsrooms supporting in-depth reporting in communities across the United States.

In “Rx Roulette,” reporters Debbie Cenziper, Megan Rose and Brandon Roberts uncovered how a secret group inside the FDA has quietly allowed dangerous drugmakers to continue selling generic medications from known substandard overseas factories that have been banned from the U.S. market. The agency failed to warn doctors or patients about the exempted drugs and did not routinely test these drugs for safety or quality, putting the public at risk.

The series also revealed that basic information about where generic drugs are made is fragmented, obscured and effectively inaccessible to consumers — making it impossible for people to see if their medications are made at troubled factories — even though generics account for about 90% of U.S. prescriptions. The team, which included members of ProPublica’s data and news apps teams and over a dozen students from Northwestern University’s Medill Investigative Lab, interviewed more than 300 people, filed almost 40 Freedom of Information Act requests and sued the FDA to obtain records, ultimately constructing a publicly available database of 40,000 generic medications and their factory inspection histories — the first comprehensive list of drugs shipped from banned factories. 

Citing ProPublica’s investigation, the Senate Special Committee on Aging has demanded the FDA conduct more drug testing and alert hospitals and other purchasers when manufacturers with safety failures are given exemptions from import bans. Senators are also calling for an immediate accounting of the exemptions. A bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation in February that requires drug labels to identify where the medication was made, bringing  more transparency and accountability to the generic drug industry.

As the Trump administration dismantled the nation’s long-standing foreign aid system, USAID, ProPublica reporters Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy documented the deadly global fallout and identified the Trump officials directly responsible in “The End of Aid.” They connected the resulting harm, including deaths of people who depended on the aid, to the U.S. policymakers and political appointees responsible for the cuts. The reporters then traveled to war-torn South Sudan to document the return of cholera after essential services stopped and to Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp, where more than 300,000 people saw their food rations cut after the U.S. severed funding for the World Food Program.

The stories sparked immediate outcry. Experts, attorneys, nonprofits and lawmakers asked the Trump administration to change course, and ProPublica’s reporting was cited in legal filings and congressional inquiries challenging the dismantling of USAID. Rep. Gregory Meeks, ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, sent multiple letters to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, citing the coverage and pressing him to explain his claim before Congress that no deaths had resulted from the administration’s actions.

After Barry-Jester and Murphy discovered that USAID staff were told to shred and burn classified documents, legal experts filed complaints with the National Archives, and Democracy Forward and the Public Citizen Litigation Group filed a motion for an emergency temporary restraining order to stop the destruction of federal records. And after ProPublica raised questions about an Agent Orange cleanup in Vietnam that had stalled due to USAID funding cuts, putting hundreds of thousands at risk for poisoning, the project received some U.S. funds to continue operating.

“We are proud to be doing work that brings accountability at the state, national and international level,” said Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s editor in chief. “Our two finalists and winning entry with The Connecticut Mirror demonstrate yet again the power of investigative reporting to expose wrongs and spur changes in the lives of ordinary people.”

ProPublica received Pulitzers for public service in 2025,  public service in 2024, national reporting in 2020, feature writing in 2019, public service in 2017, explanatory reporting in 2016, national reporting in 2011 and investigative reporting in 2010. Local Reporting Network partner Anchorage Daily News won the Pulitzer for public service in 2020. Read about our other projects that have been designated as finalists.

Project Credits

“On the Hook”: Shahrzad Rasekh, José Luis Martínez, Asia Fields, Elizabeth Hamilton, Michael Grabell, Shoshana Gordon, Peter DiCampo, Rachel Molenda, Sarah Blustain, Charles Ornstein, Ken B. Morales, Agnel Philip, Ryan Little, Hannah Fresques, Alissandra Calderon, Olivia Walton, Ariana Tobin, Stephen Busemeyer, Andrew Brown, Anuj Shrestha, Julia Rothman, Grace Palmieri, Kristine Malicse, Gabby DeBenedictis, Diego Sorbara, Emily Goldstein, Colleen Barry, Jack Putterman, Roman Broszkowski and Ryanne Mena contributed to the series.

“Rx Roulette”: Kevin Uhrmacher, Ruth Talbot, Alison Kodjak, Nick Varchaver, Alexandra Zayas, Tracy Weber, Caitlin Kelly, Ken Schwenke, Lucas Waldron, Ashley Clarke, Nick McMillan, Carissa Quiambao, Haley Clark, Joanna Shan, Diego Sorbara, Colleen Barry, Emily Goldstein, Lisa Larson-Walker, Anna Donlan, Grace Palmieri, Kassie Navarro, Sam Cooney, Chris Morran, Isabelle Yan, Jeff Frankl, Pratheek Rebala, Andrea Suozzo, Al Shaw, Alec Glassford, Irena Hwang, Nat Lash, Aaron Brezel, Melody Kramer, Alice Crites, Vidya Krishnan and Andrea Wise contributed to the series.

Students from the Medill Investigative Lab in Washington, D.C., also contributed:  Haajrah Gilani, Emma McNamee, Julian Andreone, Isabela Lisco, Aidan Johnstone, Megija Medne, Yiqing Wang, Phillip Powell, Gideon Pardo, Casey He, Lindsey Byman, Josh Sukoff, Kunjal Bastola, Shae Lake, Alyce Brown, Katherine Dailey, Anavi Prakash, Jessie Nguyen, Sinyi Au, Zhiyu Solstice Luo, Kate McQuarrie, Sadie Leite, Victoria Malis, Tianyi Wang, Gabby Shell, Zara Norman and Naisha Roy.

“The End of Aid”: Sarah Childress, Jesse Eisinger, Tracy Weber, Stephen Engelberg, Lisa Larson-Walker, Boyzell Hosey, Alex Bandoni, Peter DiCampo, Lena Groeger, Chris Alcantara, Chris Morran, Alexis Stephens, Alex Mierjeski, Molly Redden, Maryam Jameel, Ashley Clarke, Pratheek Rebala, Emily Goldstein, Olivia Walton, Diego Sorbara, Colleen Barry, Brian Otieno, Phoebe Ouma, Le Van, Yiel Awat and Ngoc Nguyen contributed to the series. The ProPublica tips truck was a key component for generating sources.

The post ProPublica and The Connecticut Mirror Win Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting appeared first on ProPublica.

Four U.S. senators sent letters grilling the nation’s major credit bureaus on Thursday after a ProPublica investigation showed two of the bureaus were fixing fewer consumers’ credit reports.

The letters came in response to a ProPublica investigation from March, which found that two of the three major credit bureaus — TransUnion and Experian — had substantially scaled back how often they provided relief to complaints filed through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The decline in relief coincided with the Trump administration’s attempts to conduct mass layoffs at the CFPB and roll back much of its oversight of the financial sector.

The letters’ lead author is Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee and a key architect in the creation of the CFPB. Democratic Sens. Tammy Duckworth, Andy Kim and Lisa Blunt Rochester also joined the letters.

ProPublica found that TransUnion’s rate of relief, which had remained relatively steady for several years, dropped sharply in the summer of 2025. By October it was providing relief roughly half as often. Experian, which had provided relief to nearly 20% of consumer complaints in 2024, provided relief to less than 1% of complaints in 2025, according to the CFPB’s data.

Companies are required to respond to consumer complaints filed through the CFPB, and relief can be financial or nonmonetary, for instance, fixing an error on a credit report.

In the letters to Experian and TransUnion, the senators called ProPublica’s findings “greatly concerning” and said that the reporting “raises significant questions about the legality” of the companies’ practices. The “drastic drop in responsiveness means that American consumers may be getting denied a mortgage or housing simply due to an error on their report that your company failed to correct.”

In a statement, TransUnion said, “We appreciate the opportunity for meaningful engagement with policymakers regarding the robust and compliant processes TransUnion deploys,” and that it would respond to the letter. Experian did not respond to a request for comment. The company previously told ProPublica it investigates “all legitimate” complaints.

The third major credit bureau, Equifax, did not see a similar decline in relief, ProPublica found. Last year, just prior to President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the company entered a settlement with the CFPB that aimed to fix the company’s deficiencies in its consumer dispute processes, although the agreement did not mention CFPB complaints specifically.

Equifax said it would engage with the letter and that the company works to make it easier for consumers to “correct any potential errors quickly.”

In the letters, the senators requested data on disputes and complaints sent to the companies, as well as information on their dispute handling processes and staffing. The senators also asked for correspondence with the CFPB, including communication regarding dropped and halted enforcement actions against TransUnion that were identified in ProPublica’s investigation.

Consumer complaints about credit reporting have risen dramatically, with over 4 million filed last year with the CFPB. The credit bureaus have said that many recent complaints are illegitimate, including a large volume filed by third-party credit repair organizations that charge customers to challenge negative information on their reports.

Errors on a credit report can be difficult and time-consuming to fix. ProPublica spoke with a Colorado accountant, Rebecca Sheppard, who had spent nearly a year trying to get a $240,000 debt that she did not owe removed from her credit report. The error caused her credit score to plunge roughly 85 points and jeopardized her plans to move with her disabled father into a more accessible home.

Sheppard contacted the credit bureaus on four occasions, including through the CFPB’s complaint system, but they did not remove the debt. In response to her fourth attempt, via certified mail, TransUnion sent her a postcard stating it believed the submission had not come from her.

She eventually sued the credit bureaus in January. TransUnion settled the claim shortly after ProPublica’s story was published, while the case is still pending against Equifax and Experian, which have denied the allegations in court.

The CFPB previously had been putting pressure on the credit bureaus to fix errors and engage with consumers, and relief rates had risen during the Biden administration. However, upon the change of administrations, Trump appointed Russell Vought as acting head of the CFPB. He quickly ordered a stop to nearly all agency work. Under Vought, the agency also attempted to fire much of its staff, an effort that has been paused by litigation.

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Credit Bureaus Are Leaving More Mistakes on Frustrated Consumers’ Reports Under Trump’s CFPB

Heeding the concerns voiced by the credit reporting industry’s lobbying group, the CFPB in February added notices for consumers to click through before filing a complaint, warning them that their requests might be ignored if they had not already disputed issues directly with credit bureaus.

A CFPB spokesperson told ProPublica in March that the complaint system was inundated with submissions from bots and third-party credit repair firms, and the agency was working to address that so legitimate consumers can more effectively get help.

In the letters, the senators also highlighted the consequences of the system. “It is hard to overstate the extent to which credit reports and credit scores produced by credit reporting companies permeate nearly every aspect of modern American life,” they wrote.

The post Lawmakers Demand Answers About Growing Number of Unfixed Mistakes on Credit Reports appeared first on ProPublica.

Counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka is one of the most controversial figures in the Trump administration, a gate crasher in the buttoned-up world of national security. 

In a field where quiet professionalism is revered, Gorka is loud and mercurial. With a booming, British-accented voice, he describes U.S. operations turning suspected terrorists into “red mist” and stacking bodies “like cordwood.” He wears a lanyard inscribed with “WWFY & WWKY,” referencing a line from President Donald Trump: “We will find you and we will kill you.”

It is a testament to the frenzy of Trump’s first year back in office that even the colorful Gorka had faded into the background as the nation reeled from a mass deportation campaign and sweeping cuts to federal agencies. That changed this February with the launch of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, which heightened the risk of retaliatory attacks on American citizens and interests around the world. Overnight, there was renewed interest in who leads White House counterterrorism efforts.

My editors and I decided it was time to break out the Gorka files. For six months, I had monitored Gorka’s public remarks for clues about the status of his long-promised national counterterrorism strategy and updates on deadly U.S. strikes in Africa and the Middle East. It had started as old-fashioned beat reporting; I cover counterterrorism, and he’s the senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council.

The trove of details I collected from months of Gorka’s public statements, along with interviews with more than two dozen current and former security officials, were woven into a ProPublica investigation published in April. It’s an in-depth look at Gorka and his role in the hollowed-out national security apparatus after a year of leadership turmoil and personnel loss as Trump shifted resources toward his immigration agenda.

ProPublica reached out to Gorka for comment in multiple ways. He never responded, instead lashing out at me via posts on X before the story published. He told his 1.8 million followers that I was anti-American and accused me of writing a “putrid piece of hackery.”

There went my hopes for a good-faith exchange. After discussion with my editors, ProPublica decided to note the insults in the story. It was another revealing layer to the combustible leader Trump had installed in a sensitive national security role. A former senior official noted the eruption was “Gorka being Gorka.”

Increasingly, journalists are pushing back against attacks on our credibility by “showing the work,” guiding readers through the reporting process to dispel myths and foster transparency. In that spirit, I wanted to take this opportunity to show how basic beat reporting — fact-checking the assertions of a powerful figure — led to a broader story about the state of the U.S. counterterrorism mission at a critical moment.

I’ve covered the post-9/11 counterterrorism apparatus for more than two decades, so Gorka was a familiar presence, an academic known mainly for a well-documented hostility toward Islam, which he has portrayed as inherently violent. Gorka has dismissed criticism of this portrayal as “absurd,” saying his focus is “the war inside Islam” between radicals and Western-aligned Muslim leaders. He also served as an adviser under the first Trump administration but was ousted after just seven months amid White House infighting. 

At the time, dozens of lawmakers had demanded his resignation, and investigative outlets detailed links — which Gorka denies — to the Hungarian far right. After the bruising exit, Gorka waited patiently as the Republican Party swung harder right in the Biden era and eventually returned Trump to office.

Gorka was appointed White House counterterrorism czar — he called it his dream job — in a new era without the “adults in the room,” as some officials referred to the more moderate advisers around Trump in the first term. Privately, national security personnel expressed alarm that intelligence about threats was in the hands of an official who reportedly struggled to get security clearance in the first Trump administration.

To me, Gorka was a weather vane for the administration’s national security thinking: Would his “war on terror” mindset clash with the more isolationist “America First” camp that wanted no more forever wars? How would a vast security apparatus built for the Islamist militant threat reorient toward a new focus on far-left “antifa” militants and Latin American drug cartels newly designated as terrorist organizations?

I was especially interested in the status of a national counterterrorism strategy Gorka had been promising since taking office; such documents typically lay out an administration’s approach to fighting the most urgent threats. Though Gorka had described his plan as “imminent” and “on the cusp” of release, months ticked by without any sign of it.

To glean clues about the strategy, I made it my mission to watch every news appearance, read every interview and listen to every podcast featuring Gorka since December 2024, the month before he entered the White House. It took some digging — he rails against the mainstream news media and prefers to appear (largely unchallenged) on niche pro-Trump news outlets and at conservative think tanks.

I developed a nightly ritual. After dinner with my family, I’d hole up to listen to Gorka, hunting for the scraps of news buried in his over-the-top vocabulary and graphic storytelling. Alongside my note categories for “Trump Anecdotes” and “Militant Death Tolls” was one for “Big Words.” For example, the president calls Joe Biden “sleepy”; Gorka prefers “somnambulant.”

Weeks into the reporting, in February 2026, I realized Gorka’s speech had burrowed into my brain when I watched a silly video and thought, in his voice, “Preposterous!” It was time for a break.

I reread my notes from hours of listening sessions. I interviewed counterterrorism analysts and national security watchdog groups about Gorka and his remit. Veteran national security personnel added context and analysis. Just as my editors and I were discussing how to turn the findings into a story, the Iran war began and the spotlight on Gorka grew brighter.

Much of the material on air strikes and the dismantling of guardrails was first incorporated into a story I reported about the Pentagon moving away from more robust civilian protections, a reversal highlighted by a deadly U.S. attack on a girls’ school in Iran. Other reporting ended up in the story about Gorka’s phoenixlike return to the White House and what it says about the Trump counterterrorism doctrine.

Gorka didn’t respond to requests for comment beyond the hostile posts on X. When I asked the White House for comment, spokesperson Anna Kelly praised Gorka’s “incredible job” but sidestepped questions about his approach. “Anyone attempting to smear him and the President’s national security team is only revealing that they haven’t been paying attention for the past year,” Kelly wrote, “as anyone with eyes can see that our homeland is more secure than ever.” 

As of writing, exactly two months into the Iran war, Gorka’s counterterrorism strategy has yet to appear.

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The Counterterrorism Czar Without a Counterterrorism Plan

The post I Reached Out to the White House Counterterrorism Czar for Comment. He Lashed Out on X. appeared first on ProPublica.

For many months, conservative lawmakers and political operatives have been targeting the scientists and lawyers behind the Climate Judiciary Project, a program meant to educate the courts about climate science, alleging that their effort constitutes a conspiracy to influence federal judges and persuade them to rule against the oil industry.

Now, just as congressional investigators are escalating a formal inquiry into the project, a separate program closely aligned with the fossil fuel industry and free-market conservatives is hosting a symposium for 150 judges in Nashville, Tennessee. The program, run by the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, also aims to educate judges, but in a way that prioritizes American business interests and questions climate science. 

The dueling efforts come as a number of significant lawsuits seeking to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate damages are making their way through the courts and as oil-industry-aligned attacks on climate policies, and the legal arguments supporting them, have been sharply increasing.

ProPublica reported in April that political operatives connected to the conservative activist Leonard Leo were coordinating an effort across 11 states to pass laws shielding fossil fuel companies from liability for climate harm. In the past three weeks, similar liability waiver bills have been introduced federally in both the House and the Senate. Last week the Florida attorney general’s office launched an investigation into alleged judicial influence by the organization that oversees the Climate Judiciary Project, the Environmental Law Institute, a nonpartisan legal scholarship group funded until recently by the Environmental Protection Agency. 

These developments come on the heels of a campaign last winter to get the Federal Judicial Center, the publishing body for the federal court system, to retract a roughly 90-page chapter devoted to climate science from the latest volume of its technical manual for judges. Twenty-two Republican attorneys general wrote to Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, demanding that the committee investigate the center’s publication of material about how to weigh scientific evidence about climate and the weather because the chapter’s authors appeared to be biased. In their letter, they noted the authors work for Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and alleged the chapter was influenced by Michael Burger, the executive director of the center who works closely with the law firm Sher Edling, which represents several climate plaintiffs. The Republican attorneys general also noted that some staff at the Sabin Center work with the Environmental Law Institute and the Climate Judiciary Project. Although the chapter had been peer reviewed and approved by the Federal Judicial Center, as well as by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the center retracted the climate chapter in February.

On April 28, Jordan went a step further, issuing letters accusing Burger, the Environmental Law Institute and Sher Edling of bias, conspiracy and collusion. Jordan demanded that the three parties produce private communications, receipts and records of funding sources, and that the recipients sit for interviews before the committee.

The Sabin Center, Jordan wrote, is “producing materials to be used to bias federal judges about novel climate-related legal theories” and coordinating to bring climate-related litigation to court. The activity raises questions about “the integrity and independence of the judicial process” and “ex parte contact with courts,” Jordan wrote, referring to the improper conduct of contacting a judge without opposing counsel present to argue issues related to a pending case. 

Neither Sher Edling, the Sabin Center nor Burger responded to a request for comment. A representative for the Environmental Law Institute stated in an email that the Climate Judiciary Project “does not participate in litigation, coordinate with any parties related to any litigation, or advise judges on how they should rule on any issue or in any case. The goal of CJP is to provide judges with the tools they need to understand climate science and how it arises in the law.”

Jordan’s office replied to a request for comment by reasserting the statements in the letters it sent, and it did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

Amid the allegations of impropriety and conflicts of interest though, the program at George Mason University has scarcely been noticed.

The George Mason conference, called the “Judicial Symposium on Scientific Methodology, Expert Testimony, and the Judicial Role,” opened the day after Jordan sent out his letters and will continue through Saturday, May 2. It is run by the university’s Law and Economics Center, which oversees a project called the Judicial Education Program. The center is funded in part by ExxonMobil, which is a defendant in several of the climate lawsuits. ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment. 

The conference includes speakers who have filed amicus briefs — filings by people who aren’t part of the case but have a strong interest in its outcome — in favor of the oil industry in several of those cases, as well as at least one lawyer who has represented fossil fuel companies in court. The reading assignments prepared for the judges include a Substack post by a notable climate contrarian accusing the authors of the retracted climate chapter in the federal court’s reference manual of including material by Burger and hiding his authorship. They also include a law journal argument that a key tenet of climate science used to identify the cause of disasters should be inadmissible in their courtrooms. One session, titled “Debates on the trustworthiness of tools to evaluate science in the courtroom,” focuses entirely on the federal courts’ reference manual. 

In an emailed response to ProPublica, Donald Kochan, the executive director of George Mason’s Law and Economics Center, which organized the event, presented the symposium as a robust and objective discussion. The program’s advisory board, he wrote, is a politically and jurisprudentially diverse group including “some of the most progressive jurists in the country, including on climate issues.” Kochan, who did not respond to a list of specific questions, added that lectures are by leading academics on science and law and that he invited the authors of the judicial reference manual to speak but they declined, as did several others who he suggested would have represented more centrist viewpoints on the climate issue.

The conference is one of dozens of meetings, retreats and “intimate weeklong gatherings” that are regularly hosted by the Law and Economics Center as part of an initiative to instill free-market values and greater knowledge of the economic consequences of policy in judicial decision-making. In 2016 the law school renamed itself after the former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the center expanded with $30 million in gifts, adding faculty and scholarships and launching additional “colloquia.” The center today runs several parallel initiatives under the umbrella of the Judicial Education Program, each aimed at gathering judges together and educating them. The symposium on science and evidence is one of these events.

According to an internal fundraising document from 2020 obtained by ProPublica, the gatherings are often luxurious all-expenses-paid affairs, created to foster lasting relationships and opportunities to network with judges. The document included a solicitation for more than $930,000 sent by the center to the Charles Koch Foundation, a libertarian organization that provides grants to universities and scholars. At the time of the proposal, more than 5,000 judges representing all 50 states had attended at least one of the organization’s programs, the document stated.

The goal of the symposium, according to the document, is to sway judges toward a libertarian economic viewpoint in their rulings — the very sort of “biasing” that Jordan accused the Sabin Center and the Climate Judiciary Project of. 

“The goal of this project is to expose judges to the intellectual history of the role of capitalism, economic freedom, and a constitutionally limited government as fundamental features of a liberal society,” the document says. It is also to establish a community of like-minded justices “with synergistic effects on the judiciary as a whole” and to influence the outcome of cases that come before the courts. Judges, the fundraising proposal continues, “urgently need to cultivate an understanding” of economic analysis and its relevance to the legal system if they “are to issue decisions that advance the rule of law and America’s free enterprise system.”

According to the George Mason University website, the Law and Economics Center’s 2025 funders include DonorsTrust, a dark money pass-through organization meant to shield the identity of contributors. DonorsTrust is often used by organizations tied to Leo, who brought George Mason a $20 million gift, in addition to $10 million from the Charles Koch Foundation, that made expansion of the law school’s program possible. 

This weekend’s symposium in Nashville is one of the most significant parts of the center’s outreach to justices. According to the 2020 fundraising letter, the goal of such gatherings is to challenge the status quo on science. The conference “will give judges a rounded understanding and healthy skepticism of the invocations of ‘science’ that lurk in the background of lawsuits they are hearing,” the center’s then-director wrote, and it will help judges understand that “so much of what passes as ‘science’ for leverage purposes never has to face tests for rigor, reliability and quality in front of a neutral arbiter.”

One of the symposium’s events prominently features Philip Goldberg, a managing partner at the law firm Shook, Hardy & Bacon and the special counsel to the National Association of Manufacturers’ policy lobbying arm, the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, which the group describes as “the leading voice of manufacturers in the courts.” MAP, as it is called, has publicly rejected the claims in a landmark case that the city of Honolulu brought against Shell, ExxonMobil and other oil companies alleging they misrepresented the risks of using their fuels and are responsible for the damages they have caused. Goldberg authored a brief for the group that was submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court on the case in 2024.

Goldberg, who did not respond to a request for comment, has also authored briefs in climate liability cases brought by the city of Baltimore against BP and other fossil fuel companies — a case won by the defendants in March — as well as a case brought by Boulder County in Colorado against Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil, which alleges the companies misrepresented the risks of using fossil fuels. Lawyers from Shook, Hardy & Bacon are also present at the conference. Other lawyers at the firm wrote a brief in favor of Chevron in a case brought by Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. (The oil companies dispute the allegations and each of these cases is ongoing.)

For its assigned reading for a session on the judicial manual, the symposium offered an article by the political scientist Roger Pielke Jr., a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Pielke wrote that he found evidence that the true authorship of a significant part of the climate chapter in the reference manual was obscured. He used the Claude artificial intelligence program to run an analysis comparing the chapter’s text to a paper co-authored by Sabin’s Burger and said he found a correlation. 

“Michael Burger did not write any of the text in the climate science chapter nor did he have any control over the content and scope,” one of the chapter’s two authors, Jessica Wentz, who has denied the chapter was biased, wrote to ProPublica. The other author did not respond, and Burger declined to comment. 

The conference did not offer readings from the climate chapter of the manual itself, which is still available on the website of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Nor did it offer readings from the United Nations climate science authorities or climate-related readings from any other peer-reviewed scientific journal.

In its final session, the symposium features attorney Matthew Wickersham of the firm Alston & Bird, which has served as counsel for Chevron in several lawsuits. Wickersham did not respond to a request for comment. The only reading assigned to justices for that session is a paper Wickersham wrote in the Rutgers Law Record in 2025 about why attribution science — the field of study that makes it possible to link climate disasters to specific amounts of pollution and their sources — should never be admitted in court.

The post Event With Links to Oil Industry Teaches Judges “Healthy Skepticism” of Climate Science appeared first on ProPublica.

For decades, a small program in the Environmental Protection Agency conducted the painstaking scientific work of assessing the toxicity of chemicals. 

The calculations done by scientists at IRIS, as it was commonly known, underpin vast numbers of chemical regulations, permits and other environmental rules in the U.S. and abroad.

Now the Trump administration is suggesting that their library of more than 500 chemical assessments can’t be trusted, opening the door to weakening hundreds of efforts to protect people from harmful chemicals at the state and federal level. The second-guessing could extend even to long-settled standards, environmental scientists said, such as how much arsenic is allowed in drinking water and how much lead is acceptable in paint and soil.

In an internal memo obtained by ProPublica, David Fotouhi, the deputy administrator of the agency, sharply criticized IRIS this week and directed EPA offices that have used any of the chemical assessments the program has produced to review them. He also advised “external entities” that have used the IRIS assessments to consider undertaking similar reviews and cautioned against using them in future regulations.

The six-page memo said the EPA would be adding “disclaimer language” to the website of the program — the Integrated Risk information System — stating that its toxicity findings are not necessarily meant to be used in regulation.

“This creates the opportunity for companies that pollute to push back on rules and regulations they don’t like,” said Robert Sussman, an attorney who has worked for chemical companies and environmental groups as well as the EPA. “Anybody who wants to ignore a regulation, permit or enforcement action can now just point to this memo and say the IRIS number it was based on wasn’t valid. It’s a huge setback for the process of protecting people from chemicals.” 

Fotouhi’s memo echoes industry criticism that the program’s scientists are far too conservative in gauging the toxicity of chemicals. Before President Donald Trump appointed him as the second highest official at the EPA, Fotouhi worked as a lawyer representing companies accused of causing toxic pollution. 

In an emailed statement, the EPA press office wrote that Fotouhi has complied with all applicable government ethics obligations and said his directive would not put people at risk or allow anyone to ignore environmental regulations. Any revisions to permits or regulatory standards must go through a process that includes public participation, the office noted.

“Science is at the heart of the Agency’s work, and this memo reaffirms that point clearly and unequivocally,” the press office wrote. 

The EPA created IRIS in 1985 as the nation’s clearinghouse for information on the toxicity of chemicals. Its assessments quantify the highest safe level of exposure to a chemical before it triggers health effects, including, in many cases, cancer. The agency previously prided itself on the program’s impartiality and, in an effort to protect its science from the influence of industry, purposefully kept the program separate from the agency offices that craft regulation. 

The memo now tasks those offices with conducting toxicity assessments and brings an end to the program that has powered the EPA’s efforts to protect people from harmful chemicals. 

IRIS assessments earned a reputation for being extremely detailed and undergoing numerous rounds of review by many scientists. The EPA offices routinely relied on them to set the amount of a particular chemical that industrial facilities are allowed to emit. States use IRIS assessments to decide which chemicals deserve their immediate attention and to calculate limits in rules and regulations. And IRIS reports guide environmental regulation in countries that don’t have the resources to fund their own scientists to review chemicals.

The memo is the latest attack on the program. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 called for the elimination of IRIS on the grounds that it “often sets ‘safe levels’ based on questionable science” and that its reviews result in “billions in economic costs.” And last year, congressional Republicans introduced industry-backed legislation that would prevent the EPA from using IRIS assessments in environmental rules, regulations, enforcement actions and permits. (The bills were not put to a vote.) 

IRIS has at times been criticized by independent scientific bodies. More than a decade ago, for example, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine took issue with the organization, length and clarity of IRIS reviews; a more recent report from the same group found that IRIS had made “significant progress” in addressing the problems.

Still, IRIS’ work stood out in a world where much of the science on toxic chemicals is funded by corporations with a vested stake in them. Studies have shown that industry-funded science tends to be biased in favor of the sponsor’s products. 

Over the past year, the EPA has essentially shut down IRIS by reassigning most of the dozens of the scientists who worked in the program to other parts of the agency. And the administration has refused to publish a report on a “forever chemical” known as PFNA, which was completed by IRIS in April 2025. 

But, until now, the EPA had not challenged the science in IRIS assessments. The memo changes that. Although the agency will continue to post the documents on its website, it calls their validity into question, arguing that the toxicity levels calculated in IRIS reports are overly cautious and fail to include the perspective of all “stakeholders.” 

This approach produces values that are more protective than they need to be, according to Fotouhi. “When many conservative assumptions are stacked on top of each other, the cumulative effect can produce an estimated ‘safe’ exposure level that is orders of magnitude below naturally occurring levels in the environment,” he wrote.

Fotouhi pointed specifically to ethylene oxide, a chemical used to sterilize medical equipment — and one used by Medline, a company he used to represent as an attorney at the firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, according to financial statements he filed and that are contained in ProPublica’s database of Trump administration officials’ disclosures. IRIS updated its assessment of ethylene oxide in 2016, after it reviewed the medical literature and found that the chemical was a more potent carcinogen than previously believed. 

The EPA’s updated cancer risk estimate set off waves of concern — and lawsuits — in communities around the country where people are highly exposed to the chemical. And it led the Biden administration to issue more protective regulations. Companies that use or manufacture ethylene oxide and their representatives complained to the EPA and questioned the science that cost them so dearly. 

Under Trump, the agency, which has been championing industry, has already paused those efforts to protect the public from ethylene oxide. But this latest step, which threatens to destabilize health protections built on hundreds of IRIS assessments, is a boon to countless companies emitting a huge variety of toxic chemicals, according to Maria Doa, a scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund who spent more than 20 years working on chemical regulation at the EPA.

“This is the EPA adopting the industry’s talking points,” Doa said. “And it’s going to leave a lot of people at risk.”

The post “A Huge Setback”: New EPA Directive Could Weaken Hundreds of Chemical Regulations appeared first on ProPublica.

When President Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 election, the institutional guardrails of American democracy held — but just barely.

If faced with the same tests today, those guardrails and the people who held the line would largely be missing, a ProPublica examination found.

At least 75 career officials who once held roles at federal agencies related to election integrity and safety are gone. Two dozen appointees — including many who either actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote or are associates of such people — have been hired to replace them. And once-fringe actors now have access to vast powers.

As the midterms approach, current and former government officials and election security experts expressed concerns that Trump appointees who’ve espoused debunked conspiracy theories about balloting are now in positions to control the narrative around the vote’s soundness.

It’s hard to debunk false claims “coming with the seal of the federal government,” said Derek Tisler, counsel and manager with the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program. “I certainly worry what damage that could do to voters’ confidence.”

Here are some of the key things you should know about the Trump administration’s efforts to, as the president said, “take over” the midterms. Read the full investigation here.

Read More

Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections

1. In 2020, institutional guardrails helped to prevent Trump from overturning the election.

Following his defeat in the 2020 election, Trump pushed for federal officials to uncover proof that he had, in fact, beaten Joe Biden at the polls. Election cybersecurity experts with the Department of Homeland Security relayed to Attorney General William Barr that the election fraud claims that they looked into were false. Barr then told the president what he didn’t want to hear: The election had not been hacked.

Barr was one of many federal officials — most of them Trump appointees — who refused to bend to the president’s demands, which only intensified in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, 2021. Despite the violent uprising at the Capitol on that day, the election results held firm.

2. Less than 18 months into his second term, Trump has dismantled many of those same guardrails.

Since the start of his second term, Trump and his appointees have made significant changes at federal agencies tasked with helping to safeguard elections. In all, at least 75 career officials who’d played important roles in elections work at DHS, the Department of Justice and other agencies have left, been fired or been reassigned, ProPublica found.

In their place are roughly two dozen people Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Ten of them actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest are associates of those people. In some cases, ProPublica found, officials have been hired from activist groups that are pillars of the election-denial movement.

3. Among the first agencies Trump gutted after returning to office was one that had repeatedly disproved his stolen-election claims.

Officials at DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had provided research to the first Trump White House that disproved many theories claiming that the 2020 election had been hacked. CISA also played a crucial part in publicly countering these claims by producing a “Rumor Control” website to rebut them.

Then, only weeks into Trump’s second term, DHS leadership put employees focused on countering disinformation and helping safeguard elections on leave. They also froze CISA’s other election security work, which included assessing local election offices for physical and cybersecurity risks. Eventually, all CISA employees specializing in elections were fired or transferred.

A DHS spokesperson told ProPublica that the changes at CISA were in response to “a ballooning budget concealing a dangerous departure from its statutory mission,” which included “electioneering instead of defending America’s critical infrastructure.”

4. Trump and his appointees have gutted election-related teams at federal law enforcement agencies.

FBI Director Kash Patel dismantled the agency’s public corruption team, which had previously been deployed to help monitor possible criminal activity on Election Day. The Foreign Influence Task Force, which aimed to combat foreign influence in U.S. politics, was also disbanded.

(An FBI spokesperson said the bureau “remains committed to detecting and countering foreign influence efforts by adversarial nations.”)

The voting section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division had enforced federal laws that protect voting rights, particularly those that combat racial discrimination. But now, nearly all of the section’s roughly 30 career lawyers have resigned or been moved. Trump then filled the section with conservative lawyers, including at least four who participated in challenging the 2020 vote or have worked with people who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election.

5. Trump has replaced ousted career specialists with “Team America.”

In the summer of 2025, after the Trump administration had forced out most of the career specialists, a small group of political appointees — which once called itself “Team America,” according to sources familiar with the matter — began convening at DHS headquarters, looking for federal levers it could pull to realize a March 2025 executive order, in which Trump tried to exert greater federal control over aspects of voting.

Among the core members of the group was David Harvilicz, a DHS assistant secretary tasked with overseeing the security of election infrastructure, including voting machines, and three of his top staffers. As ProPublica has reported, Harvilicz co-founded an AI company with an architect of Trump’s claims about election hacking in Michigan.

Heather Honey, who serves under Harvilicz in a newly created position focused on elections, is a source of the false claim that more ballots were cast in Pennsylvania than there were voters in the 2020 presidential election — a claim Trump cited on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021.

At least 11 administration appointees, including Honey, have ties to the Election Integrity Network, a conservative grassroots organization led by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. Since moving into government, Honey has maintained close ties to Mitchell’s organization, and she and at least two other federal officials have given its members private briefings.

6. Team America members are using a powerful Homeland Security Investigations tool to try to identify noncitizen voters.

The DOJ has been demanding that states turn over confidential voter roll information, and it has sued around 30 states for this data.

Meanwhile, DHS has urged states to upload their voter rolls to its tool, called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system.

The goal in both efforts has been to find noncitizens on the voter rolls. But the SAVE tool has come up short, often identifying citizens as noncitizens, as ProPublica has reported, and officials have faced other roadblocks with its use.

More recently, according to two people familiar with the matter, Team America has worked to harness a more powerful tool used by another branch of DHS, Homeland Security Investigations, to increase its ability to search for noncitizen voters and bring criminal charges against them.

In response to questions sent to DHS, Harvilicz and Honey, a DHS spokesperson disputed that they were seeking to use the department’s powers to advantage Trump. In response to questions about their ties to the election denial movement, the spokesperson wrote, “To meet the diverse and evolving challenges the Department faces, we hire experts with diverse backgrounds who go through a rigorous vetting process.”

7. Trump’s head of election security is behind the FBI’s seizure of 2020 election ballots in Georgia.

Attorney Kurt Olsen once worked to try to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss in court and was later sanctioned by judges for making baseless allegations about Arizona elections. He is now Trump’s director of election security and integrity and is the driving force behind the January raid of the election center in Fulton County, Georgia.

Toward the end of 2025, Olsen flew to Georgia to meet with Paul Brown, the head of the FBI’s Atlanta field office, according to people familiar with the matter. Olsen wanted the FBI to seize ballots from the Democratic stronghold, and he gave Brown a report he claimed would justify the extraordinary action. Brown’s team submitted an affidavit to superiors at the DOJ that did not make a strong enough case to move forward with what Olsen wanted. Afterward, Brown was given a choice: retire or be moved to a new office. Brown retired. The raid went forward under his replacement, based on an affidavit that cited information from the report Olsen provided to Brown.

Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.

An FBI spokesperson said that Brown “elected to retire” and that its “work in the election security space is entirely consistent with the law.”

8. The DOJ’s Public Integrity Section could have tried to block the administration’s Georgia voting investigation.

In the months following Trump’s return to office, the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, which had been responsible for making sure the department’s inquiries weren’t improperly influenced by politics, was eviscerated. Resignations, firings and transfers reduced the 36-person section to two.

Multiple former lawyers for the section said they likely would have tried to block the Fulton County investigation because it lacked strong evidence, had a clear political slant and went against department directives that actions should not be taken “for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.”

John Keller was principal deputy chief of the section from 2020 to 2025 and was acting chief when he resigned in early 2025. He worries that allegations of irregularities in the upcoming election will be handled on a partisan basis.

“Without that review and without apolitical, objective, honest brokers involved in the process, there is a much greater risk for intentional manipulation or inadvertent interference,” Keller said.

The post 8 Things You Should Know About Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections appeared first on ProPublica.

Connecticut lawmakers on Wednesday approved more reforms aimed at reining in towing companies in the state, following reporting by The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica that exposed problems in state law.

The Connecticut Senate passed a bill that would create an online portal so Connecticut drivers can track their towed cars and require towing companies to consider the age of towed vehicles before they’re sold.

Last year, the legislature overhauled the state’s towing laws to end a practice in which towing companies could start the process to sell people’s cars in as little as 15 days if the firm deemed the car to be worth less than $1,500. The window was one of the shortest in the country, CT Mirror and ProPublica found, and meant many people who couldn’t afford to quickly pay the towing fees lost their cars.

The 2025 reform law required 30 days to pass before cars could be sold, and it ordered towing companies to accept credit cards, let people retrieve their belongings from towed cars, and warn owners before towing cars from private property over minor issues.

But CT Mirror and ProPublica continued to hear from residents who said they never received notice that their cars would be sold because their address on file was outdated or because their vehicle was still registered to someone else. The news organizations also performed an analysis that found that many towing companies valued vehicles much lower than their estimated retail values, allowing them to sell the vehicles more quickly.

The Connecticut Senate sought to fix both those issues with the latest bill, in part with the creation of the portal. The legislation, Senate Bill 413, would put new limits on which cars can be sold quickly: Towing companies could only sell vehicles after 30 days if they are at least 15 years old.

The new bill breezed through the Senate, 35-1. The House is expected to vote on it in the next few days.

“There are bad actors,” said Transportation Committee Co-Chair Sen. Christine Cohen, D-Guilford. “We have read about it in the press. It’s what prompted us to take action and really kind of take a look at our towing statutes on the whole.”

She said that legislators wanted to find language that strikes “that necessary balance between protecting consumers from predatory behavior but also supporting the many reputable small businesses that provide these essential services to our communities.”

The bill received bipartisan support. Committee ranking member Sen. Tony Hwang, R-Fairfield, urged members to support the measure. He said it builds on last year’s work, which he called “remarkable landmark legislation.”

The measures came partly from a working group created by last year’s towing reform law that spent the past several months studying towing policy and making recommendations.

The working group, composed of towing companies, consumer rights advocates and Department of Motor Vehicles officials, struggled to come to a consensus on policy changes. DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera, who chaired the working group, ultimately issued recommendations that didn’t have support from everyone on the panel.

The new bill would create an advisory council to keep studying towing policies and how owners get their vehicles back. The council would also monitor the portal, which would be set up by the state DMV and allow owners to see where their vehicles have been towed and whether they are up for sale.

The bill also addressed towing fees. Towing companies have frequently complained that the fees they are allowed to charge are too low. The bill says fee rates should be set every three years and that those changes must be based on government measures of inflation.

Guerrera said the portal will make his agency more transparent and will help consumers find their vehicles more quickly.

“You have to be accountable and take things head-on,” Guerrera said. “This portal that we will get running as soon as possible will allow someone to go online and — even without all their information — find where their car is.”

But consumer advocate Raphael Podolsky, who served on the working group, said the portal will mostly help towing companies do away with paperwork and make the system easier for the DMV to monitor. He warned that some drivers might not be able to access the system.

“First of all, everybody doesn’t have a computer, and second of all, everybody who does have a computer would not know to go to a DMV portal, and third, not everybody has internet access, even if they have a computer,” Podolsky said.

Sal Sena, president of the industry association Towing & Recovery Professionals of Connecticut, said he thinks the portal will “make it easier for everyone” and that the state is “on the right track.”

The post Connecticut Senate Approves More Towing Reforms, Expanding on Landmark 2025 Legislation appeared first on ProPublica.