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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unhealthy Prisoners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Unscrupulous Actors”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shrouded in Secrecy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Trump administration says none of this is happening.

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

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

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

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

More than 500 cases. That includes:

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

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

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

Explore our list of incidents where 506 citizens were detained.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Upon Probable Cause”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Against Unreasonable Searches and Seizures”

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

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

Explore incidents where citizens were subjected to crowd control weapons.

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

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

“The Right of the People Peaceably to Assemble”

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

The Trump administration has, however, aggressively pursued the arrest and prosecution of citizens who were protesting, often claiming the protesters were assaulting officers or interfering with enforcement activities. We counted more than 300 people accused of assaulting or obstructing officers, about 130 of them at protests.

Top DHS officials, including former Secretary Kristi Noem, went further, claiming that filming ICE agents was interfering with arrests. Last summer, three siblings driving in Texas were detained after they stopped to film an immigration arrest. One of the siblings was a young teen. “They tackled me down and an agent put one knee behind my knee, where I felt a sharp pain,” he told ProPublica. He was separated from his mother, who has a green card. “They were saying my mom wasn’t a U.S. citizen, and I was scared they were gonna take her away.”

The siblings have filed claims for damages with the government. Asked about the incident, DHS said it respects “the First Amendment rights of individuals to observe and express themselves. However, if such actions interfere with or obstruct our operations, ICE will take necessary steps to address the situation.”

Our review did uncover instances that appear to show some protesters or other civilians assaulting officers. One person pleaded guilty to throwing pieces of cinder block at an agent. A woman in California pleaded guilty to pulling off an officer’s mask.

Many protesters were accused of crimes but never actually charged. We found 137 instances of citizens who were charged with federal crimes, most of whom were charged with assaulting or obstructing federal agents. In nearly half of those instances, the charges were dropped or dismissed. Three dozen citizens have been sentenced to prison or probation, and another three dozen cases are pending, as of September 15.

Explore incidents where citizens were detained while recording.

Some of those arrested, like clarinet player Oriana Korol, were initially charged with felony assault before pleading guilty to a misdemeanor — in Korol’s case, for trying to kick an officer. She said she did so after officers shoved her and pepper-sprayed her twice in the face. Just moments before, the band had been playing the “Ghostbusters” theme song as part of a peaceful protest.

Video footage shows agents leading Korol away, handcuffed, while one pulls her tear-gas-soaked mask over her mouth. “Please pull it down,” Korol tells the agents in the video. “I’m going to have an asthma attack. I have asthma. Why are you doing this to me? Please.”

The Rights of Children

Unlike earlier administrations, Trump has detained significant numbers of immigrant children living far from the border. Citizen kids have been swept up too — at least 70 of them. We’ve found about 20 kids who were handcuffed or zip-tied.

DHS said that ICE doesn’t zip-tie or restrain children, or separate families. But agents handcuffed a 15-year-old with disabilities outside a school in Los Angeles in 2025. The agents said they mistook the teen for an alleged gang member. A few months later, officers detained more than a dozen American children during a raid on an Idaho horse track. Anabel Romero said her children are still deeply shaken by their detention.

Romero told us how her 7-year-old son warned his older sister about going to another race this month: “He said, ‘Watch out for ICE, make sure you have your phone to film — I’ll come save you.’”

“Without Due Process of Law”

As the government has rushed to deport people as quickly as possible, Americans have also been swept up and removed from the country too. About a dozen American kids have been deported with their parents, allegedly over their parents’ objections.

DHS said: “Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates.”

One American adult in Texas was also deported this spring.

The car Brian Morales Garcia was in was pulled over earlier this year in central Texas. Officers didn’t believe him when he said he was a citizen. And they wouldn’t let him get his birth certificate. Morales Garcia was held for four days without being able to call his lawyer or anyone else. Then he was deported to Mexico.

After suing, Morales Garcia was allowed back into the country just last month using his birth certificate.

DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Morales Garcia’s deportation. In earlier court filings, officials disputed Morales Garcia’s citizenship and claimed he had admitted to being born in Mexico.

“I couldn’t process what they were doing to me.” Morales Garcia told ProPublica. When he was first stopped in Texas, he had told officers, “I’m a citizen, it’s fine.”

Explore more video evidence compiled by ProPublica and our list of incidents where 506 citizens were detained.

How We Reported This Story

How We Counted Incidents

We found and vetted cases from a number of sources, including English- and Spanish-language social media, DHS statements, court records and local news reports, in addition to our own reporting. We included an incident in our dataset only if we could find at least two sources for it. For additional details about the incident, like whether crowd control weapons were used, we accepted one source in some cases.

When DHS provided a response specific to an incident — including about whether it happened or the circumstances under which it happened — we noted that response in cases in our full list for which we offered detail beyond a simple count of detained citizens. DHS responses that generically denied ever detaining citizens or that are proven inaccurate by our reporting were not included.

As with our count a year ago, most of the detained Americans on our list fell into two broad categories. The first is Americans who were held because agents questioned their citizenship. This time, we found more than a hundred such cases. The second category is Americans arrested by immigration agents after being accused of assaulting or impeding officers at protests or during immigration arrests of others. In that category, we tallied roughly 300 Americans. 

In many of these cases, the government accused but never charged these individuals with assault. Sometimes agents detained people because of questions about their citizenship but later accused them of crimes. While public attention often focuses on ICE, the immigration dragnet often relied on officers from agencies across the government.

Since the government itself does not track these cases, our list is almost certainly an undercount. Except in a few cases in which DHS itself confirmed detentions, we only counted citizens we were able to individually identify. So, for example, while witnesses estimate as many as 200 citizens were detained in an Idaho raid last fall, we were only able to identify 30 individuals by time of publication. We encountered the same issues for many smaller raids and protests, such as a raid of a food plant in Cato, New York; protesters detained by ICE at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey; and a raid of a Hyundai-LG plant in Ellabell, Georgia.

ICE itself occasionally has stated higher numbers than we were able to confirm: It told Congress that 131 citizens were arrested for assaulting, obstructing or interfering this year in Minnesota’s Metro Surge. It didn’t name them. We cataloged fewer than a hundred.

We tagged each case with details like whether a minor was detained or a citizen was held after filming. Another trend we tracked was citizens held for more than a day without access to a lawyer or their family. When multiple citizens were detained in one incident or sometimes on the same day and city, we grouped them together.

Because we focused on the expanded presence of immigration agents in American communities, we restricted our count to warrantless arrests that took place outside of airports and away from the borders, where immigration agents have long had more authority. We also excluded cases of Americans who were arrested after a judicial warrant.

We did not include incidents where an agent shot, tackled or pepper-sprayed a citizen but didn’t detain them.

We also did not include immigration protesters arrested by police who were only enforcing local laws. We did, however, include some cases involving police working with immigration agents. We still have little visibility into how many citizens have been detained by police deputized to act as immigration agents.

We also found reports of more than 30 Americans who felt racially profiled by immigration agents, but we did not include them in our database because it was not clear they were held against their will.

How We Counted and Reviewed Court Cases

We searched every named adult in our list to see if they were charged with a federal crime in relation to their detention. We conducted searches, using several name combinations for people with double names or compound names, in federal district courts through the online platform PACER. We looked for a criminal case filed within two months of the noted date of a person’s detention in the judicial district in which the detention happened. We then noted whether we found charges, what the charges were, and whether the person involved was sentenced or had their case dismissed or discharged.

How We Chose the Videos in This Report

We reviewed hundreds of videos of federal agents detaining American citizens across the country. While that included body camera footage, news clippings and helicopter footage, the vast majority of videos were made by bystanders and shared over social media. Many of the videos went viral and were recirculated across the internet by a range of third-party accounts. They touch on everyday American life in a range of settings, including workplaces, homes, protests, car washes, suburban sidewalks and the interiors of vehicles.

We tagged each video with how clearly it shows the incident and whether the citizen detained was clearly visible. We then categorized the videos by the kind of conduct they show, such as citizens being detained after recording. We provided DHS an opportunity to respond to each of the videos we included.

We did not alter videos, nor did we add watermarks, blur faces or overlay captions on videos unless otherwise noted. Videos that include captions or watermarks are shown as they were obtained.

The post More Than 500 U.S. Citizens Have Been Detained, Including Handcuffed or Held at Gunpoint, in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown appeared first on ProPublica.

Online gambling has surged in the U.S. since the Supreme Court allowed states to legalize sports betting in 2018, prompting public health concerns about gambling addiction and calls for stricter consumer protections. Online sportsbooks such as DraftKings and FanDuel have touted “responsible gaming” features as evidence that they are taking appropriate steps to protect consumers from spiraling out of control.

Reporter Jake Pearson put these safeguards to the test. Bankrolled by ProPublica, he mimicked the betting patterns of a problem gambler for 10 weeks, consulting a panel of addiction specialists, recovering gambling addicts and professional sports bettors for advice.

He found that the safety features were overpowered by the app’s product design and promotions that pushed him to continue gambling.

Pearson detailed his entire journey, which you can read here. Here are five takeaways from his investigation.

1. Sports betting is ubiquitous. The industry relies on very active losers.

Today, nearly a quarter of all Americans, and half of men ages 18 to 49, say they have an active sportsbook account, according to the Siena Research Institute. But that rapid growth has come with consequences: About a quarter of active sportsbook account holders surveyed by the organization this year said that they’d lost enough on a bet that they’d have trouble meeting their financial obligations.

Gamblers who lose frequently are the bettors sportsbooks are most interested in, Matthew Gaskell, a British psychologist and expert on gambling addiction, said. Gaskell noted that a relatively small number of active losers account for a substantial amount of sportsbooks’ revenue.

A 2024 study out of Connecticut found that 1.8% of problem gamblers in the state accounted for 51% of sports betting revenue.

DraftKings says its responsible gaming system provides adequate safeguards to protect customers from spiraling out of control. “I think as a business, as an industry, we’re doing a good job of educating people, of raising awareness, of making tools and resources available, of monitoring accounts,” Lori Kalani, DraftKings’ chief responsible gaming officer, told Pearson.

But policymakers aren’t so sure. Lawmakers from Colorado to Massachusetts are now proposing stricter consumer protections.

2. DraftKings has adopted responsible gaming tools. They require users to opt in, limiting their effectiveness.

DraftKings’ responsible gambling safeguards include in-app notifications that encourage gamblers to take a break after they’ve lost money and “time reminders” that tell users how long they’ve been on the app. The app also features a responsible gaming center that allows users to set a budget, track their spending or opt into tools like those that allow them to limit the amount of time and money they spend in a 24-hour period or enact more severe restrictions such as a multiday “cool off.”

But this system largely relies on users to have the wherewithal to opt into the tools — something that experts say can be difficult for someone struggling with gambling addiction.

DraftKings told Pearson that if a customer’s behavior raises too many red flags, the company will proactively close an account. Yet it wouldn’t specify how often this actually happens.

Pearson’s experiment mimicked the behavior of a problem gambler to see when — and if — the company’s safeguards would stop him. The first in-app responsible gaming prompt Pearson received came more than a week after he began gambling on the NBA playoffs, when he’d already lost roughly what a minimum-wage worker in New York City earns in a month. It told him that he’d hit $2,500 or more in deposits and said to “visit our Responsible Gaming Center anytime to set limits for yourself and access tools for safer play.”

But the app’s warning wasn’t triggered by Pearson’s reckless betting. It was legally required. When New York legalized mobile sports betting in 2023, lawmakers required the apps to notify users when they hit $2,500 in total deposits. The pop-up gave Pearson two options: set limits or “I understand.” He clicked the latter and was back in action.

Even as Pearson exhibited red flag after red flag, according to our panel of experts, his subsequent warnings from the app followed the same pattern.

DraftKings says millions of customers have visited its responsible gaming center, but the little data available publicly suggests only a small percentage opt into these tools. Just over 8% of active DraftKings users in Massachusetts were using them as of April, a company official told state regulators this summer. The official added the number was trending up.

Kalani says her 51-person team manually reviews user accounts suspected of problem gambling. Yet even after Pearson deposited $21,600 into his account in less than eight weeks and exhibited just about every sign of compulsive gambling, he didn’t register for a manual review under the company’s criteria.

3. The design of online sports betting platforms can encourage users to gamble more. 

Online gambling companies have created sophisticated technology products designed to squeeze maximum engagement out of users, just as social media companies like Meta did years earlier with users of Facebook and Instagram, according to Darragh McGee, a researcher at the University of Bath.

Indeed, Pearson found that the app’s design encouraged him to keep betting.

As he gambled more, he found that the app’s quick-tap deposit buttons increased automatically, making it even easier to mindlessly transfer large sums from his bank into his DraftKings account. And while DraftKings’ safety warnings were sporadic, he was getting up to six push notifications a day notifying him of rewards and betting opportunities.

DraftKings told Pearson it sent him 32 responsible gambling prompts over 10 weeks of gambling, including emails that every DraftKings customer gets. Pearson counted in-app notifications about his betting 14 out of the 71 days he gambled on the app.

4. Perks can also help encourage users to bet more.

DraftKings, like many other sportsbooks, also offers VIP programs that give users perks, including free bets and concert tickets. After Pearson lost $1,800 betting on basketball in one night, chasing his losses with increasingly long-shot bets, he was invited to audition to become a DraftKings VIP. After only three weeks and $5,800 in deposits on the app, Pearson was formally accepted into DraftKings’ VIP program, which assigned him a personal concierge.

That VIP host told Pearson that he would be “keeping an eye out for opportunities and perks tailored specifically” to his account, plus “reminders about Responsible Gaming.” Company representatives offer VIPs special incentives to continue gambling, such as “bonus bets” (free one-time bets using house money) and “deposit matches” (extra house money called DK Dollars that come along with new deposits).

Pearson found that the program rewarded riskier bets. The more money users spend on long-odds wagers, the quicker they accumulate credits needed to “advance” to higher tiers that offer better perks.

Less than a week after Pearson opted into a three-day “cool-off” period — after losing several thousand dollars betting on tennis — Pearson contacted his VIP representative, who helped facilitate his largest deposit match to date: juicing a $5,000 deposit with an extra $1,250 in free DK Dollars.

5. Online gamblers are left to regulate themselves. Experts say more limits are needed.

Lawmakers face a public policy dilemma: While online gambling generates billions of dollars in tax revenue, research shows that gambling disorder diagnoses are rising in states that have legalized.

In New York, sportsbooks like DraftKings have to submit a “problem-gaming plan” to the state regulator but the law leaves the specifics of it up to the companies. The plan must include, among other things, procedures “for identifying users with suspected or known problem-gaming behavior” and for “providing information to users concerning problem-gaming identification and resources.” The exact details are unclear because such plans are not publicly available. (A DraftKings spokesperson wouldn’t provide a copy, and Pearson’s request for it under the state’s open records law with the gaming commission is under review.)

Other countries have already taken aggressive steps to regulate online sportsbooks’ marketing practices and advertisements. But in the U.S., the industry has actively opposed proposed reforms on the federal and state levels — and even seeded a political action committee with $41 million to influence elections this year.

Rob Minnick, a recovering gambling addict and one of the experts we consulted, said that the framework for protecting consumers shouldn’t be entrusted to a publicly traded company that’s driven to grow revenue.

DraftKings told Pearson that all 5,000-plus of its employees are trained on responsible gaming every year and that it’s “not a side initiative. It is embedded across our business and essential to DraftKings’ long-term sustainability.”

“The system worked the way it was supposed to,” Kalani told Pearson.

Critics say that’s the problem.

If you’ve bet on sports with FanDuel or DraftKings, we want to hear from you. You can help us understand how these apps respond to their users’ betting behavior. Use our browser extension to download your betting history, then drop the files here.

Read the Full Investigation

I Deliberately Bet Like a Problem Gambler. DraftKings Made Me a VIP.

The post Our Reporter Spent 10 Weeks Gambling on DraftKings. Here Are 5 Things He Learned. appeared first on ProPublica.

It began as a casual question — and a flicker of curiosity — uttered during a meeting of ProPublica journalists who this year are reporting on publicly funded private schools. We were discussing how, in many states, basically anyone can open a private school wherever they want. No experience, no training, no curriculum required.

One of our editors jumped in and asked: What if ProPublica tried to establish a private school?

We were intrigued. We are longtime education reporters, not educators. Would that matter? Where, if anywhere, do states draw the line on who is fit to run a school — and in some cases, collect public money to fund their ventures? 

We decided that testing the thesis that anyone can open a school would be valuable to our ongoing reporting, particularly at a time when we have found that private schools are growing rapidly across the country — in barns, farms, co-working spaces, people’s homes and parks. These new schools are fueled by taxpayer-funded vouchers and other programs, and our reporting has revealed states have little interest in monitoring them. 

We had some inspiration to draw from: In 2015, comedian John Oliver founded a tax-exempt church to show how easy it was for televangelists to avoid paying taxes while soliciting millions of dollars. 

Some of us live in Chicago and are well aware of the lore of the Mirage Tavern, a real bar that undercover reporters operated in the 1970s to expose corruption in the city. While that investigation had a substantial impact, and led to a new city oversight agency, it also drew criticism for its deceptive practices.  

We drew lessons from that reporting and set some ground rules at the start of our experiment. To be clear, we had no intention of operating schools. We won’t enroll any students. 

Most importantly, it would be critical for us to be transparent about who we were in our applications, using our newsroom phone numbers and email addresses. In one state, we even disclosed that we were “journalists exploring opening a microschool.” We also decided we would stop the experiment if it would require doing something illegal or using public resources for our own benefit.

Here’s how we went about the experiment in Arkansas, West Virginia and North Carolina: 

First, we partnered with newsrooms in the three states — the Arkansas Times, Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia and The Assembly in North Carolina — and pursued creating the schools together. No one knows their states better than reporters who live there, so we wanted to work with the experts. Plus, the school applications required local addresses and we reasoned that newsroom addresses, which state officials could easily look up, would be extra transparent. 

Then, we came up with names for the schools. We aimed to call them Curiosity Academies to reflect our curiosity as journalists. We succeeded with the ProPublica-Arkansas Times Curiosity Academy and ProPublica-Mountain State Spotlight Curiosity Academy. A word-count limit required us to scrap curiosity for our school in North Carolina. We simply called it the ProPublica-Assembly Academy.  

Next, we filed paperwork with each state. That turned out to be easier than working through the legal and ethical questions with our editors, our legal team and our standards editor to design our experiment in the first place. 

In Arkansas, we didn’t need permission from the state Education Department, which does not regulate private schools. All it took was filling out a form on the Arkansas secretary of state website, $45 and an American flag to be recognized as a private school business (yes, Arkansas requires all schools to have an American flag — but only public schools also are required to have the Arkansas flag). The secretary of state’s office even emailed us a certificate.

But when it came to applying for our private school to become eligible for public funds, a process that does add some guardrails, we didn’t think we could do it. In Arkansas, private schools participating in the voucher-like program have to be accredited or working toward it, which often requires creating curriculum and school handbooks. That seemed like a step too far since we weren’t actually opening schools. 

However, we discovered that Arkansas allows a subset of schools called microschools to use public money with fewer requirements. So, we decided to apply for public funds as a microschool. That process also took only about 10 minutes. We didn’t need to provide our credentials or a background check, prove our fiscal stability or assure that the newsroom was a safe place for students. (If approved, we would not take the next step and register to receive public money.)

A state employee who reviewed our application, which we submitted in early September, said we missed the deadline for this school year but could apply for next school year. He also suggested another way we could tap into public money.

Kaelin Clay, the Arkansas Department of Education spokesperson, said the agency reviews applications to the voucher-like program to determine if the schools meet state requirements. She said microschool families have the “freedom to choose” where and how their children learn.

In West Virginia, we spent little time handwriting the required information on notebook paper and submitting it to the state Education Department. We eventually established our school as a microschool after a state employee shared that, unlike the regulations for private schools, we would not need an inspection. 

We did need proof of at least a high school diploma, and we shared one of our real college transcripts from the late 1990s with the local school district, which then notified the state of our new school. (We couldn’t find the high school transcript; does anyone keep them?) 

In an official statement, a spokesperson for West Virginia’s Department of Education said it “does not approve or deny the operation of microschools for any reason, including the qualifications of the owner/operator.” State law includes no mechanism for oversight of microschools.

In North Carolina, our project’s own rules and ethics — not the state’s determination of the quality of education we would (or wouldn’t) provide — prevented us from completing the process there. Instead of using the address of The Assembly’s newsroom on our application, our editors let us use the address of a brewery for our school. We needed a property with fire and sanitation inspections. The co-working space that houses the newsroom had a fire inspection but wasn’t required to have one for sanitation. But the brewery, which has a partnership with the newsroom that led to the creation of a light and lemony ale called Tell the Truth, did have one. They let us use their inspection reports for the project. 

But when a state official told us that, in fact, we needed to get school-specific fire and sanitation inspections, we abandoned our quest. This crossed our line of straining public resources, as we didn’t want inspectors, whose salaries are paid by tax dollars, to devote their time to our experiment. 

The rest, as they say, is history. A bunch of journalists are now school owners, administrators and heads of schools. And though we plan to close down the academies we opened to ensure no potential students mistake us for a proper school, we did want some mementos of our brief school experience. So we snagged ProPublicaAcademy.com and designed some fun pencils to show our school spirit. 

And that’s not all. Now that we’ve told you about our journey opening private schools, do you think you have what it takes to open one, too? Find out by taking our quiz. Let us know how you did by replying to this email or tagging @ProPublica on your favorite social platform.

Read More

It’s Easy to Start a Private School. Take Our Quiz to Find Out Where You Can Open Yours.

The post How ProPublica Reporters Became Private School Owners in 24 Hours appeared first on ProPublica.

An Oklahoma oil and gas company plugged a well that disposes of oil production’s toxic byproduct after an investigation by The Frontier and ProPublica revealed that regulators had approved the well in violation of state rules meant to protect public groundwater supplies.

The disposal well, named the Flying Monkey, injected oil field wastewater underground and sat roughly a quarter-mile from two municipal groundwater supply sites that served the small city of Enid in northwest Oklahoma. Wastewater injection operations are banned within a half-mile of public water wells unless regulators hold a hearing to ensure that this activity will not pollute groundwater. Regulators at the Oklahoma Corporation Commission did not hold a hearing before approving the well in 2018.

The city of Enid filed a complaint last year asking the state to revoke the Flying Monkey’s permit to operate.

On Sept. 14, with the complaint still active in the agency’s administrative law court, employees of the Flying Monkey’s current owner — BCE-Mach III Midstream Holdings LLC — dropped a cast iron plug into the bottom of the well, followed by more than 200 sacks of cement, to permanently seal it off, according to a report the company filed to the corporation commission. A representative of the state was on site to witness the plugging.

Eric Huddleston, an attorney representing BCE-Mach III Midstream Holdings, which acquired the Flying Monkey in 2020, said the company decided to permanently shut the well after determining it was “underutilized and operationally unnecessary.” A spokesperson for the corporation commission did not respond to requests for comment, including about the agency’s role in the well’s closure.

Enid city officials said they did not know the well had been plugged until our reporter informed them.

“This decision is, for lack of a better word, thrilling because this is such a vital issue,” said Frank Baker, an Enid city commissioner. “Our water sources have been put in danger, and for this one well to have been plugged, this is the best possible outcome.”

In Enid’s 2025 complaint to the state, its lawyers noted that the Flying Monkey’s original operator, Hinkle Oil & Gas, had incorrectly checked a box on its permit application stating that the injection well was not within a half-mile of a public water supply well. “This was demonstrably false,” Enid’s lawyers wrote. Hinkle previously declined to answer questions about the Flying Monkey. Earlier this year, BCE-Mach III Midstream Holdings refiled a permit application for the Flying Monkey, where it acknowledged the proximity of the city’s water supply wells.

The Flying Monkey had a checkered operational history. In the last five years, the state has shut down the wastewater disposal well repeatedly after it failed tests of its structural integrity. These failures can indicate a problem that might allow wastewater to escape, potentially threatening drinking water sources. The well had failed five of these tests since 2021.

In early July, nine days after the newsrooms’ investigation published, the Flying Monkey’s owner reported another leak in the well’s tubing. The state gave BCE-Mach III Midstream Holdings 90 days to fix the leak or to permanently plug the well.

Our investigation identified two other wells in Enid that violated the state distance rule between wastewater injection wells and the city’s groundwater supply sites. Both of those wells, which are owned by other companies, remain active.

Read More

To Protect Its Drinking Water, This City Has to Appeal to the Oil Regulators That Put It at Risk

The proximity of wells to drinking water isn’t only an issue in Enid. Across Oklahoma, the news outlets identified at least 114 injection wells that were located within a half-mile of a public water supply well. More than 300,000 Oklahomans live in communities that rely on these water wells, according to our analysis.

Baker, the Enid official, told The Frontier and ProPublica that he hopes the corporation commission will begin to plug other injection wells that threaten public water supplies.

“I hope and pray this is an example that we’ll start to see replicated across the state in the near future,” he said.

In addition to its request to plug the well, the city of Enid has asked the corporation commission to impose stronger regulations on oilfield wastewater disposal near its water supply, including a wider distance buffer between the injection sites and the city’s water wells. This request comes amid a recent uptick in wastewater injection in the Enid area, according to a legal filing made by the city. The commission previously declined to comment on Enid’s complaint because it is an active case. The case will continue to be heard in the agency’s administrative law court later this year.

The post Oklahoma Oil Company Plugs Disposal Well That Posed Threat to City’s Drinking Water appeared first on ProPublica.

In late 2024, FBI investigators had enough evidence to launch a sweeping bribery probe that could ensnare top lawmakers, including Sen. Susan Collins. The agency was examining interactions between Collins and a top donor: Martin Kao, CEO of defense contractor Navatek.

According to Kao, in 2019, the head of the pro-Collins super PAC met with him and other Navatek execs and asked for a $500,000 donation. Government contractors are banned from making political contributions. For the company to offer donations to Collins in exchange for an official action, or for Collins to accept, would constitute criminal bribery.

To skirt campaign finance laws and conceal the source of the funds, Kao sent an initial $150,000 to the super PAC using a shell company, saying he had cleared it with his lawyer. The head of the super PAC knew Kao was behind the donation. “Very smart,” he replied in an email viewed by ProPublica.

Weeks later, Kao told his team Collins committed to getting the company $32 million in naval contracts.

But the FBI saw through Kao’s shell company ruse. In 2022, a grand jury indicted him for making illegal campaign contributions. Facing years in prison, Kao revealed the full scheme to the FBI, hoping to reduce his sentence. What he told them has never before become public.

Read More

The FBI Anti-Corruption Squad Was Circling Susan Collins — Until Trump Got in the Way

Kao and his close associates donated nearly $900,000 to dozens of politicians, allowing Navatek to establish operations in half a dozen states with more than $40 million a year in government funds. Collins, Kao said, was Navatek’s most important patron.

Then President Donald Trump returned to office — and the FBI and Department of Justice teams that handled public corruption cases were eviscerated. The investigation died, and the government stopped talking to an informant who had offered a road map to corruption in Congress.

ProPublica revealed the existence of the case for the first time.

Collins’ deputy chief of staff said that her office “vigorously” denies allegations of bribery and pay-for-play made by Kao and that her office “fully cooperated” with the FBI. After our story was published, the senator mustered a defense that was full of incorrect and misleading claims, calling ProPublica’s reporting a “smear job” that took “the words of a twice-convicted felon over my office, campaign staff and me.” 

ProPublica reviewed a trove of evidence gathered by the FBI and thousands of pages of legal records, and interviewed dozens of people familiar with Navatek, its Washington operations and the FBI inquiry to conduct our own investigation. 

The White House referred us to the FBI. A spokesperson said the FBI “ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins” or her campaign. The FBI spokesperson did not address questions about the new phase of the investigation prompted by Kao’s account.

Navatek founder Steven Loui said Kao’s methods were “unethical and illegal” and that the company fully complied with law enforcement.

Watch our video to learn more on how we independently corroborated much of Kao’s account.

The post Watch: We Uncovered Bribery Allegations Involving Susan Collins appeared first on ProPublica.

We have no business running a private school.

We’re reporters, not teachers. That doesn’t matter. Inexperience has hardly been a barrier for those who want to start their own schools, as we have reported this year. And it didn’t stop us, either. 

Over the last few months, to test the process, reporters from ProPublica partnered with local journalists in three states to establish private schools. None required much effort.

In Arkansas, all it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state website, $45 and an American flag to form a bona fide private school with the Arkansas Times.

We established a school with Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia after filing our new school’s name and location with authorities on a piece of notebook paper, then exchanging a few emails.

And with The Assembly in North Carolina, we filed an online notice of intent to open a private school at Ponysaurus Brewing Co. in Durham, while perched on its metal bar stools, eyeing glasses of a crisp kolsch.

We used our names and news organization email addresses, following each state’s rules for starting private or microschools, a type of private school intended for just a few students. Experience running a school wasn’t needed. No one from any of the states asked us about our backgrounds or qualifications, though West Virginia did ask for proof of a high school diploma. No one questioned what we plan to teach or how we would measure whether students are learning.

Take Our Quiz

It’s Easy to Start a Private School. Take Our Quiz to Find Out Where You Can Open Yours.

And yet we could enroll students in two states right now, if we wanted to. Arkansas even suggested ways our school could accept public money through the state’s voucher-style program.

For the record, we are not enrolling students and have no intention of operating our new schools. We did, however, register a website for our new school ventures, ProPublicaAcademy.com, and even designed some fun pencils to show our school spirit.

This year, a team of ProPublica reporters has been documenting how the American education landscape is shifting dramatically as states use public money to help fund private schools. With few regulations, hundreds of new private and microschools have proliferated.

Our reporting has shown the relative ease with which people — some with questionable backgrounds — founded their own schools in unusual places. They’ve popped up in barns and on farms, in strip malls between an antique shop and an ax-throwing business and in churches, where lighting and sound for worship services is part of the curriculum.

All of this led to a clear reporting question: If the hurdles to open a private school are so low, could we do it? And what would we learn along the way?

Est. 2026

Arkansas: ProPublica-Arkansas Times Curiosity Academy

Inside a flag shop in Little Rock, we surveyed our options. There were handheld American flags on skinny sticks, midsize ones to display on a wall and majestic formal flags adorned with silky gold fringe.

State law in Arkansas doesn’t require much to open a private school, nothing about teacher skills or what kids learn. But it does require that all schools display an American flag, and we wanted to follow the rules. So, at the Arkansas Flag and Banner store, we decided on a smallish one that could fit in a circular base atop a newsroom cubicle. We also bought an Arkansas flag — even though only public schools are required to have those. Total cost: $49.45. 

Picking the flags for our new school was the hardest part of an astoundingly easy process.

Early in our reporting in Arkansas, we tried to figure out what steps we’d need to take to make a private school. We couldn’t find all the answers online, so we called the state.

“We don’t have rules for opening a private school,” Kaelin Clay, an Arkansas Department of Education spokesperson, told us earlier this year.

In fact, we didn’t even have to file anything with the Education Department. All it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state’s website, where we registered the ProPublica-Arkansas Times Curiosity Academy LLC as a business, listed ourselves as agents and officers, and paid a fee. 

“We picked a name. We paid 45 bucks,” a ProPublica reporter noted after we submitted the application. With that, we had created a private school.

The secretary of state’s office approved our new business the same day. We even got a certificate. 

The Arkansas Department of Education does not regulate private schools once they’re open, and no one from the state inspected the Arkansas Times newsroom, the location we chose for our school. As far as we know, nobody checked our backgrounds, either.

Arkansas adopted a private school funding plan in 2023, and back then there were fewer than 100 private schools on record. With the state in the fourth year of its Education Freedom Accounts program, which provides vouchers that can be spent on private schools, there are now more than 220. 

In addition, 143 microschools, which are a different category in Arkansas, were approved this year to accept tax dollars. That’s up from about 100 last school year.

Establishing the Curiosity Academy was so simple — and, frankly, a bit anticlimactic — that reporters then applied to become eligible to receive public funds. (Again, we applied with our names, work email addresses and a note that this was a journalistic exercise. We had no intention of actually ever taking any public money.) 

We wanted to see how far our curiosity could take us. 

Accessing public funds as a microschool in Arkansas is easier than it is for other types of private schools, even though there is no limit to the number of students one can enroll. Unlike private schools, we didn’t need to seek accreditation or show proof of financial solvency to accept state funding. 

It took about 10 minutes to fill out the required information in early September. Other than our contact information, we had to upload just two documents — one detailing our proposed tuition and fees, and the other with our refund policy. 

We said that — “should we open a school” — our tuition and fees per student would not exceed $7,208 per school year, the exact amount of Education Freedom Account money that each student in Arkansas is eligible for this year. We said tuition “would be collected only if education is delivered, and it would be the policy of the school to refund all tuition payments for educational services that are not provided.”

When more than two weeks passed and we hadn’t heard back, we reached out to the state Education Department. An employee called back that afternoon and explained that the department had decided not to accept any more because the school year was underway.

But he didn’t reject us outright. He looked up our application and invited us to keep pursuing the public money. He said we still could apply to receive public money this school year, but as a vendor providing educational services such as tutoring. He also said we could apply as a microschool next year and even suggested a tweak to the language in our tuition policy should we decide to do that.

After we hung up, he emailed us the vendor application (which we will not pursue) and let us know the microschool application for next school year will open in the spring.

We asked the state Education Department whether it would be OK with us operating a publicly funded microschool. Clay, the spokesperson, said the agency’s role is to decide if schools meet state requirements. Microschool families, she said, “have the freedom to choose the educators and learning environments that best meet their children’s needs.”

Est. 2026

West Virginia: ProPublica-Mountain State Spotlight Curiosity Academy

Hunched over a desk in the Mountain State Spotlight newsroom in Charleston, West Virginia, pen in hand, we scrawled out official notice of our new school in a spiral-bound notebook. We wrote that we would serve middle school students and listed our first day as TBD.

Leaving the crunchy, ragged edges on the paper, we stuffed our notice of intent into an envelope. We’d seen other new operators file similarly casual ones as they sought to register private schools in West Virginia. 

Then we drove over to the state Education Department to deliver the request. Our group — two reporters, a photographer and a video journalist — went through security and, camera rolling, wound our way through the maze of the midcentury building. We got lost once, and our entourage received several perplexed glances from workers, but otherwise it was smooth sailing. The person we needed to deliver the letter to was out, but a friendly employee agreed to place it on his desk.

Dozens of new private and microschools have set up shop in the state in recent years, fueled by the roughly $5,400 the Hope Scholarship offers each student to pay tuition. New private schools all go through Dustin Lambert, a manager in the Office of Student Enrichment and Support at the West Virginia Department of Education.

We heard back from Lambert the next day. Our notice was received. (Hooray!) He said now we needed a letter from the fire marshal that our school building was safe for children. (Oh no.)

This was a problem. Our school would be housed in the Mountain State Spotlight newsroom, which had not been inspected as a school site. We didn’t want to usurp public resources to undergo a new inspection. It felt like the end of our Mountain State school experiment.

But it wasn’t.

After we followed up to ask whether all schools, including virtual schools, need safety clearance to register with the state, Lambert told us that though all brick-and-mortar private schools do, we “may want to consider the microschool route.” 

In that case, we later learned, the department wouldn’t be involved because state law doesn’t include any mechanism for oversight.  

West Virginia defines microschools as schools that charge tuition and are started by one or more teachers. In practice, there’s no real difference between a microschool and private school — neither has a limit on enrollment. (Yes, a micro can be macro.) He forwarded us the rules for starting a microschool, which involve providing proof of a high school diploma, at least. We notified the local school district of our new microschool venture and sent a college transcript.

The Kanawha County school district, in turn, notified the state of the existence of a new microschool.

And with that — bypassing the building health and safety requirements — we established the ProPublica-Mountain State Spotlight Curiosity Academy. Officials at the Department of Education said they were aware that journalists were establishing a school. But they had to just watch us do so — they have no authority over the state’s microschools.

In an official statement, the department’s spokesperson said it “does not approve or deny the operation of microschools for any reason, including the qualifications of the owner/operator.”

By law, should we open our microschool — and we won’t — we could enroll an unlimited number of students.

Pending

North Carolina: ProPublica-Assembly Academy

On Friday evenings, hundreds of people gather at Ponysaurus Brewing Co., a trendy spot in Durham, North Carolina, to savor its craft beers and cocktails, hardly the place you’d expect a school to open. But why not? 

On a recent Tuesday morning, the brewery was quiet and closed to customers. Behind the bar, yeast busily converted sugars into alcohol inside giant stainless steel fermentation tanks. Two journalists settled onto barstools beneath signs for pilsners and cherry sours. Icy cold glasses of Tell the Truth, a light and lemony ale, sat before them on a high-top table beside a stenographer’s notebook and a laptop. 

The brewery created the craft ale in partnership with The Assembly, which also is ProPublica’s journalistic partner in this private school endeavor, so it all felt very symbiotic. Ponysaurus’s owners had agreed to let us use their building and its fire and sanitation inspections, which are required to open a private school in the Tar Heel State.

Reporters from The Assembly and ProPublica scanned a state of North Carolina website that details how to file a notice of intent to open a private school. 

First, it explained the state’s statutory requirements for opening a private school, things like reporting the school’s name and address. We also would have to administer a standardized test in certain grades, if we were going to open an actual school, and maintain annual records about student attendance and immunizations. 

Then, we watched a four-minute, 39-second video explaining how to file the required notice of intent. 

From there it seemed simple. We created a login, then filled in the address of our school (Ponysaurus’s building), noted its owner and chief administrator (our reporters), and named it the ProPublica-Assembly Academy. We’d hoped to include the word Curiosity in the name, but the field in the form didn’t allow enough characters. In North Carolina, our curiosity would have to be implied.

We filled in a few more fields, including the grades we would serve (high schoolers), whether we would open a religious school (no) and the dates of our academic year. 

Then we needed to upload fire and sanitation inspection reports. This step is what brought us here, to Ponysaurus, filling out the online notice to the tune of a hissing compressor that kept clean air moving through the brewing system.  

“You will need to secure inspections for the building where the school will be housed. You will need a fire inspection from the local fire marshal and a health and sanitation inspection from the local health department,” the video said. 

Just that morning, a City of Durham Fire Department inspector had visited the brewery and provided Ponysaurus with a fresh business occupancy inspection. We uploaded the new report, along with the brewery’s current food establishment inspection (on which it received a 99, an excellent score, we felt, for a school).

The screen flashed a confirmation. “Thank you. We have received your request to open a private school.” If approved, the page said, we should receive a school identification number in three to five business days. 

We hoped to join the at least 169 other new private schools that have opened in North Carolina since the 2021-22 school year, which marked the start of a series of expansions to the state’s publicly funded vouchers for private school tuition.

If we wanted our school to tap the voucher money, we’d have to go through some additional steps such as getting criminal background checks. We weren’t doing that.

The following day, we hit a snag. It came in a brief and garbled email. It said only: “Good morning and thank you for submitting a Notice of Intent to operate a private school. To complete the process we need to fire and sanitation inspections to” and then ended abruptly like that, no explanation or period. We emailed back, asking for clarity and noting we had already uploaded the inspection reports.

An official from the state Division of Non-Public Education then called. The school’s name needs to be on the inspection reports, she said, something we had not seen in any of our research. We also had not found any state statutes or rules that would preclude us — or anyone else — from opening a private school wherever we saw fit, be that a church or a brewery, as long as it passed “reasonable fire, health and safety inspections.” 

In a follow-up call, she clarified that her division checks only to be sure the building has passed inspections specifically for a school. A spokesperson for the agency later added that state statute does not allow them to deny a private school application, but they won’t process an incomplete application — notably one without the proper inspections.

We hadn’t expected we would need a school-specific inspection at this point. The video explainer referred to inspections only generally, and the state’s written guidance indicated only that this would need to happen before occupancy. 

Given we had no intention of actually opening a school, we had decided ahead of time that we wouldn’t consume any additional public resources — such as fire or health inspectors’ time — in our journalistic pursuit. 

Perhaps Ponysaurus could pass the school-specific inspections. But the ethical red line would be our stop sign. Our curiosity would have to end in North Carolina.

The post We’re Reporters, Not Teachers. We Were Able to Start Private Schools Anyway. appeared first on ProPublica.

Ever imagine yourself as a private school operator? It’s not such a wild idea. Hundreds of new private schools have popped up all over the country in recent years, responding to a surge of public money for students to pay tuition.

A team of ProPublica journalists has spent this year documenting how the American education landscape is shifting with an increased push for school privatization.

Our reporting has identified big differences in how states regulate who can run a school, what they must teach and where they can hold class. While some require new private school operators to prove they’re on the up-and-up, others invite anyone with a dream and a heartbeat to get into the business. ProPublica even founded a couple this year.

So why not you? Take our quiz on ProPublica’s website to find out which states might welcome you to open one with ease, no experience required.

The post It’s Easy to Start a Private School. Take Our Quiz to Find Out Where You Can Open Yours. appeared first on ProPublica.

As head of Oregon’s housing finance agency, Andrea Bell oversees a lot of taxpayer money. 

Oregon Housing and Community Services has handed developers more than $1.4 billion in state funding to build rent-restricted apartments over the last five years — and even more counting federal tax credits the agency allocates.

Bell’s husband, Joshua Crites, works as a director for the consulting firm JH Brawner, which helps local housing authorities develop subsidized apartment projects that receive a lot of money from Bell’s agency.

The company lists offices in Oregon, Washington and Arizona and says it has played a role in creating 20,000 low-income housing units that cost $3 billion to develop. JH Brawner’s Oregon work includes consulting on two housing authority projects that applied for or were awarded tens of millions of dollars collectively from Bell’s agency since her husband started working for the company. (JH Brawner gets paid by the housing authority rather than the state.)

Oregon law requires leaders like Bell to report their sources of household income on annual ethics disclosures, including naming their spouses’ income sources, especially when they could present a conflict of interest. The law also says any government official with a conflict should notify the person who appointed them in writing.

But Bell didn’t do either until ProPublica asked her about it. 

A spokesperson for Gov. Tina Kotek, a Democrat whose predecessor appointed Bell in 2022, told ProPublica that the governor’s office had “not been notified of any potential or actual conflict of interest.”

The closest Bell came to a disclosure was in 2025 with this vague note with a misspelling: “Spouse serves in an advisory role for a developmen.” It did not name a company but instead showed a misspelled street address, with no suite number, for JH Brawner’s office in Issaquah, Washington, a commercial building with multiple tenants.

Bell filed amended economic disclosures for the last three years on Sept. 23, the day that ProPublica asked her why she did not disclose her husband’s employer. The new forms explicitly name the consulting firm.

“I take concerns about my statement of economic interests (SEI) seriously and am committed to transparency, accountability, and compliance with state law,” Bell said in a statement.

She did not respond when asked whether she had played any role in her agency’s decisions regarding projects the company worked on. A spokesperson said housing subsidies are approved first by an internal committee that does not include Bell and then are reviewed by another group, the Housing Stability Council, which Bell does not serve on. 

The spokesperson, LeiLani Barney, told ProPublica to file a formal records request to learn who’s on the internal committee. Bell advises the housing council as it sets policy and makes funding decisions, according to the agency’s website.

Neither JH Brawner nor Crites, the firm’s director of strategic initiatives, responded to messages seeking comment. 

Three former officials familiar with state ethics laws told ProPublica that Bell’s lack of disclosure was a problem that merited review to see whether she influenced any government decisions that benefited her husband’s company.

Russell Lehman, a retired administrative law judge who served on Washington’s Public Disclosure Commission from 2019 to 2021, said Bell appeared to have violated the law, even if she later corrected her mistake.

Lehman said he would want to know: “Why did it take a reporter asking you about it to have you file your reports?”

“In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need ProPublica for this kind of thing,” Lehman said. 

Kotek’s spokesperson called for an evaluation by the state’s ethics commission.

“The Governor holds all agency leadership to consistent and high ethical standards and any question on conflict of interest should be referred to the Oregon Government Ethics Commission for thorough review,” Kotek’s spokesperson said in a statement.

Bell told ProPublica in a statement that she had sought an advisory opinion from the commission at the governor’s urging and that she had updated her ethics disclosures “to provide clarity.”

Money from Bell’s department plays an essential role in helping to build apartment projects intended to be affordable, channeling state funding and federal tax credits in order to reduce developers’ costs so they can charge lower rents. 

JH Brawner, where Bell’s husband works, advises public housing authorities that are putting together subsidized housing deals.

The company’s responsibilities have included negotiating acquisitions, structuring deals, ensuring project appraisals are completed and collaborating with the state agency that Bell leads.

Crites joined JH Brawner in 2023 after jobs with local housing authorities in Oregon, Washington and Ohio. He and Bell own a home together in the Portland suburbs, records show.

JH Brawner says on its website that it worked in Oregon as a development and financial consultant on Park Place, a 200-unit project being built by the housing authority in Clackamas County with $36 million in state funding. Another project in Washington County, Aloha 209th, is awaiting a $17.5 million subsidy from the state.

A spokesperson for Clackamas County said the housing authority there “did not advocate or discuss the Park Place project or application with Andrea Bell” and that the county hired JH Brawner as a consultant before Crites joined the firm.

The company was involved in two other state-backed projects for Washington County that were well into the financing process before Crites started working for JH Brawner. Work continued on both as recently as last year, according to JH Brawner’s website.

Bell’s agency adopted a new policy in 2024 that effectively reduces its discretion over which projects get funded, moving from a competitive bidding model to one that gives money to eligible projects in the order that applications were received.

But at least one developer has asked Bell’s agency to exercise its discretion. The housing authority in Washington County in suburban Portland, which is using JH Brawner as a consultant on the Aloha 209th project, is not due to get its $17.5 million from the state until at least 2028. 

Molly Rogers, executive director of the county’s housing authority, said in a June public meeting that she had contacted Bell about the project and the county’s desire to get state money sooner.

“She’s open to having a discussion, which is great,” Rogers said.

Rogers did not respond when asked, via a spokesperson, to comment about her public remarks, and Bell did not respond when asked to comment on Rogers’ account.

Pat Hearn, who served as the ethics commission’s director for nearly two decades, said he advised state leaders “to stay as far away from the line as possible, not to get as close as they can without crossing it.”

In Bell’s case, he said, “It’s just too close, especially since we know that the agency has approved funding for these projects that the husband’s company has advised on.”

Bell’s situation is the second conflict-of-interest issue Oregon housing officials have faced in the last year.

In December, a state investigation revealed that an appointee to Oregon’s Housing Stability Council, the body that approves housing subsidies, had violated a state conflict-of-interest law by voting to award money to projects designed by the architecture firm where she worked.

(The appointee, who later resigned, told an investigator she believed she had followed high ethical standards and had recused herself from voting on projects she worked on. The commission gave her a warning letter.)

A spokesperson for Oregon’s state housing agency told The Oregonian/OregonLive at the time that housing council members had received feedback about how to be “clearer and more consistent” when declaring conflicts.

Four months later, Bell filed her annual ethics statement. The only income it listed at that time for her household was her own.

The post Her Agency Distributes Billions for Housing Projects. Her Husband’s Company Helped Develop Some of Them. appeared first on ProPublica.

A little-known effort to bring an artificial intelligence tool into Texas public schools began about a year ago, with the help of the state’s top education official, Mike Morath. 

In September 2025, Morath responded to an email from associates of a private school chain called Alpha School who wanted to talk about using their AI program to educate kids in Texas classrooms. 

“I’d love to schedule a follow-up discussion,” Morath replied.  

The online platform wasn’t new to Morath, the state’s education commissioner. Just three months earlier, he had supported Alpha leaders’ bid to open a charter school in Texas that would use the same technology. Then the Texas State Board of Education, which has the final say on such charter decisions, voted it down 10 to 3. Board members cited concerns about the company’s use of AI to teach and students’ screen time, as well as lingering questions about the drastic student test improvements Alpha leaders presented. 

But Morath and his agency leaders did not need the board’s approval to help get Alpha’s AI model into public schools. 

Over the last year, Morath and his staff at the Texas Education Agency exchanged a flurry of emails with leaders of companies connected to Alpha about possible partnerships, visited their campuses several times, helped with a one-page explainer about the program to share with school districts and connected them with district leaders, according to communications obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune through public information requests. 

One email revealed that Morath offered to personally introduce an Alpha leader to the superintendent he appointed to lead the yearslong state takeover of Houston Independent School District, the largest in the state. 

“I’d also like to set up another site visit to visit both your Austin secondary and primary with my team,” wrote Morath. “The Superintendent of H.I.S.D. would also like to do a site visit, so l’ll connect y’all separately. And hopefully we can schedule them to happen on the same day.” 

The emails show that state education officials and Alpha affiliates approached at least 10 school districts about the AI program. After the coordination, at least three of those districts — Houston; Fort Davis, in West Texas; and Aldine, near Houston — launched pilot programs incorporating the AI tool. 

The full extent of Morath and his agency’s involvement, as well as the number of public school districts using the AI program, remains unclear. The TEA has not responded to questions about its efforts for months, initially failed to provide some of Morath’s emails in response to public information requests and continues fighting the release of additional communications.

The TEA sent a written statement that said “there is no formal partnership between TEA and Alpha Schools.” But the agency continued that it “is always interested in promising ways to improve student outcomes in math and reading.” The statement said TEA officials connected district leaders who were interested in Alpha’s program but left the decision up to them on whether to use it.

Aldine and Fort Davis leaders told the newsrooms it was not unusual for the state agency to recommend potential partnerships and expressed excitement about the pilot. All three districts with pilot programs said they will use the AI software for supplemental learning rather than fully implementing the Alpha School model of using it to teach all students basic subjects in two hours a day while the human teachers, which Alpha calls guides, focus on motivation and emotional support.

Some education experts and State Board of Education members who voted against Alpha leaders’ attempt to open a charter school last year raised concerns with the state’s efforts to use the AI-led platform given its recent track record.

ProPublica and the Tribune recently reported that Texas was among at least nine states that rejected Alpha leaders’ applications to open publicly funded charter schools that would use its AI-driven learning tool, according to an Instagram post from the company’s co-founder. 

The newsrooms also found that students performed significantly worse on state-mandated exams than Alpha leaders predicted at the one charter school they got approved, in Arizona, and at an existing school in Texas where students used the AI program last year.  

Morath’s agency knew about results in at least one of those charters, Texas Preparatory School in Austin. Last year, state test scores compiled by his agency showed just 21% of students passed. The TEA then gave the charter its third consecutive F rating, mostly based on those scores. 

David DeMatthews, an education professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said it was “disheartening” and “painful” to learn that the TEA was promoting the product when the company has not yet publicly shown its success in public or charter schools, where there are likely to be more students who have learning barriers or struggle academically. 

“That raises questions about whether TEA is serving its public interest and is being transparent and accountable to us,” DeMatthews said. “It’d be one thing if they were approved as a charter and they did have a track record and they could show evidence. We don’t have any of those sorts of things.”   

The platform’s expansion into traditional public schools comes as government officials across the country, including in Texas, have taken an increasingly skeptical view of AI use in schools. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently banned generative AI for elementary and middle school students in the nation’s largest school district. Leaders in Los Angeles implemented a similar restriction. In August, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott proposed further limiting screen time in public schools.

Abbott, who has received over $1.5 million in political donations from Alpha co-founder MacKenzie Price, did not agree to an interview or directly answer whether he supports the AI platform in Texas schools.  

“A great teacher in the classroom is the most important element of a quality education,” Andrew Mahaleris, Abbott’s press secretary, wrote in a statement to the newsrooms. “Any tool a district deploys must keep teachers at the center of the classroom, limit unnecessary screen time, and prove results for students.”

Abbott’s Democratic opponent in the November governor’s race, Gina Hinojosa, recently had a press conference opposing the use of Alpha’s AI program in Houston ISD. That came after she’d already made a campaign promise to fire Morath if she is elected. 

Alpha leaders did not agree to interviews or answer detailed questions for this story. Price has repeatedly told her social media followers that she wants to bring the AI model into public schools to make it accessible for all families. School leaders previously defended the model in interviews and directly in response to Texas Education Board members’ concerns about the proposed charter. They maintained that teachers’ roles remain significant despite lessons delivered by the AI platform and that screen time at the school would comply with national recommendations, and they referred to a self-published paper summarizing that Alpha students learn twice as fast as their peers while earning test scores among the top echelon nationwide.

Pam Little, a Republican serving as vice chair of the elected State Board of Education, said she hopes Abbott’s proposal to limit screen time in public schools leads to the removal of screens in classrooms altogether. That includes eliminating pilot programs like those using Alpha’s AI platform. 

“I don’t want anything AI in our schools, especially at the lower grades,” said Little, who last year voted against the proposed charter, which would use Alpha’s AI platform. 

Gustavo Reveles, a Democratic Education Board member who voted against Alpha leaders’ charter application last summer, said he’s worried the TEA is ignoring the board’s apprehension by helping to bring Alpha’s AI tool into public schools. 

“It certainly raises a red flag that perhaps there’s ways to circumvent that concern,” Reveles said.  

Pilot Program Planning

Last fall, local television news cameras captured Morath alongside U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon as the pair visited an Alpha campus in Austin. Joining them was Price, the school’s co-founder. Morath said that day, “Our goal is to make sure that children have access to great schools,” regardless of who runs them. 

He added, “There are lessons to be learned in a school like Alpha.“

That week, Morath emailed Price and her husband, Andy Price, who business filings show holds various roles at Alpha’s related companies, including chief financial officer. 

Morath also connected with an employee from Studient, a company that uses Alpha’s AI technology, now often called TimeBack. Studient, which uses the tool for students struggling academically, is among the web of corporate entities connected to Alpha, according to its privacy policy and business filings with the Texas secretary of state. 

In his emails, Morath said he would like to learn more about Studient’s intervention work with kids lagging academically. He also wanted to discuss 1882 partnerships, formal arrangements in which a public school contracts with an existing charter, university, nonprofit or state-approved entity to run the campus. Districts with consecutive failing ratings will sometimes use these partnerships to avoid possible state takeovers. 

Morath’s staff set up a follow-up discussion with the Prices for October. 

Emails show the commissioner visited Alpha’s campuses again with six other TEA leaders. His staff coordinated to go on the same day as Houston Superintendent Mike Miles. Not only had Morath chosen Miles to lead the Houston district in 2023, but the two had worked together at Dallas ISD when Morath was a school board member and Miles was the superintendent.

As of August, the TEA said it could not find any documentation of Alpha or its other companies applying for or running an 1882 partnership. But after the school visit, emails show, other state Education Agency leaders began communicating with Alpha and Studient associates about more informal pilot programs.  

Andrew Hodge, associate commissioner of system innovation at the TEA, followed up last November to figure out how the state could test out Alpha’s AI model. Hodge emailed Joe Liemandt, the tech billionaire behind the software company Trilogy, who pioneered and invested $1 billion into Alpha’s AI-learning technology.  

“It was great meeting you and learning about Alpha last Monday,” wrote Hodge on Nov. 5. “I’d like to schedule a follow up discussion with you/your team to talk through possibilities for piloting a few supplemental (you called this Tier 3 in your outline) instances in the state. What’s the best way to get 30-45 minutes to discuss?” 

Hodge eventually had another member of his team, Michael Strange, tour Alpha’s private school in Fort Worth. Strange oversees the TEA’s blended learning programs. 

“I’d like for him to be able to visit your school as we continue to improve our supports for TX districts and better understand the landscape of tech-enabled models in K-12,” emailed Hodge. 

By April, emails show, Strange was regularly in contact with Andy Price and a Studient employee about helping to launch pilot programs in public schools. At one point, Strange sent them a to-do list with next steps, which included him drafting a one-page explainer of the pilot program to share with districts. 

Andy Price, MacKenzie Price, Studient, Hodge, Liemandt and Strange did not respond to the newsrooms’ requests for comment.

In all, ProPublica and the Tribune identified at least five school districts — Ector County, Fort Bend, Irving, Pecos and Pflugerville — that confirmed they were approached about partnering with Alpha but did not pursue an agreement. Only Ector County provided a reason, stating the district “determined our school day is not currently structured to effectively implement or support the pilot.”

But Alpha and Studient officials had some successes. By mid-June, Strange applauded their progress securing pilots with Fort Davis and Aldine.

“Happy Friday!” wrote Strange ahead of a check-in. “Looking forward to seeing everyone today and excited to hear that districts are moving forward.”

Leaders at Fort Davis and Aldine told ProPublica and the Tribune they are using the AI platform this year to help students who are behind academically. Michelle Hartmann, deputy superintendent at Fort Davis, which enrolls around 800 students, said it will deploy the model in its K-8 classrooms for students who need additional help in reading and math. 

“We’re excited because we see it as an opportunity to provide an extra layer of intervention,” Hartmann said. She later followed up with the newsrooms to say the district could not be happier after the first weeks of the pilot and that students are very engaged.

Aldine will deploy the online platform to roughly 300 students across four middle school campuses that require support in math. Ashley Brown, an Aldine spokesperson, said the Alpha intervention model aligned with the district’s mission “to provide a rigorous and enriching educational experience that prepares every student for success in college, career, and life.”

Houston ISD plans to use the Alpha technology for students with strong test scores “to evaluate whether this instructional approach can accelerate academic growth,” according to its press office. 

The office said Houston ISD wasn’t paying Alpha for the pilot but did not provide more details. The district asked the Texas attorney general to withhold the contract from the newsrooms under the state’s public records act. 

Read More

Several States Rejected This Private School Chain as a Charter. Now It’s Eligible for Texas’ Taxpayer-Funded Vouchers.

The post How Texas Helped a Private School Chain’s AI Tool Get Into Public School Classrooms appeared first on ProPublica.

Emma Joyce was sick and vomiting for days until she stopped breathing in her parents’ arms, in a small gray farmhouse in rural Idaho. It was August 2009, and she was 3 years old.

The following summer, Emma Joyce’s little sister got sick. Ava Joan wouldn’t eat or drink anything but a few grapes and some Sprite in a sippy cup. She was breathing hard and fast. And when she vomited, it came out black, the hallmark of internal bleeding. She died in her mother’s arms in July 2010 from a complication of untreated diabetes.

Less than two years later, the girls’ toddler brother died from the same complication of untreated diabetes that killed Ava Joan.

And nine years after that, another sibling died: a 4-year-old boy who’d suffered for weeks with similar symptoms.

The parents told officers that they hadn’t taken the four children who died to the doctor because of their religion, the Followers of Christ, which considers the use of modern medicine a sinful lapse of faith in God. And Idaho exempts parents from faith-healing sects like the Followers from the legal duty to give their children lifesaving medical care.

The sect had at least 15 avoidable deaths among children from 2015 through 2025, according to healthcare professionals who reviewed their records for ProPublica.

Among them were children in five families, including Emma Joyce’s, who had a combined total of two, three or four losses in this period or earlier. 

Most of the siblings died of similar ailments, following similar patterns, that experts said could have been resolved with interventions as simple as insulin, antibiotics or a supply of oxygen. Experts were uncertain on only two of the sibling deaths, saying the death records lacked enough information to determine if the children’s lives could have been saved.

Idaho’s child abuse laws contain such broad religious exemptions that authorities did not intervene — either before or after the deaths.

The exemptions don’t just shield faith-healing parents from criminal prosecution for conduct that otherwise would be charged as neglect. They also keep police and social workers from stepping in to protect a dead child’s surviving siblings from suffering a similar fate, no matter how many of them die.

It is a sharp contrast to neighboring Oregon, which in 1999 began to roll back its own exemptions. Not only did the possibility of prosecution in Oregon prove a powerful incentive for parents to seek medical care when their child’s life was at risk, the change in law also gave the state legal leverage to order medical care for surviving and future children — which happened in one Oregon case, days before Emma Joyce died in Idaho.

According to backers of Oregon’s law, the goal isn’t to punish parents for allowing the avoidable death of a child; the goal is to prevent more deaths.

“If you don’t do anything, kids are going to die,” said John Foote, a former district attorney in Oregon who prosecuted several parents in his local Followers of Christ congregation after their children died from treatable ailments. Keeping more children from dying is “the whole point,” he said.

The graves of Emma Joyce and her sister and brothers are clustered near one another at Peaceful Valley Cemetery, a hilltop graveyard that belongs to the Followers of Christ, a faith-healing sect with at least four churches in Idaho. All four children’s headstones are made from the same light gray stone, bear the words “beloved daughter” or “beloved son” in the same font and design, and have their mother’s and father’s names etched into the back.

Throughout the cemetery are more of the same: siblings buried in child-sized plots with matching headstones.

In addition to the plots belonging to Emma Joyce’s family, there are two newborn siblings who died from treatable birth complications, four infant siblings who died from various causes, and three brothers whose death records prompted doctors to speculate that an immune deficiency ran in the family.

Two babies in a single Followers family succumbed to meconium aspiration, despite how rare it is for a newborn to inhale the tarry stool known as meconium and then die from it. A study of more than 160,000 full-term births found less than 2% of newborns had meconium aspiration syndrome, and only 1.2% of those died, because healthcare providers know how to manage and treat it.

When a child dies unexpectedly in Idaho or elsewhere in the U.S., it almost always triggers close scrutiny from police and social workers. That investigation might find the parents committed a crime, such as beating or starving them, but it can also identify other risks to surviving siblings, such as a health condition that would otherwise go unnoticed — something that doctors who reviewed records for ProPublica suspected in several deaths within faith-healing families.

Surviving siblings aren’t automatically shunted into foster care in such cases, but social workers do visit the home and lay eyes on the children to make sure they are safe and healthy. If they’re not, prosecutors can seek a court order for medical care or other needs.

A parent whose substantiated abuse or neglect leads to a death is permanently registered as high risk in child protection records.

Earlier this year, in response to the death of a newborn whose parents were flagged as high risk, Idaho lawmakers passed Benji’s Law. When such a parent has a new baby, the state now must do an expedited safety check to make sure the new baby isn’t in danger.

Surviving children may be temporarily removed from their parents’ custody. Idaho authorities in 2024, for example, took in eight children after the death of a medically fragile teenage boy in a home where police said they found “deplorable, unsafe” living conditions. Idaho also took a newborn from a mother’s custody this year when the mother was indicted in the deaths of her twin toddlers; she pleaded not guilty to murder charges and is scheduled to go to trial in January.

But it’s a different story when Idaho police or social workers find that the child’s death was a consequence of choosing faith over medicine.

According to Canyon County Sheriff Kieran Donahue, the law’s exclusion of faith-healing practice from the definition of “neglect” means child protection laws for neglect don’t apply, so unless there is evidence of a crime, his deputies can’t take action and don’t notify child welfare agencies.

A deputy attorney general said something similar in 2016, when she testified before a Children at Risk-Faith Healing legislative work group.

“If you were saying that your child broke their femur and you were praying to resolve this medical issue, the Department of Health and Welfare cannot say that you are a neglectful parent because you are not seeking medical treatment,” Mary Jo Beig told the legislators.

The department doesn’t track how many of the reports it receives about medical neglect are related to faith healing. Among all 318 investigations it conducted over the past seven years into reports of medical neglect by itself, the department said it found actual neglect in 28. Most of the time, the agency said, it worked with the family to address root causes so that children could safely remain in their homes; in 10 of the 28 cases, though, kids had to be placed in state custody.

There is one way to mandate medical care without a parent’s blessing: an obscure law that says a doctor can try to persuade a judge that without treatment, the child’s life “would be greatly endangered.” There was a case in recent years where school staff noticed a student from a faith-healing family having up to 13 seizures a day, which ultimately led to a doctor going to court to say the girl needed emergency medical attention.

But use of the emergency care statute is unusual. The law says a judge must still consider any spiritual treatment the child is receiving before ordering lifesaving treatment. And, as Beig pointedly told legislators in the 2016 hearing, “someone needs to know about the child” and notice the ailment before they die from it.

That rarely happens with Idaho’s insular faith-healing communities. Many families homeschool. Few socialize outside the sect. Some families don’t even register their child’s birth with the state until much later, when they need a birth certificate to navigate through society.

Ultimately, because doctors seldom see children in faith-healing families, they typically don’t get a chance to discover ticking medical time bombs — much less witness moments of extreme medical distress when they’d have the strongest legal grounds for advocating compulsory care.

Rather, the first doctor to see the child’s grave illness is often the pathologist who performs their autopsy.

None of the parents of children in this story responded to inquiries from a reporter. ProPublica is not identifying them or using the children’s full names out of respect for the families’ privacy.

Nathan Kangas, an unordained elder in one of Idaho’s Followers churches, said few people are willing to speak because of past news coverage that they felt mischaracterized them. He said parents in his roughly 500-member church keep their children away from the doctor to teach them to avoid the curse of turning to medicine as adults.

Donahue, the Canyon County sheriff and one of the most vocal opponents of Idaho’s concessions to parents who practice faith healing, said he believes they want their children to survive. Other law enforcement officers and former members of the sect echoed that, saying members of the faith are good parents, except when it comes to medical care for their families.

“There’s no doubt in my mind, they love their kids just like you or I would love our kids,” Donahue said. But their church has erased the impulse most parents would have to call 911 for an ambulance or to rush their child to an emergency room, he said.

“They’re indoctrinated, they’re conditioned,” he said.

Read More

Children in a Faith-Healing Sect Keep Dying. The State Lets It Happen.

The social media posts of a mother from the Idaho Followers who lost three boys hint at her grief. A family photo from 2022 shows a baby with the family’s three other children. The next family photo in 2024 shows the same three older children, but with a different baby — one who, like the baby before, is now dead. There’s no updated family photo to document the addition of another baby boy in mid-2025, who died at 2 months old from an untreated infection.

The mother shared a meme that references a Bible verse from the story of Job, whose loyalty God tested by allowing Satan to destroy all the blessings in his life, including his 10 children.

Among those who reacted to the mother’s social media posts was another grieving parent: the mother of Emma Joyce and her three dead siblings.

The post Four Kids in One Faith-Healing Family Died. Authorities Could Do Nothing. appeared first on ProPublica.

Sitting in a pediatric intensive care unit last year, watching a ventilator keep her 17-month-old daughter alive, Emily Marris scoured the contents of her phone for evidence to give to California health and food safety investigators. 

She had bought raw goat milk from a farm recommended to her in a Facebook group run by her chiropractor. Marris had hoped the milk, unprocessed and natural, would help with her daughter Brooklyn’s constipation. But doctors now suspected the unpasteurized milk, which hadn’t been heated to kill off pathogens, was the source of the toddler’s severe E. coli infection. 

To the regulators who’d reached out to Marris, the case was a top priority. The farm appeared to be defying state law to sell unregulated raw milk to unsuspecting families; soon, another child, a 6-year-old girl who’d drunk milk from the same farm, would wind up in the same San Diego hospital, with the same potentially fatal illness, needing blood transfusions. 

Similar cases were popping up across the country as social media influencers and President Donald Trump’s White House kept touting the unproven benefits of raw milk and downplaying its risks. In the past two years alone, hundreds had fallen ill across nine states from drinking raw milk or eating products made with it. 

Recognizing that people still want the freedom to buy it, California had struck a balance: It licenses farms that sell raw milk for human consumption, inspects them for sanitation and requires them to regularly test batches for pathogens.

The system hadn’t prevented outbreaks, as ProPublica previously reported. But it aimed to ensure that customers, at the very least, knew what they were getting into; milk legally sold in the state had to be clearly labeled with warnings.

Which is what troubled regulators even more about this particular outbreak. 

The milk suspected to have sickened the girls didn’t come from one of the state’s dozen licensed farms. The dairy was totally off the radar, selling unknown quantities of unlabeled gallons. 

And inside Marris’ phone was even more alarming information. Months of text messages showed the farm’s owner knew from the start that a toddler was drinking her milk. Then after the farmer learned that Brooklyn had contracted a serious foodborne infection, which doctors attributed to the milk, she continued to advertise on Facebook: “raw goat milk from a clean tested herd.”

After many sleepless nights, Marris screengrabbed the messages and sent them to the investigators, hoping to quell the outbreak before it grew. 

Amid a flurry of emails involving at least four state and county agencies, investigators with the California Department of Food and Agriculture took the lead. They needed to confirm that the farm was indeed selling milk for human consumption. In California, doing so without a license is a violation of state law and can lead to fines of up to $10,000 and jail time of up to a year. 

On the evening of June 17, 2025, an undercover investigator messaged the farm’s Facebook account:  

“Would like to buy like a gallon ”

Someone from the farm replied that they sold goat milk by the gallon, explained that they were temporarily out of jugs and said they would message as soon as their shipment arrived. 

Regulators now had a rare opportunity. 

They had strong evidence: two cooperating families, direct text admissions and access to hospital records documenting the destruction wrought on two young bodies. 

They had a clear reason to act. Raw-milk consumption was a growing hazard, and their state, like others, was teeming with black-market dairies, propped up by consumer demand fueled by misinformation.

They could have pursued penalties under a law enacted to prevent this very conduct, sending a message to other sellers about what the state would not tolerate.

But that’s not what would happen.

Marris was breastfeeding her daughter in her southern California home one afternoon that previous January when a post on Facebook caught her eye.

In a private group of backyard farmers, her chiropractor, Chris Boman, had shared a photo of a refrigerator, filled with gallons of freshly collected milk. In the years Marris had been visiting his office, she’d seen him selling raw milk from his own cow in his clinic’s waiting room. 

She had never thought to try it herself, but milk was on her mind lately. She was trying to wean Brooklyn, and so far it wasn’t going well.

Brooklyn was her “miracle baby.” Marris had become pregnant with her — a desperately wanted third child — at age 48. Then she arrived seven weeks premature, her low birth weight and underdeveloped lungs confining her to the intensive care unit for her first month.

The traumatic birth sent Marris’ protective instincts into overdrive. Already a self-described “crunchy” mom, she’d detoxified their home in suburban Winchester, a small inland community in Riverside County; stripped it of harmful chemicals and synthetic materials; and limited her family’s intake of ultraprocessed food. A trained birth doula and former teacher, she spent much of her days caring for her kids while her husband ran a sports technology startup company. As she had with her other two children, she was determined to breastfeed Brooklyn for as long as needed.

But when her daughter was barely a year old, Marris started a new medication for her chronic hip pain that could pass through breastmilk. She tried organic infant formula, but the number of additives alarmed her, and store-bought cow milk left Brooklyn severely constipated. Marris considered stopping her medication, but then she couldn’t walk without pain.

Desperate for an alternative, she commented on her chiropractor’s Facebook post, “Would this be a good milk for baby Brookie?”

The group’s members quickly chimed in. “I had to put my baby on raw goats milk,” one mother wrote. “Healed her right up. … Goats milk is easier digested than cow.” While sales of raw milk are prohibited on Facebook’s Marketplace, and such ads are removed when flagged, discussions of raw milk are still allowed, said a Meta spokesperson.

The commenter recommended a farm called Moonlight Ridge, and Marris clicked over to its Facebook page, which was filled with pictures of velvety Nubian goats. The farm milked its animals twice daily, it said, so the dairy was “always the freshest and best quality.” It was only 10 miles away. Marris arranged a visit that afternoon.

There were no signs marking the farm, but Marris turned down a dirt road and spotted its 23-year-old owner, Courtney Baker, with long blond hair and a tan, standing by a metal gate near a white pickup truck. Baker and her husband had become interested in raising goats during the pandemic. They started selling raw milk to help animal rescues and breeders, Baker would later say, and got most of their customers by word of mouth.

Baker greeted Marris and handed over an unlabeled jug of raw goat milk, still warm to the touch.

Marris pointed to her daughter, asleep in the back seat of her SUV, and explained Brooklyn’s digestion struggles. “This is the sweet girl you’re helping,” she recalled telling the farmer.

Once home, Marris filled up a baby bottle and nervously handed it to Brooklyn. Her daughter didn’t hesitate.

“She is gobbling it down! ” Marris texted Baker. 

“Yay!! I’m glad she likes it!” Baker responded, then later that day asked, “How’s her tummy handling the milk?”

By the next morning, Brooklyn’s problems seemed to ease. “She has had two great and more normal poops!!!!” Marris texted Baker.

Marris believed she had done her due diligence. She had researched raw milk, whose benefits were readily promoted by the local farmers and wellness influencers she followed. Shortly after that first pickup, she and her husband, Josh, visited Moonlight Ridge to inspect the herd. The goats appeared well-kept. And when they asked Baker about her safety practices, they recalled, the farmer repeatedly assured them her herd and milk were “clean and tested.” Marris trusted Baker and thought the farmer was doing everything possible to keep the milk safe.

For six months, Marris gave Brooklyn raw milk without incident.

Then, on June 2, it all began to unravel. On the way home from swim lessons, Brooklyn vomited all over the back seat.

That same day, another couple, Navy veterans Iris and David Galindo, drove to Moonlight Ridge to pick up their first order of goat milk.

They had also been looking for alternatives for their 6-year-old daughter, Victoria, whose doctor recommended limiting dairy products from cows. They began to consider goat milk, which Iris drank as a child in Guatemala. She contacted Baker, who had tutored their son in math years earlier and was now advertising raw goat milk in a local Facebook group. “There was trust there,” Galindo said.

As Baker handed over an unlabeled jug that day, the Galindos said they made it explicitly clear the milk was for their young daughter. 

That evening, Victoria drank her first cup.

The days after Brooklyn first threw up were a hellish blur: vomit that turned bilious yellow, then a tarry blackish-green, then bloodwork that so alarmed emergency room doctors that they called for transport to a pediatric intensive care unit 70 miles away.

Stunned and helpless, Marris and her husband waited as doctors at Rady Children’s Hospital fastened a web of wires to their barely conscious daughter: a tube down her trachea to help her breathe, dialysis lines into her blood vessels to support her failing kidneys. 

Brooklyn had developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a rare condition in which microscopic blood clots clog small vessels and destroy vital organs. Infectious disease doctors suspected it had been caused by a strain of E. coli and had Marris walk them through Brooklyn’s recent diet. 

When she mentioned the raw milk, she said, they looked at her uneasily and told her that was the likely culprit. E. coli can thrive in animal intestines. As few as 10 cells, hidden in an infinitesimal fleck of feces, can contaminate raw milk and trigger a fatal infection.

Marris was terrified for her daughter and furious with herself. She had searched online for the benefits of raw milk and gotten the confirmation she needed from raw-milk proponents. 

She wasn’t aware of the medical consensus that raw milk has no proven nutritional benefits compared with its pasteurized counterpart, or that it carries over 100 times the risk of foodborne illness. “I’m the one that gave it to her,” she thought. “Just how stupid could I be?”

From her daughter’s bedside, on June 5, Marris texted Baker. “They think Brookie got a strain of e-coli possibly from a bad batch of the milk … I just wanted to let you know in case you want to alert anyone that had milk from the week before this.”

“I am so incredibly sorry to hear she is going through this!!” Baker quickly responded. “None of my milk testing results have showed anything abnormal.”

Later that day, though, Marris learned while texting with Baker that the farmer hadn’t tested for E. coli; it seemed like she didn’t know how to. “All the tests I’m finding looks like it mainly comes from meat,” Baker wrote.

Marris was taken aback. How did Baker not know how to test for a common foodborne pathogen like E. coli? Still, Marris remained polite. “Please don’t beat yourself up either. You are a sweet kind person and I don’t want you or me to go there.”

Two days after Brooklyn arrived at the hospital, on June 6, doctors took her off the ventilator, but she struggled to wake up. For hours, as she continued on dialysis, her eyes drifted back into her head, her body occasionally convulsed and her breathing grew heavy and rapid. 

That evening, her blood grew so acidic that it disrupted the electrical signals of her heart, which struggled to pump enough blood and oxygen to her brain. For hours, the medical team tried to stabilize her spiking pulse. Her parents didn’t know if she would survive the night. 

As they awaited an update, a stool sample confirmed that Brooklyn had contracted E. coli O157:H7, one of the most dangerous strains. When Marris texted Baker about the diagnosis, the farmer detailed her equipment-cleaning process and said she would send a sample to a lab in Colorado. 

After a couple of days, Brooklyn finally turned a corner. But in suburban Murrieta, not far from the Marris family home, Victoria was just starting to decline. 

She’d grown lethargic over the past week, with bouts of bloody diarrhea. After two unhelpful urgent care visits, the Galindos drove her to Rady on June 13. Bloodwork revealed she had the same disorder as Brooklyn, brought on by the same E. coli strain; she was rushed into intensive care. “My world just dropped,” Iris Galindo said. 

On June 14, after Marris learned that another child had fallen sick after drinking raw milk, she texted Baker again: “Maybe hold off on selling any until we know if there is a common thread.”

Baker didn’t reply. 

The next day, however, Marris saw that Baker had recently responded to someone in the Facebook group looking for raw goat milk: “I have raw goat milk from a clean tested herd in wine country … We milk 2x a day so it is always super fresh.”

Marris was aghast, squeezing the sides of her phone to capture what was on the screen.

“Out of respect, I’m giving you a heads up,” she texted Baker. “I wasn’t going to EVER post anything, but I’m appalled that you’re advertising the milk as tested and safe when you haven’t been able to test for that deadly strain of e-coli.”

Marris then typed up a detailed description of what had happened to her daughter.

“My 17 month old almost died this week,” she wrote. “I NEVER WANTED TO have to call her out on this, but it’s prudent that she take a break, make sure she tests for THIS SPECIFIC strain and ensure the milk is safe before resuming sales.”

She hit the post button, heaved a sigh of relief and watched the responses roll in.

“Praying for your sweet baby.”

“Omg I almost bought milk from her a couple weeks ago.”

“Thank you for protecting the rest of us.”

And then her phone buzzed. Baker had finally replied.

At first, she apologized for the slow response, explaining that she’d also been hospitalized with an unrelated illness. She said that, despite her Facebook comment, she had stopped selling milk while she waited for test results. 

And then she asked Marris to take down her post. “As much as I hate and feel bad for what happened to Brooke [sic] I really really do,” she said, “I really don’t appreciate my name being thrown out there like that.”

Reluctantly, Marris deleted what she wrote.

She’d already spoken with state regulators about the outbreak and handed over her text messages. 

Surely, she believed, they would do something.

On June 20, three regulators paid an unannounced visit to Moonlight Ridge, according to internal records from the investigation obtained by ProPublica. 

The farm was located within a larger horse ranch, and they didn’t see anyone at the entrance. They walked along the fenceline until they spotted Baker’s husband, who asked if they were there because of the goat milk. Baker showed up 20 minutes later. 

She told them something she hadn’t said to the parents or the undercover investigator: The milk was for pets only and advertised as such on Facebook. 

“Of course, she insisted that she only sells the goat milk for pet food,” Jill Soares, a regional supervisor with the Food and Agriculture Department, later wrote in an email to the team.

Although California requires licenses to sell raw milk for human consumption, unlicensed farms can sell it as long as they label it as pet food. Sellers have seized on the loophole to avoid scrutiny and prosecution, a health official familiar with Baker’s case told ProPublica, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk publicly. “There is a gap in regulation,” the official said. 

The gap is magnified in 13 other states, where raw milk can be sold only as pet food, but regulators know people are still drinking it. Outbreaks this year in Louisiana and last year in Florida sickened multiple children, including at least one who developed the same life-changing kidney condition as Brooklyn. No dairy got in trouble. State officials said the milk was legally sold and clearly labeled.

In Baker’s case, the investigative report makes no mention of California regulators interrogating her about the pet food defense, despite the text messages they’d read. “She clearly knew the milk was going to a child,” Soares wrote to her team. 

With such evidence in hand, they could have referred the case to local prosecutors. Instead, before the site visit, supervising special investigator Jeffrey Eggert wrote in an email to the team that pursuing charges was not the priority. 

“The immediate goal here is to get the goat farm to stop all milk related-product manufacturing, and keep the community safe,” he wrote. His unit “typically pursues the criminal route; however, the legal process is lengthy.” 

That decision appeared to inform how the regulators approached their visit to Baker’s farm. 

They handed Baker a cease-and-desist order and a violation notice for operating as a food facility without a valid permit; neither carried penalties, but both threatened consequences if she didn’t comply. 

Then, they told Baker they would return the next morning to collect a milk sample for testing, as the families whose children had fallen sick did not have any leftover milk.

The next day, they met Baker at the gate and accepted a half-gallon jug of raw milk she assured them had been collected the previous night from 11 goats. 

Department officials told ProPublica that California law does not permit investigators to enter unlicensed properties, even when they receive reports of unlicensed activity. 

At licensed farms, California investigators have collected the milk themselves. And because newer batches might not have the same contaminant that sickened consumers, they have also combed the farmland for the pathogen, sampling dirt, groundwater and animal droppings. In some cases when they haven’t found a pathogen strain in the milk, they have found it in the surroundings.

Eleven days after regulators left with the sample Baker collected, the state’s limited test results came back negative for several pathogens, including E. coli. 

Regulators then pivoted to helping Baker get approval to start selling her milk again — still without a license, inspections or testing — so long as she labeled and registered it as pet food. 

Baker soon wrote back to the undercover investigator to see whether they were still interested. “I have gotten confirmation from CDFA that I’m in full compliance for pet consumption milk!”

On Aug. 1, the Food and Agriculture Department closed its case, finding that Baker had “promoted raw milk for sale and sold unapproved milk products in commerce without a CDFA license.” She was given no penalty.

“I was unable to show that she sold milk intended for human consumption,” wrote special investigator Nancy Del Cid. “If this had been proven, the case would have been referred to the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office for potential prosecution.”

The department didn’t respond to ProPublica’s specific questions about the investigation, including why officials had come to this conclusion despite evidence that had made at least one supervisor remark that Baker “clearly knew the milk was going to a child.”

Officials told ProPublica that seeking criminal charges would have slowed down their effort to stop Baker from selling more milk. 

“Issuing a cease-and-desist order almost always results in a product being removed from the market more rapidly than a criminal referral,” said Devon Keeler, a spokesperson for the department, in an emailed statement. “In this case, CDFA acted to protect public health as quickly as possible by taking steps to stop this product’s distribution based on the evidence and information investigators collected and confirmed.”

In response to questions about why it did not pursue prosecution in parallel to its attempt to enforce a cease-and-desist, department officials told ProPublica that local law enforcement often does not pursue criminal charges unless a cease-and-desist order has been violated.

Earlier this year, Baker moved out of California and reopened her farm in Arizona. But before she left town, I visited Moonlight Ridge.

Heading down the same road the inspectors did months before, I came upon the same gate. This time, it was open, so I drove through it, past the sprawling estate of horse corrals and stables. I parked near a grove of peeling eucalyptus trees where I saw a small pen with a large herd of goats protected by a barking farm dog. About 30 yards away was an aging trailer. I climbed the dusty stairs and knocked.

Baker opened the door, in leggings and a tank top, her hair held back with sunglasses. After I explained why I was there — regulators had connected her farm with a recent outbreak — she told me that the case had been dismissed and urged me to call the state’s Food and Agriculture Department. “Everything was negative,” she said. “There were no pathogens.” She added that the results from her own private lab test had also come back clean.

Baker touted the resolution of the case as a total vindication, and the negative test results — from samples she had gathered unsupervised, weeks after the infections started — as proof that her milk had not caused the outbreak. 

If her animals had carried E. coli, she said, she and her husband would have been infected at some point. “Quite frankly, we don’t care if we’ve cleaned the pen and then go grab a sandwich,” she told me. “We’ll eat with our hands filthy.”

She said she tested her herd for some goat diseases, but said she never claimed to have tested the milk for foodborne pathogens. 

She also stressed that families had knowingly bought milk that was not for human consumption. “Everything is sold as pet milk,” she said. “What they choose to do with it is not my business.” She added that Marris made a poor decision and was “trying to find someone to take the blame for it.” 

She suggested she didn’t know the Galindo family well, or that they were drinking the milk. It was just a coincidence, she maintained, that the two families, who hadn’t met each other, both had children who fell ill with the same rare strain of E. coli — one strongly associated with raw-milk consumption — after drinking her product. 

Regardless, she said, she stopped selling it after Marris’ daughter fell ill. 

“I was nice to Emily,” Baker told me in a sharp tone, describing how she gave the family special privileges by allowing them to visit her farm. “She has completely ruined it.”

Several of her assertions didn’t line up with what the families had shared with me, or what I had read in their text messages and the state’s internal records. When I followed up this summer and asked her about what I had learned, she refused to respond to my questions.

Through Facebook Messenger, Baker said she “vehemently” disagreed with ProPublica’s “distortion and mischaracterization of the facts,” but did not point out any specific errors.

When Brooklyn came home from the hospital, she barely resembled the active toddler who had started to cruise and speak simple words before falling ill. The disease had substantially interrupted her development. “It just all sort of stopped and stalled,” Marris said. 

Brooklyn began physical therapy right away, but she walked with a slight limp and couldn’t sleep through the night without terrors. Doctors also warned that she would likely face long-term kidney issues. She would need to be seen every six months by a nephrologist and would not ever be able to drink alcohol.

Victoria, too, will require ongoing medical monitoring. 

Not long after both girls had been discharged, a mutual acquaintance connected their two families, who gathered in Marris’ backyard. Sitting over a spread of cheese, crackers and blueberry jam, they compared the text messages that Baker had sent them. 

It became evident, recalled Marris, that Baker had known that both children had become sick after drinking her raw milk, but had not informed the hospital or told the families that they weren’t alone. Together, they decided to file a lawsuit against Baker and her farm in Riverside County Superior Court, alleging they had negligently sold the families contaminated raw milk that was presented as “fit for human consumption.” The case is ongoing. Baker told ProPublica that the farm will “fully defend against the allegations by Plaintiffs.”

Marris said she felt she needed to hold Baker accountable for what she’d done, given that regulators had squandered their chance to do so. But she also carries her own heavy burden of guilt. 

“I’m going to hate myself to the day I die for having allowed that to happen,” she said. Now more fearful of harming her children, she agonizes over whether meat is undercooked or pasteurized milk has been sitting out on the counter too long. 

Hoping to spare other families the same pain, Marris posted another warning when she saw someone else advertising raw milk in her chiropractor’s Facebook group that summer. 

“Just PLEASE PLEASE educate yourself and make choices about raw milk carefully. My 17 month old baby and one other little girl almost died last month from raw goats milk,” she began. “I’m posting this so you know what can truly happen if the milk has bacteria….know the risks, and make your own personal choices.”

When she later logged back in to see whether people had responded, she saw a notification at the top of the feed: “Your profile is suspended from this group.”

She texted the office of her chiropractor, Boman, one of the group’s three administrators. “I’m now banned from the group Chris runs, despite knowing what has happened,” she wrote. “I’m pretty disappointed.”

Boman texted back with his condolences but said he wasn’t a mediator. “You shared your story, we appreciate it, and people can read it and decide for themselves if they want to assume the risks or not,” he said. “Are you wanting anything else from the group?”

I visited Boman this January at his office in a Murrieta strip mall where he specializes in pediatric and prenatal chiropractics. I found him leaning on the front desk of his waiting room, wearing a sweatshirt that said “PRAY” across the chest. His neatly clipped facial hair framed a welcoming smile. He agreed to speak outside.

After Marris was suspended from the group, Boman said, he hoped it would calm down the conversation. She was “just drumming up a bunch of fear,” he said. “She’s coming out of this traumatic experience. … People need to see all perspectives.”

Boman said he had spoken with Baker to understand hers. “I don’t want someone in the group that’s doing shady things,” he told me. “People have been kicked out for selling bad cows.” But Baker assuaged his concerns. “From everything I understand, her standards are super high,” he said, citing her negative pathogen results. “Her milk came back squeaky clean.”

Boman said he connected Baker with the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit that assists raw-dairy sellers, which Baker said last January was representing her. Boman said the referral wasn’t, “You did something wrong, make sure you lawyer up,” adding that he has a membership that allows him to access the fund’s services. “If something arises, it’s nice to have someone in that corner.” The organization said it is not representing Baker in the lawsuit.

Boman still believed in raw milk, he told me. He’d only stopped selling it in his office because he had dried up his cow. He said he was supportive of what Marris had been through, but “I don’t want a product to get blamed if it wasn’t that.” Boman did not respond to follow-up questions sent by email.

For Marris, his response was a betrayal. But the experience didn’t keep her away from Facebook groups where people continue to spread misinformation about raw milk and advertise it for sale. At night, after tucking her children into bed, Marris scrolls through them, tracking the posts. 

From time to time, she steps back into the comments and shares her story, hoping to prevent other mothers from making the worst mistake of their lives. Sometimes, she is attacked and accused of lying by raw-milk absolutists. And sometimes, the groups delete her posts.

The post A Girl Nearly Died After Drinking Raw Milk. The State Did Little to Punish the Unlicensed Farmer Who Sold It. appeared first on ProPublica.

Without Amy Miller, some elderly and disabled people wouldn’t be able to vote.

The attorney for Disability Rights Nebraska travels the state, investigating the quality of nursing homes and assisted living facilities. As she reminds the residents how they can report abuse or neglect, she also offers voter registration forms. Last month, she helped a veteran with a traumatic brain injury fill out change-of-address paperwork so he could vote in the upcoming midterm elections. “He 100% knew who he wanted to vote for,” Miller said, but he struggled to write with a pen.

Congress funds her organization’s efforts to ensure that even people who might not have access to the internet or transportation have the opportunity to participate in elections.

Now a White House proposal threatens that work. 

The White House Office of Management and Budget wants to change spending rules to prohibit anyone from using federal grant money for voter registration drives or what it vaguely calls “related activities.” The office is headed by Russell Vought, who has long criticized the use of taxpayer money for voter registration efforts and who more recently used his position to cancel, freeze or redirect vast amounts of federal funding in defiance of Congress’ orders.

Miller, who has worked at her nonprofit for six years, said she’s never faced regulators wanting to impede her work.

“Shutting that down and making it more difficult for these Americans to access the ballot box is bewildering to me,” she said. 

The proposal is part of the Trump administration’s broader assault on federal efforts to expand access to voting, especially among groups that have historically faced discrimination and disenfranchisement. 

President Donald Trump has championed the SAVE America Act, a bill that would require people to provide documents proving their citizenship when registering to vote, and that may require everyone to deliver that proof in person, which would effectively end voter registration drives. 

Last year, the Trump administration banned nongovernmental organizations from conducting registration drives at naturalization ceremonies, though the agency temporarily lifted the ban amid litigation over the policy change. The Department of Education also sent a letter to colleges and universities stating that they could not use federal work-study dollars to support voting-related work. (The directive has been contested.) Previously, those funds were used to pay students who had part-time jobs to conduct voter registration on campus and in neighboring communities.

And on the first day of Trump’s second term, the president rescinded an executive order signed by Joe Biden that had directed federal agencies to expand opportunities for registration. Biden’s order acknowledged that some Americans, including Black citizens and people with disabilities, face historic and ongoing barriers to voting access. 

Neither Vought nor his office responded to ProPublica’s questions about the proposed change. But in a letter sent to state officials in 2022, he condemned Biden’s executive order as a “power grab” that would “increase voter registration and turnout, especially among Democratic Party supporters.” 

Vought’s proposed change, which wouldn’t go into effect until after the 2026 midterms, could have ramifications for the next presidential election well beyond voting accessibility. 

Nonprofits that receive government funds to help people sign up for Medicaid benefits, food stamps or other programs subject to the National Voter Registration Act are required to provide registration forms and help people fill them out. Like Disability Rights Nebraska, these groups would be caught between contradictory federal directives if the proposed ban is finalized.

Thousands more nonprofits receive federal funds for other services but provide voter outreach using private donations. Nonprofit experts said the confusion over which groups the ban affects and the burden of proving an organization is in compliance could lead many to pause or curb registration efforts ahead of the 2028 election. Colleges and universities that help students navigate registering to vote while away from home could be similarly affected.

But it is nonprofits like Disability Rights Nebraska and the people they serve that will be among the most directly hit.

“I don’t really think this rule had in mind that we are going to disenfranchise voters with disabilities. But it’s going to have that kind of effect,” said Rabia Belt, a Stanford law professor who’s an expert on disability and citizenship. 

In 2002, Congress helped tackle the challenges people with disabilities face in voting when it passed the Help America Vote Act. The legislation was designed to upgrade states’ voting systems and improve security in the wake of the controversial 2000 election, when close results in Florida triggered a recount, followed by lawsuits that ultimately ended with a U.S. Supreme Court decision that led to George W. Bush being declared the winner. 

The Help America Vote Act, signed by Bush, created grants to assist people with disabilities in registering to vote, casting their ballots and accessing polling places. That funding continues to this day. In recent years, Congress has budgeted $10 million a year, which is spread among 57 nonprofit groups that together cover every state as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Native American communities and U.S. territories. 

That funding has narrowed the gap in casting ballots between those with disabilities and those without, according to an April 2024 report from Rutgers University’s Program for Disability Research that was written for the Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan panel that helps implement the reforms put in place by the Help America Vote Act. 

But challenges persist when it comes to voter registration. During the 2024 election, 3.6% of registered voters with disabilities reported difficulties with registering, compared to 1.4% of registered voters without disabilities, according to survey data from Rutgers. That gap may sound small, but it is statistically significant and represents the experiences of about 740,000 registered voters with disabilities, said Douglas Kruse, one of the Rutgers professors who compiled the survey. 

The draft version of the OMB proposal was published in May. It is part of an extensive attempt to remake the rules governing federal grants. Once OMB’s final rule is released, it will almost certainly be subject to litigation. Legal experts said some lawsuits will likely focus on how the rule contradicts existing laws and policies, like the grants that were enshrined in the 2002 law and repeatedly approved by Congress.

Samuel Bagenstos, who served as general counsel of the OMB for part of Biden’s administration, said the proposal disregards how the Constitution gives Congress the “power of the purse.” The legislative branch sets the budget and gives dozens of federal agencies instructions on distributing those funds; the agencies create detailed policies to select grant applicants and get the money out the door.

Vought understands that federal funding provides a tool to consolidate power into the White House, said Bagenstos, who is now a law professor at the University of Michigan, specializing in disability and appropriations law. 

“This is not even a surgical power grab,” he said. “It’s just a massive across-the-board power grab.”

Disability Rights Nebraska was awarded $141,000 in voter accessibility funds this year. When the organization heard about the proposed rule, it submitted a public comment in opposition. Such a change “would affect the ability of nonprofits such as ours to conduct” voter registration drives, which are “an invaluable service to Nebraskans with disabilities who are otherwise locked out of the voting experience,” the group wrote. 

The organization’s work is strictly nonpartisan as mandated by law, the letter said. During a visit in June to a rural assisted living facility, the group wrote, 30% of the new voters its staff helped register identified as Republican, 20% as Democrat and 50% as nonpartisan or affiliated with a third party.

To ensure their drives are nonpartisan, Miller said she and her colleagues conduct the work in pairs, with each person representing a different party, as required by law. 

Many of the residents she speaks with are essentially cloistered, Miller said. 

She recalled one visit to a rural assisted living facility in early 2024. The community is so small it doesn’t have a library or a gas station. The nearest election commissioner’s office is a 30-minute drive away. 

Disability Rights Nebraska had put up a poster inside the building, listing key facts about voting access for people with disabilities. At one point, Miller said, a young man in a baggy T-shirt pointed at the poster. “Is this true?” He asked her. 

Yes, she told him.

“So I could register?”

“You can,” Miller said. “Do you want to register?”

He did. Miller said he knew what party he wanted to register with, though she declined to identify the party publicly or give personal details about him to respect his privacy. She said he told her he had lived at the home for a couple of years and this was the first time someone had offered to walk him through the registration process.

Miller said she wished the politicians making rules about voting rights could witness such moments.

“If I could just bring a politician with me to stand in the front hall of a nursing home” and see how people react when they realize they can vote again, she said. “I wish they could see that and realize how important the work is.”

The post “A Massive Power Grab”: White House Proposal Threatens Funding That Helps Disabled Americans Vote appeared first on ProPublica.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court blocked an executive order from President Donald Trump restricting voting by mail in ways that could have thrown the upcoming midterms into chaos. But the White House originally had far more disruptive plans, ProPublica has learned. 

According to several people knowledgeable about the discussions, the administration initially floated an idea that would have virtually shut down mail voting: requiring all ballots to be delivered exclusively through certified mail. The proposal — which would have required voters to be home and sign for delivery of their ballots — was ultimately abandoned, after vehement Postal Service objections that it would have been impossible to execute. 

Even after the idea fizzled, Postal Service officials were cut out of crucial conversations as the Trump administration moved forward with what became the final executive order, two people familiar with the matter said. Issued in March, its contents came as a shock even to the Postal Service’s lawyers.

Trump’s order would have forced postal workers to serve as gatekeepers, deciding which ballots would be delivered and which wouldn’t. Beyond that, it would have inexplicably handed authority over the plan’s execution to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has no formal oversight over the Postal Service. 

Inside the Postal Service, which is overseen by a bipartisan Board of Governors, deliberations on whether to comply with the order stretched on for weeks. Some board members found it alarming but feared Trump would respond to a direct challenge by trying to fire them, sources familiar with their concerns told ProPublica. Instead, they remained silent, counting on the courts to block the measure. 

“The board was being careful how or when it took action, knowing that it might be its last action,” one source said. 

ProPublica previously detailed postal officials’ deep concerns with the Trump order. Now our reporting reveals how the order came to be and who was involved in crafting it, as well as the extent to which the White House tried to dictate how mail-in ballots would be processed.

The White House team leading the mail-in voting discussions included J. Brian Sikma, a special presidential assistant who has been involved in other administration election initiatives, including identifying noncitizen voters for prosecution and seeking to ban voting machines. (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The commerce secretary, Lutnick, served in “an advisory and coordination capacity” in drafting the order, a department spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica.

“President Trump values Secretary Lutnick’s advice on many matters,” the spokesperson said.

In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis denied the administration had interfered improperly with the Postal Service, an independent agency whose governance structure is specifically designed to protect it from political influence. She said the executive order “added important safeguards to vote-by-mail. These were commonsense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and to ensure only Americans vote in American elections.” 

Bis also rejected the idea that the certified-mail proposal was “unworkable,” saying this played no part in the administration’s decision “to go in another direction.”

A Postal Service spokesperson declined to comment on the agency’s internal deliberations about the executive order and said it was the Board of Governors’ policy not to discuss them.

He referred ProPublica to an earlier statement by Postmaster General David Steiner that said: “Postal employees take great pride in their responsibility to support the democratic process. We will continue to approach that responsibility with the care, professionalism, and dedication that voters and election officials expect from the United States Postal Service.”

In an interview, Jonathan Smith, president of the American Postal Workers Union, called the Trump administration’s push to revamp mail voting problematic and baseless. 

“The ultimate goal was to create chaos and doubt in the vote-by-mail process,” he said. “You’re creating a rule to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.” 

The White House first reached out to the Postal Service in the fall of 2025, saying the administration wanted to explore how to improve mail voting. 

Trump has long claimed without evidence that mail voting is riddled with fraud, though he frequently votes by mail himself. He’s said the process is “inherently corrupt” and contributed to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

Postal Service leaders responded to the administration’s late 2025 overture with recommendations they had been making to local election officials for years. Nearly a third of all ballots in the 2022 and 2024 elections were cast through the mail. Mostly, independent audits showed, the system worked reliably. But at times, ballots got lost or delayed. 

Officials with the Postal Service had long wanted election offices to use standardized ballot envelopes with scannable barcodes, logos and other features that would make it easier to separate election mail from other first-class mail. In 2024, a bipartisan bill to turn those recommendations into requirements stalled in the Senate.

When Trump retook the Oval Office, it soon became obvious the White House had other ideas, including requiring ballots to be sent by certified mail.

Doing this could, in theory, erase some security concerns, but local governments would have to pay a higher fee to send each envelope and postal workers would have to conduct millions of identity checks, crippling timely delivery. 

“It was just, for many reasons, a terrible idea,” one top Postal Service official said.

The White House backed down, but when the final order was unveiled, postal officials said they were surprised to see it demanded that they implement the envelope changes and ballot-tracking measures they’d recommended in time for the midterms.

The directive also required states to provide the Postal Service with lists of eligible mail voters, which workers would then try to match with ballots before sending them out. Designing a new ballot-tracking system would normally take about a year, postal officials said.

They were particularly concerned with the order’s requirement that Postal Service workers reject ballots for an array of reasons, ranging from outdated voter information to unscannable bar codes. All mail ballots from a state could be rejected if the state refused to provide its voter list. 

“That’s not what we do,” a former official involved with the discussions said. “We deliver mail. We don’t decide what goes and what doesn’t.”

Postal Service officials were taken aback that the final order put Lutnick in charge of coordinating with other agencies and the postmaster general in “effectuating all relevant aspects of the implementation.”

Lutnick’s involvement came after Trump had discussed putting the Postal Service under the Commerce Department. At Lutnick’s February 2025 swearing-in, Trump said he thought Lutnick’s “great business instinct” was just what the Postal Service needed. (The postal board fought back, and Trump’s idea of merging the agency into the Commerce Department is apparently no longer on the table.)

Almost immediately after the executive order became public, four separate lawsuits challenging it were filed by states led by Democrats and political and civil rights groups. Democratic members of Congress and postal union leaders urged the Postal Service and its Board of Governors, which had long defended the agency’s independence, to resist. A June 2026 Supreme Court decision allowing Trump to remove leaders of many agencies long considered independent gave the governors pause, however.

Steiner, appointed at Trump’s behest in mid-2025, directed Postal Service leaders to prepare to implement the order. In public statements, he defended the measure and said he would leave it for the courts to decide. At his direction, postal officials began establishing procedures to comply with Trump’s order. 

As they started to craft rules, career postal officials, concerned about voter privacy and disenfranchising legitimate voters, attempted to do as little as they could to comply, three people knowledgeable about their deliberations said. They looked for ways to protect workers from having to step out of their traditional lanes.

For example, they proposed having states turn over their voter lists but not requiring Postal Service workers to use them to decide which ballots to send out. When the Postal Service’s lawyer took the idea to the White House counsel, however, it was rebuffed as “not enough,” the former official said.

Read More

New Mail Voting Rules Moved Forward Despite USPS Officials’ Concerns About Mass Disenfranchisement

The White House team made clear that if even one ballot envelope in a batch mailing didn’t match the state list, the entire mailing should be rejected and election officials should be notified. “That means if four addresses don’t align in a mailing of one million, 999,996 other people don’t get their ballot tomorrow,” the former official said.

As ProPublica has reported, staffers found these issues highly troubling. A whistleblower complaint released in August warned that the system designed to carry out the executive order was rushed into being, untested and error-prone. 

The final rule — 95 pages spelling out how the agency would carry out Trump’s order — was issued on Aug. 21, less than a month before the first mail ballots were due to go out.

It left many questions unanswered: How would lists of voters be kept updated? How would the Postal Service ensure local officials were able to upload voter information to the agency’s new portal? How could postal officials approve the new ballot envelope designs required by nearly 10,000 voting jurisdictions in just weeks? 

“This was going to be a disaster,” the former postal official said.

The Sept. 14 Supreme Court ruling provided a reprieve, but Smith, the postal union president, criticized agency leadership for not stepping in more forcefully. Counting on the courts to halt the order, said Smith, was “a dangerous calculation, and showed a clear lack of courage and integrity.”

The post The Untold Origins of Trump’s Plan to Sharply Restrict Mail-In Voting appeared first on ProPublica.

An Arizona congresswoman has proposed three bills that would fund literacy classes, dual language programs and training for teachers of students learning English in the state, hoping to remedy gaps highlighted by Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica.

Rep. Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat, filed the bills Sept. 16, the same day Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica reported that the state had lowered the score students need to pass its English proficiency test. Experts warned the change will push thousands of students out of language services before they know English well enough to succeed in school. Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a Republican longtime defender of Arizona’s English-only policies, approved the change.

Grijalva’s Reaching English Learners Act would create competitive grants of up to five years for colleges that partner with high-need school districts or early childhood programs to train teachers to lead classrooms of English learners. It gives preference to programs that recruit teacher candidates who were once English learners or come from underrepresented groups. Colleges would pay at least half the cost of the training. The bill does not specify a cost for the program.

A spokesperson for Grijalva said she had previously drafted the bills but noted that Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica’s reporting underscored why federal support is needed to improve English learning.

In a statement to the news organizations, Grijalva said, “Superintendent Horne’s mismanagement of the misguided ‘English-only’ model underscores the need for real federal support for English learners, educators, and their families, which is exactly what my legislation would provide. Instead of repeating the mistakes of the past by simply making the English proficiency test easier to pass, we should give students the resources and support they need to actually succeed in the classroom, including through supporting bilingual education.”

Horne disputed Grijalva’s characterization, arguing that the English-only model is superior to bilingual education. “To put bilingual education in schools is to sacrifice the students to dogma and condemn them to not learn English properly, which negatively will affect their future academic endeavors and their hope for good jobs in the economy,” Horne told the news organizations.

The state Department of Education has previously defended its decision to make it easier to pass the test by saying it first administered the exam to 600 native English speakers to set a baseline for the changes. The department skipped this step in 2020, when it made the last major change to the test, officials noted.

As the news organizations reported, after the state lowered the score needed to pass the fluency test, the statewide pass rate, known as the reclassification rate, jumped to 26% in 2026, from 12% the year before. Of the nearly 113,000 students who took the exam, about 30,000 were classified as proficient and removed from English-language services this school year.

Proposition 203, which Arizona voters approved in 2000, established the state’s English-only policies. Students learning English spend two to four hours a day in separate English instruction until they pass a test showing they’re fluent enough to learn in a mainstream classroom.

Past attempts by the state to reclassify large numbers of children learning English as fluent prompted federal investigations. The government alleged that placing such students in classrooms where they struggled because they lacked knowledge of English violated their civil and educational rights. Arizona agreed to a settlement more than a decade ago to resolve the matter.

Grijalva proposed two other bills to aid English learning and literacy.

One of the measures, the Families Learning and Understanding English Together Act, would authorize $75 million a year from 2027 through 2031 for family literacy programs. Head Start programs, school districts, adult education providers and nonprofits could apply for grants of $150,000 to $1 million a year to teach English and literacy to young children and their caregivers together. To qualify, programs would have to serve areas where English learners are a majority, or growing share, of students at local schools.

The Supporting Young Language Learners’ Access to Bilingual Education Act, would fund dual-language immersion programs for children from low-income families from preschool through fifth grade. Students in those programs would learn in English and a second language and would use the second language for at least half the school day. The bill would authorize $15 million for 2027 and unspecified amounts in the following four years.

Since Democrats do not have a majority in either house of Congress, the bills do not stand much of a chance this year.

The post Arizona Lawmaker Proposes More Federal Support for English Fluency Services appeared first on ProPublica.

This past weekend marked the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene, which claimed more than 250 lives — 108 in North Carolina — and left hundreds of thousands of people without power for days to weeks. In Asheville, the largest city in the western part of the state, the storm left residents without drinking water for 53 days.

Part of what made the storm so devastating to the region when it hit, 400 miles inland from where it made landfall, is that the Appalachian Mountains’ typically porous soils were already saturated by recent rainfall. The rainwater hit bedrock and raced down steep mountain slopes like water on a slide. It overran the banks of normally shallow creeks and rivers, carrying the earth above it. One in 4 of those who died from the storm in North Carolina did so because of mud and landslides. 

I’m a reporter with the North Carolina online magazine The Assembly, and my stories have also covered natural disasters in California, Arizona and Texas, where I was a data reporter on ProPublica and The Texas Tribune’s investigative team. In my recent story for The Assembly and ProPublica, I wrote about how a gap in federal flood policy is putting mobile home residents in harm’s way again and again, allowing people in North Carolina to move onto the same lots where homes previously washed away. 

Joe Rogers moved into a riverfront mobile home park in Haywood County in 2006, his front door less than 100 feet from the river’s banks. At the time, the flood maps showed that the land the park sat on was at risk but didn’t have his home in the 100-year floodplain, which would have required expensive elevation. The lot was empty, and at $200 a month, the rent was affordable. Rogers reckoned he had at least 40 years until another storm came around. 

In 2021, the park was hit by a tropical storm, and the river rose a couple of inches into the home of Rogers and his wife, Sandra. When firefighters knocked on their door in the middle of the night in 2024, the couple figured Helene would play out like the last storm. Instead, the frigid, muddy river water rose from ankle deep to chest high in under an hour. Neighbors helped Joe escape, but before he could get Sandra out, the river lifted the home off its foundation and drove it downstream. Sandra’s body was found five days later, about 15 miles down river.

It wasn’t the first time that floodwaters destroyed homes at that park. In 2004, Hurricane Frances brought torrential rainfall to Western North Carolina. From his home on the park’s hillside, Dave Masters could see his father’s mobile home surrounded by water. Masters forced his then 63-year-old dad to leave, and the two watched as the river pried the home loose and drove it down the street like a car, where it crashed into a telephone pole before getting stuck under a bridge.

When the county sought properties to buy out to reduce the future risk to life and property after the 2004 floods, it bought out a home across the river but not the mobile home park. New residents moved into harm’s way. 

Asked why residents are again allowed to live by the river, Haywood County’s current recovery officer told us he “did not know it was even possible” to buy out a mobile home park. Small counties like Haywood often look to the state for direction. North Carolina Emergency Management, which reviews buyout applications, said buying out a park is no different from commercial or residential properties, and put the onus on the property owners to participate in the program and work with the local government. The park’s current owners did not respond to our questions.

Allowing people to continue to live in locations with severe and repeated flooding is one of several weaknesses reporters at ProPublica have identified while investigating deadly floods.

When it comes to updating floodplain maps, government agencies have prioritized coastal areas, as they often have large populations that can experience complex storm surges and sea level rise, said John Dorman, the retired director of North Carolina Floodplain Mapping Program. 

Many inland areas are still operating with their original flood maps from the 1970s or ’80s. In rural places that have experienced population growth and development since then, the maps don’t account for the way these places have changed. New homes, for example, take up valuable areas where floodwater is supposed to run, displacing water not unlike what happens when adding an ice cube to a glass of water. 

In North Carolina, my reporting shows what can happen when cash-strapped local governments adopt the minimum federal floodplain regulations, which allow campers to reside in floodplains and enable recreational vehicles to park in locations where they would never approve homes at ground level.

At the park where the Rogerses lived, five campers now sit on riverfront lots where mobile homes were anchored into the soil until Helene hit. 

Weaknesses in flood policy revealed themselves in the Texas Hill Country, too, when floods claimed more than 130 lives over the July 4 weekend in 2025. The majority of the people who died in the 2025 Central Texas floods were in places identified as flood-prone by the federal government, our analysis showed.  

The Hill Country floods highlighted issues about missed evacuation orders and the need for robust emergency action plans. In the months that followed, the Association of State Floodplain Managers developed model ordinances that require annual permits for campgrounds in floodplains, updated emergency plans and restrictions on building floodways. 

Chad Berginnis, the director of the ASFM, likened the minimum federal requirements to a standard recipe and said states can do more. He told me how the state of Wisconsin requires anyone who seeks to even move dirt in the floodway to have an engineer certify that it won’t raise the flood level.

Texas has more structures in flood-prone areas than any state besides Florida, according to a nationwide structure analysis by ProPublica and the Tribune. The Texas Legislature has repeatedly failed to pass bills that would allow local leaders to curb potentially unsafe development, the two newsrooms found. Without major changes, that means the same federal, state and local rules that allowed residents to live near the Guadalupe River are allowing many of them to rebuild there after the floods. 

As the Tribune’s Emily Foxhall reported, Joan Connor and David Stearns were one couple who were determined to get back in their home after surviving the 2025 floods by clinging to their pergola. With help from volunteers who repaired the storm damage and donated furniture, they were home by Christmas. It took less than a year for their home to fill with water again. They still plan to repair the house. 

Likewise, in Western North Carolina’s Haywood and Buncombe counties, residents are going back to the same locations that were destroyed by storms, including the lot where Rogers lost everything during Helene. Rogers wonders how the local and federal government can keep allowing people to live in harm’s way. 

“Ain’t that the definition of insanity: keep doing the same thing, hoping for a different result?” Rogers said. “They’re going to — I hope none of them does, you know — lose a spouse and everything that they own.”

The post Two Years After Hurricane Helene, People Are Still Allowed to Live in Harm’s Way appeared first on ProPublica.

It was late May, the French Open was on and DraftKings was pushing me into the action.

A promotion pinged on my phone. “BET & GET,” it boomed, offering to boost my profits if I threw down on tennis, punctuating the point with a cartoon stack of cash. I was already in the middle of a two-hour betting spree, ripping 64 wagers on the clay courts of Paris from my office chair in New York City.

A $75 bet that Claire Liu would win the fifth point of her first set tiebreak against Maria Sakkari? Wrong. How about an easy $300 on Francisco Comesana to win the first game of the second set against Luciano Darderi? Negativo. 

I’ll be the first to admit that my backhand needs some work. But this wasn’t about sports. It was about scratching an itch.

For the past six weeks, I’d been gambling like a man out of control, testing the guardrails of one of America’s most popular — and controversial — products: online sports betting. I’d morphed from a prudent, just-for-fun $40 bettor into a “degen” (sports betting slang for a degenerate gambler) who casually yeets $1,500 on a game. I’d feverishly jumped from sport to sport, following playoff basketball bets with live Czech table tennis. And I’d gone hog wild at the online casino, doubling down at the blackjack table. Most of the time, I’d lost — then chased those losses with more bets. Now, I was in the grips of yet another binge.

And as I approached $4,500 in losses in 24 hours, transferring money from my bank directly into my DraftKings account, the company seemed to clock the problem, sending me an in-app notification.

“Take a loss? Now take a beat,” it read. This felt right after the tear I’d been on. To date I’d blown about $12,500 in total on DraftKings. That’s the equivalent of six months of mortgage payments in as many weeks.

I followed the prompt to the site’s “responsible gaming” center, where I opted to limit myself to just two hours per day on the app and barred myself from depositing more than $100 in a 24-hour period. That pause is an essential part of DraftKings’ seemingly paradoxical business model — to make as much money as possible from the nation’s growing ranks of sports bettors without encouraging gambling addiction. The company says these limits are a cornerstone of that strategy. 

Yet 30 minutes later, the company pushed me in the other direction. My phone buzzed with the first of four promotional alerts that day. Betting opportunities, they said, were waiting.

This wink-and-a-nod dynamic is now at the center of a fierce public policy debate over online gambling, addiction and consumer protection.

Since 2018, when the Supreme Court allowed states to legalize sports betting, Americans have put more than $600 billion into play. Sports betting is now legal in 39 states and Washington, D.C. Add in prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, and more people are betting on sports than ever before.  

That explosive growth has come with consequences: About a quarter of active sportsbook account holders surveyed by the Siena Research Institute this year said that they’d lost enough on a bet that they’d have trouble meeting their financial obligations. As a result, regulators and lawmakers from Colorado to Massachusetts are starting to question whether things have gone too far — and some are now proposing stricter consumer protections.

Amid the mounting scrutiny, major operators like DraftKings have pushed back, arguing that their responsible gaming system provides adequate safeguards to protect their customers from spiraling out of control. “I think as a business, as an industry, we’re doing a good job of educating people, of raising awareness, of making tools and resources available, of monitoring accounts,” Lori Kalani, the company’s chief responsible gaming officer, told me. If a customer waves too many red flags, she said, the company will proactively close the account. But when I asked how often this actually happens, DraftKings wouldn’t say. 

So I decided to find out for myself: If I bet like a compulsive gambler, would DraftKings stop me — even if it cost the company money?

I opened an account under my own name and linked it to my debit card. ProPublica bankrolled me. When the app asked me what I did for a living, I disclosed that I was a reporter. I assembled a panel of addiction specialists, recovering gambling addicts and professional sports bettors who pointed me to the telltale wagering habits of someone who’s out of control. And then I got to work.

Over the next 10 weeks, I’d mimic those patterns and come to find out just how much DraftKings would encourage my recklessness — and just how little pushback I’d get as I spiraled downward.

I used the NBA playoffs as my launching pad, and, like much of New York, I was all in on the Knicks. After a week of moderate betting, I waved my first red flag during Game 3 of the Knicks vs. Atlanta Hawks first-round series.

I slept fitfully after my night of loss chasing and awoke at dawn to catch a train to Boston, where I attended a symposium on online gambling put on by the Public Health Advocacy Institute at the Northeastern University School of Law. 

There, Matthew Gaskell, a British psychologist and expert on gambling addiction, said that the bettors that companies are most interested in are, well, losers like me. Indeed, a modest set of very active losers account for a substantial amount of sportsbooks’ revenue, he said. (A 2024 study out of Connecticut found that 1.8% of problem gamblers in the state accounted for 51% of sports betting revenue.) And the companies have created sophisticated technology products designed to squeeze maximum engagement out of them, just as social media companies like Meta did years earlier with users of Facebook and Instagram, added Darragh McGee, a researcher at the University of Bath.

In fact, as The New York Times reported, DraftKings employs machine learning and data scientists to identify losing customers and entice them with promotions to keep them going — even if those are exactly the kinds of customers at risk of becoming addicts. DraftKings told the newspaper its promotions are geared toward users who spend a lot of time on the app and that the company “rejects any implication that its marketing practices are unfair or improperly targets customers.” 

To keep users loyal, the major operators offer VIP programs, not unlike what airlines or rental car companies do. As a bettor climbs the tiers, the perks get bigger and better, from free bets and swag to primo seats at games, fancy dinners and even concert tickets. A FanDuel VIP in Pennsylvania received a personalized video message from MLB slugger Bryce Harper.  

I wanted to be a VIP. I wanted cool perks. 

To help get that status, I’d tapped the skills of Isaac Rose-Berman, a precocious 26-year-old professional sports bettor and policy expert at the American Institute for Boys and Men, a think tank that focuses on policy issues impacting dudes. He had a hunch that by chasing losses and displaying other signs of problem gambling I’d eventually get an invite. We just didn’t know when it would come — or how much it would cost. 

It happened sooner than either of us thought. 

At 5:01 p.m. the day after I lost nearly $1,800 on basketball in one night, during the closing remarks of the gambling addiction symposium, an email popped into my inbox. “Welcome to the DraftKings VIP Showcase,” the subject line read. I couldn’t believe it. My night of loss chasing was being rewarded. 

The VIP showcase is basically a three-week tryout. Every week I’d get a new promotion as the company sussed me out to make sure that I was worthy of the title. It wanted to know whether I was actually a big spender, aka a whale, or a wolf in sheep’s clothing — a pro bettor, like Rose-Berman, who, armed with math, can beat the house more often than most by exploiting mispriced odds. Bettors like these, known in the business as sharps, calculate savvy wagers that have as much to do with sports knowledge as with probability. The apps do not like losing money to them and so limit how much they can bet. 

For long-term losers like me, though, those limits don’t apply. I’m not a sharp. I’m a square.

And when I read the fine print of the VIP loyalty program, I was floored to see the incentive structure laid out so plainly: The more I spent on long-odds wagers, the quicker I’d accumulate the credits I needed to advance from tier to tier — from bronze, to silver, to gold, to diamond, to Onyx — and thus get closer to the cool perks I so desired. The upshot? Full send every time, baby! 

Before I could get started though, I encountered my first in-app responsible gaming prompt since I began betting.

In just over a week, I’d gambled away roughly what a minimum-wage worker in New York City earns in a month by chasing my losses and repeatedly tapping my bank account. But the notice wasn’t served to me because of how I’d been betting. It was sent because when New York lawmakers legalized mobile sports betting in 2023, they required the apps to notify users when they hit $2,500 in total deposits. 

The law also requires sportsbooks like DraftKings to submit a “problem-gaming plan” to the state regulator but leaves the specifics of it up to the companies. The plan must include, among other things, procedures “for identifying users with suspected or known problem-gaming behavior” and for “providing information to users concerning problem-gaming identification and resources.” But the exact details are unclear because such plans are not publicly available. (A DraftKings spokesperson wouldn’t provide a copy, and my request for it under the state’s open records law with the gaming commission is under review.)  

The app’s response to my $2,500 in deposits was tepid. With a click I could either set limits on my betting or avoid doing so altogether. Eager to gamble, I clicked “I Understand” and moved on. That was it, warning resolved. I got on the horn with my panel of experts to map out the next phase of my experiment. It was time to up the ante.

One of my advisers, Joshua Grubbs, who studies gambling disorders at the University of New Mexico, said he’d expect to see someone on my trajectory pick up the frequency of his betting, have longer sessions on the app, jump from sport to sport in search of fast action and start experimenting with more exotic betting products, like parlays and prop bets.  

OK, I said. Let’s rip some parlays.

Parlays link multiple events into a single wager, drastically decreasing the likelihood of all parts happening while simultaneously increasing the potential payout. They’re enticing, aspirational bets. And, Grubbs was quick to remind me, they’re known by another name: a sucker’s bet. 

DraftKings heavily promotes parlays, offering “profit boosts” that juice their potential payouts. 

The companies say these bets make watching a game more fun and exciting. They’re a reason to tune in, and hang on, if you’re not otherwise interested in whatever’s on TV. 

Do enough parlays, though, and you become seduced by what’s known as the “near miss” effect — a psychological phenomenon in which your brain basically tricks you into thinking you’ve got skill after almost winning. 

Mathematically, however, you’re actually four times more likely to get three out of four legs of a parlay, for example, than all four. Yet every time I got close, I wondered if maybe I just needed to tweak my formula, even as my rational brain recognized that I couldn’t hit a parlay to save my life.

Prop bets play on a different dynamic in your brain. They are wagers on a player’s stats or a specific event within a game that’s divorced from the overall outcome. Among the most controversial forms is the microbet, which offers very fast action — who will win the next point in a tennis match, will the next pitch be a strike. Another one of my consultants, Natasha Schull, an anthropologist at New York University and the author of “Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas,” said microbetting is as close as you can get in sports betting to playing slots, widely considered to be one of the most addictive forms of gambling.

So I followed Grubbs’ and Schull’s advice to escalate my risk-taking as I bet from my living room couch.

Betting on the couch was fun enough, but I was itching to feel what it was like to have money riding on a game being played right in front of me. So in early May, when my neighbor and I went to see the Yankees play, I decided to give betting IRL a try. 

It’s hard to overstate how heavy-handed the sports betting messaging in Yankee Stadium is. When I went to get a hot dog, there were ads from DraftKings’ chief rival, FanDuel, on the monitors that displayed the menus. 

I settled into my seat, cracked a cold one and logged into DraftKings. It was time for more microbets. When Yankees shortstop José Caballero was up in the fifth inning, I bet $50 that he’d either get a hit or take a ball on his third pitch. I was right! Easiest $95 I’d ever made. 

So I kept going — with less success. 

I lost $50 on the next pitch to Caballero, then I went 0-5 at $20 a pop trying to guess what Baltimore Orioles center fielder Leody Taveras would do from the box during his third plate appearance. I’d managed to squander my payday in just a couple of minutes. 

Schull told me that since there’s so little lag time between placing your wager and getting your result, you can quickly get into a flow of submitting and repeating bets — exactly the kind of trance she observed in gambling addicts pulling slot machine levers. The result, obviously, is that it’s very easy to lose a lot very quickly. 

I’d soon find out that DraftKings knows this, too, though its take on microbetting was far less full of doomerism.

Three days after the Yankees game, on May 7, following yet even more parlay losses, the company served me a “responsible gaming” pop-up video — the first I’d been served in the app since the New York-mandated one on April 25.

“Took a loss? Now take a beat,” it read, directing me on how to visit the “My Stat Sheet” page on the app, where I could set a budget or impose limits on my ability to spend. I clicked “Maybe Later,” and the interruption was over.

But DraftKings’ apparent concern for my well-being was belied by a promotion the company sent me just hours later: A 20% profit BOOST on bets of up to $250 for an unlimited number of live microbets on baseball plate appearances. This was exactly the kind of bet that had led me to lose so quickly at the ballpark. Now the company was encouraging me to run it back at even bigger dollar amounts for as many times as I wanted until the promotion expired later that day. “Bet, settle, repeat!” read the push notification that popped up on my phone. I could practically hear the crank of a slot machine lever.

When I described this bet-pause-promote progression to Kalani, DraftKings’ responsible gaming chief, she told me she’d “take that back” to her team for review but added, “I just don’t think we should be drawing broad conclusions from, you know, your single account, what you did.”

A few days later, exactly two weeks after my first big night of loss chasing during the Knicks game, I was formally accepted into the VIP program and assigned my very own, personal concierge. It had taken only three weeks and $5,800 in deposits on the app. My rep said he’d be “keeping an eye out for opportunities and perks tailored specifically” to my account, plus “reminders about Responsible Gaming.” 

I could text him directly. I could reach out for special treatment. Rose-Berman explained to me that this meant I could ask for “bonus bets,” free one-time bets using house money, or, more commonly, “deposit matches,” extra house money called DK Dollars, that fattened up my account when I made a transfer from my bank. He said that sportsbooks are happy to provide these freebies to losers like me because they’ve assessed, rightly, that we’re likely to end up gambling it right back — and that the special treatment will keep us loyal. I’d be earning crowns that I could convert to DK Dollars as I climbed the tiers of the loyalty program, which I could use to bet more or buy merch. I couldn’t help but hope that I’d also get the really cool stuff. A personalized video from a major leaguer? Tickets to a game? Swag?

My rapid ascent to VIP at DraftKings made me wonder how its major competitor, FanDuel, would handle a problem gambler like me. So I repeated the behavior there, placing the same kinds of bets at the same odds over the course of a week on their app.

One night I blew $529 on playoff basketball bets and then chased my losses with a $750 wager on professional hockey, backing the Minnesota Wild in a high-scoring matchup against the Colorado Avalanche. When the Avs won and my money was gone, I found the only remaining live action I could: a cricket match between Indonesia and Malaysia.   

Like most Americans, I have no idea what cricket is. But whatever. It was near midnight and this was work, so I deposited $500 and tried to put it all on Malaysia. That bet would’ve netted me $11,000 had Malaysia won, but FanDuel wouldn’t accept it and required me to lower my wager amount. When I later asked the company about this, FanDuel wouldn’t say whether it did so because it didn’t want to lose the money or out of a commitment to responsible gaming. In any event, I put $200 on Malaysia instead and, of course, lost. 

The app also put some speed bumps in my way over the course of that night, prompting me with “Reality Check” reminders six times that showed me the amount of time I’d been on the app and the amount I’d wagered thus far.

And unlike on DraftKings, my weeklong betting behavior on FanDuel didn’t result in a VIP invite. When I reached out to FanDuel for comment, the company touted its responsible gaming tools. A company spokesperson added in a statement that FanDuel’s program is “designed to identify potential risk early and empower customers with real-time information about their play.” For some customers, the statement said, “trained specialists” will intervene “or apply protective measures, including limits or exclusion,” though the company didn’t say how often that happens and what it takes, exactly, to trigger those measures. The New York Times reported that FanDuel is one of several operators that have signed up with third-party firms that help gauge customers’ risk for problem gambling to curb it. DraftKings is not among them but said it has its own tools.

Over on DraftKings, things were heating up. A month into my experiment I’d already lost $4,671 — enough scratch to buy a used car (with a lot of miles) — and my bet size was growing, too. I was getting used to risking large sums. I looked back on how nervous I’d been to place $200 bets when I first started and couldn’t believe that I’d been so naive. 

I’d been wagering so much, in fact, that the quick-tap deposit buttons in the app had increased to $500, $750 and $950, making it even easier to mindlessly transfer large sums from my bank into my DraftKings account.

Computer scientists have a term for this choice of user design: They call it a “dark pattern.” Critics say this is a key way that apps essentially trick you into subscribing to or purchasing things you don’t want or need with just one click.

And boy, was I getting fed opportunities to click. I’d selected the open settings for notifications on DraftKings, and as a result I was just getting pummeled with push alerts to my phone. Sometimes there’d be six in a day, offering BOOSTS. In the app, they’ve even got their own tagline: “BOOSTS DON’T STOP.” 

I was hoping for tickets to a game or swag or anything super cool, but so far my VIP rep had hooked me up with only a 12-month ESPN subscription. That and lots of promotions to bet, at all hours. On Saturday, May 16, as I was getting the kids home from my son’s baseball game, DraftKings pushed me an “Exclusive Offer” to double my winnings on any bet up to $250. I pieced together a parlay on the subway, placing the bet as my service cut in and out.

The Yankees were playing the Mets that night, and Rose-Berman had encouraged me to shoot the moon — to climb the tiers of VIP status — so I strung together a five-leg parlay for the full eligible amount. My payout, highlighted in purple at the bottom of my slip, would be $6,250 if it hit.

The Yankees lost, and I hit only one leg of my parlay. As I nursed my wounds I began to wonder: Would I have spent that $250 but for the promotion?

I promise you I wasn’t trying to lose. Sure, I was firing unlikely bets, but I wanted them to win. If you could lose intentionally then you could win intentionally, and gambling wouldn’t exist. Over time most gamblers lose, and like them my performance was trending southward consistently — and fast. 

But then, heading into Memorial Day weekend, I got on a hot streak. In statistics, this is called variance, but colloquially we refer to it as luck. Over five days, I notched real wins betting serious cash. After winning $3,869 on parlays from a Yankees game and the thrilling double overtime Spurs win in Game 1 of the Western Conference finals against the Oklahoma City Thunder, I almost forgot that, net, I was still down $8,836. And you know what? I felt like Superman. 

To my betting brain, I was flying high. I was hot. I contacted one of my advisers, Rob Minnick, himself a recovering gambling addict who hosts a YouTube channel about problem gambling, and asked what he did after big wins.

He told me to withdraw the deposit I’d made immediately before my hot streak and then bet the winnings left in my DraftKings account with gusto because, hey, it’s just house money.

“I always say on my channel, like all wins are just future losses because when you don’t stop, it eventually gets given back,” he said.

Today, nearly a quarter of all Americans, and half of men ages 18 to 49, say they have an active sportsbook account, according to the Siena Research Institute. And with the advent of prediction markets, millions more are believed to be betting on sports. 

But companies like DraftKings and FanDuel don’t just offer sports action: You can also gamble on casino games like blackjack and roulette in the handful of states where that’s legal. The companies call it iGaming, and they want it to be legal everywhere that sports betting is.

“I do think it’s a when, not if, that a lot of these states are going to legalize iGaming,” DraftKings CEO Jason Robins said at a June investor conference. “Customers want it. The tax revenue potential is real. And so we’re seeing a lot of momentum develop in different states.” 

New York doesn’t permit that kind of gambling, but New Jersey is one of the roughly half dozen states that does. Since I was headed down the shore for Memorial Day weekend and my DraftKings account was flush from playoff basketball betting, it proved to be the perfect opportunity to try out iGaming.

I logged into my account from the beach on May 22 and was hit with a reminder of the app’s responsible gaming suite of tools, including the option to set a budget. I bypassed the prompt with the swipe of a finger, and there, on the main page, was a shortcut straight to the card table.

I explored the expansive casino offerings: I played roulette and tried out blackjack. The cards were dealt on a table that looked straight out of Vegas but for your phone. I didn’t have to think about how much to wager because DraftKings had already done that for me: With the click of a button I could bet as much as $1,000 per hand. And I was struck by how DraftKings cross-promoted iGaming to the sports bettor.

That included “baseball blackjack” and “basketball blackjack” — a regular deck of cards but instead of a felt card table background, there was a baseball diamond or basketball court.

I didn’t think much of that until after I bet on the Knicks and Cavs in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals the next day. At the bottom of the receipt of my bet slip, I noticed for the first time a “Suggested For You” section. Mine advertised baseball blackjack and basketball blackjack. The app was drawing me back to the table.

Not that I needed that hard of a nudge to start playing cards again.

Rose-Berman and I had discussed a strategy for the weekend: To escalate my compulsive betting late into the night, I transitioned from my usual sports fare to even faster, more exotic sports action (read: Czech table tennis) and then, ultimately, to the casino, following the path DraftKings was all but paving for me.

As I devolved in Jersey, Draft Kings promoted me to silver-tier status.

I’d played about 500 rounds of blackjack in a couple of days — accounting for just over half of my total betting activity during 10 weeks on DraftKings. By the end of the holiday weekend, I’d blown close to $3,000 on casino gambling. Before I left the Garden State, I asked my VIP rep whether there was any way to get just the casino stuff off my phone.

Days later he responded, informing me that, no, unfortunately, that wasn’t possible. But he did ask me whether I needed “help with setting in app limits.” I declined the offer. 

DraftKings’ Kalani told me I wasn’t the first user to voice this complaint and said the company was working on allowing customers who’d rather just bet on sports to toggle off the casino on their phone.  

I came away from my betting mania with an overarching takeaway: that the “responsible gaming” prompts that were served to me were no match for the product design pushing me to do more gambling.

While I was fighting off sleep to play cards, DraftKings occasionally threw me some responsible gaming speed bumps. Just before midnight, for example, a “time reminder” popped up on the blackjack table, telling me I’d been on the app for three hours and 45 minutes. 

The pop-ups were barely disruptive: They covered a small part of the screen and could be swept away in a second. The design of the blackjack game, by contrast, facilitated betting big and chasing losses. That’s because DraftKings has made doubling your bet one of the options you’re served in between hands — literally enabling doubling down in a millisecond with the push of a thumb.

Minnick, who, in addition to hosting a YouTube channel on problem gambling, has co-founded a nonprofit industry watchdog that Rose-Berman advises, told me this dynamic pretty much summed up how he has come to understand the industry’s “responsible gaming” approach. 

“It’s like an entire system that’s just built to appear to be doing something good while giving them basically like a free pass to do everything bad by saying, ‘Hey, we told you, you know, you have a responsibility, it’s your fault,’” Minnick said. 

In a statement, DraftKings disputed that characterization, saying that all 5,000-plus of its employees are trained on responsible gaming every year and that it’s “not a side initiative. It is embedded across our business and essential to DraftKings’ long-term sustainability.” 

But either way, Minnick and others said the framework for protecting consumers shouldn’t be entrusted to a publicly traded company that’s driven to grow revenue. “It’s unfair for us to expect or require a private business to do something that goes against its own mission of generating profit, right?” Minnick said. “Well, if you choose the industry standard, it’s going to be the least effective means.”

By late May, according to my expert panel, I was enthusiastically waving all the red flags of a compulsive gambler. Loss chasing? Check. Regular depositing? Yup. Exotic betting products? Lots of ’em. Long hours on the app and bets of increasing size and frequency? Yes and yes. 

Yet the only pushback I got from DraftKings came in the form of responsible gaming prompts that required me to opt in to the app’s tools. The company told me it sent a total of 32 such notices over my 10 weeks of gambling, including emails that every DraftKings customer gets. By my count, I got in-app notifications about my betting on 14 of the 71 days I gambled. 

Kalani, who served as DraftKings’ outside lawyer before becoming its responsible gaming chief, says her 51-person team manually reviews user accounts suspected of problem gambling. But I’d never heard from a single one, and I wondered if it was because I wasn’t compulsive enough.

So to erase any conceivable doubts about my status as a problem gambler, I went full “degen,” as sports bettors say when they’re on a particularly wild tear.

This is the moment that I bet feverishly on the French Open. I was fueled with $1,100 I’d won from my second bet ever, on April 16, a $200 wager on the Knicks to win the Eastern Conference finals. Now, six weeks later, I was compulsively betting on tennis, a sport I’d never bet on before. Once I blew my stack, I went straight to the responsible gaming center to set limits on how much I could deposit and how many hours I could be on the app. 

The company says it doesn’t want there to be a stigma attached to using responsible gaming tools, but instead wants to encourage its users to budget, impose limits and avoid going off the deep end. DraftKings says millions of customers have visited its responsible gaming center, but the little data available publicly suggests only a small percentage opt into these tools.

As of April, just over 8% of active DraftKings users in Massachusetts were using them, a company official told state regulators this summer. This number was trending up, which was a good thing, the official said. 

But when I used the tools, it didn’t take long to see their limitations. Just a half an hour after opting in, I received the first of four push alerts.

When I asked Kalani if the push notifications undermined my efforts to control myself, she dismissed the issue.  

“People use our tools all the time, and they also appreciate being offered the same things other customers are also offered,” she said. “I think they are two very different things.” Besides, she said, those kinds of marketing materials aren’t sent to customers who opt into more severe restrictions, like a “cool-off” period. 

I knew she was right about that from firsthand experience because I’d opted into a three-day cool-off after blowing another couple of grand on tennis to really communicate to DraftKings that I was struggling. 

When you’re cooling off, you literally can’t log in. I’d picked a torturous time to enroll — the NBA Finals were underway as I was headed to a reunion trip with the college bros. I couldn’t have scripted a more stereotypical scenario for betting. The Knicks were playing the Spurs in Game 1, but I couldn’t get in on the action! 

When I emerged from betting purgatory, it did seem like DraftKings had taken its foot off the gas. I wasn’t getting push alerts. Some of the bonus perks the app regularly fed me weren’t available. Even the dark patterns deposit buttons had returned to the default amounts of $10, $20 and $50.

So on June 8, ahead of Game 3 in the Knicks-Spurs series, I texted my VIP host to see what the deal was — and to see how firm the guardrails were. I asked whether I could get some extra DK Dollars in exchange for making a big deposit. I wondered if, given the circumstances, he’d invoke responsible gaming. He responded a day later and initially demurred.

But on the advice of a recovering gambling addict I’d been speaking to, I tried another tactic: asking for a bonus bet — just to remind my rep that I was eager for action.

Not one week after coming off my three-day cool-off, my VIP rep juiced my biggest deposit to date with an extra $1,250 in free DK Dollars.

Kalani told me she didn’t see a problem with this, either. It had been me, after all, and not my host, who first made contact following the cool-off. “At that point, again, you’re a VIP customer, and you’re asking for something that we would give to any customer,” she said.

Overall, “the system worked the way it was supposed to” in my case, Kalani said. The range of behaviors and indicators that DraftKings scans for that trigger closing or manually reviewing an account didn’t ping for me, she said. 

While I often played late into the night, I wasn’t playing in the wee-est hours, between 1:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m., she said.  

I found this response revealing, though perhaps not in the way she’d intended it to be. I’d deposited $21,600 into my account in less than eight weeks, exhibiting just about every sign of compulsive gambling there is, according to my expert consultants. By DraftKings’ metrics, I didn’t even register for a manual review. Kalani had told me that the company was motivated to retain customers who were betting “within their means and can sustain their own entertainment.” 

So I asked Kalani straight up: Does DraftKings ever cut somebody off purely based on their betting history and not because they’ve disclosed that they’ve got a problem? “Yes, we do that all the time,” she told me. She repeated the same answer when I asked her how often. I pressed again, and a spokesperson interjected, telling me he could take the question as a follow-up. I checked in later, but the company told me that “we do not share the specific number of closures.” 

Sportsbooks know how to identify and restrict gamblers’ behavior. In fact, they already do so when it comes to sharp bettors like Rose-Berman. Gaming regulators in Massachusetts who crunched the numbers on this last September found that, on average, just 0.64% of gamblers in the commonwealth were limited as of December 2024 and that, within that group, winning bettors were more likely to have their bet maximums lowered than losers. 

Sportsbooks could do the same to losers who are digging deeper and deeper holes. In fact, the Times reported, data scientists at DraftKings had developed a tool to identify customers who were headed in this direction, but the company didn’t adopt it. Kalani told the Times that DraftKings’ existing system for identifying problem gamblers was a “better methodology.”

As it stands, the current system relies on users to opt into setting responsible gaming tools like budgets or time limits. That model restricts the tools’ utility to those who have the wherewithal to police themselves, said Brianne Doura-Schawohl, a gambling reform advocate who lobbies statehouses to impose stronger consumer and public health protections on behalf of the Campaign for Fairer Gambling. 

To stem the flow of casual money losing and potential addiction, advocates say, the design should be the exact opposite, requiring users to opt out of setting limits, especially since research shows that gambling can impair decision-making.  

The argument about responsible gaming tools, while legitimate, misses an even larger public policy question, Doura-Schawohl added. States that have legalized sports betting derive billions of dollars in revenue from it — even as research shows that gambling disorder diagnoses are skyrocketing in those places. That makes it harder for lawmakers to impose stiffer regulations on specific offerings such as VIP programs or prop bets, like microbets, that are huge sources of revenue for companies and thus state coffers, she said. Other countries have already taken aggressive steps to curb some of the industry’s more problematic products, from marketing practices to advertisements. But in the U.S., the industry has actively opposed proposed reforms in Washington as well as statehouses across the country, and it even seeded a political action committee with $41 million to influence elections this year.

“We want regulations like deposit limits, the reconsideration of microbets. Let’s talk about the inundation of advertising that we’re all sick of,” Doura-Schawohl said. “How do the products themselves impact harm? I think VIP is a big problem with that.”

Midway through June, the unimaginable happened: The Knicks won the NBA championship for the first time in more than half a century.

It’s hard to add anything of substance to the canon of what’s already been written about the historic turn. But what I can say is that from a betting perspective, this was very good for me. My first bet, for $100, was on the Knicks to take home the chip. And ahead of Game 5, I had laid down my biggest bet ever: $10,000 on the Knicks — five times my biggest bet to date. As the city erupted in celebration, my account was as flush as ever, with $25,350. I’d erased all of my previous losses and netted a couple grand in profit.

And as it turns out, I was far from alone. 

In fact, so many New York fans went big that the unlikely win resulted in sportsbook operators reporting a $48.5 million loss for the week ending after the Knicks secured the championship, the first time that’s happened since state lawmakers legalized online sports betting. 

This confusing series of events presented a wrinkle in my experiment: What does the problem gambler who has been a consistent loser do when, by the grace of God, he comes out ahead?  

Minnick, Grubbs and Rose-Berman all had the same answer: He keeps on going. “Congrats on becoming a huge world cup fan,” Minnick texted me. 

It was good timing. The 48-team tournament was a major betting event, with billions wagered on the regulated apps alone. DraftKings was eager to get me into the action. 

For the first time in the 12 days since my cool-off, with my account newly fat with house money, the company turned back on the push notifications notifying me of BOOSTS and betting opportunities. Between 1 p.m. and 8 p.m. on June 16, for example, I got five alerts pushing me to bet. “Defending champs Argentina start their quest for back-to-back glory,” read one. “Can they score 3+ goals vs Algeria (+180)?…” So I threw myself into World Cup betting with enthusiasm. And guess what? I was winning. A lot.

I was up $16,000 on top of my initial investment — astronomical heights. I frankly started to wonder: What if I was really good at this? What if I kept on winning? 

My experts knew better. Winning, and winning big, can actually be dangerous for a problem gambler because it instills in that person a false confidence, a validation of their betting behavior. What I experienced was also a representative snapshot of how it really plays out on a problem gambler’s account.

“Most people’s gambling stories aren’t straight down,” Rose-Berman told me. “The whole point is that so much of the asymmetric downside is caused by the initial upside.”

I had to keep going. I was putting more money than ever into play, placing between $3,000 and $7,000 a day on games, going for lucrative, unlikely parlays. 

Think about that. That’s well above monthly rent for most people. 

But I was hit in the app with responsible gaming prompts on only one of the 10 days that I spent so lavishly on the World Cup, receiving time reminder pop-ups notifying me of how long I’d been on the app, and how much I’d wagered, on June 17. 

In fact, DraftKings was egging me on. Because of my VIP status, I’d been able to bet up to $250 to qualify for a profit BOOST. But as I kept spending more and more, DraftKings lifted the qualifying bet amount from $250 to $500 and even $1,000.

I’d recently hit the gold tier of VIP, but I still hadn’t gotten any cool perks as a result of my status. So I texted my host to see if I could get tickets to a World Cup match in New Jersey. No such luck, he said. 

That should have been an omen. My fortune was turning.

In all, I’d lost $10,702 and decided enough was enough. I’d eventually withdraw the remainder and return it to ProPublica. 

But before closing out my experiment, I wanted to see just how far DraftKings would let me go. So I asked my VIP rep if I could get a match on a (hypothetical!) $25,000 deposit.

If I deposited more, my rep said, he could “look into the account and see what is available to add in.”

The post I Deliberately Bet Like a Problem Gambler. DraftKings Made Me a VIP. appeared first on ProPublica.

If you’re one of millions of Americans who have placed an online bet on a sporting event, you know how quickly you can go from celebrating your wins to feeling like the odds are stacked against you.

ProPublica is trying to understand how sports betting apps incentivize users to keep playing and when they warn users to pump the brakes. To do that, we need your help: We’re aiming for at least 250 people to upload their gambling history from apps like FanDuel and DraftKings. We’re not quite there yet, so if you’ve used these apps, you can help our journalists. If you’ve worked in the industry, you can also help us by answering a few questions. (You can also reach us on Signal.) 

Sharing your transaction histories and insights about the apps can help us understand when companies provide boosts, invite you into VIP programs and push responsible gaming notices. Without this data, there is no way to know how the companies truly operate. 

Learn more about this project and how to share your data by visiting our website.

The post What Does Your Data Reveal About Sports Betting Apps? Help ProPublica Find Out. appeared first on ProPublica.

A Colorado manufacturer of a popular brand of marijuana vapes warned dispensaries last week that it is recalling products due to contamination by methylene chloride, a chemical the Environmental Protection Agency has sought to ban for most uses because it can cause cancer.

The recall comes amid a protracted delay in state implementation of expanded testing procedures that would have detected methylene chloride and other solvents that pose health risks.

The manufacturer, StayCon, voluntarily flagged 49 of its products, some of which first went up on dispensary shelves more than a year and a half ago. The recalled items include vapes that go by the brand name Maui Wowie and Grape Gorilla. The recall notice said a “botanically-derived” flavoring compound used in its marijuana vapes contained methylene chloride.

The owner of the third-party lab that detected the toxic solvent, which can be used to strip paint, said that he notified the company and the state six weeks before StayCon issued its recall. The state has yet to issue its own alert to consumers. Kyle Boyd, a spokesperson for the Colorado Marijuana Enforcement Division, told The Denver Gazette and ProPublica that the agency “does not comment on investigations” in response to a question about why it hasn’t made the recall public.

The Denver Gazette and ProPublica reported this month that regulatory loopholes in Colorado have allowed contaminated marijuana products that pose health risks to continue being sold to consumers for months, sometimes even years. Regulators have been slow to provide public warnings even after they’ve received reports of consumer harm. Earlier this year, the publications also reported on the dangers of methylene chloride as part of an investigation into Colorado’s failure to adopt many regulations used by other states to keep intoxicating hemp products off marijuana shelves.

Methylene chloride can be used to cheaply synthesize hemp into THC, the psychoactive compound in marijuana that makes people high. That chemically converted hemp is then falsely labeled and sold as marijuana-based products. State law bans the chemical conversion process and prohibits marijuana manufacturers from using methylene chloride, which the EPA banned for most uses in 2024. This month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit struck down the EPA ban and sent the matter back to the agency for further review.

The still-unimplemented testing rule for methylene chloride and 30 other solvents was meant to align Colorado’s standards with requirements that are already in place in 24 of the 43 states with regulated marijuana markets. The new testing was supposed to be implemented in July — nearly three months before StayCon told dispensaries it was recalling products. A spokesperson for the Marijuana Enforcement Division said the state public health department, which reviews labs and recommends their certification, told his agency it needed more time.

Implementation, he said, will begin at the end of this month.

Denver-based Bona Fides Laboratory in August detected the methylene chloride that prompted Friday’s recall notice during routine testing for other contaminants such as pesticides and mold. Lab owner David Mathis said he immediately notified the state and StayCon. He criticized state regulators for delaying implementation of the new testing rules, saying his company had been ready to conduct expanded screening since the start of July.

“How many samples were not tested but have contaminants in them and were passed to the public?” Mathis said.

StayCon, a Pueblo County-based company doing business as Craft, did not respond to questions from The Denver Gazette and ProPublica about its recall.

Even as the new testing protocols are set to go into effect, the state has backed away from plans to close a related and longstanding regulatory loophole: Manufacturers still get to choose the samples that labs test and the labs that do the testing.

Regulators in January said they were considering overhauling sampling rules to require lab personnel to collect samples, but they backed down after top manufacturers said it would be too expensive.

Read More

Regulators Knew This Marijuana Product Was Harming People. It Stayed on Shelves for More Than a Year.

Smoke and Mirrors: How Intoxicating Hemp Seeped Into the First Recreational Marijuana Market in the Country

The post Colorado Marijuana Company Voluntarily Recalls Dozens of Contaminated Products Amid State Regulatory Delays appeared first on ProPublica.

Across the country, states have been shuttering their youth prisons as juvenile crime has plummeted and research shows the facilities are not effective at keeping youth out of trouble after release. From 2000 to 2022, the number of the highest-security facilities for kids has dropped by more than 40%, the most recent federal data shows.

In contrast, Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services has budgeted $360 million to build two new facilities with a total of up to 256 new beds for youth. Construction is set to begin this fall, and they are expected to open in 2028 and 2029. 

According to Tennessee officials, the state doesn’t have enough space for kids who courts have found committed crimes. In the last few years, it has held dozens of teens overnight in temporary places, including, at one point, office buildings. In an emailed response to WPLN and ProPublica, the agency attributed the lack of bed space to a number of factors, including teens’ needs for specific mental health services and temporary staffing issues in its facilities. And it said that national trends “do not determine” whether Tennessee has enough youth beds available.

But juvenile crime is down in Tennessee, too, and advocates and experts say the state’s push for more prisons does not line up with the needs of the kids in its care. 

“The argument that’s made is that [juvenile crime is] worse than ever, right? Or the kids are out of control,” said Josh Rovner with the nonprofit research and advocacy group The Sentencing Project, which seeks to reduce incarceration across the country. “The data doesn’t back that up.”

Tennessee said youth are committing more violent crimes. But fewer are entering the juvenile justice system.

To explain its need for more youth prisons, Tennessee’s DCS points to a recent state-commissioned study. It shows that police reports of violent juvenile crimes in Tennessee — including murder, aggravated assault, motor vehicle theft and crimes with firearms — have increased since 2013. 

But not every report results in an arrest, for a number of reasons; multiple people might call police for the same crime, for example. Data from the same report shows that the number of kids arrested and entering the system, even for violent crime, has decreased over that time period. Murder was the only violent crime included in the report for which arrests increased, from 15 cases in 2013 to 26 in 2024. That number is still lower than it was at its peak in 2018.

The state oversees different types of facilities for kids in the justice system, ranging in security level from group homes to prisons surrounded by barbed wire. DCS leaders said in a state hearing that the agency has reached maximum capacity and run out of beds in high-security facilities. DCS said in a recent statement that the number of youth needing space in a particular type of facility can remain high day to day even as overall arrests decline. 

In a 2024 lawsuit over Tennessee’s juvenile justice system, advocates said the state is not appropriately utilizing the bed space it currently has, putting kids into the highest-security facilities without considering their need for mental health treatment and other services. Because of juvenile privacy laws, no publicly available data shows what charges land youth in which setting.

In response, DCS acknowledged that it sometimes places youth in facilities based on capacity, but denied that it improperly held youth in the highest-security facilities. The case is ongoing. 

Tennessee promised its new prisons would be rehabilitative. Experts say they are too big to succeed at that mission.

Unlike the adult system, the juvenile justice system is set up to rehabilitate, not punish, based on decades of research showing that youth are more capable of change. 

DCS told WPLN and ProPublica that it is designing the new facilities to provide care that addresses the trauma youth have experienced, including behavioral health treatment tailored to their individual needs. The design includes dedicated spaces for education, job training and recreation. It also includes rooms for mental health staff to do their work, including “calming rooms” for youth. 

The agency also describes its existing prisons as rehabilitative. All three of the state’s highest-security prisons are run by Tennessee businessman Jason Crews and his company, Wayne Halfway House. The company is required by its contract and state policy to provide mental health treatment, education and other services to imprisoned youth. 

The 2024 juvenile justice lawsuit, which an advocacy group and multiple unnamed youth in the system filed against DCS, argued that the department places youth in facilities that are more punitive than rehabilitative. Some teens placed in prison, the lawsuit said, should not be there at all.

The lawsuit also claimed that Tennessee’s juvenile justice facilities keep youth from accessing education and mental health treatment. Two facilities run by Wayne Halfway House, according to the lawsuit, have had policies barring youth from attending school if they misbehave. One teen, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and other mental health conditions, did not get needed individual therapy for months while in a Crews facility, the lawsuit stated, and only got a couple of hours of education each day. Several other contractors’ jails and treatment centers across the state are referenced by name in the lawsuit.

DCS said in a legal filing that it didn’t have enough information to respond to all of the specific allegations about youth mentioned in the suit, but it pushed back against many claims, including that youth were provided inadequate education or mental health treatment. It also denied that the teen in the Crews prison was kept from therapy or education, but did acknowledge that some youth in the juvenile justice system may temporarily “receive minimal educational services.” 

A recent WPLN/ProPublica investigation uncovered several serious incidents that Crews’ facilities failed to report to the state as required. In a statement, Wayne Halfway House said the company “vehemently denies” that Crews or his company has ever discouraged staff from reporting serious or life-threatening incidents to the state. 

Wayne Halfway House said in a statement that it disputes the allegations in the lawsuit and referred the newsrooms to “numerous state audits and/or reports” during that time that refute those claims. It declined to share the specific documents it was referencing. “Wayne Halfway House programs are compliant with state policies and law,” the company wrote in its statement.

Daniel Macallair is the executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works to reduce society’s reliance on incarceration. “These institutions are not humane places,” he said, referring to large-scale youth facilities. “They’re not rehabilitative. They never have been.”

According to Macallair, who has been working on juvenile justice reform for more than 40 years, any facility with more than 10 kids becomes unwieldy, distracting from rehabilitation and becoming more correctional. Research shows that larger facilities often involve harsher treatment of youth, including higher rates of sexual abuse and practices such as solitary confinement. One of the prisons that DCS is planning would have up to 160 beds, making it the largest in the state.

By contrast, the programs that have proven to help youth avoid future crimes are small and based in the communities they are from, Macallair said.

Missouri, a nationally lauded example, has established small facilities throughout the state, keeping youth — even those who commit violent crimes — close to home for therapeutic programs. Research has shown that not only are these community-based programs more effective and affordable, but they lead to low rates of reoffending and high rates of high school graduation. 

DCS told WPLN and ProPublica that it provides community-based services for youth who can safely remain at home. But Tennessee data shows that the vast majority of youth in the system were not allowed to stay in their communities last year. 

One way to assess the rehabilitative success of youth prisons is whether youth are rearrested after release. But Tennessee officials acknowledge that they cannot measure that in a comprehensive or accurate way because the state lacks a centralized way of tracking when a youth commits a new crime.

Tennessee has pushed against outside oversight of its youth prisons. Experts say this is a crucial reform.

The state says there will be a bid process to determine who will operate the new facilities. Right now, two providers run all of the state’s private youth prisons — Wayne Halfway House and Youth Opportunity Investments, a company that runs lower security facilities. 

In response to questions about the new facilities, Wayne Halfway House said it would not comment about its business plans. It also noted that the facilities in which it holds youth in state custody for committing a crime are classified by the state as “residential treatment centers,” not youth prisons. Across the country, states use different terminology to refer to these facilities. By federal law they are supposed to provide treatment, but they also are secure facilities, often with barbed-wire fences and cells that lock, that hold youth long-term after a court finds them responsible for a crime — similar to adult prisons.

Experts say robust independent oversight is crucial to keep youth in juvenile justice facilities safe, but Tennessee does not have this. Instead, it has one agency that helps families navigate the system but lacks enforcement power and a new Juvenile Justice Review Commission tasked with releasing its first set of recommendations in 2028.  

“The main goal is to bring more transparency to what’s going on inside these facilities, to make that information public, to make recommendations about ways it can improve,” said Michele Deitch, a criminal and juvenile justice expert at the University of Texas at Austin. “You really need the external body that is independent.”

In 2024, a bipartisan group of Tennessee lawmakers introduced a bill that would give oversight and enforcement power to an independent organization instead of just DCS. Under the bill, DCS would be required to suspend a facility’s license or stop placing youth there until it fixed violations.

Lawmakers felt that DCS had a conflict of interest — it is responsible for both finding beds for children in these institutions and sanctioning providers if they are not following the rules or regulations. 

Wayne Halfway House, which pays a legislative lobbyist and also makes political donations in the state, opposed the bill. One of the bill’s sponsors said that a lobbyist for the company pushed to exempt privately run facilities from the bill, and the proposal made it into an amendment filed in the House. 

A lobbyist for Wayne Halfway House said at the time that the company had concerns about how the bill would “affect accountability in the governance of youth corrections in Tennessee.” In a recent statement, the company said it supports the state’s policies and laws that “rigorously oversee organizations like ours and hold us to high standards for operational performance.”

Ultimately, the bill failed.

The post Across the Country, Youth Prisons Are Closing. This State Is Building More. appeared first on ProPublica.