Now, under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the agency is poised to reverse itself. That’s despite few clinical studies supporting the effectiveness or safety of these peptides, which are amino acid chains meant to help regulate functions in the body and have become popular among fitness and longevity enthusiasts.

In February, Kennedy said the FDA acted illegally in 2023 when it categorized 19 peptides as too unsafe for compounders, whose final products aren’t tested or approved by the FDA. Kennedy, who described himself as a “big fan” of peptides, has used the therapies himself.

“It was illegal because they’re not supposed to do that unless there’s a safety signal,” Kennedy said on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, referring to adverse events related to medications. “And they didn’t have a safety signal. They’re not allowed to look at efficacy. They’re not allowed to say, ‘Well, we don’t believe these are efficacious,’ or whatever. They can only look at safety.”

But three former FDA officials closely familiar with how the agency created the criteria to assess the peptides in the first place say Kennedy has mischaracterized their work. The agency’s 2023 decision to ban certain peptides was supported by numerous documented safety concerns, they said. FDA regulations also require the agency to assess both safety and effectiveness before approving a substance for compounding.

“It would be a disruption of the societal pact we have had since 1962 that drugs will be studied to see if they work before they are marketed in the U.S.,” said Janet Woodcock, a former FDA acting commissioner.

If Kennedy justifies reversal of the previous work by suggesting there were no safety concerns, it would give a false imprimatur of safety to more than a dozen unapproved, untested drugs, the officials said.

There’s been little new science on the 19 peptides since the FDA’s 2023 decision to categorize them as unsafe. But demand for the drugs has exploded as influencers have flooded social media with promises of sculpted physiques, glowing skin, luscious hair, rapidly healing injuries, youthful energy and blazing sex lives.

The demand has given rise to a burgeoning gray market, where wellness spas, multilevel marketers and telehealth websites ply the public with vials of “research grade” peptides labeled “not for human use.”

“More people want to use them,” said Lauren Colenso-Semple, a muscle physiology researcher and science communication specialist who follows scientific studies of peptides as part of her work. “That’s what’s changed.”

FDA-approved peptide drugs such as insulin and oxytocin have been available for decades. Newer ones such as semaglutide and tirzepatide, broadly known as GLP-1s, have exploded in popularity for weight loss and have shown promise for treating other conditions, such as addictions and neurodegenerative and liver diseases. The popularity of these drugs has led the public to become more comfortable with injectables and has helped drive attention to other gray-market peptides.

Last year, at a Las Vegas conference promising radical life extension, two women became critically ill after being injected with peptides the FDA had categorized as unsafe. Although Nevada regulators investigated and fined the health practitioners involved in administering the peptides, investigators weren’t able to determine the exact cause of the reaction. The doctor who ran the booth where the women became ill said he didn’t believe that the peptides caused their reactions but apologized for the incident and said he would review his practices.

The Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding, one of the largest industry associations lobbying for the FDA to change its stance on peptides, acknowledges it knows little about the safety of individual peptides being sold to the public. (Its CEO says it is an advocacy organization, not a scientific one.) But the group argues the public would be safer if peptides were handled by regulated compounding pharmacies instead of the gray market. The FDA should forgo the usual human clinical trials in order to bring about this shift, a spokesperson for the alliance said.

“Where we don’t have research, clinical trials, what we’ve got a ton of, is, shall we say, testimonials, patient affidavits, attesting to the wonders of the drug,” said Scott Brunner, the alliance’s chief executive officer. “And RFK Jr. is one of those testifiers.”

On the Rogan podcast, Kennedy wasn’t clear on exactly how the FDA would let compounders start dispensing peptides, describing it only as “some kind of action” to make “about 14” peptides “more accessible.” Nor has he specified which peptides he wants to make available. (Neither the FDA nor HHS responded to ProPublica’s requests for more information.) But several regulatory shortcuts exist and, ultimately, Kennedy could simply declare the ingredients are legal.

“He has all of the authority,” said Woodcock, likening such a declaration to former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ unilateral 2011 reversal of the FDA’s decision to lift age restrictions on the emergency contraception Plan B. (A judge ultimately found Sebelius’ move to be arbitrary and capricious and nullified it.)

“The secretary can do anything they want.”

The Bulks List

The FDA’s road to regulating compounding pharmacies — and by extension the peptides they seek to dispense — has been long and tedious. Much of the regulatory fight has focused on which ingredients compounders should be allowed to use.

Under a 1997 law, the first passed by Congress to regulate the industry, compounders can only use ingredients that are a component of an approved drug, have what’s known as a USP monograph (essentially a third-party certified recipe for a drug used mainly by manufacturers of generics), or are listed as approved substances by the FDA.

This FDA list, known as “the bulks list,” is at the center of the ongoing peptide debate.

Litigation and pressure from the industry and lawmakers delayed for decades the creation of the bulks list, leaving compounders in limbo on scores of substances, not just peptides.

“Everything was a fight. It was a huge fight,” said one former FDA official who has spent more than 30 years working on compounding policies. The former official asked not to be named to avoid a public debate with the industry.

The need for the list took on new urgency in 2012, when more than 60 people died from fungal meningitis infections contracted from a drug produced at a compounding facility and dispensed to hundreds of people. Congress passed another law further regulating large compounders that sell medications to doctors’ offices and hospitals rather than individual patients. The new law also prompted the agency to move more quickly on establishing the bulks list.

The FDA asked the industry to nominate substances for inclusion on the list. It did so, nominating thousands of ingredients, including, for example, purified water and asparagus.

“They put in everything,” the official said. “Literally thousands of nominations with absolutely no justification for why it needed to be there.”

Each substance would have to be reviewed individually before it could be added to the bulks list. The agency would have to solicit public comment and an advisory committee of health and pharmacy experts would have to review the FDA’s research.

Reviewing them “was a massive effort. The agency proceeded glacially, but really we were speeding as fast as we could,” the official said.

In 2017, under pressure to move more quickly, the FDA came up with an interim solution. It substantially narrowed the list of nominated ingredients, quickly reviewed each remaining substance and placed them into three categories. The first was substances with enough of a safety track record that the agency felt comfortable letting compounders use them while the final list was assembled. The second category included substances considered too risky for compounding. And the third included those without enough supporting information for the FDA to make an informed decision and therefore wouldn’t be used for compounding.

This categorization didn’t constitute a formal regulation; rather the agency was using its discretion not to go after compounders who used ingredients it deemed safe — those from the first category.

In 2023, the FDA placed 19 peptides in Category 2, which already included a handful of substances the agency considered to be dangerous.

This is what Kennedy has called “the war on peptides.”

In explaining its decisions, the FDA pointed to well-established research in peptide drug development that injectable peptides carry the risk of causing immune reactions. Such reactions can range from responses with “no clinical manifestations” to irritating rashes to life-threatening conditions such as anaphylactic shock, which constricts breathing and impairs motor function.

Peptides occur naturally in the body but break down quickly after serving their purpose. Peptide drugs, on the other hand, are manufactured to last longer in the body to create a therapeutic response, such as controlling appetite or promoting the growth of new blood vessels, bone density or muscle.

“Now that it’s been tweaked to make it something else, the immune system can recognize it as foreign and there’s the potential issue of having an unwanted immune response,” Colenso-Semple said.

The manufacturing process can also introduce impurities — like bacteria or heavy metals — into peptide drugs. They also are sensitive to environmental conditions and can change chemical composition if stored at the wrong temperatures or shaken too vigorously, increasing the risk of an immune response or decreasing their effectiveness. And when a substance is injected, as opposed to taken orally, it bypasses most of the body’s natural defenses.

The risk of an immune response is common to peptide drugs in general. But individual peptides also present specific potential risks.

The FDA reviewed data to assess these risks and found limited human studies on a few peptide therapies; most have only been studied in animals or in clinical populations like HIV patients. What human data the FDA did find for individual peptides indicated the potential for harm. Subjects in studies of six individual peptides — growth hormone releasing peptide-2, ibutamoren mesylate, ipamorelin, CJC-1295, AOD-9604 and melanotan II — experienced adverse events, including death. (It wasn’t proven whether the deaths were caused by the peptides or by something else.) Ultimately, the FDA decided not enough data existed to allay the known safety concerns.

“Of course any adverse event can be a flag,” said another former FDA official who worked in the compounding division when the peptides were categorized as unsafe. The former official asked not to be named because they work in public health and don’t want to antagonize the current administration. “Also, if there is no clinical data for a substance, and an awareness that the substance has the propensity for harm, that could make it an appropriate placement on the Category 2 list.”

Are They Safe?

Putting the peptides on the unsafe list didn’t change much for compounders. Because those peptides aren’t components of an approved drug and don’t carry a USP monograph, compounders weren’t allowed to dispense them anyway.

“All that did was put an exclamation point on it,” Brunner said. In the months after the FDA’s announcement, his organization repeatedly warned its members not to dispense peptides.

But the listing prompted at least two peptide companies to sue the FDA, arguing it was dragging its feet on creating the bulks list of allowed compounding substances. To date, only six substances have made it through the process to be put on the list, none of which are peptides and none of which are injectables. As the lawsuit wound its way through federal court, the FDA agreed to accelerate the review of four peptides named in the lawsuit: CJC-1295, AOD-9604, thymosin-alpha and ipamorelin acetate. It also decided to move forward on two other peptides not listed in the complaint: kisspeptin and ibutamoren mesylate. Online marketing claims these peptides help with, among other things, weight loss, muscle-building, anti-aging, insomnia, tissue repair and sexual dysfunction. Marketers also claim thymosin-alpha, one of the more studied peptides, can help with immune function, Lyme disease and COVID-19.

In the final months of the Biden administration, the FDA convened the expert advisory committee and presented its research on the six peptides. In reports up to 158 pages long, the agency detailed the science behind the immune response risk in synthetic peptides, listed documented adverse events associated with the drugs and summarized the limited research on human subjects. In each case, the FDA recommended against putting the peptide on the bulks list for compounders.

“I can’t imagine anybody looking at this data and being comfortable” making these available to the public, Colenso-Semple said.

The peptide industry was given just 10 minutes before the committee to present arguments that the six peptides were safe. Speakers offered anecdotal evidence from their own and others’ practices. Even though peptides can’t legally be used by compounders, many were dispensing the drugs because the FDA has been lax in enforcing its regulations.

“Many of the peptides that have been placed on Category 2 have been used successfully by thousands of our practitioners treating hundreds of thousands of patients who utilize these compounds to energize cellular function and give the body what it needs to help address sickness and disease, including obesity, diabetes and addiction,” said Dan DeNeui, CEO of one of the peptide companies that sued the FDA.

His wife, Terri DeNeui, a nurse practitioner and founder of their company Evexias Health Solutions, presented information from a survey of 508 patients treated with various peptides that said 19% reported uncomfortable side effects and less than 1% experienced an adverse event.

They also contended peptides would be more safely dispensed by regulated compounders than on the gray market — the argument now being made by the Alliance for Compounding Pharmacies. The active ingredients in the drugs would be manufactured at an FDA-registered facility subject to inspection, and compounders are overseen by state boards of pharmacies to ensure sterile conditions.

That’s “a heck of a lot better than what many consumers are doing,” getting advice in chat rooms and “ordering some substance that purports to be a peptide and may or may not be,” Brunner told ProPublica.

While that argument addresses quality-control concerns associated with the gray market, it doesn’t confront the fundamental question of whether peptides are safe.

“They’re totally unapproved drugs,” said one of the former FDA officials. “Would you let a pharmaceutical company do this? No. No way.”

In the end, the advisory committee sided with the FDA and endorsed its initial decision that the six peptides were too risky to be dispensed to the public.

What Happens Now?

Unhappy with the advisory committee’s decision, the compounding industry has amplified its argument that the FDA review process for the bulks list is broken. The advisory committee had few working compounders on it and didn’t give those who opposed the decision on peptides enough time to present its arguments, industry advocates say.

With a new administration, whose health secretary has used peptides himself and is trying to advance alternative health practices, they see an opportunity. They hope the FDA will appoint more members with compounding experience to the committee and ease enforcement on peptides while it continues the established regulatory process.

“Given the scale of demand — demand that is going to be met, if not by a state licensed compounding pharmacy, then by the black and gray markets — we believe the lens that the FDA is using related to these peptides, at least some of the peptides, is the wrong lens,” Brunner said. “They’re wanting research, clinical trials. They’re wanting a certain amount of certitude that, frankly, is appropriate for most drugs, but not for this moment.”

Regulatory shortcuts exist that would allow the FDA to skip the more laborious approval process. The FDA could simply remove the peptides from Category 2, those it considers unsafe. It could place them in Category 1, allowing them to be used in compounding. Or it could announce it’s changing its enforcement strategy and not going after compounders who work with these substances.

None of that would be safe for the public, Woodcock contends. Congress intended for the FDA to “refer to a substantive body of evidence about the safety and effectiveness” of ingredients put on the bulks list, she said.

“This wasn’t supposed to be a route for unapproved drugs to get into the market,” she said. “Not even Congress was thinking that.”

The post RFK Jr. May Reverse a Peptide Ban He Calls “Illegal.” Former FDA Officials Say He Mischaracterized Their Work. appeared first on ProPublica.

Nearly all of these charges originated from cases along the U.S. southern border, where last spring, the White House designated large swaths of land as national defense areas. Putting them under military authority allowed troops to play an unprecedented role in apprehending undocumented immigrants; federal soldiers are generally barred from enforcing the law on domestic soil. If you were caught in one of these zones, the government could also now prosecute you for breaking federal laws, including one enacted in 1909 to keep spies away from arsenals.

In an investigation we published recently, my co-reporters Perla Trevizo, Abe Streep, Pratheek Rebala and I dug into what experts say is a major flaw afflicting these prosecutions that threatens to ensnare people for crimes they did not commit: Migrants didn’t know the land they were crossing now belonged to the armed forces. And many judges have ruled that you can’t be guilty of trespassing on military land if you had no idea you were on it.

Since April of last year, we found, at least 4,700 immigrants already charged with entering the country illegally faced these military trespass charges; at least one had to wait in jail for more than a month to stand trial. Most of the charges didn’t stick. In fact, we found that in 60% of the resolved cases, the trespass charges were dropped or dismissed. Yet prosecutors kept filing them.

Download the full data used in our analysis on our GitHub page.

As we visited courtrooms in West Texas and New Mexico and pored through case records, it became clear how hard it would be to prove that someone knowingly trespassed on military land. Some couldn’t read. At least one person didn’t speak English or Spanish. The small signs are spaced far apart and easy to miss, and many migrants were arrested far away from them.

A Justice Department spokesperson said the prosecutions have deterred unauthorized border crossings and cartel activity. And prosecutors have argued in court that illegally crossing is enough to prove criminal intent for the military trespassing charges. Senior officials in the U.S. attorney’s offices handling trespass cases declined repeated interview requests.

In November, Perla, Abe and I set out to report throughout southern New Mexico and West Texas to see for ourselves what information we could gather about where the zones were and how they were marked.

Abe and I arranged a ride-along with Doña Ana County Sheriff Kim Stewart, whose New Mexico agency shares jurisdiction with Border Patrol and the military in one of the zones.  A sergeant from her office drove us along a dirt road that parallels the border as she pointed out 12-by-18-inch red and white signs opposite the fence. She told us her office hadn’t received specific information about where the military zone boundaries were; all they had were the signs. Even in broad daylight, it was difficult to read the words on them unless we got within a few feet.

On another outing in New Mexico — this time with the photographer Paul Ratje — I went to a spot in Sunland Park where Ratje said he’d previously taken photos of the border fence. The 2-acre dirt lot sat less than a mile from residential neighborhoods and a popular Italian restaurant. From the lot, we could see more red and white signs along the nearby border road.

While we were taking pictures, a pickup truck with a Border Patrol livery approached us. I was surprised to see that inside, instead of Border Patrol agents, there were two Army soldiers. The soldier in the passenger seat pointed to the signage along the border road and told us not to go past there. The border road was part of the defense area, he told us, though the lot we were standing in wasn’t.

The next day, Perla and I returned to the same location. This time, a Border Patrol agent drove up. The lot was part of the defense area, he told us. When I pointed out that I had been given conflicting information the previous day, the agent said he was told by the military that people couldn’t be in this area. We left. (An Army spokesperson said that the base responsible for the defense area in New Mexico published a map in December; the lot was not included in it.)

My interactions with Border Patrol and the military had so far only added to our confusion about these areas. Later that day, Perla and I drove south to a stretch of border fence along the Rio Grande near Tornillo, Texas. We saw a Border Patrol van near a gate in the fence. We thought we’d try to ask where the defense area was. Before we could do that, another Border Patrol van pulled up to us. Soldiers, including one with a rifle strapped across his shoulder, emerged from both vehicles. Another soldier told us he was “not at liberty to discuss” the national defense area’s exact location. 

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The Trump Administration’s “Disturbing” New Legal Strategy to Prosecute Border Crossers Is Taxing Courts and Testing the Law

The response bewildered us. We asked him how we were supposed to know whether we were trespassing. He shrugged. (Spokespeople for U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Defense did not directly answer questions about these interactions.)

As we got back into our rental SUV, Perla and I wondered: If we, as reporters who investigate things for a living, couldn’t get a straight answer on where these military zones were, how did the government expect people crossing the border to do better? 

In the four months between our reporting trip and the publication of our investigation on March 16, the government continued to file military trespassing charges in more than 1,300 cases. And it’s established new military zones, too, in Arizona, California and Texas.

The post Why We Went Looking for National Defense Areas Along the U.S. Southern Border appeared first on ProPublica.

Aaron Szabo, an assistant administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, is listed in PDF metadata as the author of a January 2022 comment letter objecting to proposed controls on methane emissions in the oil and gas industry. The letter was submitted to the EPA by the American Exploration and Production Council, which represents some of the industry’s largest emitters of the planet-warming gas, including ConocoPhillips, Diversified Energy and Hilcorp. Szabo’s name does not appear in the document itself, but it can be found in information embedded by the software used to create the PDF file.

Szabo was registered as a lobbyist for one of the AXPC’s lesser-known members, Ovintiv, when he drafted the arguments against the restrictions, which were finalized later in the Biden administration. He has also lobbied for other clients in the oil and chemicals sectors. While he did not hide that work during his confirmation last year as head of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, he described it in terms that avoided any mention of efforts to influence climate policy: “I learned how regulated entities comply with the federal government’s thousands of regulations and policies. I also saw firsthand that the people working in these companies want to ensure the environment is properly protected.”

In his current role overseeing federal climate rules at the EPA, Szabo has been soliciting input and even specific regulatory language from oil industry groups that stand to gain from watered-down methane rules, according to internal emails, calendar entries and records of closed-door conversations reviewed by ProPublica.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., the ranking Democrat on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, pointed to Szabo’s previous lobbying as evidence that the EPA had effectively been captured by the oil and gas industry. “Now he can do Big Oil’s dirty work from inside the EPA,” Whitehouse told ProPublica in an email.

As part of its plan to “unleash American energy,” the Trump administration has waged an unprecedented campaign against regulations on fossil fuels, the main cause of global warming. One of its biggest moves was to repeal the “endangerment finding” that classified greenhouse gases as pollutants — the basis for the EPA’s authority to limit emissions at all. Rather than throw out the methane rules entirely, however, Szabo’s office is working to revise them, emails and documents show. It has already delayed many of the compliance deadlines until next year.

Methane, the main component of natural gas, is a climate superpollutant, responsible for one-third of the rise in global temperatures since preindustrial times, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. When it escapes into the atmosphere without being burned for energy, it can trap 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide, research shows. The oil and gas business is the largest industrial source of U.S. methane emissions, in part because of leaks from poorly maintained equipment. If it is uneconomical to collect the gas for sale, companies sometimes intentionally release it in a process known as venting.

To cut down on methane discharges, President Joe Biden’s EPA imposed much stricter controls on oil and gas operations, including requiring increased monitoring for leaks and equipment upgrades. According to agency estimates, the new rules would have lowered the industry’s methane emissions by nearly 80%. And, given that the gas breaks down relatively quickly, this would have been one of the fastest ways to reduce global warming.

Industry groups pushed back. In the January 2022 letter that Szabo helped to draft, the AXPC used the word “burdensome” 10 times to describe the new requirements and pushed for more “flexibility” to allow for less expensive leak-detection methods and less frequent monitoring, among other requests.

The group also cast doubt on the rules’ expected climate and health benefits, highlighting what it called “the importance of communicating the significant uncertainties within the estimates.” The AXPC’s chief executive, Anne Bradbury, added in a later statement that the rules risked “undercutting US production in the near and long-term — which will lead to increased energy costs and reduced energy security.”

The AXPC failed to persuade the Biden administration to change its approach. But it renewed its push after President Donald Trump returned to office and ordered federal agencies to “suspend, revise, or rescind” any “undue burden” on domestic energy production.

Szabo, after two years as a fellow at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, joined the administration on Day 1 as an adviser to EPA chief Lee Zeldin. He immediately signaled that he planned to weaken the regulations he had argued against as a lobbyist. His staff met with AXPC representatives as early as Feb. 6, 2025, less than three weeks after Trump’s inauguration, to discuss its petition to “reconsider” the methane rules, according to emails and calendar entries obtained through public records requests and shared with ProPublica by Fieldnotes, a watchdog group that investigates the oil and gas industry. His staff went on to meet with them at least twice more, and Szabo himself was listed as a required attendee for a meeting with Bradbury last July.

The AXPC didn’t respond to emails from ProPublica seeking comment.

According to records of closed-door conversations reviewed by ProPublica, other oil industry representatives have described their meetings with Szabo and his staff as highly favorable to their interests. “Mr. Szabo assured us that the EPA is focused on these [methane] rules and doing everything that can be done to limit the damage they will cause,” the leadership of a major trade group wrote to its members last year in an internal newsletter.

Lee Fuller, of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, also spoke glowingly about his meeting with Szabo’s office on a conference call with industry representatives last year.

“It was one of the more fascinating meetings that we’ve ever had, just because they were suddenly willing to talk to us,” he said. “And they’re also suddenly willing to talk about things that we’ve been trying to get them to do for years, and they’ve never even let it kind of come onto the radar screen.”

The IPAA declined to answer specific questions from ProPublica but linked to a September 2025 letter in which the group publicly asked the EPA for exceptions to the methane rules.

Szabo’s office has even invited oil industry groups to offer specific wording for the revised rules. “We had a call several weeks back re. pneumatics on temporary equipment,” Mike O’Connor of the American Petroleum Institute wrote to an EPA official, referring to devices that are a major source of methane emissions. “EPA had informally requested input on this topic and any suggested reg. text language. We are providing the attached draft document as informal input to EPA’s inquiry.” The draft called for a number of exemptions.

The shift in priorities under Szabo can also be seen in communications from the EPA itself. In a June 2025 email reviewed by ProPublica, an agency official asked O’Connor to meet and discuss alternative leak-detection methods. Echoing the language in the AXPC comment that Szabo helped to draft, the official spoke of “the additional flexibility we would like to pursue.”

“I think their agenda was, from what I could tell, to do what industry wanted,” one former EPA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe confidential discussions, said of Szabo and other Trump appointees at the agency.

“Since when is it a bad thing for public officials to ask the public what they think?” the EPA said in an emailed statement, referring to Szabo’s interactions with oil industry representatives. Szabo “fulfilled all his ethical obligations to the letter. He met with EPA career ethics staff when he started at EPA to ensure he is aware of and complies with federal ethics requirements.”

Szabo’s affinities are hardly a secret. He is thanked by name in the EPA chapter of Project 2025, the deregulatory blueprint for the second Trump administration. As part of the nomination process for his appointment at the EPA, he also submitted ethics disclosures listing oil, natural gas and chemicals companies he had lobbied for.

Still, at his confirmation hearing on March 5 last year, he repeatedly declined to elaborate on his role in Project 2025, beyond saying he provided “general advice and thoughts” on the Clean Air Act.

The post The Trump EPA Official in Charge of Methane Regulations Helped Write Oil Industry Argument Against Those Rules appeared first on ProPublica.

The cases included an investigation into a Virginia nursing home with a recent record of patient abuse; probes of fraud involving several New Jersey labor unions, including one opened after a top official of a national union was accused of embezzlement; and an investigation into a cryptocurrency company suspected of cheating investors.

In total, the DOJ quietly closed more than 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of President Donald Trump’s administration, abandoning hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs and other offenses as it shifted resources to pursue immigration cases, according to an analysis by ProPublica.

The bulk of these cases, which were closed without prosecution and known as declinations, had been referred to the DOJ by law enforcement agencies under prior administrations that believed a federal crime may have been committed. The DOJ routinely declines to prosecute cases for any number of reasons, including insufficient evidence or because a case is not a priority for enforcement.

But the number of declinations under Bondi marks a striking departure not only from the Biden administration but also the first Trump term, according to the ProPublica analysis, which examined two decades of DOJ data, including the first six months of Trump’s second term. ProPublica determined the increase is not the result of inheriting a larger caseload or more referrals from law enforcement.

In February 2025 alone, which included the first weeks of Bondi’s tenure, nearly 11,000 cases were declined, the most in a month since at least 2004. The previous high was just over 6,500 cases in September 2019, during Trump’s first administration.

Some of the cases shut down were the result of yearslong investigations by federal agencies such as the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration. For complex cases, the DOJ can take years before deciding whether to bring charges.

The shift comes as the DOJ has undergone an extraordinary overhaul under the Trump administration, with entire units shuttered, directives to abandon pursuit of certain crimes and thousands of lawyers quitting or, in some cases, being forced out of the agency.

In doing so, the DOJ is retreating from its mission to impartially uphold the rule of law, keep the country safe and protect civil rights, according to interviews with a dozen prosecutors and an open letter from nearly 300 DOJ employees who have left the department under Trump. The Trump DOJ, the employees wrote, is “taking a sledgehammer” to long-standing work to “protect communities and the rule of law.”

The change in priorities was outlined in a series of memos sent to attorneys early last year. Trump’s DOJ has said it is “turning a new page on white-collar and corporate enforcement” and emphasizing the pursuit of drug cartels, illegal immigrants and institutions that promote “divisive DEI policies.” Trump, in an address last March at the department, said the changes were necessary after a “surrender to violent criminals” during the past administration and would result in a restoration of “fair, equal and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”

The department prosecuted 32,000 new immigration cases in the first six months of the administration, which was nearly triple the number under the Biden administration and a 15% increase from the first Trump term. It has pursued fewer prosecutions of nearly every other type of crime — from drug offenses to corruption — than new administrations in their first six months dating back to 2009.

The DOJ has also closed hundreds of cases involving alleged crimes that the administration has publicly emphasized as enforcement priorities. Even as the Trump administration unleashed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency operatives to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, the DOJ declined over 900 cases of federal program or procurement fraud. About three times as many cases of major fraud against the U.S. were declined under Trump compared with the average of similar time periods under prior administrations. And while the Trump administration has promised to “make America safe again,” its DOJ has declined more than 1,000 terrorism cases, also more than prior administrations.

Federal prosecutor Joseph Gerbasi had spent years in the department’s Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section helping build cases against major suppliers of fentanyl ingredients in India and China. After Bondi came in, he was left bewildered when his team was ordered to abandon its work.

“All of the building blocks of what would become successful prosecutions were pulled out,” said Gerbasi, who retired as the section’s acting deputy chief for policy in March 2025 after 28 years with the department.

The move had an “overwhelming deflating effect on morale,” he said.

After Trump’s Inauguration, the Department of Justice Turned Down a Record Number of Cases

The first quarter of 2025, and especially February of that year, saw the department declining to prosecute cases against thousands of defendants outside of its regular six-month review process.

Barbara McQuade, who worked as a federal prosecutor in Michigan for two decades until 2017 during Republican and Democratic administrations, said it was not unusual for new administrations to come to office with a few “pet priorities” — such as a focus on violent crime or drug trafficking. But she said those changes usually involved modest adjustments in policy and that most of the decisions on what crimes to focus on were typically made at the local level by the district U.S. attorney in coordination with the FBI or other agencies.

“We would revise those about every five years, not having anything to do with any administration, just because it made sense,” she said.

A DOJ spokesperson, in an emailed response to questions about the spike in declinations, said that in “an effort to clean, remediate, and validate data in U.S. Attorneys’ case management system,” the department reviewed all pending criminal matters opened prior to the 2023 fiscal year, which included updating the status of closed cases. “This Department of Justice remains committed to investigating and prosecuting all types of crime to keep the American people safe, and the number of declinations is a direct result of our efforts to run the agency in a more efficient manner.”

The agency did not respond to questions about the types of cases declined.

The spike of declined cases began in February 2025 when the department ordered prosecutors to review every open case launched prior to October 2022 and determine whether to close it. Such a review would typically take months, according to one attorney tasked with reviewing cases. A memo, which was described to ProPublica reporters, ordered the review to be completed within 10 days.

Former DOJ prosecutors told ProPublica that they typically reviewed caseloads every six months with supervisors and that closing out languishing cases wouldn’t ordinarily be cause for concern. They said the February directive, however, was unusual. None could recall a similar order.

The directive came as higher-ups in the department had begun making frequent demands for data about specific types of cases and charging decisions, such as the outcome of fentanyl cases, according to former prosecutor Michael Gordon. Gordon, who helped prosecute Jan. 6 cases before moving to white-collar crime prosecutions, said the “fire drills” from officials in Washington became so regular that he grew used to the forlorn look on his supervisor’s face when he showed up at Gordon’s door, apologetically delivering yet another frantic request.

“It was either ‘give us stats we can use to make ourselves look good’ or ‘give us the stats to show how bad things are in this area,’” Gordon said. “It was never productive fact-finding.”

Though Gordon didn’t see the memo, he remembered getting the request to review all cases that had been open for more than two years and report back on their status, entering into a master spreadsheet basic information about any that he wanted to keep pursuing.

“The office was pushing us to close everything by a certain date so that when they had to report up to D.C. they had a low number of open cases,” he said. “You really had to go to bat to keep open a case that was more than two years old.”

Gordon said he was fired by the DOJ last June. He has filed a lawsuit alleging his termination was politically motivated. The department did not respond to questions about Gordon’s comments or his lawsuit. The government filed a motion to dismiss the case late last year, arguing that the federal court did not have jurisdiction over the matter. The court has not yet ruled on that motion, and the case is still pending.

Investigations into individuals or corporations declined for prosecution are generally not reported to courts and usually only disclosed in summary form by the DOJ in annual reports. To conduct its analysis, ProPublica obtained declination data from the DOJ and the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a center that obtains data through Freedom of Information Act requests.

The DOJ Declined a Slew of Cases Shortly After Pam Bondi Was Confirmed as Attorney General

Nearly 11,000 criminal cases were declined during her first month in office.

Here are some of the areas most impacted by the spike in declinations.

Drugs

As president, Trump has spoken frequently about the “scourge” of drugs coming into the country. At the same time, the Justice Department has declined to prosecute nearly 5,000 cases of federal drug law violations, including trafficking and money laundering. The number of declinations were 45% higher than the average of the prior three new administrations.

Gerbasi, the counternarcotics prosecutor, declined to comment on specific cases that might have been declined in his office. But, he said, once Bondi was appointed, the priority in the office became building cases against Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan group that the Trump administration has labeled a foreign terrorist organization.

“Tren de Aragua was not anywhere close to the scale or impact of the cartels we were focused on,” Gerbasi said. “But we were told to generate those cases.”

He said his office had to scramble to fly people to investigate local gangs in small towns that were reportedly affiliated with Tren de Aragua. “They never would have merited a full-scale federal investigation,” he said.

“It told me that decisions were going to be based on political appearances and not based on the merits of where investigative resources should be placed.”

The DOJ declined to comment on Gerbasi’s remarks.

Trump’s DOJ Has Rejected Far More Cases Than Previous Administrations Across a Wide Range of Categories

Many of the dropped cases were in programs the DOJ has claimed were priorities.

National Security

Under Bondi, the DOJ declined more than 1,300 cases involving terrorism and national security, nearly twice what was typical at the start of the most recent new administrations. While domestic terrorism was the hardest-hit program, just over 300 cases involving charges of providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations were also dropped.

The DOJ program handling matters relating to national internal security — which considers cases of alleged spy activity and the security of classified information — saw over 200 declinations, which is four times as many as typical in the first six months of a new administration. Some of the cases related to serving as an unregistered foreign agent, a charge Bondi ordered prosecutors to stop pursuing unless they involved “conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors.”

Jimmy Gurulé, a former federal prosecutor and George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Treasury Department who investigated the financing of terrorism, said the decline in terrorism cases was troubling.

“The Trump DOJ has been used as a political weapon,” he said. “It’s a question of prioritizing resources. Are they going to be used for national security threats or to prosecute his political enemies and critics?” The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment on Gurulé’s remarks.

Labor

The DOJ shut down over 60 union corruption and labor racketeering cases, 2.5 times the number in Trump’s first term. Nearly half of the cases turned down for those offenses were out of the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office, which in the past has aggressively pursued alleged union corruption. All were noted as declined for insufficient evidence.

Most of those cases had been opened by Grady O’Malley, an assistant U.S. attorney who oversaw several prosecutions of union corruption while working in the New Jersey office over four decades. He retired in 2023 and was disturbed to learn from former colleagues that the office was shutting down the open union probes.

A Trump supporter, O’Malley said that while he doesn’t blame the president, he worries the decision to drop so many cases could embolden unions that he and his colleagues spent years working to hold accountable. “No one is assigned to do labor union cases, and the unions have every reason to believe no one is looking.”

The New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office said it had no comment on the declination of labor cases.

White-Collar Crime

The Trump administration has pledged to root out “rampant” fraud in federal benefit programs like food stamps and welfare. The controversial surging of federal agents to Minnesota in January began as a stated crackdown on noncitizens allegedly ripping off nutrition and child care programs.

The DOJ, however, shut down more than 900 cases of federal program or procurement fraud in the first six months of the administration, including one targeting a mortgage lender accused by several state regulators of defrauding the Federal Housing Administration. The case was dropped due to “prioritization of federal resources and interests.” The U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Alabama, which declined the case, did not reply to a request for comment. The number of fraud cases closed was about double that in the same time period of the Biden and first Trump administrations.

The agency also closed over 100 health care fraud cases as a result of “prioritization of resources and interests” even though the Trump administration has said it is making this area of enforcement a priority.

Among other cases the DOJ determined weren’t a priority: the probe into the Virginia nursing home accused of abuse, as well as investigations in Tennessee into fraud at a national hospital chain and one of the largest Medicaid managed care companies.

The Western District of Virginia U.S. attorney’s office, through a spokesperson, declined to comment on the nursing home case. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney in the Middle District of Tennessee said the office does not comment on investigations that do not result in public charges.

The DOJ’s Antitrust Division, which focuses on preventing big businesses from creating harmful monopolies, also declined an unusually high number of cases in Trump’s second term. More than 40 cases were dropped within the first six months of Bondi’s tenure. That’s more than double the number declined in the same time period by the prior three new administrations.

Despite the declinations, the department said it charged slightly more people with fraud in 2025 compared with the final year of the Biden administration, and those cases alleged larger financial losses.

Promises Kept

The DOJ under Bondi has also rapidly pursued many of the priorities laid out in Trump’s early executive orders and her own “first day” directives to staff.

Trump in February 2025 issued an executive order pausing new investigations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits citizens and companies from bribing foreign entities to advance their business interests. The order asked the attorney general to review and “take appropriate action” on any existing probes to “preserve Presidential foreign policy prerogatives.”

In the first six months, Bondi’s DOJ shut down 25 such cases, which is more than the combined number dropped by the prior three new administrations over the same time period. One of the cases declined for prosecution involved a major car manufacturer, which had reported possible anti-bribery violations to federal investigators involving a foreign subsidiary. The DOJ declined the case for prosecution last June, citing the “prioritization of federal resources and interests.”

On her first day, Bondi ordered a review of criminal prosecutions under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE Act, which prohibits people from illegally blocking access to abortion clinics and places of worship. The department dropped as many cases under the act in its first six months as the past three new administrations combined, over the same time frame. Bondi’s order focused on “non-violent protest activity,” although at least one of the closed cases was being investigated as a violent crime. The DOJ has since charged protesters against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and journalists in Minneapolis under the FACE Act. The defendants in the case have pleaded not guilty.

The agency closed three times the number of cases alleging environmental crimes as the Biden administration did and one-and-a-half times as many as compared with Trump’s first term. The declinations came as the DOJ reassigned and cut prosecutors working on environmental cases. One-fifth of all of the dropped environmental protection cases were shut down for “prioritization of federal resources and interests.”

The post Trump’s Justice Department Dropped 23,000 Criminal Investigations in Shift to Immigration appeared first on ProPublica.

Coulson had been admitted to Hillview Post Acute and Rehabilitation Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, in January 2016, after Parkinson’s disease left her at risk of choking when she swallowed. That April, the facility’s operations were taken over by Skyline Healthcare, a New Jersey-based company that was buying up nursing homes across the country.

Medical records for the retired cardiac nurse, then 71, were marked “NPO” — nothing by mouth.

Then that September, a nursing assistant found Coulson unresponsive and hanging off the side of her bed, her skin ashy and her breathing shallow. She was taken to a hospital in a coma and died several days later. The chief cause of death was aspiration pneumonia, according to her death certificate.

“The doctors said they found scrambled eggs in her lungs,” said her daughter Melissa Coulson.

Coulson’s death and the circumstances surrounding it led her family to file a lawsuit against Skyline and its owner, the New Jersey businessman Joseph Schwartz, alleging that cost-cutting at Hillview left Coulson without the care she needed. It was one of several lawsuits tied to patient outcomes as Schwartz’s empire expanded and then unraveled, with much of the chain collapsing by 2018.

Schwartz didn’t contest the case, and a judge in 2020 awarded nearly $19 million in damages. Coulson’s family has never been able to collect. Schwartz had by that time relinquished all of his property in Arkansas, so there was nothing left in the state for the family’s lawyer to try to seize, nor was there enough information about assets he may hold in other states.

Coulson’s civil action was one of several efforts to hold Schwartz accountable for what happened at his nursing homes. In perhaps the most sweeping move, federal prosecutors in New Jersey charged Schwartz with orchestrating a $39 million payroll tax scheme connected to his nursing home empire.

He pleaded guilty last April to failure to pay the IRS taxes withheld from employees and failing to file a financial report for his employees’ benefit plan. A federal judge sentenced him to three years in prison.

But Schwartz served just three months. In November, President Donald Trump granted him a full pardon, negating his criminal conviction — part of a series of clemency decisions in the president’s second term that have benefited well-connected defendants, including political allies with access to the White House and individuals like Schwartz who had spent heavily on lobbyists.

Often overshadowed in the attention around Trump’s decisions is the emotional and financial devastation left behind. Few clemency decisions illustrate that more clearly than the case of Schwartz, who paid himself millions of dollars from his nursing homes while diverting tens of millions owed to taxpayers and employees, and who has failed to satisfy at least three multimillion-dollar judgments awarded to grieving families.

In the Coulson case, Schwartz later claimed he never received key filings and had mistaken the complaint for the same lawsuit first filed in 2017, which he believed his insurer had already handled before it was withdrawn and refiled. And he argued the company that took over Hillside and canceled insurance coverage — not him — was the proper defendant. He also said he was representing himself, in poor health and isolating because of COVID-19 risks. A judge denied his request to put the case on hold.

Kevin Marino, a lawyer representing Schwartz and Skyline, said he and Schwartz had no comment. He did not respond to a follow-up email containing a detailed list of questions.

Trump has granted clemency to several figures in major health care fraud cases. In 2020, he commuted the 20-year federal prison sentence of Philip Esformes, a Florida nursing home magnate convicted in a scheme that prosecutors said involved about $1.3 billion in fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid claims. The White House cited allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, echoing claims from Esformes’ defense that prosecutors improperly invaded attorney-client privilege by reviewing documents seized in an FBI raid. Although appeals courts did not overturn the conviction based on this argument, Esformes had support from two former U.S. attorneys general.

That same year, Trump commuted the sentence of Judith Negron, convicted in a $200 million Medicare fraud case. Trump’s clemency grant said the “ends of justice” did not require her to serve another two decades in prison.

Lawyers for Esformes and Negron did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump has also nominated nursing home owner Benjamin Landa as ambassador to Hungary. The nomination has remained in place even as a facility Landa co-owns faces a federal audit alleging there were more than $31 million in Medicare overpayments. Landa is suing the administration to block repayment. An attorney for Landa did not respond to a request for comment but has previously denied wrongdoing by his client, saying in a statement the issues identified in the audit occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic when nursing homes were in the midst of a crisis and that the company was committed to patient care.

Schwartz’s case was highlighted by the far-right activist and Trump ally Laura Loomer, who had previously worked on other issues alongside the lobbyists Schwartz hired to press his case in Washington. Loomer published a series of posts on X that falsely claimed that Schwartz was not responsible for the tax violations, that he had been unfairly blamed for the collapse of his nursing home chain and that he had paid back “every dime.”

She also accused the judge in the case of antisemitism against Schwartz, who is Jewish, though she offered no evidence. She also said Schwartz was in “extremely poor health” and that prison would be a “death sentence,” though the judge found no evidence that Schwartz was unfit for prison.

Versions of Loomer’s narrative surfaced in the White House’s explanation for the pardon. A White House official said in response to questions from ProPublica that Schwartz “relied on a third-party entity” to manage tax filings, that he paid restitution, that no funds were used for personal enrichment, that the sentence was exceptionally harmful to a 65-year-old man in deteriorating health and that it was “an example of over prosecution.”

But those claims are contradicted by the court record and Schwartz’s own guilty plea, in which he acknowledged responsibility for the unpaid payroll taxes. While he repaid $5 million, that covered only a fraction of what he owed. Federal prosecutors said that under Schwartz’s plea agreement, the IRS could have pursued the remaining balance — an effort that now appears far less likely following the pardon. And his three-year sentence fell in the middle of the range recommended under federal sentencing guidelines.

Asked about those statements and how they square with the court record, the White House did not respond.

Schwartz’s faith also became part of the Trump administration’s public celebration of the decision. Alice Marie Johnson, who has advised the White House on clemency, wrote online that the pardon meant Schwartz could now join his family for Shabbat, and weeks later, he attended the White House Hanukkah party.

Schwartz paid more than $1 million to lobbyists to press the White House, the Justice Department and Congress on his behalf — including on his efforts to secure a pardon — according to lobbying disclosure forms. The White House has insisted that paid lobbyists have no influence on pardons.

Loomer said she was not paid for her advocacy. She said she heard about Schwartz’s case in a group chat with members of an orthodox Jewish outreach movement, who asked her to look into it. She also pointed to her influence within the Trump administration, citing several instances in which she publicly urged specific actions that the president ultimately took. She said Schwartz approached her at the Hanukkah party to thank her.

Melissa Coulson said Trump’s pardon of Schwartz reinforced her belief that justice is not applied equally.

“Apparently he’s got money somewhere,” Coulson said.

Her lawyer hopes to find it.

From the outside, Schwartz’s operation doesn’t look like a corporate empire. The headquarters of Skyline’s fast-growing nursing home network was a second-floor office above a pizza parlor in Wood-Ridge, New Jersey.

Schwartz entered the nursing home business in the late 2000s and formed Skyline to acquire and operate skilled nursing facilities, initially in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He sold a Florida-based insurance business in 2015 for $22 million, allowing him to rapidly expand Skyline. By 2017, Skyline and the related companies Schwartz controlled cared for approximately 15,000 residents in roughly 100 facilities in 11 states.

In a 2017 deposition in a wrongful death suit in Philadelphia, Schwartz defended the care at his facilities as “superb” while distancing himself from day-to-day operations by saying he relied on facility-level administrators and nursing directors. The suit was settled without Schwartz admitting wrongdoing.

In the deposition, Schwartz minimized reports of staffing shortages and unpaid bills as simple business “disagreements.” Asked about the facility’s one-star federal staffing ratings from 2010 to 2014 — the lowest possible score under the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Five-Star system — Schwartz said he recalled having “a good star rating” and that his nursing homes had tried their hardest to provide as much staffing as possible, insisting that they were “very, very, very, very, very compliant” and that residents were “happy and satisfied.”

The collapse was swift. Skyline facilities failed to make payments for food and medical supplies, and cut hours for nursing home staff. At the same time, Schwartz began to siphon money from multiple sources — overbilling Medicaid and withholding millions of dollars in payroll taxes from workers’ paychecks but never sending the money to the IRS, he admitted later. What’s more, Schwartz paid himself $5 million as what one federal prosecutor described as a “ghost employee” at some of his facilities.

As conditions in the homes deteriorated, health officials in at least six states from Nebraska to Massachusetts seized or transferred control of his facilities or relocated residents. In South Dakota, a vice president who oversaw 18 Schwartz-owned nursing homes began sending increasingly desperate emails to state health officials, according to court records.

Debbie Menzenberg wrote in the emails that Schwartz’s son Louis, an executive officer for Skyline, had called her to say the state “has to do something — there is no money — he told me to discharge residents???”

Then Menzenberg’s emails to the state became more urgent:

“I need water paid at Bella Vista and Prairie Hills today or it will be SHUT OFF — Skyline is SILENT!!!”

“Disconnect notice came today for Pierre May 8 electric.”

“I NEED HELP!!!!!”

“CEO’s are aware of stuff going on!!!”

Neither Menzenberg nor Louis Schwartz could be reached for comment.

A group of employees at Skyline nursing homes across the country later filed a lawsuit alleging that Skyline withheld more than $2 million in health insurance premiums from more than 1,000 workers’ paychecks but failed to provide coverage. That left some of his employees with denied health insurance claims and mounting medical bills.

Schwartz has not defended himself against the claim, and a lawyer for the employees has asked a judge to award a $2.4 million default judgment. The case remains pending in federal court in New Jersey.

One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, an activities director at a nursing home in Arkansas, said that she was left with more than $50,000 in medical bills after surgery on her back and neck. She said she couldn’t pay the bills and that the debt ultimately wrecked her credit.

“They withheld over $1,000 from my paycheck for insurance premiums and did nothing with them except abscond with them,” said the employee, Margaret Gates.

Under Schwartz’s ownership, residents suffered — and some died.

In a lawsuit against Schwartz, Zelma Grissom’s family said the conditions at Hillview, the same facility where Doris Coulson was living, left residents without even basic care. The mother of six had entered the facility after brain surgery left her unable to move on her own and dependent on staff to turn her in bed.

Grissom’s son, LeVester Ivy, said Hillview appeared chronically short-staffed. One day, Ivy said, a wound-care nurse called the family into his mother’s room and showed them a severe pressure sore that had developed after Grissom hadn’t been turned regularly. Surgeons had to cut away infected tissue, leaving a large open wound. After that, he said, her health spiraled.

“She started getting infection after infection,” Ivy recalled.

During one late-night ambulance transfer, he said, an emergency medical worker quietly told him how his mother had arrived. “She pulled me to the side and told me how dirty and nasty, how wet she was,” Ivy said.

The family’s lawyers said she died of sepsis from the bedsores that Hillview caregivers allowed to become infected.

A judge in February 2023 ordered Schwartz to pay Grissom’s family $15.7 million after neither Schwartz nor any representative challenged the family’s wrongful death claim. Schwartz later tried to overturn the ruling, claiming poor health, lack of notice and that he was merely an investor with no role in operations, but a judge rejected the effort.

Ivy said the family sued Schwartz because “we wanted nobody else to go through the things we had to go through.” Schwartz has not paid the judgment, and the family’s lawyer said in an interview that he does not have enough information about Schwartz’s assets to try to recover the money.

The suffering described in cases like Coulson’s and Grissom’s was not part of the tax case against Schwartz that landed him in prison. But it loomed over the proceedings when he appeared for sentencing in federal court in Newark, New Jersey, last April. Schwartz had pleaded guilty to withholding $39 million in payroll taxes from his employees and failing to send the money to the IRS.

The investigation never determined where the money went. Prosecutors said they were not able to establish that Schwartz had used the money on a lavish lifestyle. But they said they never completed a forensic accounting of his finances, which moved money through more than 200 bank accounts. They said they believed Schwartz still controlled more than $50 million in assets.

His attorneys argued that his actions were not an attempt at personal enrichment but the result of a businessman who expanded too quickly, fell behind on bills and then made a series of financial decisions — some of them admittedly criminal. But, they argued, he was simply trying to save his company.

Schwartz apologized for his conduct and told U.S. District Judge Susan D. Wigenton that he “always tried to live the right way” and set a good example. But he acknowledged that he’d failed to do so in this instance.

Wigenton said she could not understand why prosecutors had agreed to a sentence of just a year and a day. Even years into the investigation, she noted, it remained unclear where much of the money had gone. And because so many of the letters submitted on Schwartz’s behalf described him as a brilliant businessman, Wigenton said the “number of layers and businesses and LLCs that were created” made it hard to see him as someone who had been fooled or confused.

“Not a single asset is in your name,” she said. “Not one.”

Wigenton said the case was not merely an abstract tax case, citing the collapse of Skyline’s nursing homes and the harm to patients. She said there was a need for deterrence in sentencing.

The judge sentenced Schwartz to three years in prison and ordered him to pay restitution of $5 million — the amount he had paid himself as a ghost employee — which he did. The remaining taxes were not part of the criminal sentence because prosecutors said they were used to fund his collapsing business rather than for personal enrichment. They said the IRS could try to recover the rest through a civil case.

Trump’s pardon wiped away Schwartz’s federal prison sentence — and likely any IRS effort to claw back the rest of the stolen taxes. But it did not affect a separate Arkansas state conviction for Medicaid fraud and tax evasion, in which Schwartz admitted submitting false and misleading information that inflated the Medicaid rates paid to his facilities in the state.

A judge in Little Rock had sentenced Schwartz to one year in state prison, ordered to run at the same time as his federal term. Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, who had announced Schwartz’s conviction as a signature achievement, made clear after Trump’s pardon that the state prosecution stood on its own.

Schwartz, Griffin said at the time, owed the state of Arkansas nine months in prison and $1.8 million in restitution. A spokesman for Griffin said last week that, after making some payments — on schedule — Schwartz owed the state about $1.2 million, which must be fully repaid by April 2027.

One of the lobbyists whom Schwartz hired, Joshua Nass, worked to try to reduce Schwartz’s sentence in Arkansas. Nass declined to comment. He was later charged with attempting to extort $500,000 from a client and his son. Although the victims are not identified in the case, the circumstances match those of Schwartz.

Nass was released from federal custody after posting a $5 million bond. He has not yet responded to the charge. Prosecutors said in a court filing they were negotiating with Nass for a plea deal that could resolve the case without a trial.

Schwartz reported to an Arkansas prison on Dec. 29, creating an opportunity for the lawyers representing families who had won judgments against him. At the height of Skyline’s expansion, the company controlled nearly 1 in 10 nursing home beds in the state. But by the time families won their cases, Schwartz had relinquished or sold his Arkansas facilities, leaving no clear assets for lawyers to pursue.

Because Schwartz was in state custody again, lawyers could serve him with court papers and ask a judge to compel him to answer questions under oath about his finances — requiring him to disclose bank accounts, companies and other assets and to turn over financial records. Those proceedings are often the first step in tracing money and identifying property that might be used to satisfy a judgment. From there, attorneys could ask courts in other states to recognize and enforce the Arkansas judgments so they could pursue assets located elsewhere.

John Landis, an attorney for Reddick Law, which represents the Coulson and Grissom families, said he and another attorney representing yet another client with a judgment against Schwartz, contacted the state prison system to set up depositions of Schwartz. But the window proved too brief. The Arkansas parole board released Schwartz after just three weeks.

Before they could ask a single question, the chance to follow the money was gone.

The post A Nursing Home Owner Got a Trump Pardon. The Families of His Patients Got Nothing. appeared first on ProPublica.

That will change soon. Earlier this month, state lawmakers passed a bill that prohibits police and other government officials from requesting polygraph tests for alleged sex assault victims. Gov. Spencer Cox signed it into law on Thursday, and it goes into effect in May. 

Experts say these tests are known to be especially unreliable with victims of sexual abuse. That’s because victims may have stress and anxiety recounting their assault that the polygraph may interpret as deception. Other states don’t allow them to be used with assault victims for this reason.

It took two years and three legislative sessions for Utah state Rep. Angela Romero, the House minority leader, to get the bill across the finish line. When she first sponsored it in 2024, she cited reporting from The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica as she told her fellow legislators the damaging effects polygraph tests can have on people who are reporting sexual abuse. 

In the case covered by the news outlets, state licensors asked a man to take a polygraph test after he reported that his therapist, Scott Owen, had touched him inappropriately. The test results indicated he was being deceptive, and that led the patient to drop his complaint. Owen was allowed to continue to practice for two more years, until others came forward with similar allegations. Owen is now in prison after admitting he sexually abused patients.

Romero said in a recent interview that she was determined to bring the bill back for that former patient.

“For me, it was really specifically for that one individual who was not believed,” Romero said, “and then their perpetrator went on to harm other people.”

Cox signed the legislation during a small ceremony at his office, telling Romero that she “has been such a champion, and made a difference and saved lives.” The governor also nodded to The Tribune and ProPublica’s reporting driving change.

Provo police began investigating Owen in 2023 after The Tribune and ProPublica published a story that detailed a range of sexual assault allegations from the man given the polygraph test, identified in previous reporting under the pseudonym Andrew, and three others. 

Former patients who spoke to the news outlets said they sought Owen’s help because he was a therapist who had built a reputation as a specialist who could help gay men who were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They said he touched them inappropriately during those sessions, some of which were paid for with church funds.

Half of states have laws that explicitly prohibit law enforcement from conducting a polygraph test with someone reporting a sexual assault. Some go further, barring a broader group of government employees beyond law enforcement from requiring an alleged sexual assault victim to take one. 

Although Romero’s bill had support from prosecutors and police each session she proposed it, there was pushback from defense attorneys and some fellow legislators who wanted to keep polygraph tests as an option because alleged sex assaults often have no other witnesses.

Polygraph test results are not admissible in court because of their unreliability. But Steve Burton, with the Utah Defense Attorney Association, said in a recent legislative hearing that it is still valuable for prosecutors and investigators to consider those results before deciding whether to pursue criminal charges.

“This is often one of the only things that a defense attorney can ask for or use in order to try to show that their client may be telling the truth,” he said.

Romero pushed back on that idea, saying there are other kinds of interview techniques that authorities can use to help determine whether someone’s account is truthful.

“This is not a way,” she said. “Especially when you’re dealing with someone who has been a victim. You could revictimize that person. And it also could discourage that person from going forward and participating in the process of criminally prosecuting their perpetrator.”

“The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Gone Through”

Reporting from The Tribune and ProPublica showed the damaging effects a polygraph test had on the man who reported Owen to state licensors.

Andrew reported Owen to Utah’s Division of Professional Licensing in 2016. As part of the investigation, licensors offered polygraph tests to both Andrew and Owen.

Owen declined. Andrew agreed, recalling that an investigator told him passing would bolster what was essentially one person’s word against another’s.

But the polygraph results, Andrew said, suggested he was being deceptive. Polygraph tests generally function to record signs of internal stress, which could suggest someone is not telling the truth.

“I had so much trauma,” he told The Tribune and ProPublica. “And so, certainly, when they asked me questions about the particular things that happened in therapy, it’s going to elicit a very strong emotional response.”

The result affected his mental health, he said, and he told an investigator he no longer wanted to pursue the complaint.

In a 2016 public reprimand from licensors, Owen admitted giving Andrew hugs — touching he called inappropriate but “non-sexual.” Andrew had reported that Owen groped him, encouraged him to undress and kissed him during sessions.

Officials with DOPL said they believe they responded appropriately to the complaint. But communications between Andrew and an investigator suggest that the agency’s decision not to more harshly discipline Owen rested largely on his denial and on Andrew’s polygraph results.

Owen pleaded guilty to felony charges in February 2025, admitting he sexually abused two patients and led them to believe that sexual touching was part of therapy. He pleaded no contest in a third patient’s case.

Andrew was among more than half a dozen men — mostly former patients — who spoke during Owen’s sentencing hearing a month later about how he had harmed them. 

“The experience with Scott Owen has been the worst thing I’ve ever gone through,” Andrew said. “I don’t think he belongs in society anymore.”

A judge sentenced Owen to at least 15 years in prison. He’s currently at the central Utah prison facility.

A New State Task Force

The state is addressing some of the shortcomings identified by The Tribune and ProPublica in another way as well: creating a task force to look into a rise in sexual misconduct complaints that state licensors say they’ve seen against licensed professionals. The task force will focus on health care, mental health and massage therapy, professions state officials say have historically received the highest percentage of sexual misconduct complaints.

The news organizations reported that more than a third of mental health professionals who received discipline from licensors beginning in 2012 were accused of sexual misconduct. In 2023, DOPL spokesperson Melanie Hall said the agency was aware that certain license types “have a tendency towards certain types of violations.” The agency, she said, “takes these factors into account when investigating complaints, and takes appropriate disciplinary action when necessary.”

The task force, which was announced earlier this month, will focus on suggesting changes to the law and creating resources to help victims more easily report misconduct to the state. 

It also plans to develop a standardized process for sharing reports among agencies that might have knowledge of an accusation — something that is not currently legally required. The Tribune and ProPublica highlighted this gap in their reporting on Owen’s case: Although Andrew and at least two others reported Owen to DOPL, licensors never shared those reports with Provo police. 

Margaret Busse is the executive director of the Utah Department of Commerce, which houses DOPL. She said in a statement that licensed professionals who engage in sexual misconduct violate not just their clients’ trust, but the public’s confidence in their profession.

“These heinous acts inflict profound harm to victims and damage the reputations of entire industries,” she said. “This task force is our unequivocal declaration: Utah will hold licensed professionals accountable to protect our communities and the integrity of state-regulated industries.”

The post Utah Bans Polygraph Tests for Those Reporting Sexual Assault appeared first on ProPublica.

Before vaccines, death and disability stalked children. Then shots turned once-common infections into something doctors only read about in textbooks.

When immunization rates drop, however, plagues from the past can come roaring back, as measles has in American communities where parents decided not to vaccinate their children.

Imagine what would happen if even the people who wanted shots couldn’t get them.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who founded an antivaccination group, is considering changes that could prompt the handful of companies that make most shots for American children to stop selling them here. Over the last year, he has been transforming a government that long championed the lifesaving benefits of vaccines into one that questions their safety here and around the world.

Shortly after Kennedy was nominated, questions swirled over how he might overhaul America’s immunization system. Two Stanford University researchers wondered how many people would suffer if vaccination rates dropped or shots became entirely unavailable for four of the most infamous diseases: polio, measles, rubella and diphtheria. 

Outbreaks often start when an American catches one of these illnesses abroad and returns home. So epidemiologists Mathew Kiang and Nathan Lo, who is also an infectious diseases doctor, built a model to simulate how the four contagions could spread from sick travelers based on each state’s vaccination rates.

Since a sizable chunk of the population is currently vaccinated, some of the infections wouldn’t get a foothold right away. But over time, as more babies are born and not vaccinated, a larger share of the population would become susceptible. 

The professors ran thousands of simulations for each disease, producing a range of possible outcomes. From there, they figured out the average number of deaths and disabilities over a 25-year period.

Their model shows that at current vaccination rates, the nation is already teetering on the brink of an explosion in measles cases — one that would be virtually wiped out with just a 5% increase in vaccination. But if current rates drop by half, all four diseases could return. 

The researchers’ modeling of the worst-case scenario assumes a quarter century where no one could get the shots. It doesn’t account for the likelihood of parents going abroad to find vaccines or politicians intervening to ensure drugmakers offer them again. 

But the results demonstrate in stark terms how vital shots are and what’s at stake if policy changes interfere with Americans’ ability to vaccinate their kids. 

ProPublica shared the key findings of that scenario with the Department of Health and Human Services. An agency spokesperson didn’t address the modeling but said “HHS has not limited access or insurance coverage to any FDA-approved vaccines” and continues to routinely recommend the shots for children.

When they published their paper in early 2025, Kiang and Lo emphasized the outcomes from less extreme drops in vaccination rates, in part because the peer reviewers suggested those were more realistic. Back then, Kennedy was in his earliest days at HHS. 

A year later, though, a scenario where no one can get these vaccines doesn’t feel as far-fetched, Kiang said. “Every week that goes by,” he said, “that seems more plausible.” 

Lo said that their goal was to show policy makers, “if we make certain decisions, this is what could happen.” 

So ProPublica decided to illustrate what a future without vaccines could look like.

If We Lost the Vaccine for Polio

Polio, which mainly affects young children, can invade the nervous system and cause paralysis in the limbs or in the muscles needed to breathe. In the 1950s, many people were kept alive in iron lungs, huge metal contraptions that encased the body up to the neck and used pressure to force air in and out of the lungs.

Ventilators have since replaced the antiquated equipment, but modern medicine can’t reverse the paralysis. The model assumes 1 out of every 200 unvaccinated people who catch polio would become paralyzed.

Imagine if this group of kindergartners became paralyzed by polio.

They would be a tiny sliver of the 23,000 people the model predicts could be paralyzed by polio over 25 years if no one is getting the vaccine.

That 23,000 is the model’s average. It’s the equivalent of more than a thousand kindergarten classes. (The model results range from 0 to more than 70,000 cases of paralytic polio.)

If We Lost the Vaccine for Measles

Measles is among the most contagious diseases in history. A child can spread it before they even get a rash, and the virus can linger in the air for up to two hours after they leave a room. 

Famous for its blotchy spots covering the body, measles is a respiratory disease that can lead to pneumonia and swelling of the brain. Before the vaccine, just about everyone got measles, and every year 400 to 500 Americans died.

The model assumes that 3 out of every 1,000 people infected with measles would die.

Over the last 25 years, six people who contracted measles in the U.S. died from the disease.

If Americans could no longer get the vaccine, the model predicts measles would spread quickly.

The model shows that measles could kill about 290,000 people over 25 years.

If We Lost the Vaccine for Rubella

Rubella, also known as German measles, is usually mild in kids and adults. But it’s devastating to a developing fetus. If an infection occurs very early in pregnancy, there’s up to a 90% chance that the baby will be born with congenital rubella syndrome. These children frequently have heart defects, deafness or blindness — and sometimes all three. Many have intellectual disabilities, too. About a third of babies with the syndrome die before their first birthday. A U.S. rubella epidemic in the mid-1960s left 20,000 newborns with congenital rubella syndrome.

If the vaccine went away, we wouldn’t see babies born with congenital rubella syndrome right away. The unvaccinated children would first need to grow into their childbearing years.

The model shows that cases would begin to climb after about 15 years. And within 25 years, 41,000 babies could be born with congenital rubella syndrome.

If We Lost the Vaccine for Diphtheria

Diphtheria, a major killer of children in the 1900s, was known as the “strangling angel.” 

The disease’s name comes from the Greek word for leather because diphtheria’s toxin attacks the respiratory tract. Dead tissue builds up in the throat like a thick piece of hide, sealing off a swollen airway. 

For those who escape suffocation, the toxin can damage the nerves and heart. Patients who seem better can drop dead weeks later.

An antitoxin made from the blood of horses needs to be given promptly, but it is in short supply. Children elsewhere in the world have died waiting for it.

The disease is rare and much less contagious than measles or rubella. But it’s also far more deadly. The model assumes only one infected traveler would arrive every five years and that 1 out of every 10 unvaccinated people who catch diphtheria would die.

The researchers found it’s very possible nobody would die of diphtheria in the 25-year period their model covers. But we would be playing a game of high-stakes roulette if we lost the vaccine. There is a chance that the strangling angel could become devastating again.

Remember the 23,000 people who could be paralyzed without a polio vaccine? A world without a diphtheria vaccine could be even worse.

On average, the model predicts 138,000 deaths from diphtheria.

In the worst-case scenario, though, the model shows that more than a million people could die from diphtheria in 25 years without a vaccine.

The chance of that is remote, but it’s the gamble we’d all be taking.

The post The Horrors That Could Lie Ahead if Vaccines Vanish appeared first on ProPublica.

The OB-GYN, Dr. Mark Mulholland, stood between her legs, inquiring about the woman’s sex life as he had in prior visits, she wrote in a complaint filed with Washington state health care regulators.

She said Mulholland had previously asked about her enjoyment of sex and if she had a boyfriend, a strange way to learn about a patient’s sexual activity, she thought. But this was her last checkup after her hysterectomy and the last time she expected to see Mulholland.

“Do you masturbate?” Mulholland asked the woman during their final appointment, according to her complaint.

The question shocked her. She wrote that Mulholland explained he wanted to “make sure the nerves were intact.”

Then, the woman wrote, he inserted his fingers into her vagina and pumped his hand back and forth in a way she said felt “sexual and not medical.”

“Does that hurt?” the woman said Mulholland asked her, before ending their visit by saying “the playroom is open” — a comment she interpreted as Mulholland clearing her for sexual activity.

The woman said she left the room in shock. She made her way to the parking lot of the Kadlec Clinic-Associated Physicians for Women, climbed inside her car and sat, incredulous, she said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica. What happened felt terribly wrong, she said.

Mulholland did not respond to requests for comment for this article after being sent a detailed list of findings by email and by letter. His attorney declined to comment.

What the woman didn’t know was that by the time of her exam in February 2025, the Washington Medical Commission had already received complaints from four other women since 2022 accusing Mulholland of sexual misconduct. And yet he was allowed to keep seeing patients throughout.

The accounts related by the women, whom KUOW and ProPublica are not naming to protect their privacy, included descriptions of Mulholland touching them unnecessarily, using sexually charged language, or performing painful or seemingly sexual pelvic exams that involved moving his fingers in and out.

The commission also gathered testimony a year before the woman’s February 2025 appointment from three of Mulholland’s colleagues with their own troubling accounts. These included hearing firsthand about or observing him telling patients they had “tight” and “pretty” vaginas, touching and slapping his patients’ legs, and aggressively pulling a patient’s pants down without permission. 

Washington law allows the commission to take emergency action and suspend a doctor’s license while disciplinary proceedings are pending. The law says a suspension is defensible if it’s more probable than not that the physician poses an “immediate threat to the public health and safety.”

In Mulholland’s case, the commission did not choose suspension. Instead, it issued a formal statement of charges accusing Mulholland of abuse and unprofessional conduct in April 2025 — more than a year after the commission’s investigator submitted her reports on two of the complaints for review and 11 months after Mulholland was offered an informal settlement that he apparently did not sign.

Even after the commission declared its charges against Mulholland, he was allowed to keep practicing while the case proceeded. He saw patients as late as May, before he went on leave.

At least 84 patients have filed lawsuits against Mulholland or his employer since the state’s investigation became public. Court filings by Mulholland’s attorney, made in response to the lawsuits, have denied wrongdoing or improper conduct toward women. He also has denied the allegations made by the medical commission and is entitled to a hearing to contest them.

Emily Volland, a spokesperson for Kadlec and its affiliate, the Providence health system, said Mulholland is no longer employed by Kadlec. Volland declined to comment on the allegations against him but said via email: “We take our patient’s safety very seriously and are fully cooperating with the state in this matter.”

The lawsuits against Mulholland, Kadlec and Providence are ongoing. Lawyers for Providence and Kadlec in court filings denied allegations of negligence and wrongdoing.

While other news coverage has described the lawsuits and the commission’s actions in 2025, none has focused on how the state dealt with complaints against Mulholland during the three years before he agreed to restrictions on his license.

Washington state has faced criticism in the past for its handling of sexual misconduct complaints. A 2021 Seattle Times investigation found that in 282 cases of alleged sexual misconduct since 2009, state regulators took more than a year to impose discipline.

Several other states in recent years have dealt with their own high-profile cases of sexual misconduct involving OB-GYNs. On March 10, for instance, Columbia University in New York released a report detailing how a culture of silence at the institution had allowed OB-GYN Robert Hadden to abuse more than 1,000 patients over decades. 

States like Ohio and Delaware have moved aggressively to make it easier to keep doctors accused of sexual misconduct away from patients.

In Washington, the medical commission wasn’t the only organization that allowed Mulholland to keep practicing.

A Kadlec risk management employee, through an attorney, acknowledged to the commission that the clinic had received patient complaints against the doctor and said they were investigated. (The letter did not describe the complaints but said they included “communication with patients regarding obesity.”) Mulholland’s privileges were never restricted or terminated, the statement said.

When local news stories covered the commission’s charges against Mulholland in June, it unleashed a deluge of 18 new complaints in the following three months.

In September, the commission placed restrictions on his license that prevented him from seeing female patients. Mulholland agreed pending a hearing on his case.

Yanling Yu, a former Washington medical commissioner and a patient advocate with Washington Advocates for Patient Safety, wouldn’t comment on the Mulholland case directly. But she said it’s ethically wrong to allow a doctor facing serious allegations of sexual misconduct to continue seeing any patients while an investigation is ongoing.

“In an ideal regulatory system, if there has been enough or strong evidence to support the allegation, the doctor’s practice should be temporarily suspended or at least summarily restricted to protect patients’ safety,” she wrote in an email.

Kyle Karinen, executive director of the Washington Medical Commission, said the agency wasn’t slow to act and that it must operate under the system lawmakers created.

“I acknowledge that sometimes it takes longer than people would like, but we take that process really seriously,” Karinen said. “When we file a case and go to a hearing, we want to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to be heard on a particular topic.”

The woman who saw Mulholland in February 2025 filed a lawsuit against the clinic and a board complaint against the doctor, both in August. She said she was indignant after learning about the earlier complaints.

She said the commission should have taken those women more seriously. “They just let him keep practicing,” she said.

2022: The First Complaint 

The first sexual misconduct allegation against Mulholland landed in the commission’s email inbox in January 2022. The author was a first-time mother who, at 41 weeks pregnant, went to have labor induced at the Kadlec Regional Medical Center.

The woman said she had hoped a female doctor would deliver the baby. But Mulholland was the on-call doctor assigned the day she arrived. When she saw that the doctor was a man, she asked if the female nurse who was there could perform her predelivery cervical check instead, according to her complaint.

Mulholland insisted, she said. (He later told a commission investigator that because the woman was having labor induced, he had to personally know her cervical dilation and consistency, whether the fetus was in breech position or if her amniotic sac was intact. He also said because she was experiencing high blood pressure, her delivery couldn’t wait to be rescheduled with a female doctor.)

“I didn’t have a choice but to trust who was supposed to be trustworthy,” the woman said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica.

In her complaint, she said Mulholland was inappropriate. When the nurse asked her if she still had her underwear on, Mulholland joked that he still had his on too, she wrote.

During the cervical check, with his fingers inside the expectant mother, he pressed in different directions, according to her complaint. The woman said Mulholland told her he doesn’t perform exams this way because it hurts. Then he showed her what he described as the correct way, she said in the complaint.

“The cervical check was the longest and most painful one I have ever had,” she said in the complaint.

Three OB-GYNs, when presented by KUOW and ProPublica with the woman’s description of the pelvic exam, said the maneuver sounded unnecessarily painful.

“That sounds strange,” said Alson Burke, an associate professor at the University of Washington who teaches medical students how to perform pelvic exams. “Saying ‘I don’t do something because it hurts’ and then doing it doesn’t make sense to me.”

Commission records show that Mulholland said the allegation that his cervical exam was longer than what’s typical was absurd.

“I do try to be as careful, quick, gentle, and efficient as I can be when doing a pelvic exam whether it is for gynecology or obstetrics,” he wrote in an email to a commission clinical health care investigator. “With regards to being the most painful one she ever had, for that I am surprised as well as sorry. I pride myself on trying to be as gentle as absolutely possible. I get frequent compliments on how much less uncomfortable my exams are than most other providers, male or female.”

The nurse present during the woman’s exam told the commission it seemed “no longer or any more painful than these types of exams are typically.”

Up until that day, the patient’s pregnancy had been a joyous experience, she said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica. She was excited to meet her daughter and picked out the outfit she’d arrive home in.

The nurse was ultimately able to line up a midwife to assist with the woman’s delivery in place of Mulholland.

But her cervical exam with Mulholland made the birth experience “worse than we could have ever imagined,” the woman, now 27, said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica. It brought about depression and anxiety, she said.

“My daughter’s an only child, and I’m not sure if she ever will get a sibling because of how traumatic that was,” she told the news organizations.

By the end of July 2022, the new mother’s case was closed without any disciplinary action.

At the time, it was an isolated complaint in the record of a doctor who, records show, had not faced accusations of sexual misconduct with the medical commission before.

Then, a little over a year later, came another complaint, this time filed by a woman who had worked with Mulholland for nearly a decade.

October 2023: A Co-worker and Patient Speaks Out

According to an investigator’s report, the woman said she had worked at Kadlec Regional Medical Center for nine years and her interactions as Mulholland’s colleague had always been professional.

The complaint she filed in October 2023 concerned events she said took place when she was Mulholland’s patient. She’d had her fallopian tubes and the tissue lining her uterus removed and developed pain that was only present when she was menstruating.

On the day of her appointment, her complaint said, she’d explained all this to Mulholland when he began a line of questioning.

“Does it hurt you to have intercourse?”

“No,” she replied.

Then, the woman wrote in her complaint to the medical commission, Mulholland stood close to her and in a lower tone asked. “Not even when he’s deep inside you?”

“No,” she said she asserted.

Mulholland told the woman he needed to do a pelvic exam, according to the complaint.

While examining her, the woman wrote, Mulholland used one hand to push down on the top of her abdomen and with the other hand began repeatedly and “powerfully” thrusting his fingers into her vagina.

Burke, the associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington, said repeated “thrusting” is neither a technique she uses nor something she has ever observed.

“The reason I wouldn’t recommend it is because it could be triggering and really uncomfortable for someone,” Burke said. “Is that actually helping you gather the information? And is the patient feeling safe in the way that you are examining them?”

She said that no part of the pelvic exam should be performed in such a way that its intent could be perceived as sexual.

According to the former colleague’s complaint, each time Mulholland shoved his fingers inside, he leaned in close and asked, “Is this the same as the pain you felt?”

The woman wrote that Mulholland was “effectively holding her in place” on the exam table and she was unable to move to escape the pain. A medical assistant was nearby, she said.

After the pelvic exam, she said, the assistant left. Mulholland told the woman that she had a “great looking vagina,” she wrote, and that he usually had to use three fingers, but with her, he could only use two. Before leaving, the woman said in her complaint, the doctor asked her if she worked out and said he could tell she did.

Through an attorney, Mulholland later told the commission that he conducts all of his exams “as respectfully as possible” and that he is “very cognizant of his patient’s reactions.”

The doctor was responding to a commission investigator’s December 2023 request for his version of what happened during the woman’s visit.

That same month, a complaint from a third woman arrived.

December 2023: Another Exam Complaint

It was three weeks before the new year when the woman went to the medical commission for help.

The patient, whose primary language is Spanish, had an interpreter join her in-person appointment virtually. A physician’s assistant had referred the woman to Mulholland to discuss a possible hysterectomy to relieve pain.

The woman later told a commission investigator that during her appointment, Mulholland entered the exam room and introduced himself. Then he lifted the paper sheet that covered her naked lower half, looked at her genital area, then looked back at her, which made her uncomfortable. Without asking her to reposition herself, he grabbed her by the butt to move her down the exam table, she said.

Mulholland’s pelvic exam was aggressive, she said in her written complaint to the commission. The investigator who interviewed her wrote that the woman said he’d moved his fingers in and out and that she felt a lot of pressure.

“I yelled at some point,” she wrote in her complaint.

A nurse was present but seemed fixated on the computer screen, the woman said.

Before the appointment ended, Mulholland said he was “eager to see” the woman’s vagina again, laughed and then said he was looking forward to reuniting with her womb, the investigator quoted the woman as saying. When the Spanish-language interpreter on the computer screen went quiet and asked Mulholland to repeat what he said, the woman wrote in her complaint, the doctor told the interpreter there was no need to relay that last message.

The woman was left in pain for 12 days after her appointment with Mulholland, she told the investigator, adding that she didn’t want others to go through what she had.

In response to this complaint, Mulholland’s attorney wrote to the commission, “at no time has he ever simply moved his fingers in and out several times with this patient or any other.”

(A separate report the woman filed with the Richland Police Department, which the department classified as a potential sex offense with “forcible fondling,” was closed in 14 days. The responding officer wrote that he hadn’t found facts to indicate a crime was committed “on the basis that the alleged incident occurred during a medical examination.”)

The state medical commission pressed ahead with its investigations into the two 2023 complaints, both of which asserted Mulholland had moved his fingers in and out during a pelvic exam.

The investigator assigned to both cases turned to Mulholland’s current and former colleagues. Two said that while some patients complained about the way Mulholland communicated with them about weight issues, they personally did not have concerns. Three other current or former colleagues, meanwhile, described problems.

Alexis Tuck, an OB-GYN who worked at Kadlec from 2017 to 2022, said in a statement to the commission that she noticed a pattern of Mulholland’s patients switching providers because they wanted anyone “except Dr. Mulholland,” and sometimes requested her.

She said that when she asked these patients about the reason behind their switch they replied:

“He grabbed my belly fat and shook it in front of my husband.”

“He called me fat and made fun of me.”

“He told me my vagina is tight during a pelvic exam.”

“He told me I have a pretty vagina during a pap smear.”

“He made a comment about my vagina being tight and I talked to my mom about him. Apparently she had a similar weird experience with him.”

Tuck told the commission that more than once, patients cried in her office while sharing their stories.

“These accounts were consistent in their tone and content, painting a troubling picture of a physician whose behavior repeatedly crossed the line of professional and ethical conduct,” she wrote to the commission.

Tuck told the commission that the woman who filed the October 2023 complaint was among those who described their experiences to her. Tuck said the woman was “visibly shaken and emotional” when she detailed what happened, which, based on Tuck’s retelling, was generally consistent with the woman’s complaint to the medical commission.

Another colleague told the commission that Mulholland once told her as a patient was leaving the office, “I bet you were skinny like her when you were pregnant,” and that another time he said he thought he’d seen her driving a BMW and that she looked “hot.” Another said she found Mulholland’s comments about overweight women disrespectful.

The claims against Mulholland were piling up.

In February and March 2024, Britta Fischer, commission investigator, submitted the 2023 cases for review.

What to do next was soon in the hands of commissioners.

March-September 2024: A Decision Awaits 

The medical commission takes its guidance on how to handle allegations against a doctor from Washington statutes, which prohibit physicians from engaging in a range of behavior defined as sexual misconduct.

The law bans statements about a patient’s “body, appearance, sexual history, or sexual orientation” except for legitimate purposes of care. The law also bars behavior, gestures or expressions that could “reasonably be interpreted as seductive or sexual.”

A doctor can’t remove a patient’s gown or draping unless it’s with a patient’s consent, during emergency care or in a custodial setting.

A doctor can’t touch a person’s breasts, genitals, anus or other “sexualized body part” unless it’s “consistent with accepted community standards of practice for examination, diagnosis and treatment and within the health care practitioner’s scope of practice.”

Determining whether or not behavior is appropriate can be particularly difficult when it comes to OB-GYNs, said Emily Anderson, professor at Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics and Healthcare Leadership and Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine.

“They have access to our naked bodies as women, to our vaginas, to our breasts,” Anderson said. “They are allowed to do things that we don’t give other people permission to do, and that’s part of their job.”

There are standards for physical exams. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ Committee on Ethics wrote that exams should be explained appropriately, done only with patient consent and “performed with the minimum amount of physical contact required to obtain data for diagnosis and treatment.”

State medical boards can also look to patterns of behavior.

Two of the three complaints against Mulholland from 2022 through 2023 mentioned movement in and out during pelvic exams, while all three described painful pelvic exams and comments the women considered inappropriate. Three colleagues also had described hearing about or witnessing him making disrespectful or inappropriate remarks, including one who said they were directed at her.

Anderson, in a journal article, wrote that it’s common to find repeated, lesser forms of misconduct in the backgrounds of doctors who act egregiously.

“For example, sexual violations are nearly always preceded by boundary violations such as inappropriate comments or touching,” the article said.

Anderson and her colleagues recommended state regulators consider restricting a doctor’s license for multiple smaller offenses.

Stephanie Loucka, executive director of Ohio’s medical board, said that if patterns of misconduct exist, the process will find them — even when an OB-GYN’s actions occur under the guise of legitimate care. Ohio began its overhaul of sexual misconduct investigations seven years ago.

“If a complaint gets made, we’re going to work the fact pattern from the assumption that there might be something there, and we’re going to gather the evidence and see where the evidence takes us,” she said. “And it typically takes us clearly one way or the other.”

If there’s a threat of immediate harm in cases of sexual misconduct, Loucka said, Ohio moves “with a sense of urgency” to file an emergency suspension. She estimated it has taken the Ohio board from six weeks to nine months to do so.

In Washington, the medical commission reviewed the investigator’s reports on  the 2023 cases and decided on what it considered an appropriate resolution.

It proposed an “informal way of settling” allegations against Mulholland.

A heavily redacted May 31, 2024, letter sent to Mulholland’s attorney by the commission does not reveal the terms of the settlement. But the letter said the settlement would not require an admission of “any unprofessional conduct or wrongdoing.” Although settlements appear in the commission’s newsletter with brief summaries, the letter told Mulholland that a settlement would avoid a hearing, typically a public process.

All Mulholland had to do was sign.

Months passed. Mulholland’s attorney asked for the information gathered about his client, and the commission sent it. A June 2024 deadline for him to accept the agreement passed, as did a subsequent one in August. Nothing in documents released by the commission indicates he signed — or that the commission took any disciplinary action.

Mulholland kept seeing patients.

2018-2023: What the Hospital Knew

Long before the commission’s investigator filed her report with her superiors, Mulholland’s employer had also heard repeated concerns, according to Kadlec Clinic records acquired by attorneys in a lawsuit against Providence and the clinic. The attorneys submitted the documents as an exhibit in court.

(In court filings, Providence and Kadlec denied that they were negligent or that they knew or should have known about the abuse the plaintiffs alleged.)

Kadlec’s records in the lawsuit show that the clinic conducted a 2018 human resources investigation into allegations that Mulholland had mocked a co-worker’s sexuality and religion, concluding that it was “more likely than not” the allegations were true. Afterward, the records say, Mulholland’s employer provided him “coaching.”

Kadlec’s records also say that the clinic conducted a 2019 workplace investigation into allegations that Mulholland made sex jokes and condescending remarks, displayed discrimination toward women, and challenged a co-worker who complained about him.

A labor nurse told a Providence investigator that year that Mulholland had pinched a patient’s labia while she was in labor and asked if she was hurting. A colleague told the nurse that Mulholland had done the same to another patient who was giving birth, according to the labor nurse’s account as written down by the investigator.

A different colleague reported to a Kadlec workplace investigator that a patient had disclosed that Mulholland told her to “masturbate more often,” Kadlec records say.

Separately, Tuck, the OB-GYN who worked alongside Mulholland, told a Kadlec investigator that a patient disclosed she felt Mulholland had assaulted her but that the woman didn’t report it because she felt no one would believe her.

Following the 2019 workplace investigation, Kadlec’s records say, Mulholland’s employer concluded in 2020 that he “engaged in multiple instances of inappropriate behavior” that violated the medical center’s expectations. He was placed on a “behavior agreement” and required to take harassment prevention training.

In 2022, Kadlec records show, more emails were sent to clinic leadership alleging that Mulholland was demeaning to patients and co-workers. They described a “toxic work environment” and said management failed to address employees’ concerns about the doctor.

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Concerned About Your OB-GYN Visit? A Guide to What Should Happen — and What Shouldn’t.

Tuck departed the clinic sometime that same year. She later told the medical commission she left because management failed to take action against him.

Tuck raised concerns about Mulholland within an email to Chief Medical Officer Rich Meadows in July 2022, writing that patients “felt they had been insulted/assaulted” by Mulholland.

Kadlec’s records in the lawsuit show that Tuck had also told a Kadlec workplace investigator in 2019 that the clinic manager, Lisa Mallory, protected Mulholland. In the statement she later gave the state medical commission, Tuck said when she brought concerns about Mulholland to Mallory, she responded, “He’s always been like that.”

Mallory, in response to a request for comment from KUOW and ProPublica, said this statement was taken out of context. She declined to say more. Meadows, through a Providence spokesperson, declined to comment.

In June 2023, clinic records in the lawsuit say, Kadlec took a phone call from a patient who said Mulholland shoved his two fingers inside of her so hard during a pelvic exam that she felt his knuckles slam up against her vagina and anus.

“Rough, jabbing and pushing up, like he was trying to arouse me or something,” according to Kadlec’s narrative describing the woman’s complaint.

She told Kadlec that she had alerted Mulholland before the exam that her vagina was prone to tearing and that she experienced vaginal pain with as little as a sneeze or a cough.

Kadlec’s summary of the woman’s account said that after a rectal exam, Mulholland told the patient: “Well, you took that surprisingly well. It’s a good thing my fingers are small.”

The woman said her body where Mulholland touched her was inflamed for two and a half days.

When the commission eventually contacted Mallory as part of the state’s own investigation, the clinic manager acknowledged there had been complaints within Kadlec. She did not seem to give them much credence.

“Dr. Mulholland has received his fair share of complaints over the years as have all the other providers here” at the Kadlec clinic, she wrote in a statement to the state board. “From what I have observed, he cares deeply for his patients and has spent his career trying to educate women on their health. They have not always appreciated how he has done that.”

September 2024: State’s Investigation Resumes

By September 2024, more than two years had elapsed since the state received its first complaint about a pelvic exam performed by Mulholland. Six months had passed since an investigator forwarded her report on two other pelvic exam complaints. That month, the commission learned of a new one.

“During examination, he said my vagina was very dry and that my husband wasn’t doing his job,” the woman wrote in her complaint.

The woman also described her interaction with Mulholland to a commission investigator. At the appointment, the woman had told a medical assistant that she was concerned about a fishy smell, she said. Upon entering the exam room, she told the investigator, Mulholland said loudly, “Hey, I heard you had a vagina that smells like fish.”

When he conducted his physical examination, the woman told the investigator, Mulholland penetrated her with his fingers and was “going in and out” and touching her clitoris.

The patient said she asked Mulholland to stop more than once. She was uncomfortable and what Mulholland was doing reminded her of her past sexual abuse, she wrote in her complaint. She said he eventually stopped.

Next, according to an investigator’s memo outlining the patient’s interview, Mulholland asked her if she masturbated and if she used sex toys or her fingers to do so. When the patient said she did not, Mulholland encouraged her to purchase some toys and to use them alone, she said. Then, according to the memo describing the woman’s account, Mulholland rubbed her shoulder and said, “You’re too young not to have good sex.”

A mandatory reporter filed a complaint supplementing the woman’s filing at around the same time.

By that time, the woman’s account brought to four the number of women asserting sexual misconduct by Mulholland since 2022. Counting a woman who reported rude behavior in a submission that was not marked as alleging sexual misconduct and that the commission closed, Mulholland had been named in six complaints.

Only 11 licensed physicians and physician assistants were the subject of six or more complaints in that time frame, the commission’s spokesperson said. As of last year, 41,256 people held this type of license in Washington.

A week after the mandatory reporter contacted the commission, Kelly Elder, a Washington Medical Commission staff attorney, sent the two pending 2023 cases back to Freda Pace, the commission’s director of investigations.

Elder asked Pace to have investigators try and reach people whose statements hadn’t been collected before.

Medical commission records show that investigator Britta Fischer also began looking into the new allegation.

Fischer’s inquiries produced statements from co-workers attesting to Mulholland’s good character and stating that they were unaware of any concerns raised by patients.

Mulholland himself, in a statement his attorney gave to the commission, said he didn’t have a “firm recollection” of the appointment the patient described in her complaint. He said he would never tell a patient anything to the effect that her husband was not doing his job. He said he addresses masturbation with patients who complain of sexual dryness or pain during sex, and he denied stroking the patient’s shoulder in a “suggestive way.”

Due to “unjustified allegations,” the statement said, Mulholland had changed the way he worked with patients. The statement said these changes included always trying to have a chaperone present instead of just during physical exams. He also started creating more physical distance from the patient during counseling and exploring “tangential issues, such as sexual health and wellbeing” only when a patient brought them up.

“Dr. Mulholland is truly sorry if his previous long-standing practice patterns have caused any patient any type of duress or anguish because of misinterpretation of what Dr. Mulholland was attempting to accomplish — excellent patient care,” the statement sent to the commission said.

Still, the commission also had the prior, adverse statements from colleagues and patients. In April 2025, the agency formally accused Mulholland of abuse and unprofessional conduct. (The allegations would later be amended to include sexual misconduct.)

Neither the medical commission nor the Washington State Department of Health, which oversees it, posted a news release on their websites. Members of the general public could have learned of the charges — if they knew to search for Mulholland’s name on the Health Department’s “provider credential search” page. Stephanie Mason, spokesperson for the commission, said the statement of charges would also go out to anyone who subscribed to quarterly email updates from the commission.

It wasn’t until a June Tri-City Herald story that the commission’s claims seemed to become widely known.

The outpouring of new patient complaints that followed echoed what the commission had already heard.

Their accounts included allegations that Mulholland had peeked at their pubic hair under the sheet, physically pulled them down the exam table, used sexual language and performed extremely painful vaginal exams.

Two of the women who have filed lawsuits against Mulholland or his employers told KUOW and ProPublica they attended appointments with him after the commission had received multiple complaints and before he agreed to restrictions on his license.

One said she was angry she hadn’t heard about allegations against Mulholland sooner. After a hysterectomy, she was directed to see him every four months for a year for pap smears.

She saw Mulholland for the last time on May 1, 2025 — two days after the commission filed its allegations against him. She learned about the commission’s case after the media coverage began.

“I don’t know if I expected the lady at the counter when you’re checking in to warn you and say, ‘Hey, you’re gonna see Mulholland, and he’s had complaints,’” she said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica. “I don’t see a company or whatever ever doing that, but it would have been nice to know. I would have picked a different doctor.”

Another woman who sued, Torryn Kerley, said she was angry at Kadlec to learn of all the women coming forward in lawsuits after she had already complained to the clinic about Mulholland.

“Nobody was listening to me, and I did everything that I should have done,” said Kerley, who asked to be identified by name for this article. “I reported it. I told people about it. I told doctors in the office about it.”

Karinen, the medical commission director, said it’s very unusual for the commission to file a statement of charges and then get dozens of complaints in the same vein against that same doctor, as happened with Mulholland.

“That’s unheard of,” he said.

Mason, the commission spokesperson, cast the arrival of the new complaints as a positive outcome of the action that commissioners took against Mulholland.

“That’s what opened the door to these women coming forward, because at that point, really not very many people had said anything at all, by comparison,” Mason said.

No date has been set yet for a hearing in which Mulholland can challenge the commission’s allegations against him.

The post An OB-GYN Was Repeatedly Accused of Sexual Misconduct. The State Medical Board Let Him Keep Practicing. appeared first on ProPublica.

The first thing I photographed that day was a woman trying to calm a man with a hug. “There was a young man right at the police tape, honestly inches away from some of the agents, and he was so angry,” she told me later. “I was getting really scared for him.” Not long after, the scene grew volatile, as federal, state and city police forces tear-gassed and detained protesters in a standoff that lasted for hours.

Kristin Heiberg, I learned, is a 64-year-old technical writer, a volunteer at an animal shelter and a cancer survivor. And, like many other people here, she patrols her neighborhood with a whistle, on the lookout for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

As I’ve watched the Twin Cities rally to respond to Operation Metro Surge, I’ve wanted to see the one thing I had not: What do these people look like in their day-to-day lives? I wanted to know who they are and what motivated them to patrol their streets, drive strangers to work and provide food and rent money for the families who have been in hiding since the surge began. While media coverage has moved on, and there are fewer ICE agents on the streets, they’re still here, and my neighbors are still providing mutual aid.

When I asked Heiberg who she felt was involved, she said: “Everyone in the community. Anyone with a heart.” This is how it has felt to me as well. Whether gathering with friends or ordering coffee or running into a neighbor while walking my dog, every recent conversation has led to the same place: What are you doing to meet this moment? 

Each of the people I photographed scoffed at the idea that they were paid agitators, or that they were led in their efforts by state or city officials. They said they just wanted to help their neighbors.

These are my neighbors, in their city, in their own words.

The post “This Is What It Means to Be Minnesotan”: Why My Neighbors Continue to Stand Up Against ICE appeared first on ProPublica.

“I believe we are in compliance with the court order. We’re not a racist organization, and we don’t racial profile,” he said on Phoenix-area talk radio in March 2025. 

In May, he told the same radio host: “Is the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office racially profiling or are they racially biased? We have documentation for well over 10 years that that is not the case.”

His evidence for ending oversight stemming from Melendres v. Arpaio, the federal case whose 2013 settlement imposed parameters the department has operated under ever since, was a monthly sampling of a few dozen traffic stops. The settlement requires deputies to document each stop in exacting detail. The report, analyzed by a court-appointed monitor, showed individual deputies had not used race to initiate that limited sample of traffic stops.

But annual reviews of every traffic stop or arrest of a Latino driver have repeatedly contradicted Sheridan’s claim. With the exception of one year, each of the past 10 reports showed disparities affecting Latino drivers. The latest, covering 2024, found, “Stops involving Hispanic drivers were more likely to result in an arrest than stops involving White drivers.”

Under Sheriff Arpaio, deputies began in 2007 to use traffic stops to arrest people on immigration charges, illegally racially profiling Latinos in the process. When the constitutional violations spurred the Melendres lawsuit, a judge found they were so widespread that he included the county’s more than 1 million Latino residents as plaintiffs in the case. Fallout from it ended Arpaio’s political career.

Sheridan, a Republican, was Arpaio’s second-in-command. During his campaign for sheriff in 2024, Sheridan pledged to cooperate with the court-appointed monitor. He predicted that the judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow, would be pleased to see him back in the courtroom given his understanding of the settlement. He could hit the ground running and bring the case to a close, Sheridan said.

In June 2025, the latest report finding bias against Latino drivers was released. Months later, in October, Sheridan was back on the radio repeating his argument: “There has been no racial profiling or bias in well over 10 years, and that’s the gist of this lawsuit. The judge didn’t want MCSO to racially profile or be biased, and we have proven time and time again that the deputies are not.”

Latino activists and residents who endured the racial profiling and anti-immigrant policing of the Arpaio era tracked Sheridan’s first year as sheriff with growing alarm. 

They remembered that as chief deputy, Sheridan was caught on camera telling deputies that court-mandated reforms were “ludicrous” and “crap.” (He later apologized to the judge.) They also pointed out that Sheridan staffed his administration with key figures from Arpaio’s time.

The activists and residents said their concerns were also rooted in the reality of the second Trump administration.

As Sheridan took office, President Donald Trump was initiating plans for mass deportations. Trump tasked Immigration and Customs Enforcement with expanding local law enforcement’s involvement in street and workplace operations. If the case ended now, Sheridan would be free to join forces with ICE, critics said. Without the court to keep it in check, the Sheriff’s Office could backslide. 

The anxiety and anger were evident in the town of Guadalupe in February 2025, as Sheridan arrived for his first court-mandated public meeting as sheriff. Guadalupe was among the communities most affected by Arpaio’s immigration patrols and workplace raids. Residents, who were there to receive an update on the court case, greeted the new sheriff with signs saying, “Deport Jerry Sheridan,” and “We belong together not separated.”

The court-appointed monitor, Robert Warshaw, told the crowd inside an elementary school cafeteria that Sheridan had requested that the meeting be canceled, citing safety concerns related to ongoing anti-ICE protests around metro Phoenix. (The request was denied.) This angered the residents.

Their frustration grew as Warshaw noted that although the Sheriff’s Office was complying with more than 90% of the settlement, it fell short in two critical areas: continued racial disparities in traffic stops and failure to quickly investigate misconduct claims against deputies. Long delays in such investigations discouraged the public from reporting wrongdoing by deputies, attorneys and advocates said.

When it was Sheridan’s time to speak, he addressed the doubters, citing the sample of traffic stops that showed deputies didn’t use race to initiate traffic stops. He has also noted that the department is prioritizing the investigation of deputy misconduct complaints from Latino residents.

“The judge wants bias-free policing, and I want bias-free policing,” Sheridan said. “All I can ask from all of you in this room, the people that live in this community, and the 4.6 million people in Maricopa County, is to let me show you by actions the things that I have said and the fact that we all want bias-free police.”

Joel Cornejo, a community activist from south Phoenix who had protested Sheridan’s arrival, told the sheriff that he’d come of age during Arpaio’s raids. He said he was skeptical that Sheridan would fully comply with the lawsuit.

“We learned to fight your department,” Cornejo said. “We destroyed Joe Arpaio’s career. And if you target our community, we will do the same to your career.”

Sheridan repeated his pledge to show them the department had truly changed.

“I need that opportunity from you, to give me that chance,” he said.

Sheridan’s victory in the sheriff’s race capped a comeback that began after Arpaio lost reelection in 2016.

Under Arpaio, Sheridan rose through the ranks to chief of custody in 1999, running the county’s jails. In 2010, Arpaio elevated him to chief deputy, helping oversee the entire department. He held the job for six years.

During those years, Snow later ruled, the Sheriff’s Office illegally enforced federal immigration laws, violated residents’ constitutional rights and ignored the judge’s orders to end these practices.

Sheridan tried to distance himself from the controversies that led to Arpaio’s defeat, rarely speaking of his former boss. He maintained that the immigration sweeps and patrols were carried out by a separate division while he was focused on running the jails.

Sheridan stands by his work as detention chief, which included supervising 60 detention officers certified through an ICE program known as 287(g), allowing the department to process people in its jails for deportation. Maricopa County remains the only Arizona county to provide office space for ICE agents in its jails.

Arpaio’s efforts to arrest undocumented immigrants began under the same 287(g) agreement, which also allowed local officers to question individuals’ immigration status during routine policing. Sheridan says he disagreed with Arpaio’s tactics and tried to persuade him to not target day laborers or set up patrols in mostly Latino communities like Guadalupe. (Arpaio told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that he considered enforcing immigration laws to be part of his job.)

During a 2015 court hearing, Sheridan denied that he knew about a 2011 preliminary injunction — issued while he was Arpaio’s chief deputy — barring the Sheriff’s Office from making immigration arrests. He didn’t learn about the injunction until 2014, Sheridan said.

Evidence presented in court showed Sheridan had been notified starting in 2011. Snow accused Sheridan and Arpaio of “deliberately” violating the order, withholding evidence and failing to investigate and discipline deputy misconduct, among other things. “Sheriff Arpaio and Chief Deputy Sheridan are the authors of the manipulation and misconduct that has prevented the fair, uniform, and appropriate application of discipline on MCSO employees,” Snow wrote in a 2016 ruling. He held them in civil contempt of court.

“I don’t even remember exactly why the judge held me in contempt of the court — what exactly he used against me,” Sheridan told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica. “He didn’t think that I was truthful because I wasn’t aware of something. And I was very truthful.”

Arpaio did not endorse Sheridan’s 2024 bid for sheriff and has declined to talk about him while hinting at a falling-out. “I made a couple mistakes, which are management mistakes,” Arpaio told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica. “I may have appointed a couple of wrong people. But in managing, you try to back up your people and so on. So, in any big organization, you can’t be perfect.”

Sheridan filled key leadership positions in his administration with former colleagues who worked under Arpaio and who, like Sheridan, had left the Sheriff’s Office after Arpaio lost reelection. Sheridan appointed retired Sgt. Clint Doyle to the Court Implementation Division, which is responsible for enforcing the court’s mandates. And he rehired Paul Chagolla, who ran public relations at the time of Arpaio’s raids and sweeps. Snow criticized Doyle’s appointment, calling out Sheridan for attempting to bypass a court requirement that key leadership roles dealing with the Melendres settlement be approved by the monitor.

Doyle and Chagolla didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

Christine Wee, the lead attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that it was alarming to see so many from Arpaio’s administration return. “These folks were instrumental in the abuse and the terror that so many of our clients had to experience,” she said. “And then to bring them back in again, I think it sends a dangerous message to the community.” 

Sheridan acknowledges the criticism, but points to improvements like significantly reducing the misconduct complaints backlog. “From the sins of the previous administration, we’re now three different sheriffs since then, and some people just don’t want to let go.”

Since Sheridan took office last January, Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica have attended seven of his public appearances, reviewed his public remarks and interviewed him on three occasions. During that time, his assertions that the department had done enough to justify ending court oversight grew bolder, and Republican allies amplified his efforts.

“It’s about time that the public gets over some of the things that happened well over a decade ago and to realize the deputy sheriffs that work in their community are really good law enforcement officers,” he told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica in a March 2025 interview.

Ending the settlement would eliminate the near-constant recordkeeping tasks deputies face while on duty, including documenting 13 details about each traffic stop. This hampers their “ability to do the job,” Sheridan said, and discourages interacting with the public. Deputies fear prolonging a traffic stop, even for a brief chat, will lead to discipline.

“If they see somebody walking down the street, they can’t just pull over and say, ‘Hi, how are you doing?’” Sheridan told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica. “Every time they contact a member of the public, it is a lengthy process. And so it slows them down and it intimidates them not to want to do it.”

Last March, Sheridan began organizing meetings, in addition to the court-ordered gatherings, in rural communities policed by the Sheriff’s Office.

In Gila Bend, a town of about 1,800 southwest of Phoenix, Sheridan said he wanted to hear about locals’ needs. The town pays more than $900,000 a year to the Sheriff’s Office for public safety services.

“I’m a good leader and our deputies are responsive to your needs,” Sheridan told the group inside a community center. “And that’s really what this is all about, right? The sheriff’s main job is to keep people safe.”

A slide displayed data about traffic stops, calls for service and dispatch times. “For the population that’s here in Gila Bend, for the number of violent crimes — at least the ones that are notated here -– you guys are a very safe community,” a sheriff’s office lieutenant told the group.

The town’s vice mayor, Chris Riggs, a former deputy himself, disagreed. Crimes weren’t being reported, making the town seem safer than it is, he said. 

Residents “just don’t trust MCSO anymore,” Riggs said. “They’ll deal with it themselves.” Several residents agreed. 

No deputies live in Gila Bend, where response times lag and police services have suffered, they said.

“Deputies aren’t like they used to be, where they get out and they mingle with the community,” Riggs said.

Sheridan blamed the settlement for overburdening the department.

Ten days later, residents of Aguila, an unincorporated community nestled among farms where the population swells to about 1,000 during the winter growing season, told the sheriff they too felt neglected by deputies.

“We have 9,224 square miles to cover” and limited resources, Sheridan said. 

Sheridan has tried to address this. When he took office, there were about 140 vacancies for patrol deputies. He raised starting pay to compete with other local law enforcement agencies in the county. By the start of 2026, vacancies declined to 65, according to his office. Sheridan called it one of his biggest successes in his first year.

But hiring was still hindered by the paperwork deputies do to comply with the settlement, he said.

The Sheriff’s Office has made significant progress on a key requirement of the court: reducing the backlog of misconduct investigations. Although it has been cut by 76% since November 2022, there are still about 475 claims that haven’t been investigated, and three recently completed investigations dated from 2017.

In June, the Sheriff’s Office released the court-mandated traffic stop report for 2024.

It tracked some improvements. But when all traffic stops by deputies were analyzed, the report concluded: “Stops involving Hispanic drivers were more likely to result in an arrest than stops involving White drivers”; and traffic stops involving Black drivers, who are not covered in the Melendres settlement, were more likely to take longer and result in an arrest compared to stops of white drivers.

Despite the findings, Sheridan insisted there was no racial profiling at the department. 

In July, the court’s monitor team held another community meeting to review the Sheriff’s Office’s progress. It was in Maryvale, a West Phoenix neighborhood where three-quarters of the residents identify as Latino.

Before it began, Sheridan told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that while he remained committed to reaching full compliance with the court’s requirements, a majority of Republicans on the county’s governing board “have a different perspective because they’re the ones that fund what the sheriff does.”

Three members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors were at the meeting.

Latino residents and advocates from the heavily Democratic area typically made up a majority of attendees. But this crowd was mostly white Republicans, including some from retirement communities miles away. From the front of the gym, Sheridan could see signs that read, “We support MCSO,” and, “Take the handcuffs off Jerry!”

Republican Supervisor Debbie Lesko, who represents retirement communities in western parts of the metro area, said she believed the settlement was getting in the way of public safety. “They’re spending a lot of time on paperwork instead of being able to provide public safety. And when I talked to the sheriff’s department, they said it’s hurting the morale of the deputies.”

When Latino residents asked questions and voiced concerns, they were interrupted by jeers and groans from white members of the audience.

Warshaw, the court monitor, pleaded for the crowd to allow others to speak.

Sheridan’s supporters focused on $350 million the county supervisors had approved since 2013 to implement the court-mandated reforms, including $226 million allocated to the Sheriff’s Office. The monitor later found that the Sheriff’s Office had greatly exaggerated total expenses, and the judge cautioned county leaders against citing the dollar figure because it was misleading.

“Mr. Warshaw, tell the judge to stop looting Maricopa County tax dollars to pay for that oversight,” Tom Berry, a retiree from Sun City, said to the monitor. “Advise the judge to stop the oversight.”

The case hinges on how well the Sheriff’s Office complies with 368 paragraphs outlined in four court orders aimed at rooting out racial profiling, Warshaw responded. “Is there still work to be done? Yes, there is still work to be done. Is this thing going to go on forever? No.”

“It looks like it,” a woman blurted.

Salvador Reza is a longtime organizer of Latino communities and day laborers who regularly attends meetings related to the settlement. He said it appeared Republicans were organizing to call for an immediate end to court oversight, which Sheridan would welcome.

“That’s what he’s hoping, that the federal court lets him off the hook so he can do whatever he wants,” Reza said, noting he was concerned by Sheridan’s history with Arpaio and approach to the case since taking office. “So there’s no way that we can rebuild trust in the community knowing very well who Sheridan is.”

Sheridan denied he had coordinated with the supervisors to publicly call for an end to the settlement.

Months later, debate over the settlement’s cost came to a head.

Community members asked for details about how the $226 million the sheriff’s department had attributed to enforcing the settlement was spent. The monitor’s team published a report in October that concluded the Sheriff’s Office had greatly exaggerated the cost. More than $163 million, about 72%, of the total attributed to the reforms was unrelated or lacked justification, the report found.

Sheridan attacked the audit.

“These guys are not CPAs, they don’t have the experience to do an audit of a huge government operation,” he said on the conservative talk radio show where he regularly appeared. “The sheriff’s budget is about $700 million a year, and the county’s budget is a couple of billion. They don’t have the expertise to do this, and so they come up with this report.”

He listed some expenses, including an order to create and staff new divisions. “We have three Ph.D.s that are analysts, and all of this has led to the fact that there has been no racial profiling or bias in well over 10 years, and that’s the gist of this lawsuit.”

Sheridan’s attorneys petitioned the court to dispute the audit but later dropped the challenge, saying the county wanted to avoid additional “unnecessary” expenses.

The audit reinforced many Latino community members’ belief that the agency couldn’t be trusted.

After the raucous gathering in Maryvale, advocates alleged there had been an effort to intimidate Latino residents, including the use of racial insults in a forum intended to gather their input and check on the Sheriff’s Office’s progress. 

Judge Snow held the next public meeting at the federal courthouse. He acknowledged the increasingly vocal opposition to the settlement and its costs, but defended it as necessary.

“This is not an easy case. It is an expensive case. It is a case where everybody in Maricopa County has benefited, whether or not they appreciate it,” Snow said, before noting there was still work to do resolving the backlog of misconduct reports. “Sheriff Sheridan has done a considerable amount in reducing the backlog he was left with, but there is still a considerable backlog to be resolved.”

Sheridan conceded the settlement had made his office better, even if it sometimes caused friction. Still, attorneys for the Sheriff’s Office and the county government argued to Snow that they had done enough to end his oversight.

In December, the county filed a motion to sidestep the remaining reforms and end court supervision. Sheridan’s attorneys signed onto the motion in January. 

“After 14 years, four sheriffs, and hundreds of millions spent tax dollars, it is essential to defend taxpayer money if federal oversight is no longer warranted,” Thomas Galvin, the Republican chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors at the time, said in a video statement released after the motion was filed.

Attorneys representing Latino residents in the Melendres case opposed the bid to end court oversight. Snow has yet to rule on the motion.

Raul Piña, a member of a court-mandated Community Advisory Board tasked with helping the Sheriff’s Office rebuild trust with Latinos, said the push to end oversight ignored a plain fact: The most comprehensive data still showed the department hadn’t eliminated bias from its policing.

“If Melendres goes away, that takes away significant protections for brown and Black people or the immigrant community in Maricopa County,” he said.

Since it joined the Melendres case and settlement in 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice had supported the reforms. But with Trump back in the White House, Suraj Kumar, an attorney in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, informed Snow in January that the DOJ backed efforts to end oversight of the Sheriff’s Office.

This added to Latino community leaders’ worries that the Sheriff’s Office could once again, as it had under Arpaio, partner with ICE and allow deputies to enforce immigration laws.

Sheridan tried to put those concerns to rest, saying that if court oversight ended, he would not enter such an agreement.

But the questions grew louder as ICE surged into Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis to carry out mass deportations. Phoenix was reportedly next. 

After a U.S. citizen was killed during ICE operations in Minnesota, Sheridan was asked on a conservative radio talk show what he would do if something similar happened in Arizona.

His deputies would step in if ICE agents did anything “illegal,” Sheridan said in the mid-January interview.

Four days later, Sheridan backtracked, saying he would instead side with immigration officers: “I will be here to protect them to do that and keep people from interfering with them.”

Cornejo, the community activist who attended the meeting in Guadalupe, read the reversal as a sign that Sheridan was too easily swayed and could not be trusted without court oversight. “Facing a crowd that tends to lean to the left, he’s going to give rhetoric that kind of says that he’s working on those things that he’s supposed to be,” Cornejo said. “If he’s with more conservatives, his language and rhetoric is completely different.”

Sheridan said that his position has not changed and that he “firmly believes that the Sheriff’s Office is in full compliance and that the current oversight should be concluded.”

Later that month, ICE raided 15 metro Phoenix restaurants that federal prosecutors alleged had knowingly hired undocumented laborers. Protests erupted outside some of the raided restaurants.

Sheridan sent deputies to help with crowd control, saying ICE had first asked Tempe police for assistance but the request was declined.

“We went out there, not to facilitate what ICE was doing or get involved in their business, because we don’t do that,” Sheridan told Latino faith leaders and residents at a February town hall in the suburb of Gilbert. “We were there to keep the peace.”

The Tempe Police Department told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that it did not receive a request for help from ICE, nor was it notified in advance of the immigration operation. ICE did not respond to a question about local law enforcement participation in the raids. 

Latino activists said the episode raised more questions about Sheridan’s willingness to collaborate with ICE and whether he would be transparent about his intentions. It would be harder for him to earn back their trust, they said.

The post This Sheriff Says His Department Eliminated Racial Bias. Data Shows Otherwise. appeared first on ProPublica.

After an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three who’d recently moved to Minneapolis, local law enforcement officials requested a partnership with the federal government to investigate the case, as they’d done in past shootings involving federal agents.

When the Trump administration refused to cooperate, Minnesota prosecutors ratcheted up their efforts. They sent a series of strongly worded legal letters demanding evidence in the Good shooting as well as the shootings of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan immigrant who was wounded a week after Good was shot, and Alex Pretti, who was killed on Jan. 24.

Still, the administration rebuffed the requests.

This week, prosecutors from Hennepin County and the state of Minnesota took the next step to force the Trump administration’s hand. They filed a federal lawsuit against the departments of Homeland Security and Justice over the evidence in the shootings, an action that Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, whose jurisdiction covers Minneapolis, characterized as “unprecedented in American history.”

The Trump administration has declined to release the names of the agents involved in the shootings, even after the Minnesota Star Tribune and ProPublica identified the officers involved in the Good and Pretti incidents.

“The federal government has refused to cooperate with state law enforcement, which is unique, rare and simply cannot be tolerated,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told reporters. “[We] can’t sit around and let them do it.”

In the standoff over evidence, the case has already become a game of constitutional chicken over states’ rights versus federal immunity, a battle that will have implications for others who wish to hold agents in the president’s immigration surge criminally accountable. 

So far, neither side is showing signs of backing down, foreshadowing a fight that could take years. If prosecutors do eventually file charges against federal agents involved in the shootings, legal experts said the path to trial, much less winning convictions, will be filled with legal and procedural challenges.

“State prosecutors across the country are going to be watching what happens in Minnesota really closely,” said Alicia Bannon, director of the judiciary program at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice.

The first test for prosecutors, if they file charges, would be to prove the agents don’t qualify for immunity through the Constitution’s supremacy clause, a rarely invoked legal doctrine that protects federal officers from state prosecutions if they’re acting lawfully and within the scope of their duties.

Failing to pass that test would likely end the case.

The U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t taken up a case involving supremacy clause immunity in over 100 years, Bannon said, and judges have come down differently on legal issues related to its application. 

There’s no easy answer as to whether Minnesota will be able to get past a supremacy clause defense, said Jill Hasday, a constitutional law professor at the University of Minnesota.

“That depends on the facts, but probably the odds are stacked against it,” she said.

Even if they survive such a fight, the cases could be dogged by a series of logistical challenges. Moriarty, who has been leading the investigations, has decided not to seek reelection and will leave office at the end of the year. That means whoever wins the election for her seat in November could inherit the prosecutions. 

In addition to not having the names of the agents, prosecutors don’t know where those agents are now. Minnesota may need to extradite them, potentially from a MAGA-leaning state that may balk at sending them to Hennepin County to stand trial. 

“Will the federal government or other states cooperate with that? I think the answer to that is sort of iffy,” said Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University in Virginia. (Indeed, in a case involving a doctor charged with illegally mailing abortion medication to a Louisiana woman, the state of California has rejected an extradition request, citing its own laws protecting doctors from prosecution elsewhere.)

The fight is focused on three shootings. But Moriarty’s office has opened criminal investigations into 14 additional cases of potentially unlawful behavior by federal agents during Operation Metro Surge, which started in early December and has wound down over the past few weeks. 

The other cases Moriarty is examining involve allegations of excessive force or other misconduct by federal agents, such as an incident in early January in which agents allegedly used force on staff and students on the grounds of a high school.

Prosecutors are also investigating Gregory Bovino, the outgoing Border Patrol commander who helped to lead immigration surges into several American cities and who was seen on video lobbing green-smoke canisters into crowds at a park in Minneapolis. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said at the time that Bovino and other agents were responding to a “hostile crowd.”

The tension has played out in a series of demand letters sent by Moriarty to the Justice and Homeland Security departments. “Public transparency is vitally important in these cases — not just for the people of Hennepin County and Minnesota, but for the public nationwide,” Moriarty wrote in one of the letters. “The only way to achieve transparency is through investigation conducted at a local level.”

In January, after the shooting of Good, federal officials had agreed to participate in a joint investigation with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension — Minnesota’s state police agency tasked with examining use of deadly force cases — according to the letters signed by Moriarty. 

State officials presumed they’d be able to examine evidence, such as the car Good was driving and the guns used to shoot her and the other victims. But the investigators later learned through public statements by high-ranking Trump administration officials that federal agents were no longer planning to share evidence, the letter states. 

Local and state prosecutors don’t have the authority to subpoena them for evidence like in a typical criminal investigation. The demand letters, called Touhy letters, are formal written requests, used as an alternative to a subpoena, asking a federal agency to provide evidence or testimony in a case in which the government is not a party. Moriarty sought an extensive list of evidence in the shootings, from the guns fired by the agents in all three cases to official reports, agent GPS devices and witness statements. The Touhy letters asked for a response by Feb. 17. 

Normally, the federal government complies with Touhy letters as a matter of protocol, as long as releasing the information doesn’t violate an internal policy, said Timothy Johnson, a political science and law professor at the University of Minnesota. 

But on Feb. 13, the FBI told BCA investigators that it won’t share investigative materials in the Pretti case, BCA Superintendent Drew Evans said in a statement. Evans said the police agency had reiterated its requests for evidence in the Good and Sosa-Celis cases.

More than a month after the deadline set by prosecutors, the Trump administration still hasn’t turned over the materials.

“There has been no cooperation from federal authorities,” BCA spokesperson Michael Ernster said. 

The agents involved in the shootings have not spoken publicly, but a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security defended Good’s shooting, saying the agent acted in self-defense. They said the Pretti shooting was under investigation by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, with the Border Patrol conducting its own investigation. Those investigations could result in discipline or charges, including for civil rights violations. 

The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said federal officials found that, after Sosa-Celis’ shooting, officers made false statements. But the agency did not say whether it would cooperate with the local authorities or follow a court ruling requiring it to do so.

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment or to questions. Neither agency has responded to the lawsuit.

Moriarty called the lawsuit “critically important” to investigating the shooting cases but also said she had not made any decisions on whether her office will file charges.

“There has to be an investigation anytime a federal agent or a state agent takes the life of a person in our community,” she said. “And ultimately the decision may be it was lawful. You don’t know, but that’s why you do the investigation. You are transparent with the results of that investigation, and you are public with your transparency about the decision and how you got there.”

But a lawsuit does not guarantee that prosecutors will get all they want. “The question then becomes, even if Hennepin County or Minneapolis wins the suit, will they comply then?” Johnson asked. “And the answer is probably no.”

If the Trump administration did eventually defy a judge’s order, he said, prosecutors could try to appeal up to the U.S. Supreme Court. As far as what could happen next: “It’s anyone’s guess.”

The post Minnesota Kicks Off Legal Battle With Trump Administration to Hold ICE Shooters Accountable appeared first on ProPublica.

Officials began pursuing the overpass in 2023, after the news organization and its reporting partner, InvestigateTV, documented dozens of children crawling through, over and under trains that blocked them from getting to and from school in the city.

Hammond is a nearby suburb of Chicago, the busiest train hub in the nation. At the time, the area served as a kind of parking lot for Norfolk Southern’s trains as they idled between two busy intersections — a growing problem in Hammond and railroad communities like it across the country as trains get longer.

After publication, Norfolk Southern’s CEO at the time, Alan Shaw, called Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott to discuss solutions, including a pedestrian overpass. The mayor said Shaw committed to paying the full cost of the project. A spokesperson for Norfolk Southern told ProPublica the company never made any such commitment.

The company would later make operational changes, such as stopping the trains in a different location to reduce the impact to Hammond and the schoolchildren. Still, one child was captured on video jumping from a moving train after Norfolk Southern said it made those changes.

For a while, the overpass effort seemed to have some momentum. The company paid for engineering and design plans, and in June 2023 the city received a $7.7 million federal grant for the project. While it required a local match of $2.6 million, McDermott said Shaw agreed to pay it.

The mayor said the company made no written commitment, and Shaw was fired by the railroad in 2024. Now, McDermott is accusing Norfolk Southern, under its current CEO, Mark George, of backing out of the handshake deal. “The new guy got amnesia,” the mayor told ProPublica.

Shaw did not respond to messages seeking comment.

A spokesperson for Norfolk Southern, which reported $2.9 billion in profit in 2025 according to its Securities and Exchange Commission filings, disputed McDermott’s claims that the company agreed to provide the matching funds but said it did provide the city with $450,000 and “assisted officials in successfully applying for a federal grant to make the city’s plan for a pedestrian bridge possible.”

The spokesperson also said that the changes the company made in 2023 to reduce the impact on schools are working.

“More than two years later, these changes continue to yield results, including a nearly 50% drop in blocked crossing calls into our communications center at this location,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

But local and state officials say Hammond is still seeing blocked crossings near schools. Carlotta Blake-King, the local school board president, told ProPublica that district employees saw children at a different location traversing a stopped train as they left school as recently as last week.

A Norfolk Southern spokesperson acknowledged the blockage but said it was “not typical for that location.” The company said its trains normally have clear passage through that area without stopping. “We never want to inconvenience our communities with a stopped train, and we encourage everyone to always stay off railroad tracks and never attempt to cross between rail cars,” the spokesperson wrote. 

McDermott said he’s also noticed Norfolk Southern’s trains beginning to block the roadways again and worries that “it will slowly but surely resume to where it was.”

“I’ve already been lied to once by Norfolk Southern,” the mayor said, “so I have no reason to believe that they’re going to keep on trying to reduce the impacts upon our city.”

McDermott said the community will ultimately see some relief in the form of a vehicle overpass in the area where the children routinely encounter the train. The project, however, won’t be completed until at least 2029. And while it will include a path for pedestrians, it won’t help many students, as they would need to walk at least a mile out of their way to reach it.

Indiana state Rep. Carolyn Jackson, a Democrat who represents the Hammond area and has in the past introduced legislation to address blocked crossings, said she doesn’t want the community’s children to grow “up thinking that crawling under or over the train is a way of life.” Her fear is that without the bridge, “a child will be severely injured or killed in Hammond.”

McDermott said he has the same fear: “I hope to God, and I pray it never happens.”

The post Walkway Over Dangerous Train Crossing Is Dead After Norfolk Southern Backtracks on Funds, Mayor Says appeared first on ProPublica.

The deal came together with little public discussion of how Oregon and other states in 2020 landed a $550 million settlement with the car loan company where Dundon built his wealth. The settlement followed an investigation into lending practices that Oregon’s then-attorney general, in a news release, described as “predatory and harmful.”

Now, Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica have obtained documents that reveal the role Dundon played in pushing some of the key company practices that regulators later presented as problematic.

Specifically, the documents show that Dundon, as the company’s CEO, was behind what regulators called an “aggressive push” at Santander Consumer USA in 2013 to waive requirements that car dealers prove borrowers had enough income to afford loans. The company would then charge more for those loans to ensure profit even in cases where borrowers ultimately failed to keep up with payments, according to internal emails and a slide deck that described findings in the multistate investigation.

Oregon officials wrote in their 2020 court complaint against Santander Consumer that many customers took out loans under the “false pretense” that they were acquiring a car they’d eventually own, when in fact the terms of the loans were so onerous that they would “almost certainly” result in the loan defaulting and the car getting repossessed.

Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, when asked about Dundon’s call for waiving proof of income on car loans when he was at Santander Consumer, said in a statement: “Proof of income requirements exist for a reason — they protect borrowers from being sold loans they cannot afford. When those guardrails get waived, dealerships win in the short term, and consumers lose.”

Rayfield, who was elected in 2024, is working with other state attorneys general in a continuing investigation into another auto loan company, Exeter Finance, where Dundon’s website lists him as an investor and where he has served as chairman of its board. Dundon left Santander Consumer in 2015.

“Working families put a lot on the line when they take out a loan,” Rayfield said, “and they deserve lenders who treat them fairly and follow the law.”

Read More

Before Tom Dundon Agreed to Buy the Portland Trail Blazers, Oregon Accused the Company He Created of Predatory Lending

Dundon, whose deal to buy the Trail Blazers is expected to close on March 31, did not answer emails sent to his investment firm from OPB and ProPublica that included a copy of the newly obtained records and a list of questions. When provided separately with an overview of the story via text to his phone, he responded simply: “Can talk after 3/31.”

Exeter has said in regulatory filings that it is cooperating with the current multistate investigation. A spokesperson for Exeter declined to comment. 

Asked for comment by OPB and ProPublica, Santander Consumer referred back to the statement it gave the newsrooms for an October story: “Operating in a highly regulated industry, we have robust processes in place that are designed to protect customers and adhere to all regulatory requirements and industry best practices.”

Lawmakers recently approved $365 million in public funding to renovate Portland’s 30-year-old Moda Center, home to the Blazers, one of Oregon’s most prominent businesses. The bill awaits Kotek’s signature. Combined with city and county money, the total proposed public backing has reached $870 million, far exceeding what the team originally asked for.

Kotek’s office did not respond when asked when she became aware of the investigations into businesses connected to Dundon and whether it affected her position on giving public money to the team. Instead, a spokesperson pointed to public remarks Kotek made in support of public funding for the Blazers arena as the Legislature adjourned.

“This is a great first step,” Kotek told reporters at the time. “We’re going to get the best deal possible for Oregon, and the economic impact of keeping not only the Blazers but all the activity at Moda is really important for the state.”

The chief sponsor of the bill, Senate President Rob Wagner, a Democrat representing the Portland suburb of Lake Oswego, also declined to answer when asked if he was aware of Oregon’s investigations into Dundon’s businesses.

“The Oregon Legislature does not have a role in who owns the Trail Blazers,” Wagner said in a statement. “Our goal all along has been to support the renovation of Oregon’s Arena so it can remain an economic and entertainment hub for the region.”

But a prominent critic of the deal with the Blazers said Dundon’s history with regulators is troubling.

State Sen. Khanh Pham, a Portland Democrat who cast one of just six no votes in the 30-person chamber, wrote at the time that she supported a public investment in the arena but worried the Legislature wasn’t including enough protections for taxpayers. She tried unsuccessfully to win amendments that would require the state to negotiate a private investment and revenue sharing with the Blazers.

Pham said she wasn’t aware of Dundon’s history in Oregon until OPB and ProPublica asked her about the newly obtained emails.

“This new information affirms that guardrails on public-private partnerships are important in all instances and especially this one,” Pham said in a statement.

“Ignoring This Internal Concern”

Dundon was known as a key player in the rise of subprime lending to car buyers, a niche that supporters say makes car ownership possible for people with poor credit. He sold the subprime company he founded to a Spanish firm in 2006, retaining a 10% stake and becoming CEO of the newly formed company.

In January 2013, he took a step that would keep the company’s lending from being slowed down by people having to prove they could afford the cars they were buying. He set a plan in motion that would let the company advertise to car dealers that Santander Consumer wasn’t going to ask anymore for proof of income, or “POI,” in order to issue a loan.

“Lets do a test,” Dundon wrote to two of his senior employees, Karthik Chandrasekhar and Steve Zemaitis. “I want to waive poi more often.”

As the plan moved forward, Santander Consumer’s chief risk and compliance officer, Michele Rodgers, sent an email on Jan. 21, 2013, to Zemaitis and various senior executives expressing worry the company’s plan could violate federal law.

Rodgers identified potential concerns surrounding anti-money laundering and identity theft laws. She also noted that federal regulators were less than a year from implementing a new rule for another type of loan — home mortgages — requiring those lenders to “determine the consumer’s ability to repay both the principal and the interest over the long term.”

But the records collected by the attorneys general indicate the plan proceeded.

Two weeks after Dundon’s email, Santander’s marketing and sales teams got involved, records show.

Matt Fitzgerald, Santander Consumer’s executive vice president of sales and marketing, described a conversation with Dundon about “stips,” or statements stipulating the borrower’s income, address and phone number have been verified.

“I just rode up the elevator with TD and he wants us to market (fax, e-mails, sale handout) the waiving of stips to all dealers,” Fitzgerald wrote on Jan. 30, 2013. “And he wants to see these communications by the end of the day.”

He added: “We can serve it up to dealers that due to their good performance of the loans, we have decided to waive these certain stips to make it easier for you to close deals.”

Mark Williams, a former Federal Reserve regulator who teaches finance at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, reviewed the state’s summary of the company’s correspondence and said it was troubling that internal concerns seemed to go unheeded.

Williams described proof of income as one of the pillars of bank lending.

“To say, ‘Sure, I’ll give you a loan and we don’t even care whether you make income or not,’ or, ‘You don’t even have to state your income,’ that’s counter to just sound banking practices,” he said.

By early February of that year, the company was days away from announcing its new plan to car dealers, including a fax-based marketing plan and promotional flyer, ready for final approval.

“Flyer looks good,” Robert O’Brien, senior vice president at Santander, wrote on Tuesday, Feb. 5, “however the POI change will not be in the system until Thursday.”

He suggested holding off a couple of days. Then Rodgers, the company’s chief risk and compliance officer, chimed in again with a question.

“What is the POI Change?” she asked.

“Tom wants to waive POI as much as possible and build in pricing to cover the incremental risk,” O’Brien wrote back. O’Brien said that their tests showed the stated income was correct on most loans, and that they would continue to require proof of income for dealers with a history of problems. He said they found that requiring proof of income “reduces capture especially in the nearprime segment.”

In other words, the company felt it was limiting its business opportunities by forcing potential customers to prove they could afford to pay back a car loan. Any increase in risk created by the new approach would be made up through fees and interest rates.

“I am just trying to ensure we aren’t disparately treating any of our customer base,” Rodgers wrote to O’Brien on Feb. 5, 2013. Under fair lending laws, companies are not allowed to enact policies that would have disparate impacts on certain groups of customers, such as people of a particular race or gender.

Dundon is not listed as a recipient on the emails that Rodgers sent, and the degree to which her concerns may have been shared with him is unclear from the company emails obtained by OPB and ProPublica. 

However, in the slide presentation regulators gave to Santander Consumer, they  said the remarks O’Brien and Fitzgerald described Dundon making showed he continued to push for waiving proof of income even after Rodgers raised red flags on Jan. 21. The slides characterized Dundon as “ignoring this internal concern” from his company’s risk and compliance officer.

Oregon’s subsequent 2020 legal complaint against the company alleged Santander Consumer did not, as O’Brien’s email suggested it would, continue requiring proof of income from dealers with a history of fudging borrowers’ incomes as it launched its new approach.

“When Santander rolled out this change to its funding requirements, Santander did not bar those dealers identified as ‘problematic’ by Santander from using stated income on loan applications,” Oregon’s attorney general wrote in the 2020 complaint. “Santander’s decision to broadly market its new stated-income policy, even to dealers with a history of misstating income, led to a significant spike in the number of early payment defaults.”

Dundon’s 2015 departure from Santander Consumer came with a separation agreement of more than $700 million, including cash for stock he owned, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Rodgers, Zemaitis and Chandrasekhar all left Santander Consumer and are currently listed as senior executives at Exeter Finance, a subprime car lender where a number of top Santander Consumer employees have landed.

They did not respond when OPB and ProPublica sent copies of the Santander Consumer correspondence in which they are named and requested comment. O’Brien and Fitzgerald are no longer alive.

Santander Consumer did not admit any wrongdoing as part of the settlement it paid to 33 states — including Oregon — and the District of Columbia.

Private Business, Public Money

Six years after the settlement, Dundon and his associates are playing hardball in negotiations with state and city leaders to secure public money to revamp Portland’s Moda Center.

Although sports arena renovations in some cities have been 100% taxpayer-financed, at least 10 — including in Atlanta; Phoenix; Jacksonville, Florida; and Cleveland — have been funded wholly or partially with private money during the past decade. Just north of Portland, Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena opened in 2021 after $1.15 billion in renovations that were entirely privately financed.

That same precedent exists in Portland: When the Moda Center opened in 1995 — back then it was Portland’s Rose Garden — Blazers owner Paul Allen got $34.5 million from the city of Portland but financed the rest of the $262 million construction himself.

Dundon, too, has offered private dollars as part of arena renovations in the past. In 2023, he agreed to a new arena lease in Raleigh, North Carolina, for his professional hockey team, the Carolina Hurricanes. Raleigh put $300 million toward the arena while Dundon committed to investing $800 million over 20 years toward developing an entertainment district in the surrounding area.

Portland was a different story.

According to a January chat group message from a city employee whose job is to manage sports venues, a consultant for the team and Dundon’s billionaire ownership group was asking for the public to cover 100% of the cost to renovate the Moda Center.

A phalanx of lobbyists hired by the Blazers, meanwhile, were telling state lawmakers they’d need a total of $600 million, starting this year.

“The assumption that the incoming ownership group can finance an additional $600 million for Moda Center — which is now a publicly-owned community asset is not possible,” lobbying materials from the Blazers stated.

After state and local leaders concluded that the team’s initial ask wasn’t nearly enough to cover rising construction costs, they bumped up the investment to $870 million.

Team representatives wrote in the lobbying material that the Blazers’ future in Portland was at stake — and that a departure would threaten the city’s turnaround from pandemic-era headlines about downtown retail vacancies and crime.

“If the Portland Trail Blazers leave Rip City,” team officials stated, “we are losing far more than the tax revenue the Blazers generate for the General Fund. It would have a devastating impact on the City’s national and international reputation and would feed the ‘doom loop’ narrative we have all been working to refute.”

The Blazers did not respond to emailed questions. When asked about the lobbying effort in a March 17 interview on OPB’s “Think Out Loud,” the Blazers’ President of Business Operations Dewayne Hankins said Dundon’s ownership group never explicitly told the team it would move without a public investment. But he noted that other cities are pushing hard to get an NBA team and said the Blazers had “heard rumblings” of interest.

“You have a team that has very few years left on their lease,” Hankins said of the Blazers. “You have a team that could potentially be portable.”

Portland Mayor Keith Wilson declined to say whether Dundon’s business history would affect the city’s ongoing negotiations with the Blazers after the late Paul Allen’s sister agreed to sell the team. The council plans to take up the issue of arena funding no later than this summer.

“Jody Allen chose to sell the team to the ownership group led by Tom Dundon,” Wilson said in a statement, echoing a point made by Oregon’s Senate president. “The City is not a decision maker in the process of approving franchise ownership changes; that authority lies exclusively with current team ownership and the NBA. The City will work in good faith with whoever owns the Trail Blazers.”

John Van Alst, senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, said state and local officials should use caution in negotiating with someone whose business the state previously accused of violating consumer protection laws.

“If they’re willing to violate those rules, I’d be concerned about doing business with them,” Van Alst said.

Van Alst said leaders in Portland, far more so than people buying a car through a subprime lender like Santander Consumer or Exeter, have options at their disposal as they negotiate for the Blazers’ future.

“They have more resources to make good choices, hopefully, than a lot of folks do who get themselves tangled up in really bad subprime auto financing,” Van Alst said.

The post New Portland Trail Blazers Owner Played Key Role at Company Oregon Accused of Predatory Lending appeared first on ProPublica.

ProPublica and many others repeatedly documented that is not true: Americans have even been kicked, dragged and detained for days by immigration agents.

On Tuesday, House and Senate Democrats are spotlighting a particularly troubling part of the crackdown: the American children who have been collateral damage in the deportation campaign. 

The forum the lawmakers are holding is part of an ongoing congressional investigation prompted by ProPublica’s report last fall that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been detained by immigration agents for some amount of time. That included Americans who have been handcuffed, held at gunpoint or simply prevented from leaving their location.

As of last October, more than 20 of those citizens were children, ranging from toddlers to teens. A toddler, a preschooler and a 7-year-old — all citizens — were deported despite their documented parents claiming they wanted to keep the children in the U.S. 

In response to questions, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement that Immigration and Customs Enforcement “does NOT deport United States citizens or separate families,”

American children held along with their families will be sharing their stories at Tuesday’s forum. That includes two families whose accounts were featured in ProPublica investigations.

Eighteen-year-old Fernando Hernández García, who is using a pseudonym to protect the safety of his family in Mexico, is speaking on behalf of his 11-year-old sister. Both siblings are citizens. 

Last year, the family was driving to Houston to get emergency treatment for the girl, who was recovering from brain cancer. Border Patrol agents ignored a hospital letter that the family had used previously to go through checkpoints. This time, agents held the family until they were deported the next day to Mexico. With few other options, the American children went with their parents — except for Hernández García, who had not been detained and stayed to earn money and send medicine home.

The family’s lawyers say they have not been able to access the care they need for their daughter in Mexico, and they have applied for humanitarian parole to return. Customs and Border Protection previously told ProPublica the family’s account was inaccurate but declined to provide specifics.

Read More

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

Some Americans Have Already Been Caught in Trump’s Immigration Dragnet. More Will Be.

We Found More Than 40 Cases of Immigration Agents Using Banned Chokeholds and Other Moves That Can Cut Off Breathing

Also speaking is 16-year-old Arnoldo Bazan. As ProPublica detailed earlier this year, Bazan was tackled and choked by immigration agents who were chasing his undocumented father in Houston.

Bystanders filmed the teen screaming that he was a minor and a U.S. citizen. After agents knelt on his neck and put him in a choke hold, then they handcuffed him.

Bazan told ProPublica that when he was in a choke hold, “I felt like I was seeing the light.” He said he’s now speaking up — including on Capitol Hill — to help keep others from going through the same. “I don’t think nobody’s safe anymore.” 

DHS said in its statement that Bazan elbowed an officer in the face as he was detained, which the teen denies. The agency’s spokesperson added that any allegations that agents assaulted Bazan “are FALSE.” 

It’s unclear exactly how many American kids have been held. The government doesn’t disclose how many Americans are detained, even briefly, during immigration enforcement. 

Former immigration officials told ProPublica that it used to be rare to encounter, let alone hold, American children for any amount of time. While the officials couldn’t recall a specific policy prohibiting it, they said past administrations just didn’t prioritize arresting families during immigration enforcement in the interior of the country. (A ProPublica investigation published Monday found that in his second term, President Donald Trump has deported mothers of U.S. children at four times the rate Biden did.) 

In a report shared with ProPublica, the minority staff from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform compiled 128 cases of children — a mix of citizens and noncitizens — who were injured, left unattended or otherwise put at risk by enforcement operations conducted by Department of Homeland Security agents.

The review found that citizen children caught up in immigration operations were also exposed to chemical agents, were placed in restraints or required medical attention, and some were held at gunpoint, were left unattended when agents detained their parents, or were present when agents smashed car windows or rammed their vehicles. 

“The impact of all of these practices on children — the physical injuries but also the trauma — is really horrific,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told ProPublica. 

Several other citizen teens and mothers of U.S. citizens who were detained by immigration agents will be delivering testimony at the forum. 

Anabel Romero, an Idaho mother, recalled how she was detained with three of her children during a multiagency raid at an Idaho racetrack. The stated target of the raid was illegal gambling, but it ended with more than 100 people in ICE custody.

Officers pointed guns at Romero’s 14-year-old, SueHey Tello, and at her 8-year-old and 6-year-old. Tello said they dragged her from the truck and eventually zip-tied her, leaving bruises and marks.

Asked about the raid and agents’ conduct, DHS said, “ICE does not zip tie or handcuff children.” (Romero and Tello do not know which agency’s officers zip-tied them.)

Tello told ProPublica she was petrified and particularly worried for her younger siblings. “My little sister’s crying, my little brother’s scared,” Tello recalled. “I don’t know what to do. [I was] looking for any familiar face.”

Romero noted that the Trump administration has often said its immigration dragnet is keeping kids safe by going after predators and criminals. “They say they’re doing this to protect children,” recalled Romero. “But they hurt my children.”

The post How American Kids Have Been Collateral Damage in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown appeared first on ProPublica.

His nearly 40-year career, though, has been marked by controversies.

In at least two death penalty cases, Louisiana judges found that Holland withheld evidence. In a third, he secured the conviction of a Black 16-year-old, comparing the boy to a dog and telling the jury to “get rid of it”; prosecutors later admitted that Holland and his team had failed to turn over evidence.

Defense attorneys have also accused him of racism, pointing, for example, to a capital murder case several years ago in which Holland emailed one of them to say he was going to spend Veterans Day in his pickup truck looking for “a Black guy or a Mex-can.” Holland called it a joke.

Holland, 62, is now running for judge in the First Judicial District Court in Caddo Parish, and his nascent campaign appears to have substantial backing. He has raised more than $61,000 in less than two months, according to the first campaign finance report released in February — twice the amount many candidates running for the 1st Judicial Court spend in an entire campaign, said Jeffrey Sadow, an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University in Shreveport.

Holland’s donors include an assistant district attorney with the Caddo Parish DA’s office, the district attorney of neighboring Bossier and Webster parishes, a former state judge, and members of major law firms throughout the area.

Holland’s funding haul might prove to be so daunting that it scares off potential challengers, Sadow said, though candidates have until the end of July to enter the race. “It shows he’s got an awful lot of support and that he’s considered a quality candidate,” he said.

In addition to his robust campaign fundraising, Holland has been able to bring on the head of the local Republican Party, Matthew Kay, as his campaign chair. (Kay also served as an elector for Donald Trump in 2024.)

Holland declined multiple requests for comment about his candidacy and record as a prosecutor. Neither Kay nor nine of the 10 donors Verite News and ProPublica reached out to would respond or agree to speak about their support for Holland.

Charles Jacobs, the city attorney for Bossier City and a former state judge who has known Holland for nearly 20 years, described him as a “very fair” prosecutor who sticks to the facts and the letter of the law. Jacobs donated $2,500 to Holland’s campaign, saying that his extensive trial experience will serve him well on the bench.

“That guy cuts it right down the line — black or white, brown or yellow. He doesn’t care,” said Jacobs, dismissing defense attorneys’ allegations of racism.

Civil rights leaders and defense attorneys say they believe Holland lacks regard for the rights of the mostly Black defendants he prosecuted, and that makes him uniquely unfit to serve on the bench.

“He’s demonstrated that he is untrustworthy, unreserved in his aggression and without any judicial temperament,” said defense attorney Ben Cohen, who represented the 16-year-old in the death penalty case in which Holland withheld evidence. “He brings disrepute to the justice system in a way that undermines people’s faith in it.”

As an assistant district attorney in Caddo Parish from 1991 to 2012, Holland displayed a portrait of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, in his office. Local and national coverage of Holland’s affinity for Forrest drew accusations of racism from Black residents and defense attorneys. Holland has insisted that he is not racist, claiming in interviews that he appreciated Forrest as a cavalry commander in the Civil War and not because he was a member of the Klan.

In another controversy, Holland was forced to resign from the district attorney’s office in 2012 after the state inspector general found that he and a colleague had submitted “false information” to obtain a cache of fully automatic M-16 rifles through a federal program. Holland said a special investigations unit needed the weapons for protection because “we routinely participate in high-risk surveillance and arrests,” a claim local law enforcement agencies refuted, according to the inspector general. Holland and his colleague told the inspector general that if they had the opportunity, they would word the justification differently, citing situations in which the weapons would be useful in protecting district attorney employees who work in dangerous areas and advise local law enforcement.

These scandals, however, did little to damage Holland’s career. After his resignation, he became a successful prosecutor-for-hire for more than a dozen district attorneys who lacked the staff or expertise to try high-profile murder cases on their own. In 2017, Holland was paid to lobby on behalf of the powerful Louisiana District Attorneys Association to stop a bill that would have eliminated the death penalty; the effort succeeded.

Caddo Parish secured more death penalty convictions per capi­ta than any oth­er coun­ty in the United States between 2010 and 2014, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Of the people sent to death row during that time period, 80% were Black, even though Black people made up just under half the parish population. (Nationally, Black people made up just over 40% of death row prisoners and 13% of the U.S. population at that time.)

Caddo Parish has long been a center of racial injustice, known from the Reconstruction era through the Jim Crow period as Bloody Caddo for having among the highest numbers of lynchings of any county in the country.

Theron Jackson, the pastor of Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church in Shreveport, the largest city in the parish, fears that a Holland victory would be a “step back” toward those days of Bloody Caddo, when the failure of elected officials to “protect and serve everybody’s community resulted in the victimization of Black people.”

Withholding Evidence

The doubts surrounding Holland’s death row convictions have taken on even more urgency since the election of Jeff Landry, who upon being sworn in as governor in 2024 said he wanted to execute every prisoner on death row as quickly as possible.

Of the at least 10 people Holland has sent to death row over four decades as prosecutor, one has been released, and two have had their sentences reduced to life in prison. Of the seven remaining on death row, at least two — Bobby Hampton and David Brown — are challenging their convictions after they discovered that Holland withheld evidence.

In 1997, Holland secured a death sentence against Hampton for a murder that happened during a liquor store robbery in Shreveport. The Louisiana Supreme Court later found that Holland had withheld grand jury witness testimony that someone else fired the fatal shot. The court nonetheless ruled that the omitted testimony would not have changed the verdict because prosecutors did hand over a similar statement the witness had made to police. But a dissenting court opinion pointed out that the grand jury witness testimony, unlike the police statement, was given under oath and unambiguously identified another person as the shooter. Hampton remains on death row.

Fourteen years later, a similar situation unfolded. The courts once again found that Holland failed to disclose evidence during his 2011 prosecution and conviction of Brown, one of five prisoners convicted of murdering a guard at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Holland did not reveal that another prisoner had told prosecutors about a jailhouse confession from one of the five, who said he and another inmate — not Brown — had decided to kill the guard. As a result, a state judge vacated Brown’s sentence in 2014, but the Louisiana Supreme Court reinstated it after ruling that the withheld evidence would not necessarily have changed the jury’s decision; the confession, they said, did not preclude Brown’s participation in the killing.

Hampton and Brown maintain their innocence and are still challenging their convictions. Holland did not respond to requests for comment about the cases.

Holland withheld evidence in a third death penalty case, involving Corey Williams, a 16-year-old convicted in the fatal shooting of a pizza delivery man in Shreveport. Williams’ 2000 death sentence was reduced to life without parole because the boy has a severe intellectual disability, according to court documents. As a child, Williams was hospitalized for “extreme lead poisoning” and was institutionalized multiple times for mental health reasons, according to court documents filed by his attorneys.

Fifteen years after Williams’ conviction, his attorneys alerted the court that Holland had concealed a trove of evidence that they said proved his innocence: Witnesses on the night of the murder told police Williams was innocent, and detectives stated at the time that they believed several older men were responsible and trying to pin the blame on Williams, according to a court filing by Williams’ defense team.

The actions by Holland’s team led dozens of former U.S. Department of Justice officials and federal prosecutors to file a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of efforts to overturn Williams’ conviction.

A former Caddo Parish district attorney, who took office on an interim basis 15 years after Williams’ prosecution, acknowledged in 2015 court filings that Holland and his team had withheld evidence, but insisted that it did not prove Williams’ innocence and would not have changed the verdict. Before the U.S. Supreme Court could take up the issue, however, Williams’ team agreed to a deal with prosecutors that allowed him to plead guilty to manslaughter and obstruction of justice in return for his 2018 release from prison. Holland has said he did not withhold evidence and maintained that Williams is guilty.

In other contexts, Holland questioned established law on the obligation to turn over evidence. Two years ago, a case came before the Louisiana Supreme Court to preserve a death sentence that defense attorneys claimed was secured after another prosecutor withheld key evidence. Arguing on behalf of the Rapides Parish district attorney, Holland expressed disdain for a 1995 U.S. Supreme Court ruling requiring prosecutors to turn over such evidence that could be considered favorable to defendants.

“It’s a very poorly written opinion because it leaves far too much to conjecture by people on the bench,” Holland said. “It’s got judges second-guessing juries.”

The state Supreme Court ultimately upheld the death sentence.

Matilde Carbia, a defense attorney representing a death row inmate whom Holland helped convict, said Holland’s antipathy toward transparency makes his candidacy dangerous. “If that is the kind of perspective that he would bring to the judiciary, that would be wholesale damaging to criminal defendants across the board,” Carbia said.

Holland’s unprofessional behavior in and outside of the courtroom is also a grave concern, she said. During a 2018 postconviction hearing for a murder case, Carbia said Holland claimed he couldn’t hear when she was questioning a witness, so he began following Carbia around the courtroom as she spoke.

“He’d come stand looming over my shoulder with his coattail pushed back so that you could see the firearm on his hip,” Carbia recalled in a recent interview.

In another incident, Carbia said Holland displayed an AR-15 rifle on his desk when she entered his office to review some files. “He was doing everything he could to attempt to intimidate me,” she said.

Holland did not respond to questions about these incidents. Verite News and ProPublica spoke with another attorney who witnessed the events and confirmed Carbia’s account.

An Evolving Caddo

Caddo Parish has changed since Holland last worked for the district attorney’s office, with Black voters now making up just over half of the parish population. With that increase has come more political influence.

In 2011, parish leaders removed a Confederate flag that had flown in front of the courthouse for decades. Eleven years later, the parish removed a monument featuring four Confederate generals that also stood before the courthouse steps.

The changes go beyond symbolic. Caddo voters elected the parish’s first Black district attorney in 2015 by a 10-point margin. Nine years later, voters elected the parish’s first Black sheriff by a similar edge.

Holland, however, will not be facing voters parishwide. There are 14 open judicial seats in the parish, and candidates choose among three districts in which to run. Only one is majority Black, according to Sadow, the political science professor. Holland hasn’t announced where he would run, but running in a majority white, conservative district would increase his odds of winning, Sadow said; Holland’s prospects would also be boosted in one of the majority white districts by not having to run against an incumbent, who is retiring.

Defense attorney Nick Trenticosta, who once faced off against Holland in a death penalty case, said he hopes voters will remember Holland’s ethical controversies and reject him as a relic of the past.

“Caddo is not the same Caddo it was 30 years ago,” Trenticosta said. “The voters know who he is.”

The post He Compared a Black Child to a Dog and Withheld Evidence in Death Row Cases. Now He’s Running for Judge. appeared first on ProPublica.

Briany, with her plump cheeks and full head of dark hair, wasn’t normally this fussy. But it was late that January night — around midnight — and she was still hungry. Her mom, Doris Flores, had tried nursing her to calm her down. It didn’t work. When she brought Briany to her breast, the milk wouldn’t come. Flores thought it had to do with the panic that set in after the officers arrested the baby’s father and told her she was next. 

The baby also drank formula. The pastor and his wife, who’d never had children of their own, should take her bottles and the yellow cans of formula, too, and follow the instructions on the label. They should use distilled water, never from the tap. Briany drank 5 ounces at each feeding. She needed to eat every two to two-and-a-half hours.

She was almost due for her next round of vaccinations. She was getting big enough for Size 3 diapers. What made her happiest was to be held in someone’s arms.

The Rev. Israel Vázquez, 58, soft-spoken with close-cropped hair, had held Briany before, when he formally presented the baby to God in a ceremony at his Pentecostal church in Lakeland. If he and his wife, a fellow pastor at the church, didn’t take the girls in, they would have to go into foster care. “What else could we do?” he said.

The baby’s half-sister would be easier for the older couple to take care of. Eight-year-old Briana was quiet and humble. She preferred speaking in English rather than Spanish. Her favorite color was blue.

Deputies from the Polk County Sheriff’s Office helped load a baby stroller and bouncy swing into the couple’s car. Then the officers, employed by one of the hundreds of Florida agencies carrying out immigration enforcement for the Trump administration, handcuffed a sobbing Flores. 

Incidents like this, involving the arrest and detention of immigrant parents with American citizen children, occurred twice as often after President Donald Trump returned to office, according to an analysis of a new nationwide Immigration and Customs Enforcement dataset shared exclusively with ProPublica. In the first seven months of his second term, authorities arrested and detained parents of at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children — a number that, if the pace held up, will have roughly doubled by now. That’s an average of more than 50 U.S. citizen kids a day with a parent pulled into detention.

The data underlying this analysis was obtained by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights as part of an ongoing public records lawsuit. It covers the last three years of the Joe Biden administration and the Trump administration until mid-August 2025.

The differences between the fates of detained immigrant parents under the two presidents are stark, our analysis shows. The impact on mothers is particularly pronounced. Trump is deporting about four times as many moms of U.S. citizen children per day as Biden did. 

Immigration authorities are arresting more of these moms in the first place, but that doesn’t account for all of the surge in deportations. If arrested, they are seldom allowed to return home to their families anymore. About 30% of such arrests under Biden resulted in a deportation. Under Trump, almost 60% resulted in a deportation.

Compared with the Biden administration, Trump officials are detaining many more parents with only minor criminal histories or none at all. Under Trump, more than half of the detained fathers of American citizen kids, and about three quarters of the mothers, had no criminal convictions in the United States except for traffic- or immigration-related offenses.

While thousands of children who aren’t U.S. citizens are also caught up in the administration’s crackdown — some of them detained with their parents, others by themselves — families with mixed citizenship can be uniquely difficult to keep together. American-born kids like Briany can’t legally join their parents in immigrant detention. So some end up in the care of friends or strangers.

Current and former officials from the Department of Homeland Security said such separations are not necessarily a violation of policy. Instead, guidelines on the way officers should exercise discretion have changed. Among the changes: A document once known as the Parental Interests Directive has been given a new name under Trump — the Detained Parents Directive. And its preamble, which once instructed agents to handle immigrant parents in a way that was “humane,” has been stripped of the word.

John Sandweg, who oversaw ICE when the original directive was adopted under President Barack Obama, said, “Back then, we were operating from a lens that family unity is everything.” Tom Homan, then a top ICE official and now Trump’s border czar, introduced the directive to field offices around the country. If agents encountered parents, the directive would help them enforce immigration laws without “unnecessarily undermining their parental rights,” according to his August 2013 talking points, which were obtained by ProPublica.

Now, Sandweg and the other former officials said, the second Trump administration has put aggressive enforcement goals like arresting 3,000 immigrants a day above concerns about the harms of hastily separating children from their parents.  

ProPublica sent detailed questions about our findings to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE. DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said in an emailed statement that the agency “cannot verify the veracity of the data” that ProPublica analyzed. (We validated the data, which the agency provided via Freedom of Information Act requests, and our approach with outside experts.) Bis also said in the statement, “ICE does not separate families.”

Immigrant parents can choose to leave the country with their children or to designate someone to care for them, Bis said, which “is consistent with past administration’s policies.” The revised directive “simply standardizes the required forms.” She added that “under President Trump, ICE will not ignore the rule of law.”

A White House spokesperson wrote in a statement that those in the country illegally “who wish to avoid the deportation process should self-deport.”

The unraveling of Flores’ family began with another kid’s alleged threat against 8-year-old Briana.

According to a Jan. 15 police report, the girl’s school bus driver had contacted the Polk County Sheriff’s Office after Briana claimed a student at her elementary school, a boy with blond hair and blue eyes, had threatened to kill her.

The sheriff’s office dispatched a deputy to the family’s mobile home, where she introduced herself to Flores and her fiance, Egdulio Velasquez, and asked to speak with Briana. The 8-year-old was “timid,” according to the police report, and initially denied any trouble with fellow students. The family said that the deputy questioned Briana alone outside the trailer. Eventually, the girl let on that her classmate had indeed been bothering her, poking her in the back and face with his fingers — but did not say the boy had threatened to kill her, according to the police report.

The deputy went to the classmate’s house, and the boy told her it was Briana who had made the threats. He said she had pointed a broken pencil at him. The deputy filled out two threat assessment forms, one for the boy, one for the girl, noting that she hadn’t checked the boy’s home for firearms because his “father was uncooperative” but had searched Briana’s trailer.

“I was unable to determine probable cause,” the deputy wrote in her report. She would have to drop the case. But her investigation had turned up something else: Flores and Velasquez were both immigrants from Honduras.

A second sheriff’s deputy arrived at the trailer not long after and took their passports. According to police records, he then called an ICE hotline, a requirement stemming from Florida’s close cooperation with the agency. An operator told him that both parents had deportation orders: Velasquez from a DUI conviction and Flores from a missed asylum hearing.

Flores said she had missed the hearing because of computer issues and was trying to appeal the ruling. She’d crossed the border into the United States and applied for asylum in 2023, after a man in Honduras had threatened to kill her. DHS’ Bis confirmed that Flores entered the country in 2023 and had a deportation order issued in May 2025. 

Flores had met Velasquez, who is from the same rural Honduran province of Olancho, in the United States. Briana, his daughter from a previous relationship, was born in Honduras. The family built a life together in Lakeland, where he worked in a factory that built shipping pallets, and they became members of Vázquez’s church.

A third squad car appeared outside the trailer. The officers arrested Velasquez first, keeping him handcuffed in the back of one of the cars for hours. But before they could arrest Flores, they needed to figure out what to do with the kids.

“Don’t be like this,” Flores recalled saying to the officers as she held baby Briany. “My girl needs me.” She said they told her they were just doing their jobs. She said she prayed to God: “Lord, I’m putting everything in your hands.”

According to Flores and Velasquez, one of the deputies took a liking to a family kitten and offered to take it home with him. Velasquez said he later saw the kitten clinging to the officer’s pants.

The Polk County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to specific questions about the incident, instead sending an emailed statement that outlined its state-mandated cooperation with federal immigration authorities. 

It was close to 11 p.m. when an investigator from Florida’s child protective services finally arrived, the family said. She informed Flores that if she couldn’t find someone to take the children, the state would place them in the foster care system. So Flores called her pastor.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd recently began calling for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who have committed no crimes and have strong community ties. A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office wrote in the statement to ProPublica that deputies do not make any decisions on who to detain — they report suspects to ICE, and ICE makes the decision.

But she noted they now make an effort to determine citizenship status.

“Nothing has changed in how we deliver day-to-day law enforcement services in our community,” she wrote, “other than asking everyone with whom we interact their place of birth.”

Federal policy still says ICE officers should ask people they arrest if they are the parents or legal guardians of minors — and if they are, they should be allowed to make arrangements for the children’s care. The Trump administration’s July revision to this directive, the one that removed the word “humane” from the preamble, also added a new line. It specifies that the directive “in no way limits the ability of ICE personnel to make enforcement decisions on a case-by-case basis.”

In practice, instances when parents are spared are becoming increasingly rare, said Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, a former ICE official who oversaw implementation of the directive at ICE during the Obama and first Trump administrations. “It may happen on a case-by-case basis because an officer in and of himself has humanity,” he said.

ProPublica followed multiple families through their sudden separations — examining the moment itself and its aftermath — and found a wide variety of outcomes for the children. 

Fernanda, a Florida restaurant worker, made an agonizing decision after the father of her children was arrested and deported: She would send their toddler son and 4-year-old daughter to Guatemala to live with him. She feared it was only a matter of time until immigration agents came knocking on her door. She didn’t want the children, both U.S. citizens, to be stranded.

Fernanda asked to be identified by only her middle name because of her immigration status. The Guatemalan-Maya Center, a nonprofit, helped her take the kids to the Fort Lauderdale airport in early February, the little boy dressed in a Spider-Man outfit, the little girl in a CoComelon sweatshirt and pink hat, and put them on a plane.

Griselda, a single mom originally from Honduras, had to leave her young daughters with their babysitter for four months. She said she was getting a ride to a housepainting job in Melbourne, Florida, when the car’s brakes failed and it crashed into a stop sign. Police officers showed up, she said, then called ICE. 

A domestic abuse survivor who asked to be identified by only her first name, Griselda said she told the officers, then ICE, about her children, but she was sent out of state to be detained in Dilley, Texas, without them. Griselda was desperate to reunite with her 4-year-old, who was born in Mexico during her journey to the southwest border, and her 1-year-old, who is a U.S. citizen. She said she decided not to file an appeal after a judge denied her asylum claim and that an ICE agent and a social worker were dispatched to Florida to retrieve the girls. Then, she said, she and her daughters were escorted to the border to cross on foot into Mexico — where they knew no one and had no money. 

A DHS spokesperson confirmed that the family was sent to Mexico together.

Mauricio Ayala, a 24-year-old engineer working at a firm in downtown Seattle, called 911 after immigration agents arrested his dad last April. “My father has been illegally detained,” he told the dispatcher nervously, stumbling over his words. “A bunch of masked men in unmarked vehicles pulled up and detained him.” (A DHS spokesperson wrote in a statement that “our officers verbally identify themselves” and wear badges and vests that display their agency name.)

His dad, a roofer, had been swept up in one of the first large-scale workplace raids of the new Trump administration. It was the beginning of a role reversal for Ayala, his college-age sister and his brother, a high school senior. All citizens, they would be the ones supporting their parents. Their mom had been forced to leave the country after an immigration arrest over a decade ago, Ayala said, but officers didn’t arrest his dad at the time because there were young children in the home. His dad was found guilty of reckless driving in 2015 but had no other criminal convictions that we could find in the United States. But now, as the siblings entered adulthood, their dad would be deported, too.

To cut costs and send money to his parents in Mexico, Ayala moved from his Seattle apartment back into the trailer his dad owned in a smaller city 90 minutes away. His sister did the same. Their little brother picked up part-time jobs.

Maria Magdalena Callejas, her boyfriend and her 14-year-old son were detained in Texas while on a road trip last spring. She called a friend back home in California who she’d asked to watch her two younger children — both U.S. citizens — until her return. She begged the friend to take care of them for even longer.

Callejas’ boyfriend was deported. She and her older son, Edwin, were held in family detention, where he said he was stressed because it felt like a prison. He said he lost 10 pounds in a week after he got sick. He was so despondent, his mother said, that she felt her only option was to allow them to be sent back to El Salvador, a country Edwin left when he was 5. (ICE has said conditions in its facilities are safe for families and that everyone is provided proper medical care.)

Callejas said she agreed to return to El Salvador only because she understood that her 6-year-old and 4-year-old would be allowed to join her and their older brother. 

The kids’ father had previously pleaded no contest to domestic battery and had a restraining order placed against him, which allowed brief supervised visitation.  (Attorneys for both parents said Callejas allowed him to spend time with the kids despite the order.) When he found out their mom had been deported, he opposed the children leaving the country and decided to fight for custody. Since Callejas’ deportation, the children have been with a caretaker, and a judge has allowed their father more time with them, according to lawyers for both parents. The result: a monthslong battle in a Los Angeles court — with Callejas attending hearings virtually from El Salvador.

Back in Lakeland, Israel Vázquez takes no credit for feeding the baby that first night or the ones after. “That girl can drink milk!” he said. His wife, the Rev. Raysa Vázquez, woke up every couple of hours and tended to Briany, sitting with her in the brown recliner in the living room, rocking her back to sleep.

They did not know how long the girls would be with them. They decided 8-year-old Briana should stay at the same elementary school, to keep her with her friends and teacher. They drove around 45 minutes round trip to the school every day.

Meanwhile, the girls’ parents bounced among hold rooms, jails and detention centers. In detention, Flores said, she began to suffer a painful swelling, which she believed could have been mastitis brought on by her inability to nurse her baby. Her chest became hot to the touch, her whole body feverish. The fever lasted a week. 

The couple wanted to do whatever they could to make the girls feel at home. But they also wanted to make sure the girls could be reunited with their parents. If Flores and Velasquez were going to be deported, the pastors wanted the girls to go with them. And to go with them, Briany would need a passport. The pastors would have to get both parents’ signatures while they were in detention. 

Briany was sitting on Raysa’s lap as they watched TV in the living room, babbling along as she listened to the couple talk, when Israel’s phone rang. It was an ICE deportation officer. He said Flores would be removed from the country soon and the window for getting her daughters on a plane with her was closing. He offered to help the Vázquezes get the parents’ signatures and said ICE would bring Flores to Tampa.

The next day, they drove to a government office in Tampa to get Flores’ signature, where the girls were allowed to see and hug her. She let out a loud scream and started weeping at the sight of the children. In Mississippi, volunteers rushed to the detention center where Velasquez was being held and got his signature, too.

The couple drove Briany to Miami a few days later and picked up her passport. Then they brought the girls to the Tampa airport.

They met Flores at the terminal. She was clad in a sweatshirt and bleary from the early hour. Israel handed over the diaper bag he’d been carrying around and the baby’s bottles. Flores’ fiance would be deported a few weeks later on a separate flight to Honduras. Her eldest child, a son from a previous relationship who had to go live with his father after she was arrested, would remain in the U.S. So for now it was just Flores and the two girls. They posed for a photo, then said goodbye.

The family now lives at Velasquez’s father’s house in the town of San José, deep in rural Honduras. The baby no longer breastfeeds. She hasn’t since the night deputies separated her from her mother. “I brought her to my breast,” Flores said, “but she doesn’t want it anymore.”

Briany’s preferred formula costs too much for the family to afford. To keep the baby fed, they rely again on their church. A box of it recently arrived, enough to last several weeks, sent by the Vázquezes and their Lakeland congregation.

How We Measured Separations of Families with U.S. Citizen Children

Ours is the most detailed accounting to date of the U.S. citizen children whose immigrant parents have been arrested, detained and in many cases deported. Underlying the analysis is a database of ICE I-213 records obtained by the University of Washington. Immigration agents fill out Form I-213 when they arrest someone alleging they are in the country without permission. Among other pieces of information, it records the citizenship and number of minor children of each arrestee.

The data appears to contain arrests only by ICE and does not cover arrests by Customs and Border Protection. It covers late 2021 to mid-August 2025. We used this data to calculate the number of parents of U.S. citizen children arrested each day.

To learn what happened to parents after they were arrested by ICE, including detention, final release from ICE custody in the United States or removal from the country, we combined the I-213 data with records from the Deportation Data Project, which covers late 2023 to mid-October 2025. The I-213 dataset contains about 17% fewer arrests by ICE in any given month than the Deportation Data Project’s arrest dataset. 

We were able to combine these two datasets using fields common to both of them, including date of arrest, gender, age, nationality, location and method of arrest. We matched about 85% of the arrests in the I-213 data to a unique record in the ICE arrest and detention data. (An additional 7% had multiple possible matches, so we did not include them, and about 7% had no possible match. These rates were similar across presidential administrations.) 

We used the overlapping 85% to make statements about the number of U.S. citizen children who had a parent arrested and detained by ICE since Trump returned to office and about the criminal status of their parents. We also used these combined records to compare how their mothers were treated differently by the Trump and Biden administrations.

To calculate that more than 11,000 U.S. citizen children had a parent arrested and detained by ICE, we counted only children of fathers. We did this to avoid double-counting children in cases where both parents were detained, and fathers made up a large majority of the parents detained. We were limited to the first seven months of Trump’s second term, the time period covered in the I-213 data. If a father was arrested and detained more than once under Trump, we counted that father’s children only once. All other calculations were performed at the arrest level, meaning that in a very small number of instances, the same parent could be included more than once for each time they were arrested, detained, released or removed.

The government cannot legally detain U.S. citizen children with their parents or deport them. According to immigration experts and current and former officials, the arrest and detention of parents of U.S. citizens often leads to a family separation, even if it’s brief. 

We counted a parent as having been detained by ICE if they were booked into a facility for any length of time according to the Deportation Data Project’s detention records. In a very small minority of cases during the Trump administration, parents were released from ICE custody in less than a few days. This was more common under Biden. When we calculated the criminal history of parents arrested and detained by ICE, we relied on the criminal charges in these detention records.

To calculate that Trump has deported mothers of U.S. citizen children at four times the rate that Biden did, we calculated the total number of mothers removed under each administration in the period covered by our data and divided by the number of days each president was in office during that period. We used the period from November 2023 through mid-August 2025 to minimize undercounting at the start and end of our detention dataset. We also compared equivalent seven-month periods in 2024 and 2025, which produced a similar result. For the purposes of our analysis, we counted a small number of detained mothers who agreed to leave the country voluntarily as having been deported.

Validating Our Approach

We verified our matches between the two data sources in several ways. First, there were three fields in the I-213 data that were in other parts of the Deportation Data Project data but not used as part of the linkage process: marital status, processing disposition and date of entry. For records we linked that contained values in those fields (some were empty in one or both datasets), we found that those data points matched more than 98% of the time.

Next, we checked to make sure that there were no systematic differences in which ICE arrests appeared in the I-213 dataset compared to those contained in the Deportation Data Project records. We checked to make sure that women and men were equally represented, the different ICE field offices were equally represented, nationalities were equally represented, etc. We found no appreciable difference between the two datasets.

We also compared records for which we found a match between the two datasets to records that had no match and found no strong patterns suggesting systematic differences between the two.

ICE publishes the number of parents of U.S. citizens arrested on its detention management website and in reports to Congress. We compared our analysis against these numbers and found that for fiscal years 2023 and 2024, our data showed about 15% fewer such parents arrested by ICE than the official statistics noted. We do not know exactly why this is, although it is in line with how many fewer I-213 records we have than there are arrest records in the Deportation Data Project.

We ran our findings and methodology by Phil Neff, a researcher at the University of Washington Center for Human Rights and Joseph Gunther, a mathematician who researches immigration-related datasets and former ICE officials.

We also were able to link some of the data to leaked ICE flight manifests, which allowed us in some cases to find the full names — redacted in most of the other data — of some of the deported parents. In a handful of those cases, we found their phone numbers or those of family members, and we reached out to hear their stories.

We conducted interviews in Spanish and English with close to two dozen detained or deported parents or their relatives or lawyers. We also spoke with nonprofits like the American Friends Service Committee and Each Step Home, which assist immigrant families — including Flores’ family — after they are separated.

The parents we followed through the arrest process were originally from a range of mostly Latin American countries: Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and Ecuador. They and their children had made lives in all corners of the United States, including California, Washington state, New York, Massachusetts and Florida. Most of the parents we interviewed were moms.

The post Trump Has Detained the Parents of More Than 11,000 U.S. Citizen Kids appeared first on ProPublica.

One month after Landa’s appointment, the inspector general of Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services issued a blunt audit estimating that a nursing home Landa co-owns received Medicare overpayments of at least $31.2 million and recommending that the government recoup the money.

Now that facility, Pinnacle Multicare Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, is suing the very administration that is nominating Landa to the diplomatic post. The suit, filed Feb. 26 in federal district court in New York, asks the court to stop the government’s collection efforts and names HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, HHS Inspector General Thomas March Bell and a Medicare contractor as defendants. A federal district judge denied Pinnacle’s request for a temporary restraining order.

As of March, Landa has an ownership interest in more than 100 nursing homes in eight states, CMS data shows. Landa also is a donor to Republican causes, but his biggest donation by far was $5 million to MAGA Inc., a pro-Trump Super PAC, in August 2025, two months before his nomination.

Critics of Landa’s track record point to the audit’s findings, along with other legal actions against homes connected to him, as reasons that his nomination should face additional scrutiny.

Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid, described Landa as an example of “giant corporate health care interests that prey on the vulnerable and use clever tricks to exploit loopholes at taxpayers’ expense.”

“It’s no surprise that these companies and their owners are cozy with Trump: instead of accountability, they’ve been rewarded,” Wyden said in a statement, with “plum political appointments and ambassadorships in Europe.”

The White House and the Department of State did not respond to requests for comment about the status of Landa’s nomination. An attorney for Landa denied wrongdoing in a statement, saying the issues identified in the audit occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic when nursing homes were in the midst of a crisis.

“At Pinnacle MultiCare, patient care comes first — period, full stop,” attorney Alyssa Friedman wrote in an email to ProPublica. “That commitment drove every decision during the pandemic and continues to define operations today.

“Let’s be clear: this is about decisive actions taken during the height of COVID-19 that prioritized patients and saved lives in one of the pandemic’s epicenters — decisions now being second-guessed years later through an absurdly flawed audit of billing paperwork and a retroactive reinterpretation of the rules by government bureaucrats,” she added.

The inspector general’s audit and the resulting lawsuit are the latest controversy involving Landa.

In November 2022, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued The Villages at Orleans Health and Rehabilitation Center, as well as Landa and others she said were owners of the facility. A press release announcing the suit alleged “years of financial fraud that resulted in significant resident neglect and harm.” Between 2015 and 2022, Landa made at least $1.49 million from the facility, James’ suit alleged, through means that James characterized as “looting.” Meanwhile, Landa “contributed nothing and failed to prevent the abuse and neglect,” the suit alleged. James described a pattern of harm to residents at the home, due in part to what the suit said was “systemic understaffing and cost cutting,” which included potentially preventable deaths of residents due to delayed wound care and suicide.

The home and the defendants named as owners have disputed the suit. In 2024, a state Supreme Court judge allowed multiple claims in the case to proceed; in 2025, Landa appealed that decision. The case is ongoing.

Landa’s attorney said her client “merely owned a minority interest in the company that owned the real estate and served as the landlord of the building out of which the facility operated. He had no interest in the licensed operator of the facility and no involvement in the operations of the facility. The attorney general’s claims against Mr. Landa are baseless and a waste of the court’s time and taxpayer dollars.”

One month after filing the suit against The Villages, James sued Cold Spring Hills Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, based in Long Island, making nearly identical claims to her prior suit. Landa owned 25% of the facility’s property holding company, according to the lawsuit. Over a number of years, the facility paid over $15 million in rent to the property holding company co-owned by Landa; over $1.4 million to a management company co-owned by Landa; and almost $500,000 in consulting fees to a company owned by Landa, the lawsuit alleged. At the same time, residents were losing significant weight and developing malnutrition, enduring life-threatening pressure ulcers and repeatedly suffering unwitnessed falls, in part due to understaffing, James alleged.

The home and its owners disputed the allegations. In March 2024, a judge in Long Island ordered four defendants, including Landa, to pay a total of $2 million back to the nursing home, and ordered that an independent health care monitor be appointed to run the facility. Landa and his co-defendants have appealed various orders in the case. In January 2025, Cold Spring Hills filed for bankruptcy; in March 2025, the facility sold itself for $10 to a third-party receiver and changed its name. (“Our facility is now under new ownership with a renewed vision for excellence,” the nursing home’s rebranded website reads. “A new chapter in compassionate care has begun.”) The appeals and bankruptcy proceedings are ongoing.

Landa’s attorney said he was merely a landlord of Cold Spring Hills and was not involved in operating the facility. She noted that the judge found no fraud committed by Landa, that all business arrangements between Landa and the home were approved by the state health department, and that none of the defendants enriched themselves at the expense of patient care.

Landa has been involved with other legal actions related to his nursing homes. In 2017, for example, an employment agency co-owned by Landa was sued on behalf of a class of Filipino nurses alleging that it had trafficked them, withheld wages, and threatened civil and criminal litigation should the nurses leave. In September 2019, a New York district court found the agency and its owners had violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Act; in April 2022, the case was settled for $3 million on the condition that the findings involving trafficking were vacated. Landa’s attorney did not respond to follow-up questions about the other suits in which he has been involved.

In one of her 2022 lawsuits, James estimated Landa’s net worth at more than $300 million in 2016.

The audit at the center of the current lawsuit was the government’s first related to a new nursing home payment system rolled out during Trump’s first term. Under the previous system, nursing homes were reimbursed based on the number of minutes of therapy provided to patients, which “created financial incentives” for them to focus on patients who needed therapy, according to the November audit report. In contrast, the new payment system was designed to “improve payment accuracy and appropriateness by focusing on the enrollee, rather than volume of services provided,” according to the report.

The inspector general’s office found that Pinnacle, located in the Bronx, received significantly higher reimbursements from Medicare under the new payment system than the old one, raising red flags at the agency.

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ProPublica Adds Ownership Search to Nursing Home Inspect Database

The inspector general found that Pinnacle had violated CMS billing requirements in 99 of the 100 claims it audited. The agency noted that, in 95 of those 99 claims, Pinnacle requested reimbursement for levels of services that were higher than what was justifiable when the agency reviewed patients’ charts — for example, billing for speech therapy for aphasia in a patient who clinicians had explicitly stated did not need speech therapy. Additionally, in 54 of the 99 claims, the agency found, Pinnacle provided services that could not be justified by the patients’ charts — for example, billing for “bed mobility and wheelchair training” for patients who were able to walk on their own.

The HHS inspector general’s office declined to comment on the audit, citing pending litigation.

Separately, the New York State Department of Health has imposed three financial penalties against Pinnacle since 2021.

In its lawsuit, Pinnacle alleges that the auditors “blatantly ignore” state and federal waivers for documentation and billing requirements issued as part of the effort to reduce administrative barriers to patient care during the COVID-19 public health emergency. “Pinnacle’s efforts to provide exceptional care to its patients were an undeniable success,” the facility wrote in the lawsuit.

Additionally, the facility only had two COVID-19 deaths at the height of the pandemic — “one of the lowest COVID related death totals among New York nursing homes despite being a 480-bed facility located in one of the most heavily affected areas,” Landa’s attorney said. “The outcomes during that period are the most important measure of care,” she added.

In its suit, Pinnacle characterized the government’s demand for repayment as an “administrative process riddled with constitutional violations.” That request “would immediately paralyze Pinnacle by rendering it unable to pay its employees,” the facility added, “and would result in the shut down of the entire nursing facility — leaving highly vulnerable patients without life-saving care, depriving hundreds of individuals of jobs and income, and divesting New York City of this critical medical facility.”

Industry watchdogs say threatening closure in response to state or federal enforcement actions is a familiar ploy for nursing home owners.

“That’s their constant refrain whenever they don’t get what they want,” said Kevin Walsh, former New Jersey comptroller who investigated tens of millions of dollars in nursing home fraud during his tenure.

“The risk of closure based on the finances and cost reports that I’ve seen seems low,” Walsh added. “They’re not going to kill the golden goose they’re using to siphon profits.”

Landa has repeatedly filed lawsuits in response to allegations against nursing homes with which he is affiliated. In 2022, he brought a suit for libel against The American Prospect, as well as one of its reporters and an editor, following an investigation titled “The Nursing Home Slumlord Manifesto.” Years earlier, he sued freelancers writing for ProPublica, also alleging defamation. Judges dismissed both cases.

Landa’s nomination remains under consideration by the Senate Foreign Relations committee. (No hearing has been scheduled.) But if confirmed as ambassador to Hungary, Landa would hold a powerful position.

Hungary, despite its small population and historically minor role in U.S. foreign policy, holds increasing symbolic importance in the global conservative movement.

In a mid-February visit to Budapest, Trump administration officials reinforced their support for Orban. Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed an agreement to nurture Hungary’s civilian nuclear program. (The country does not presently have nuclear weapons, according to the World Nuclear Association, an international organization that publishes reports on global nuclear activity.)

“We are entering this golden era of relations between our countries,” Rubio said in a press conference in Budapest, “not simply because of the alignment of our people, but because of the relationship that you have with the president of the United States.”

The post Nominee for Ambassador to Hungary Co-Owns a Nursing Home That’s Suing the Trump Administration Over Medicare Payments appeared first on ProPublica.

One such owner, Benjamin Landa, was nominated by President Donald Trump in October to be ambassador to Hungary. ProPublica reported Monday that Pinnacle Multicare Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, which Landa co-owns, is suing the Trump administration following a Department of Health and Human Services audit that estimated more than $30 million in Medicare overpayments had been made to the facility.

An attorney for Landa denied wrongdoing in a statement, saying the issues identified in the audit occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic when nursing homes were in the midst of a crisis.

To give the public more insight into who owns American nursing homes, ProPublica has added the ability to search by owner, manager or officer name to Nursing Home Inspect, our database that helps you find issues that federal inspectors have identified in more than 14,000 facilities. The update allows users to find all references to an owner’s name across homes and filter results based on location or the person’s role in the nursing home.

ProPublica already publishes data provided by CMS on “affiliated entities,” groups of homes determined to share an owner, officer or entity with managerial control. However, these groups do not always capture every home a person or company has a relationship with. For example, CMS lists Landa as an affiliated entity associated with 55 nursing homes across four states. But the name “Benjamin Landa” appears in the CMS ownership data for 102 nursing homes in eight states. 

To make connections between owners more visible, if you search for a specific person or company name, the database now also surfaces others who frequently appear alongside the searched name.

ProPublica plans to continue improving Nursing Home Inspect in the coming months. If you write a story using the ownership search, come across issues or have ideas for improvements, please let us know!

The post ProPublica Adds Ownership Search to Nursing Home Inspect Database appeared first on ProPublica.

Between April 2025, when President Donald Trump started sending families there, and January of this year, the number of people sent into detention with their families averaged around 600 per month. In February, those so-called books-ins fell to 133. As of mid-March, they dropped again to just 54.

This week there were only around 100 people in family detention at Dilley, compared with an average daily population in January of over 900, the data shows.

Current and former ICE officials and lawyers with clients in Dilley said they were unable to explain the reason for the sharp decline. However, they said the shift followed weeks of mounting public pressure generated in part by the widespread publication of letters written by several of the detained children in which they described the conditions inside Dilley and their despair at being ripped from their homes and schools.

ProPublica published several of those letters on Feb. 9 after visiting the facility — about an hour south of San Antonio — in mid-January. The letters set off a storm of outrage in Washington and across the country. They were raised in congressional hearings and pasted on posters in anti-ICE demonstrations.

Rep. James Walkinshaw, a Democrat from Virginia, read the letters aloud to ICE’s acting director, Todd Lyons, during a congressional hearing on Feb. 10, pressing him for answers about whether the children’s detention could cause adverse psychological effects. He pointed to one drawing by a 5-year-old Venezuelan girl named Luisanney Toloza of her family. 

“My son’s 5. He can’t write many words, but he can communicate through drawings like this,” Walkinshaw said, making special note of the expressions on the family’s faces. “None of the faces are smiling.”

It was another 5-year-old who first triggered public attention to children being detained at Dilley. Liam Conejo Ramos was picked up on Jan. 20 in Minnesota and sent to the facility with his father. A photograph of him at the time of his detention, wearing a blue bunny hat, went viral. 

Detainees, emboldened by the attention, organized a protest in a yard at the facility that was captured in an aerial photograph and widely published on social media. Lawmakers demanded multiple visits to push for the release of Ramos and others. Nearly 4,000 doctors, nurses and health professionals sent a letter to the Trump administration calling for the immediate release of all children currently in immigration detention. This month, social media personality Rachel Accurso, an educator better known as Ms. Rachel, who makes popular children’s programming, posted a video conversation with one of the kids detained at Dilley to her 4.9 million Instagram followers, garnering more than 3,700 comments.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Democrat from Texas, has been at the forefront of a push by legislators from his party to shut down Dilley and for the administration to find alternatives to family detentions. When told about the drop in the number of families being held at Dilley, he said, “That trailer prison is no place for children, and I’m glad to hear that the numbers continue to decline,” adding, “It’s a reminder that people can make a difference by speaking up.”

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a statement that custody decisions are made “daily, on a case-by-case basis,” adding that the “administration does not make immigration decisions based on public opinion. We follow the rule of law.” In the past, the agency has said that Dilley offers families a safe environment equipped with access to educational materials, child care necessities and round-the-clock medical and mental health care. Meanwhile, CoreCivic, the private prison company operating the facility, said in a statement it does not have “any say whatsoever” in whether detainees are deported or released. In previous statements, it has said that the health and safety of detainees is its “top priority.”

Dilley first opened as a family detention facility under former President Barack Obama in 2014, mostly for recent border crossers. Trump kept the facility running during his first term, but President Joe Biden stopped holding families in 2021, arguing the United States shouldn’t be in the business of detaining children.

Soon after taking office a second time, Trump resumed family detentions at Dilley. As border crossings have dropped to record lows, more of the families being held there have been arrested inside the United States and have been in the country long enough to lay down roots and build networks of relatives and friends. The children detained there have ranged in age from newborns to older teenagers. The vast majority of adults held at Dilley had no U.S. criminal record. 

Following the protests and the publication of children’s letters, detainees and attorneys interviewed by ProPublica said guards took away crayons, colored pencils and drawing paper during recent room searches. This week, ProPublica learned the facility had cut off access to video calls in common areas.

The Trump administration said in a recent court filing that personal property had not been destroyed at Dilley and items confiscated during searches were “limited to materials identified as protest-related and not authorized under facility rules.” CoreCivic “vehemently” denied staff confiscated or destroyed children’s personal artwork or supplies. DHS said the restrictions were put in place on video calls following the livestreaming of recorded calls online “that resulted in the unauthorized dissemination of law enforcement sensitive information.” The agency added the video calls are still available in private rooms, as is access to in-person visitation and phones.

While a long-standing legal settlement, known as the Flores agreement, holds that children should generally not be detained for more than 20 days, the data ProPublica obtained showed the average days in custody was longer than that for every month since family detentions resumed at the facility last year. In each month between November and February, the average stay in family detention was over 50 days.

DHS has said in the past that the Flores agreement, in place since the 1990s, is outdated and should be terminated because newer regulations address the needs of children in detention.

One Egyptian family, Hayam El Gamal and her five children ranging in age from 18 to 5-year-old twins, has been at Dilley for nine months. They were taken into custody after the father, Mohamed Soliman, was charged over an alleged antisemitic attack in Boulder, Colorado, that killed one person and injured 13 others. The family said it had no knowledge of his plans. DHS said it is still investigating.

One 13-year-old Guatemalan boy named Edison was released from Dilley with his mom this week. During his 92-day detention, Edison had cried in video calls to his father back in Chicago, saying he felt like he was being treated like a criminal. (His father asked that his son’s last name not be used.) Then in the early hours of Wednesday morning, a guard came to their bunk room and told him and his mom to start packing their belongings. By that night, they were on a plane to Chicago to be reunited with Edison’s dad. “We don’t understand why they were released,” his dad said. “All I can tell you is it was a miracle from God.”

As soon as they landed, the family went home to enjoy a seafood dinner, one of Edison’s favorites.

The post The Number of Families Being Held at Dilley Detention Center Has Plummeted appeared first on ProPublica.

On the agenda that day: the future of nuclear energy in the Trump era. The meeting was convened by 31-year-old lawyer Seth Cohen. Just five years out of law school, Cohen brought no significant experience in nuclear law or policy; he had just entered government through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team.

As Cohen led the group through a technical conversation about licensing nuclear reactor designs, he repeatedly downplayed health and safety concerns. When staff brought up the topic of radiation exposure from nuclear test sites, Cohen broke in.

“They are testing in Utah. … I don’t know, like 70 people live there,” he said.

“But … there’s lots of babies,” one staffer pushed back. Babies, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups are thought to be potentially more susceptible to cancers brought on by low-level radiation exposure, and they are usually afforded greater protections.

“They’ve been downwind before,” another staffer joked.

“This is why we don’t use AI transcription in meetings,” another added.

ProPublica reviewed records of that meeting, providing a rare look at a dramatic shift underway in one of the most sensitive domains of public policy. The Trump administration is upending the way nuclear energy is regulated, driven by a desire to dramatically increase the amount of energy available to power artificial intelligence.

Career experts have been forced out and thousands of pages of regulations are being rewritten at a sprint. A new generation of nuclear energy companies — flush with Silicon Valley cash and boasting strong political connections — wield increasing influence over policy. Figures like Cohen are forcing a “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley ethos on one of the country’s most important regulators.

The Trump administration has been particularly aggressive in its attacks on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the bipartisan independent regulator that approves commercial nuclear power plants and monitors their safety. The agency is not a household name. But it’s considered the international gold standard, often influencing safety rules around the world.

The NRC has critics, especially in Silicon Valley, where the often-cautious commission is portrayed as an impediment to innovation. In an early salvo, President Donald Trump fired NRC Commissioner Christopher Hanson last June after Hanson spoke out about the importance of agency independence. It was the first time an NRC commissioner had been fired.

During that Idaho meeting, Cohen shot down any notion of NRC independence in the new era.

“Assume the NRC is going to do whatever we tell the NRC to do,” he said, records reviewed by ProPublica show. In November, Cohen was made chief counsel for nuclear policy at the Department of Energy, where he oversees a broad nuclear portfolio.

Hundreds of Staff Who Do Work Related to Nuclear Reactors and Their Safety Have Left and Not Been Replaced

The aggressive moves have sent shock waves through the nuclear energy world. Many longtime promoters of the industry say they worry recklessness from the Trump administration could discredit responsible nuclear energy initiatives.

“The regulator is no longer an independent regulator — we do not know whose interests it is serving,” warned Allison Macfarlane, who served as NRC chair during the Obama administration. “The safety culture is under threat.”

A ProPublica analysis of staffing data from the NRC and the Office of Personnel Management shows a rush to the exits: Over 400 people have left the agency since Trump took office. The losses are particularly pronounced in the teams that handle reactor and nuclear materials safety and among veteran staffers with 10 or more years of experience. Meanwhile, hiring of new staff has proceeded at a snail’s pace, with nearly 60 new arrivals in the first year of the Trump administration compared with nearly 350 in the last year of the Biden administration.

Some nuclear power supporters say the administration is providing a needed level of urgency given the energy demands of AI. They also contend the sweeping changes underway aren’t as dangerous or dire as some experts suggest.

“I think the NRC has been frozen in time,” said Brett Rampal, the senior director of nuclear and power strategy at the investment and strategy consultancy Veriten. “It’s a great time to get unfrozen and aim to work quickly.”

The White House referred most of ProPublica’s questions to the Department of Energy, where spokesperson Olivia Tinari said the agency is committed to helping build more safe, high-quality nuclear energy facilities.

“Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, America’s nuclear industry is entering a new era that will provide reliable, abundant power for generations to come,” she wrote. The DOE is “committed to the highest standards of safety for American workers and communities.”

Cohen did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The NRC declined to comment.

Blindsided by DOGE

The U.S. has not had a serious nuclear incident since the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in 1979, a track record many experts attribute to a rigorous regulatory environment and an intense safety culture.

Major nuclear incidents around the world have only strengthened the resolve of past regulators to stay independent from industry and from political winds. A chief cause of Japan’s Fukushima accident, investigators found, was the cozy relationship between the country’s industry and oversight body, which opened the door for thin safety assessments and inaccurate projections overlooking the possible impact of a major tsunami.

“We knew regulatory capture led directly to Fukushima and to Chernobyl,” said Kathryn Huff, who was assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy during the Biden administration.

The U.S. has barely built any nuclear power plants in recent decades. Only three new reactors have been completed in the last 25 years, and since 1990 the U.S has barely added any net new nuclear electricity to its grid. Though about 20% of U.S. energy is supplied by nuclear power plants, the fleet is aging. Some experts blame the slow build-out on the challenging economics of financing a multibillion-dollar project and the uncertainty of accessing and disposing of nuclear fuels.

But an increasingly vocal group of industry voices and deregulation advocates have blamed the slow build-out on overly cautious and inefficient regulators. Among the most powerful exponents of this view are billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen; both venture capitalists have their own investments in the nuclear energy sector and are influential Trump supporters.

Andreessen camped out at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Florida, after Trump won the 2024 election, helping pick staff for the new administration. In late 2024, Thiel personally vetted at least one candidate for the Office of Nuclear Energy, according to people familiar with the conversations. Neither responded to requests for comment.

Four months into his second term, Trump signed a series of executive orders designed to supercharge nuclear power build-out. “It’s a hot industry, it’s a brilliant industry,” said Trump, flanked by nuclear energy CEOs in the Oval Office. He added: “And it’s become very safe.”

Under those orders, the NRC was directed to reduce its workforce, speed up the timeline for approving nuclear reactors and rewrite many of its safety rules. The DOE — which has a vast nuclear portfolio, including waste cleanup sites and government research labs — was tasked with creating a pathway for so-called advanced nuclear companies to test their designs.

The goal, Trump said, was to quadruple nuclear energy output and provide new power to the data centers behind the AI boom.

As DOGE gutted agencies, departures mounted in the nuclear sector. Career experts in nuclear regulations and safety departed or were forced out. When Trump fired Hanson, a Democratic NRC commissioner, the president’s team explained the move by saying, “All organizations are more effective when leaders are rowing in the same direction.”

In an unsigned email to ProPublica, the White House press office wrote: “All commissioners are presidential appointees and can be fired just like any other appointee.”

In August, the NRC’s top attorney resigned and was replaced by oil and gas lawyer David Taggart, who had been working on DOGE cuts at the DOE. In all, the nuclear office at the DOE had lost about a third of its staff, according to a January 2026 count by the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit focused on science and technology policy.

That summer, Cohen and a team of DOGE operatives touched down at the NRC offices, a series of nondescript towers across from a Dunkin’ in suburban Maryland. He was joined by Adam Blake, an investor who had recently founded an AI medical startup and has a background in real estate and solar energy, and Ankur Bansal, president of a company that created software for real estate agents. Neither would comment for this story.

Many career officials who spoke with ProPublica were blindsided: The new Trump officials at the NRC seemed to have no experience with the intricacies of nuclear energy policy or law, they said. One NRC lawyer who briefed some of the new arrivals decided to resign. “They were talking about quickly approving all these new reactors, and they didn’t seem to care that much about the rules — they wanted to carry out the wishes of the White House,” the official said.

At one point, Cohen began passing out hats from nuclear energy startup Valar Atomics, one of the companies vying to build a new reactor, according to sources familiar with the matter and records seen by ProPublica. NRC staffers balked; they were supposed to monitor companies like Valar for safety violations, not wear its swag.

NRC ethics officials warned Cohen that the hat handout was a likely violation of conflict rules. It betrayed a misunderstanding of the safety regulator’s role, said a former official familiar with the exchange. “Imagine you live near a nuclear power plant, and you find out a supposedly independent safety regulator — the watchdog — is going around wearing the power plant’s branded hats,” the official said. “Would that make you feel safe?” The NRC and Cohen did not respond to requests for comment about the hat incident.

Valar counts Trump’s Silicon Valley allies as angel investors. They include Palmer Luckey, a technology executive and founder of the defense contractor Anduril, and Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer of Palantir, the software company helping power Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation raids.

It was among three nuclear reactor companies that sued the NRC last year in an attempt to strip it of its authority to regulate its reactors and replace it with a state-level regulator. Before the Trump administration came into office, lawyers watching the case were confident the courts would quickly dismiss the suit, as the NRC’s authority to regulate reactors is widely acknowledged. But new Trump appointees pushed for a compromise settlement — which is still being negotiated. The career NRC lawyer working on the case quietly left the agency.

Valar and its executives did not reply to requests for comment.

“Going So Fast”

The deregulatory push is the culmination of mounting pressure — both political and economic — to make it easier to build nuclear power in the U.S. Over the years, a bipartisan coalition supporting nuclear expansion brought together environmentalists who favor zero-carbon power and defense hawks focused on abundant domestic energy production.

Anti-nuclear activists still argue that renewable energy like wind and solar are safer and more economical. But streamlining the NRC has been a bipartisan priority as well. The latest major reform came in 2024, when President Joe Biden signed into law the ADVANCE Act, which went as far as changing the mission statement of the NRC to ensure it “does not unnecessarily limit” nuclear energy development.

Some nuclear power supporters say the Trump administration is merely accelerating these changes. They cite instances in which the current regulations appear out of sync with the times. The NRC’s byzantine rules are designed for so-called large light-water reactors — massive facilities that can power entire cities — and not the increasingly in vogue smaller advanced reactor designs popular among Silicon Valley-backed firms.

Rules that require fences of certain heights might make little sense for new reactors buried in the earth; and rules that require a certain number of operators per reactor could be a bad fit for a cluster of smaller reactors with modern controls. Advances in sensors, modeling and safety technologies, they say, should be taken into account across the board.

The NRC has said it expects over two dozen new license requests from small modular and advanced reactor companies in coming years. Many of those requests are likely to come from new, Silicon Valley-based nuclear firms.

“There was a missing link in the innovation cycle, and it was very difficult to build something and test it in the U.S. because of mostly licensing and site availability constraints in the past,” said Adam Stein of the pro-nuclear nonprofit Breakthrough Institute.

The regulatory changes are in flux: This spring, the NRC is starting to release thousands of pages of new rules governing everything from the safety and emergency preparedness plans reactor companies are required to submit to the procedures for objecting to a reactor license.

“It’s hard to know if they are getting rid of unnecessary processes or if it’s actually reducing public safety,” said one official working on reactor licensing, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration. “And that’s just the problem with going so fast — everything just kind of gets lost in a mush.”

Lawyers from the Executive Office of the President have been sent to the NRC to keep an eye on the new rules, a move that further raised alarms about the agency’s independence.

Nicholas Gallagher — a relatively recent New York University law school graduate and conservative writer whom ProPublica previously identified as a DOGE operative at the General Services Administration — has been involved in conversations about overhauling environmental rules.

He’s working alongside Sydney Volanski, a 30-year-old recent law school graduate who rose to national attention while she was in high school for her campaign against the Girl Scouts of America, which she accused of promoting “Marxists, socialists and advocates of same-sex lifestyle.”

NRC lawyers working on the rules were told last October that Gallagher and Volanski would be joining them, and they both appear on the regular NRC rulemaking calendar invite.

The White House maintains, however, that “zero lawyers from the Executive Office of the President have been dispatched to work on rulemaking.” Neither Gallagher nor Volanski replied to requests for comment.

The administration is routing the new rules through an office overseen by Trump’s cost-cutting guru Russell Vought, a move that was previously unheard of for an independent regulator like the NRC. The White House spokesperson noted that, under a recent executive order, this process is now required for all agencies.

Political operatives have been “inserted into the senior leadership team to the point where they could significantly influence decision-making,” said Scott Morris, who worked at the NRC for more than 32 years, most recently as the No. 2 career operations official. “I just think that would be a dangerous proposition.”

Morris voted for Trump twice and broadly supports the goals of deregulating and expanding nuclear energy, but he has begun speaking out against the administration’s interference at the NRC. He retired in May 2025 as part of a wave of retirements and firings.

At a recent hearing before the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board — an independent body that helps adjudicate nuclear licensing — NRC lawyers withdrew from the proceedings, citing “limited resources.” The judge remarked that it was the first time in over 20 years the NRC had done so.

Meanwhile, some staff members, other career officials say, are afraid to voice dissenting views for fear of being fired. “It feels like being a lobster in a slowly boiling pot,” one NRC official who has been working on the rule changes told ProPublica, describing the erosion of independence.

The official was one of three who compared their recent experience at NRC to being in a pot of slowly boiling water. “If somebody is raising something that they think that the industry or the White House would have a problem with, they think twice,” the official said.

Inside the NRC, the steering committee overseeing the changes includes Cohen, Taggart and Mike King, a career NRC official who is the newly installed executive director for operations. The former director, Mirela Gavrilas, a 21-year veteran of the agency, retired after getting boxed out of decision-making, according to a person familiar with her departure. Gavrilas did not respond to a request for comment.

Any final changes will be approved by the NRC’s five commissioners, three of whom are Republicans. In September, the two Democratic commissioners told a Senate committee they might be fired at any time if they get crosswise with Trump — including over revisions to safety rules.

Draft rules being circulated inside the NRC propose drastic rollbacks of security and safety inspections at nuclear facilities. Those include a proposed 56% cut in emergency preparedness inspection time, CNN reported in March.

Even some pro-nuclear groups are troubled by the emerging order. Some have tried to backchannel to their contacts in the Trump administration to explain the importance of an independent regulator to help maintain public support for nuclear power. Without it, they risk losing credibility.

“You have to make sure you don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater,” said Judi Greenwald, president and CEO of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, a nonprofit that promotes nuclear energy and supports many of the regulatory changes being proposed by the Trump administration.

Greenwald’s group favors faster timelines for approving nuclear reactors, but she worries that the agency’s fundamental independence has been undermined. “We would prefer that they yield back more of NRC independence,” she said.

“Nuke Bros” in Silicon Valley

One Trump administration priority has been making it easier for so-called advanced reactor companies to navigate the regulatory process. These firms, mostly backed by Silicon Valley tech and venture money, are often working on designs for much smaller reactors that they hope to mass produce in factories.

“There are two nuclear industries,” said Macfarlane, the former NRC chair. “There are the actual people who use nuclear reactors to produce power and put it on the grid … and then there are the ‘nuke bros’” in Silicon Valley.

Trump’s Silicon Valley allies have loomed large over his nuclear policy. One prospective political appointee for a top DOE nuclear job got a Christmas Eve call from Thiel, the rare Silicon Valley leader to back Trump in 2016. Thiel, whose Founders Fund invested in a nuclear fuel startup and an advanced reactor company, quizzed the would-be official about deregulation and how to rapidly build more nuclear energy capacity, said sources familiar with the conversation.

Nuclear energy startups jockeyed to spend time at Mar-a-Lago in the months before the start of Trump’s second term. Balerion Space Ventures, a venture capital firm that has invested in multiple companies, convened an investor summit there in January 2025, according to an invitation viewed by ProPublica. Balerion did not reply to a request for comment.

A few months later, when Trump was drawing up the executive orders, leaders at many of those nuclear companies were given advanced access to drafts of the text — and the opportunity to provide suggested edits, documents viewed by ProPublica show.

Those orders created a new program to test out experimental reactor designs, addressing a common complaint that companies are not given opportunities to experiment. There are currently about a dozen advanced reactor companies planning to participate. Each has a concierge team within the DOE to help navigate bureaucracy. As NPR reported in January, the DOE quietly overhauled a series of safety rules that would apply to these new reactors and shared the new regulations with these companies before making them public.

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright — who served on the board of one of those companies, Oklo — has said fast nuclear build-out is a priority: “We are moving as quickly as we can to permit, build and enable the rapid construction of as much nuke capacity as possible,” he told CNBC last fall. Oklo noted that Wright stepped down from the board when he was confirmed.

The Trump administration hopes some of the companies would have their reactors “go critical” — a key first step on the way to building a functioning power plant — by July 2026. Then the NRC, which signs off on the safety designs of commercial nuclear power plants, could be expected to quickly OK these new reactors to get to market.

According to people familiar with the conversations, at least one nuclear energy startup CEO personally recruited potential members of the DOGE nuclear team, though it’s not clear if Cohen was brought aboard this way. Cohen has told colleagues and industry contacts that he reports to Emily Underwood, one of Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s top aides for economic policy. He is perceived inside government as a key avatar of the White House’s nuclear agenda.

In its email to ProPublica, the White House said, “Seth Cohen is a Department of Energy employee and does not report to Emily Underwood or Stephen Miller in any capacity.”

The DOE spokesperson added, “Seth’s role at the Department of Energy is to support the Trump administration’s mission to unleash American Energy Dominance.”

Cohen has been pushing to raise the legal limit of radiation that nuclear energy companies are allowed to emit from their facilities. One nuclear industry insider, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said many firms are fixating on changing these radiation rules: Their business model requires moving nuclear reactors around the country, often near workers or the general public.

Building thick, expensive shielding walls can be prohibitively expensive, they said.

Valar CEO Isaiah Taylor has called limits on exposure to radiation a top barrier to industry growth. A recent DOE memo seen by ProPublica cites cost savings on shielding for Valar’s reactor to justify changing those limits. “Shielding-related cost reductions,” the memo said, “could range from $1-2 million per reactor.” The debate over the precise rule change is ongoing.

The DOE has been considering a fivefold increase to the limit for public exposure to radiation, which will allow some nuclear reactor companies to cut costs on these expensive safety shields, internal DOE documents seen by ProPublica show.

A presentation prepared by DOE staffers in their Idaho offices that has circulated inside the department makes the “business case” for changing the radiation dose rules: It could cut the cost of some new reactors by as much as 5%. These more relaxed standards are likely to be adopted by the NRC and apply to reactors nationwide, documents show.

In February, Wright accompanied Valar’s executive team on a first-of-its-kind flight, as a U.S. military plane was conscripted to fly the company’s reactor from Los Angeles to Utah. Valar does not yet have a working nuclear reactor, and a number of industry sources told ProPublica they viewed the airlift as a PR exercise. Internal government memos justified the airlift by designating it as “critical” to the U.S. “national security interests.”

Cohen posted smiling pictures of himself from the cargo bay of the military plane.

Cohen told an audience at the American Nuclear Society that the rapid build-out was essential to powering Silicon Valley’s AI data centers. He framed the policy in existential terms: “I can’t emphasize this strongly enough that losing the AI war is an outcome akin to the Nazis developing the bomb before the United States.”

As it deliberated rule changes, the DOE has cut out its internal team of health experts who work on radiation safety at the Office of Environment, Health, Safety and Security, said sources familiar with the decision. The advice of outside experts on radiation protection has been largely cast aside.

The DOE spokesperson said its radiation standards “are aligned with Gold Standard Science … with a focus on protecting people and the environment while avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy.”

The department has already decided to abandon the long-standing radiation protection principle known as “ALARA” — the “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” standard — which directs anyone dealing with radioactive materials to minimize exposure.

It often pushes exposure well below legal thresholds. Many experts agreed that the ALARA principle was sometimes applied too strictly, but the move to entirely throw it out was opposed by many prominent radiation health experts.

Whether the agencies will actually change the legal thresholds for radiation exposure is an open question, said sources familiar with the deliberations.

Internal DOE documents arguing for changing dose rules cite a report produced at the Idaho National Laboratory, which was compiled with the help of the AI assistant Claude. “It’s really strange,” said Kathryn Higley, president of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, a congressionally chartered group studying radiation safety. “They fundamentally mistake the science.”

John Wagner, the head of the Idaho National Laboratory and the report’s lead author, acknowledged to ProPublica that the science over changing radiation exposure rules is hotly contested. “We recognize that respected experts interpret aspects of this literature differently,” he wrote. His analysis was not meant to be the final word, he said, but was “intended to inform debate.”

The impact of radiation levels at very low doses is hard to measure, so the U.S. has historically struck a cautious note. Raising dose limits could put the U.S. out of step with international standards.

For his part, Cohen has told the nuclear industry that he sees his job as making sure the government “is no longer a barrier” to them.

In June, he shot down the notion of companies putting money into a fund for workplace accidents. “Put yourself in the shoes of one of these startups,” he said. “They’re raising hundreds of millions of dollars to do this. And then they would have to go to their VCs and their board and say, listen, guys, we actually need a few hundred million dollars more to put into a trust fund?”

He also suggested that regulators should not fret about preparing for so-called 100-year events — disasters that have roughly a 1% chance of taking place but can be catastrophic for nuclear facilities.

“When SpaceX started building rockets, they sort of expected the first ones to blow up,” he said.

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