More than $7,000 in cable TV subscriptions.

An $11,000 golf cart.

$1.5 million in renovations to office space in a swanky Phoenix high-rise.

And another $1.7 million for Tasers.

Those were among more than $200 million in expenses that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office billed to a class-action settlement aimed at rooting out racial profiling in the department.

A federal judge in 2013 found the department under then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio had violated the constitutional rights of Latino drivers, and the court has required sweeping reforms. These include documenting all traffic stops to detect patterns of racial bias, employing additional investigators to probe reports of deputy misconduct and appointing a monitor to oversee the settlement.

Since Sheriff Jerry Sheridan took office last year, he and Republicans on the county’s Board of Supervisors have cited the cost of complying with these orders to call for an end to the settlement of the case known as Melendres v. Arpaio — even as reviews of the department’s traffic stops continue to show racial disparities affecting Latino residents. The lingering disparities amplified Latino leaders and community members’ concerns as the second Trump administration has boosted local law enforcement’s involvement in its mass deportation campaign.

Maricopa County, home to more than half of Arizona’s population, has approved $353 million in spending related to the settlement since 2013. But an audit of the sheriff’s office spending ordered by the court and a review of the public ledger by Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica show millions of dollars went to expenses that had little or nothing to do with the settlement. (The audit focused on $226 million that the sheriff’s office charged to the settlement over a 10-year period; it didn’t examine legal and monitoring costs or the two most recent department budgets.)

The auditors, who were hired by the monitor, found that nearly 72% of the sheriff’s office spending was misattributed or misappropriated. For example, the full cost of some services and salaries was assigned to the settlement when those jobs were completely unrelated or only partially related to court orders. Only $63 million was appropriately charged to the settlement, they said.

Upon releasing its findings late last year, the two-member auditing team, led by an individual with decades of experience in public finance, noted that overstating the cost of the reforms undermines the court’s credibility. “This mischaracterization misleads the public on the cost of reform efforts and calls into question MCSO’s credibility, transparency, and truthfulness of its reporting,” they stated.

The financial ledgers detail many of these expenses, including more than $310,000 for travel and professional development. Among them are $1,261 for travel in 2020 to research buying a boat and swift-water rescue training — for deputies who work in the desert, $4,070 to train and test whether to buy a horse for the mounted unit in 2021 and $5,077 to attend National Police Week in Washington, D.C., in 2023.

The audit concluded that the county Board of Supervisors, which approves the sheriff’s annual budgets, provided no “meaningful” oversight of its spending and had no process to verify if funds were being used appropriately to comply with court orders.

Indeed, as costs ballooned, the Board of Supervisors rarely questioned the expenses, Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica found based on a review of nearly a decade of public budget hearings.

The supervisors responded to the audit by telling U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow that the reforms, and in particular the audit’s scrutiny of county spending, had far exceeded the original racial profiling complaints. 

“Hispanic residents of Maricopa County concerned with racial profiling are unaffected by how the County and MCSO allocate costs,” the filing read. “Nor does any member of the Class experience a constitutional violation because MCSO purchased a golf cart.”

Snow’s 2013 ruling found deputies had relied on race to pull over Latino drivers during immigration actions, violating their rights to equal protection and against unreasonable seizures.

Attorneys for the county have filed a motion to end court oversight. That motion is pending.

“Digging into county finances and trying to minimize the cost of Melendres compliance is not just an insult to taxpayers, it’s beyond the federal court’s jurisdiction,” Republican supervisors Thomas Galvin and Kate Brophy McGee said in a November statement. “Nothing about our budgeting or accounting practices violates federal or state law. This is why we decline to participate in further arguments over compliance costs.”

Sheridan, whose tenure was not covered by the audit period, dismissed the findings and defended his department’s spending practices. The sheriff’s attorneys joined the motion to end court oversight.

The past two years, the Board of Supervisors have approved Sheridan’s budget request, billing an additional $72 million to the settlement.

The auditors, William Ansbrow and Eric Melancon, are barred by Snow from speaking publicly about their work.

Steve Gallardo, the lone Democrat on the five-member Board of Supervisors, has opposed ending court oversight of the sheriff’s office. He said the focus should remain on eliminating biased policing.

The sheriff’s office is above 90% compliance with the two major court orders, but Snow has yet to clear the department in two key areas: racial disparities in traffic stops and a backlog of uninvestigated misconduct claims against deputies.

“We should be having benchmarks in terms of, how do we get in full compliance,” Gallardo told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica in April. “Others are going to say, ‘Well, they keep moving the goalpost.’ Well, let’s continue to move forward. I mean, that should be our overall goals: How do we get in full compliance with the Melendres case?”

The sheriff’s office did not respond to Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica’s questions about the spending.

While the audit and county ledger showed spending that appeared unrelated to the court’s orders, they also showed spending spiraling on things the court had ordered.

In 2013, Snow required the sheriff’s office to purchase body cameras for patrol deputies and sergeants who conduct traffic stops. The audit found that the number of employees required to wear the cameras ranged from 434 in fiscal year 2023 to 513 in fiscal year 2021. Yet the department had purchased 950 cameras from Axon, a Scottsdale company, at a cost of $8.6 million. About $2.9 million of the spending “exceeded the Court’s requirements,” the audit found.

The sheriff’s office also purchased Tasers from Axon, bundled with the body cameras, and charged them to the settlement. The court had not required deputies to carry Tasers.

The sheriff’s office contended that buying the cameras separately would have been more costly. Even so, the audit found, the cost for Tasers — roughly $1.7 million — should have been charged to the department’s general fund instead of the settlement.

To operate body camera docking stations, the department purchased high-speed internet. But monthly invoices revealed that from fiscal years 2020 to 2024, the charges included cable television subscriptions, which were unrelated to the settlement, totaling $7,670.

Since 2016, Snow has required the sheriff’s office to house the Professional Standards Bureau, its internal disciplinary body, separately from its downtown Phoenix headquarters. The order was intended to encourage residents to report deputy misconduct after Snow found department leadership had routinely interfered in discipline of deputies. (Sheridan was Arpaio’s chief deputy at the time.)

To shuttle employees between headquarters and the standards bureau, the sheriff’s office purchased in June 2019 a golf cart valued at $11,800. At the same time, the department was also paying an average of $34,000 a year for additional parking at the bureau building to accommodate visitors and employees, according to the audit and county ledgers.

The sheriff’s office added to these costs in July 2024 by moving the bureau for a second time in less than a decade, the audit shows. The bureau now occupies two floors inside a premium midtown Phoenix high-rise, the court’s auditing team found, citing public real estate listings.

The department spent $1.5 million refurbishing the new offices, which auditors found was inappropriately charged to the settlement. The bureau had already been housed separately from department leadership, they noted. During a visit to the offices last year, a member of the audit team found that some of the space was empty and noted that the bureau could have been housed in “various unused publicly owned properties.”

Sheridan says the bulk of spending on the settlement goes toward staffing. Snow called for the creation of two divisions that enforce the court’s orders: the Court Implementation Division and the Bureau of Internal Oversight. The sheriff’s office also hired additional investigators for the Professional Standards Bureau, as it works to clear a backlog of 433 pending investigations.

“We went from having an internal investigation division with maybe 15 people to well over 50,” Sheridan told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica. “You can see those costs right away.”

During a February town hall meeting, Sheridan criticized the audit and said the court had required the sheriff’s office to hire 25 sergeants. His chief financial officer said those positions cost about $3 million a year.

But the audit determined the sheriff’s office misused funds by charging unrelated or partially related staffing expenses to the settlement. It found that starting in fiscal year 2016, the department shifted the cost of the sergeant positions from general county funds to the settlement.

The audit determined that of the 209 positions charged to the settlement at the start of the 2025 fiscal year, only 55 could be reasonably attributed to Snow’s orders. Another 84 were “inappropriately attributed to Melendres,” while an additional 70 were partially related and should have been prorated to reflect the share of the work related to the settlement versus other duties.

Expenses related to these employees further exaggerated the cost of the settlement. The sheriff’s office charged $1.3 million to purchase 42 patrol vehicles for positions that the audit found were inappropriately attributed to court orders, including six vehicles for employees whose jobs had no connection to the case.

In May 2022, the sheriff’s office began to charge car washes to the Melendres fund for vehicles it purchased for new patrol supervisors. Deputies expensed $3,259 in car washes that were not justified under the court’s orders, according to the audit.

In all, the sheriff’s office misattributed to the settlement or inappropriately expensed about $144 million in personnel costs from 2014 to 2024, the audit determined.

The auditors concluded that the department continues to misattribute funds, citing accounting practices that remain in place. As a result, they warned, taxpayers could be on the hook for millions of dollars more that have nothing to do with rooting out racial profiling.

Galvin and Brophy McGee, two of the Republican supervisors, defended the county’s handling of its finances. “We stand by our budgeting practices and the 209 positions we created as a direct result of the Melendres Orders,” they said in November. “It would be a complete waste of taxpayer money to engage the federal courts in a back-and-forth over what is clearly an issue of local jurisdiction.”

Before the audit was released in October, Republican supervisors were calling for an end to judicial oversight to protect the rights of Latino residents, claiming it had become too costly.

“It’s a huge expense to the Maricopa County taxpayers,” Supervisor Debbie Lesko told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica in July. “It seems like it’s never-ending because the judge just changes; they put out a new order. They move the goalposts, and so we need to resolve this.”

Their attorneys argued in court that the Melendres lawsuit has been a success and the settlement was no longer needed.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, which joined the lawsuit in 2008, opposes ending oversight until the sheriff’s office is in full compliance with Snow’s orders. But it signaled a willingness to reduce monitoring of a few requirements that the department has complied with for at least three years.

At a January hearing, Snow said he was reluctant to allow the county to “use cost orders both as a sword and a shield and make statements to the public which may, in fact, be completely inaccurate.” He doesn’t intend to police supervisors’ speech, Snow said, but he could require the county to justify the costs.

Attorneys for the county and the sheriff’s office asked the judge for an opportunity to challenge the findings, which Snow approved. But they soon dropped it, citing the “unnecessary” cost of examining department spending.

Public finance experts said county boards have an obligation to taxpayers to ensure they can account for how each dollar is spent.

Zach Mohr, an associate professor at the University of Kansas who teaches public budgeting, accounting and financial management, reviewed the audit for Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica. He said that if the board disagrees with the findings, “the way to solve that would be to get another audit.”

Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica attempted to contact all current and former Maricopa County supervisors who had approved sheriff’s office spending during the case. Only Gallardo and one former supervisor agreed to comment.

The news organizations’ review of past budget hearings showed supervisors had been more likely to probe spending during the early years of the settlement, as the county created infrastructure to implement reforms. In 2016, for example, Sheridan — then the department’s second-in-command — responded to a question about the court’s requirement to purchase body cameras for deputies, saying it was the sheriff’s office’s idea. “They’re more cutting-edge, and they’re more flexible. They travel with the deputies everywhere. And so it was our desire to do the body cameras,” he said at the time.

In later years, however, supervisors rarely questioned publicly how the sheriff’s office spent the money.

This year was different. Galvin asked the sheriff’s chief financial officer if their Melendres budget request for $36.5 million had been vetted. The officer said yes, adding that requests for the past 13 years were also vetted by the county budget office and state auditor.

Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, who served on the board from 1993 to 2014, was the lone Latina and Democrat during most of her tenure. She told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica she objected to Arpaio’s spending and focus on immigration enforcement — which led to racial profiling, lawsuits and the settlement that continues today.

“The others really didn’t, and they found Melendres was way over the top. But they knew they had to comply.”

She recalled previous allegations of misspending by the sheriff’s office. In 2011, a county audit found the department used $100 million from jail funds to pay patrol deputies. At the time, Sheridan chalked it up to a bookkeeping error, referring to it as a “systems issue.”

The board approved an oversight resolution, adopting rules to prevent the problem from happening again. “Hopefully, this is a chapter in Maricopa County’s history that we close and we never see such an abuse of funds again,” Wilcox told The Arizona Republic in 2011.

The post This Sheriff’s Office Says Racial Profiling Reforms Are Too Costly. Auditors Found It Misused $163 Million. appeared first on ProPublica.

As reporters at the Lexington Herald-Leader, we first started hearing troubling stories in 2023 from former clients and staff of Addiction Recovery Care, once Kentucky’s largest residential addiction treatment service provider. Over the last three years, we have spoken with dozens of former and current ARC clients and staff. And in April, we teamed up with ProPublica to publish a story detailing how ARC allegedly used staff to falsely bill Kentucky Medicaid for millions, an allegation the company denies.

For our next story, we want to take a closer look at how ARC treated the people who came to the organization seeking help with their sobriety. We are particularly interested in hearing from clients, as well as staff who worked closely with clients to deliver care. 

If you were or are an ARC client or employee, tell us about your experience with the treatment provider. Your perspective will help guide our reporting, ensuring we understand the issues from all sides.

You can fill out our brief form or email Lexington Herald-Leader reporter Alex Acquisto aacquisto@herald-leader.com. 

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

We’re gathering these stories for our reporting, which can take several weeks or months. We may not be able to follow up with everyone, but we will read everything you submit and it will help guide our project.

The post Tell Us About Your Experience With Kentucky’s Addiction Recovery Care appeared first on ProPublica.

In October, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued pharmaceutical companies tied to Tylenol in state court, repeating claims made a month earlier by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that the pain relief drug was linked to autism and ADHD in children.

Paxton, a close ally of the Trump administration who had already announced a U.S. Senate bid, accused drugmakers of marketing Tylenol to pregnant mothers without disclosing its dangers. “The reckoning has arrived,” the state’s attorneys wrote in the lawsuit against pharmaceutical companies Johnson & Johnson, Kenvue Brands and Kenvue Inc.

“By holding Big Pharma accountable for poisoning our people, we will help Make America Healthy Again,” Paxton proclaimed in a news release that echoed Kennedy’s slogan.

Paxton hired the Chicago law firm Keller Postman to argue the case in state court. The firm had served as lead counsel in a similar case about Tylenol’s safety that was dismissed a year earlier by a New York federal judge who found the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses unreliable.

But the court the attorneys chose to bring the suit in wasn’t in Austin or any of the state’s large counties that have extensive experience and multiple judges handling large, complex litigation. It was in Panola County, a community of 23,000 residents on the Louisiana border that Trump carried by 67 points two years ago and whose sole state district court judge is a Republican.

At a hearing that month in the three-story brick courthouse in the county seat of Carthage, Kim Bueno, the lawyer representing the drugmakers, accused Paxton’s office of pushing a baseless lawsuit through forum shopping — seeking out judges and juries that plaintiffs believe will be most favorable to them, rather than filing suit in the courts that most commonly handle similar cases.

“These claims have been rejected over and over and over again in courts of law by the same plaintiff’s counsel,” said Bueno, who declined an interview request. “And now they’re trying, once again, to suggest that Tylenol is harmful for women when pregnant. And it’s been soundly rejected.”

The case was not the first that Paxton’s office had filed in a county with little connection to the allegations of wrongdoing made by his office. ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have identified at least 30 cases filed by the attorney general over the past nine years that have a tenuous connection to the counties in which they were filed.

The filings mark a striking departure from Paxton’s previous opposition to the practice. In a 2017 legal brief that Paxton wrote on behalf of 17 states, he urged the U.S. Supreme Court to crack down on forum shopping in federal courts. The practice, he wrote, “has the pernicious effect of reducing confidence in the fairness and neutrality of our Nation’s justice system.”

Paxton’s approach also subverts what the Legislature intended when it passed a law in the 1990s that required plaintiffs to file lawsuits in counties where a “substantial” part of the alleged violation took place, according to three legal experts. That was done at the behest of conservatives who felt trial lawyers were flocking to venues favorable to them to win big damage verdicts against businesses.

“It looks like the attorney general’s office is interested in engaging in litigation games that it would otherwise decry if the shoe were on the other foot,” said Michael Ariens, a professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio, who has studied laws regulating where lawsuits can be filed.

Neither of Paxton’s Republican predecessors, Gov. Greg Abbott and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, appears to have employed this strategy. ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed hundreds of cases filed outside of the state’s five large urban counties during their tenures. Each had a clear connection to the venue Abbott or Cornyn chose.

Neither Abbott nor Cornyn, who Paxton is trying to unseat, responded to requests for comment. Trump on Tuesday endorsed Paxton in the race.

Texas’ major consumer protection law gives the attorney general some flexibility with those cases despite the state’s broader restriction on forum shopping. The office does not have to prove that a substantial part of the events in a consumer protection case happened in the place where it files suit but can instead file in counties where a defendant has done business.

But Paxton has stretched the boundaries of that law, too, according to legal experts and to former staffers of the attorney general’s office who argued against him in court. Last year, for example, the attorney general filed a lawsuit against the gaming platform Roblox in King County, a ranching community of about 200 people east of Lubbock. Its key justification for selecting the tiny county was that residents there had internet access.

Paxton, who did not respond to requests for comment or to written questions, has not spoken publicly about his office’s decisions to file lawsuits in courts with little connection to the cases.

At the November hearing in Panola County, Judge LeAnn Rafferty, a Republican first elected in 2016, did not question the attorney general’s office on its venue choice but asked, “Do you disagree with the defendants’ assertion that Tylenol is the safest choice for pregnant women who have a fever?”

“It depends on — oh, you said for having a fever? That probably is true,” replied J.J. Snidow, a partner at Keller Postman. “There are not alternatives in the pain relief space to Tylenol that don’t also have risks.”

Tylenol makers, Rafferty said, already tell pregnant women to consult with a doctor before taking the drug. Rafferty declined to comment about the case. Snidow said Keller Postman had no comment. Paxton has repeatedly turned to the firm as he has grown increasingly reliant on private attorneys to litigate major cases for his office.

Kenvue directed ProPublica and the Tribune to a statement on its website that said there is “no proven link” between acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, and autism. A spokesperson for Johnson & Johnson said the company has had nothing to do with making or selling the drug since splitting with Kenvue in 2023.

Rafferty threw out five of the six claims in the attorney general’s lawsuit. She dismissed one for insufficient evidence. In the other four, Rafferty ruled that the state did not have jurisdiction over Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue Inc. because they do not manufacture or sell Tylenol in Texas.

She allowed one claim to proceed that alleged Kenvue Brands had violated the state’s consumer protection act by making false claims about Tylenol’s safety.

With most of the claims thrown out, the attorney general’s office doubled down on its strategy.

Two weeks later, it filed a new case against the pharmaceutical companies.

This time, it chose Bailey County, a community of 7,000 residents on the New Mexico border.

Paxton’s Pivot

For decades, plaintiffs’ attorneys from across the U.S. swarmed courts in small Texas counties that had reputations for sympathetic judges and generous juries. The practice became so ubiquitous that The Wall Street Journal branded the Texas judicial system a “Wild West embarrassment.”

In 1995, Robert Duncan, then a Republican state representative from Lubbock, resolved to crack down on the practice. He authored a bill that required a “substantial part” of a lawsuit’s claims be connected to the county of filing.

An attorney himself, Duncan recalls traveling hundreds of miles from his home in the Texas High Plains to the Rio Grande Valley for cases that had no connection to the border region. Forum shopping, Duncan told ProPublica and the Tribune, had led to too many attorneys choosing courts where there was “no reason to be there other than the bias or prejudice of whatever the plaintiff’s lawyer is trying to establish that would favor the case, as opposed to giving the defendant a fair opportunity.”

Duncan declined to comment on Paxton’s practice of filing lawsuits in counties with little connection to the allegations of wrongdoing.

Paxton was not in the Legislature when Duncan’s bill passed but, as a freshman representative in 2003, he supported legislation that gave judges more power to dismiss lawsuits they concluded belonged in another state.

He also railed against “rampant forum shopping,” asserting that the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017 should restrict the practice after plaintiffs in patent infringement lawsuits began flocking to courts that most often ruled in their favor. The Eastern District of Texas had become the most popular venue for the lawsuits, even though few of the cases had clear connections to the area. Most cases landed on the docket of a judge based in rural Harrison County, 140 miles east of Dallas, where plaintiffs won 78% of the time, according to legal researchers.

That waned after justices ruled that federal courts must strictly enforce a decades-old law requiring corporations in patent disputes to be sued only in their home states.

Since then, Paxton has repeatedly engaged in forum shopping in state courts, legal experts said. In fact, his office, or attorneys on behalf of his office, have filed 11 cases in Harrison, the same county where he argued that federal courts should limit plaintiffs from filing.

“It’s hypocritical for the AG to criticize patent litigants for forum shopping but then to forum shop himself,” said Paul Gugliuzza, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law. “Forum shopping, judge shopping — it’s usually not unlawful, but it is highly opportunistic, and, in many circumstances, probably shouldn’t be lawful.”

Paxton notched one of the biggest wins of his tenure in Harrison County. He secured a $1.4 billion settlement from Meta after alleging that the Facebook parent company captured Texans’ biometric data without their consent. Paxton’s office contended in court filings that Harrison was a proper venue for the 2022 lawsuit because the company had done business in the county and a substantial part of the alleged lawbreaking occurred there. The office did not provide specifics.

Meta has an office in Travis County, home to Austin, not in Harrison, where only about 0.2% of Texans live, but the company did not challenge the venue. The company didn’t admit to wrongdoing in the settlement and did not respond to questions about the case. It’s unclear why its lawyers did not seek a different venue, but the judge in the case, Republican Brad Morin, denied a transfer in at least one other lawsuit involving Paxton during the Meta litigation.

Paxton has not limited his efforts to find more favorable courts solely to small counties. The attorney general has repeatedly filed cases, particularly political ones, in Tarrant, the state’s largest Republican county and home to Fort Worth.

In August, Paxton’s office chose the county as the venue to sue former Democratic U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke and his political organization, Powered By People, after the group helped pay expenses for Democratic members of the Texas Legislature who left the state to block the passage of new congressional maps. The maps, drawn at Trump’s behest, favored the GOP.

The attorney general’s office stated in court documents that the case had a “substantial” connection to Tarrant County because the group planned a rally in Fort Worth. When O’Rourke sought to move the case to El Paso County — where he lives and where the group is headquartered — Paxton accused him of forum shopping. O’Rourke did not respond to an interview request.

Paxton secured a court order in Tarrant that prohibited Powered by People from fundraising while the case was pending. But within weeks, the 15th Court of Appeals overturned the decision. It noted that Paxton was a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, which created an incentive to blunt Democrats’ ability to campaign. The judges said the order infringed on the organization’s free speech rights before a court had determined guilt.

Legal experts say such forum shopping erodes trust in the court system. It is especially problematic when it comes from the attorney general, who is supposed to defend state laws and preserve public trust in the justice system, they said.

“It’s hard to respect the system if you think it’s being employed in a way you fundamentally think is unfair,” said Paul Grimm, a former U.S. district judge in Maryland and an advocate of restricting forum shopping.

“Not the Law”

In at least two recent cases, Paxton has tested a novel interpretation of state law governing where lawsuits can be filed. His office has argued that if a company does business over the internet, it can be sued in any Texas county.

One such case was a 2022 lawsuit against pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca. Two law firms filed the case against the company under a law that allows private attorneys to sue on behalf of the attorney general. The lawsuit accused AstraZeneca of defrauding Medicaid by giving kickbacks to healthcare workers in exchange for prescribing the company’s products. The company, which did not respond to a request for comment, said in legal filings that the lawsuit sought to punish its innocuous outreach to doctors and did not identify a single patient harmed or taxpayer dollar wasted.

Paxton’s office formally joined the case in July. Attorneys working on behalf of his office argued that Harrison County was the proper venue because the firm’s website could be accessed from there, company salespeople had visited the county and a local clinic had a brochure for one of the company’s drugs.

When AstraZeneca asked Morin, the lone Harrison County judge, to transfer the case to Travis County, he refused without explanation. The company appealed and, in November, the 15th Court of Appeals overruled Morin’s decision. The court concluded that he abused his discretion in declining to move the case. Morin did not respond to a request for comment.

The court also found that Paxton’s office failed to provide proof that any of the alleged lawbreaking occurred in Harrison County. It ordered the case transferred to Travis County, where it is ongoing.

That month, the attorney general’s office argued that Roblox could be sued in King County, an expanse of rolling plains with no incorporated communities, because third-party retailers there sold gift cards to access the online gaming company.

Then the office made another bold claim: that companies with websites can be sued anywhere, no matter how small the county.

“This is a case about ubiquity, about being online and accessible to all children throughout the state,” Mark Pinkert, a Florida lawyer whom Paxton’s office had hired as outside counsel, argued at a hearing to discuss a request from Roblox that the case be moved to Travis County. “They are advertising broadly.”

Pinkert did not respond to a request for comment.

Roblox’s attorney Ed Burbach was stunned by the argument. He’d previously led the civil litigation division at the attorney general’s office under Abbott. The office’s longstanding practice, Burbach told the judge, was to file statewide consumer protection cases in Travis County.

This new argument by the attorney general’s office would obliterate the Legislature’s attempts to limit forum shopping by allowing any company to be sued in any county, Burbach said.

“That is simply not the law,” Burbach said, adding that most Texans, including lawmakers, would “be shocked to hear that outside counsel of the AG’s office would be arguing that.”

The judge transferred the case to Travis County, where it is ongoing.

Burbach declined to comment, but Paul Rogers, a law professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, warned of the dangers if Paxton succeeds at getting courts to side with his expansive interpretation. The attorney general, he said, would have “a lot of power to file any lawsuit, in any county, for any reason, whether the underlying lawsuit has merit or not.”

Doubling Down

In Washington, Trump and Kennedy’s public rebukes of Tylenol have tapered off. Paxton, however, continues to vigorously pursue his lawsuit against the drugmakers in state court.

After the setback in Panola County, the attorney general’s office filed an urgent request in Bailey County, arguing that Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue should be barred from selling any products in Texas until they filed paperwork and paid a $750 fee to register with the secretary of state. (Such registration would allow Paxton’s office to strengthen its case in Panola County.)

Though Paxton’s office was already involved in a lawsuit against the pharmaceutical companies in Panola County, the attorney general’s office stated in court filings that it did not know the companies’ attorneys, so it could not notify them of the suit.

Without hearing from the drugmakers’ lawyers, Judge Gordon Green ordered the companies to register. He said they could be barred from doing business in Texas if they didn’t. Paxton proclaimed the ruling a “major win” over Big Pharma.

The victory was short-lived. A week later, the drugmakers’ lawyer Aaron Nielson, who had previously served under Paxton as the state’s solicitor general, attended a hearing in Green’s court. He accused Paxton’s office of sleight of hand by trying to relitigate claims that had already failed to persuade the Panola County judge.

“This is blatant forum shopping and taking another bite at the apple,” said Nielson, who did not respond to a request for comment. “They decided to bring Your Honor into this, rather than let the Court that they chose continue with its own proceedings, which we think is highly improper.”

At the end of the hearing, Green withdrew the order requiring the companies to register. He did not respond to a request for comment.

The Panola and Bailey county cases are awaiting a ruling from the 15th Court of Appeals.

In the meantime, the attorney general’s office tried yet another gambit in Panola, where the judge had allowed one of its original claims to move forward.

Paxton’s lawyers amended their original lawsuit in the county. They noted that Green had ordered the drugmakers to register to do business in Texas, which meant Texas now had jurisdiction to pursue the claims that had been dismissed.

They omitted the fact that Green voided that order.

By referencing the order as if it were still in effect, the attorney general’s office risks losing credibility with the Panola County judge, Gugliuzza said.

“If you knowingly are presenting false information to the court, that is textbook sanctionable conduct,” Gugliuzza said.

The post Ken Paxton Wanted to Crack Down on Forum Shopping. Now Lawyers Say He’s Improperly Seeking Out Favorable Courts. appeared first on ProPublica.

Launched as a new kind of gun retailer in 2012, the Range USA chain was built to look and feel different from the smaller, unwelcoming shops and gun ranges often associated with the industry.

Its founder and president, Tom Willingham, wanted to make the experience of buying and shooting firearms more mainstream. So he modeled his company on big box chains, striving for bright, comfortable outlets that would be inviting to women, novices and others put off by some older gun stores.

Today, Range USA has bloomed into a formidable brand, with 50 stores in 14 states, a footprint that spans from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Coast.

But despite efforts to set itself apart, the company is beset with the same vexing problems faced by more traditional retailers. Federal regulators have repeatedly cited its employees for failing at basic protocols designed to help thwart illegal sales, and guns purchased at its stores keep getting recovered by police.

Take the recent killing of Chicago police officer John Bartholomew, who was fatally shot on April 25. The suspect who used a 10-millimeter Glock 29 to shoot Bartholomew was not the original owner of the gun. It was first purchased in 2024, according to investigators, in an illegal transaction at a Range USA store in the northwest Indiana town of Merrillville, a short drive from Chicago.

Records obtained by ProPublica show that, in the years before the gun in the fatal shooting was purchased, the store was cited for serious compliance failures on multiple occasions by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal agency tasked with oversight of the nation’s gun retailers.

The Merrillville store faced revocation of its license following a 2022 inspection that determined a background check was missing for one sale, according to ATF inspection records. Inspectors also determined that the company made “no significant improvement” toward rectifying over a half dozen previous violations, ATF records show.

In their response to the findings, Range USA managers blamed the store’s antiquated system for filing federal sales paperwork, telling inspectors the underlying problems would be cured once the company moved to an electronic system. The ATF later rescinded the recommendation on the Merrillville store after proof was found that the background check had been conducted.

Records show that between 2020 and 2024, federal authorities recommended revoking the licenses of three other Range USA locations, including two in Ohio.

In 2021, inspecting the Range USA in Dayton, the ATF determined an employee sold a firearm to a person who failed a background check, records show. Company representatives admitted to the agency that the employee had failed to follow store policy and “missed the appropriate connections” concerning illegal sales, despite training. They said the company would implement new policies to head off additional lapses.

A year later, at the Range USA in Lewis Center, an ATF inspector found that a sales clerk had falsified records of a gun sale after accepting an expired conceal-and-carry permit in lieu of conducting a background check, records show. In response, Range USA managers disputed that its employees lied intentionally.

All the Range USA stores that faced revocations are currently open, according to the company’s website, though some have paid fines. Now, as Range USA contends with another controversial gun sale, the ATF is weakening Biden-era penalties for failures to ensure compliance with federal gun regulations, including those meant to deter criminals.

The company did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. It has often responded to ATF findings by blaming employee mistakes and staff turnover while making promises of improved training, records show.

Meanwhile, the chain has continued to grow. In 2025, Range USA sales, according to industry trade publications, increased by just over 5% even as the industry cooled. With that momentum, the company is eyeing another expansion. It plans to open three new locations by 2027.

Amid this success, Willingham became a staunch advocate for the industry. In the last five years, he’s contributed to a political action committee that has sought to elect candidates friendly to the interests of gun retailers like Range USA.

Both Range USA and Willingham personally have given to a committee run by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association that lobbies for the gun retail industry. Range USA has given $35,000, and Willingham $5,000.

The violations cited at Range USA shops sometimes have grown out of investigations into straw sales, transactions where customers lie to purchase guns on behalf of someone prohibited by law from buying them. These guns are typically resold for profit and sometimes end up being used in crimes.

In Chicago, where gun sales are banned, Bartholomew is not the first officer to be killed with a straw sale executed in Indiana, just the most recent. Nearly five years ago, Ella French was shot to death by Emonte Morgan during a traffic stop. The gun he used was purchased by another man, Jamel Danzy, from Deb’s Gun Range in Hammond, Indiana, in March 2021.

Danzy lied by claiming on a required form that he was purchasing it for himself, when in fact he intended to pass it along to Morgan, according to federal investigators. He was ordered to serve two and a half years in prison for making false statements on federal forms. Morgan was sentenced to life without parole following his 2024 conviction for French’s killing.

In recent weeks, Chicago was confronted with the loss of another public safety officer. Bartholomew was inside a hospital when he was shot to death while guarding Alphanso Talley, a suspect in an armed robbery who allegedly drew the concealed gun and opened fire. Talley has been charged with murder and has yet to enter a plea.

That gun was allegedly purchased two years prior at the Merrillville Range USA by Olivia Burgos, who now faces criminal charges for making false statements in order to facilitate the sale. According to federal investigators, Burgos told store employees that she was purchasing the gun for herself. In actuality, investigators allege, she bought the gun on behalf of her boyfriend, a felon prevented from legally purchasing one.

She also allegedly lied by indicating on federal purchase documents that she was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of the sale. According to federal investigators, Burgos told them she was addicted to fentanyl and was on the drug when she signed the papers for the gun. Federal authorities have charged her with making a false statement while purchasing a firearm.

The gun eventually made its way to Talley. An investigation into its path to Chicago is ongoing.

Last year, advocates with the gun control advocacy group Brady United alleged negligence by Range USA, several Range employees and Willingham in a straw sale from a different shooting, linked to its store in Shorewood, Illinois, about 50 miles outside Chicago. The suit grew from a 2023 incident where then-18-year-old Maxwell Williams shot a woman through the neck amid an argument at a large house party. He later pleaded guilty to aggravated battery with a firearm and is currently serving a 10-year sentence in Illinois state prison.

Williams, who at the time wasn’t old enough to buy a firearm, had his girlfriend illegally purchase one on his behalf, the suit alleged. According to court records, the Range USA sales clerk proceeded with the sale despite signs that the girlfriend was not the actual buyer. Video taken of the transaction shows Williams verbally directing her on which gun to buy and counting out the cash for the purchase himself, the lawsuit alleges. The girlfriend pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery in the shooting.

Range USA has denied the allegations from Brady and moved to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming that its employees had no knowledge of any criminal intent by Maxwell or his girlfriend. Attorneys for the company also cited the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which they said preempts lawsuits against gun retailers and their employees over harm caused by guns bought at their stores.

A solution to the problem of detecting and preventing illegal sales like those that preceded the deaths of the two Chicago police officers has eluded lawmakers and industry figures alike. Employees at retail gun stores are generally taught to notice typical signs of straw purchases and are entitled to end any suspect transaction. But even with good-faith efforts, straw sales persist.

For its part, the ATF has established several surveillance programs requiring retailers to report potential or suspected straw purchases. The trigger for one such effort was so-called “crime guns,” those recovered by police within three years of being sold at retail. Stores with more than 25 such guns annually were targeted for enhanced scrutiny, a program known as Demand Letter 2.

Under the Biden administration, the program was used to connect guns purchased on underground markets to the original sellers. Last year, Trump officials announced the program would be discontinued.

According to an analysis by Brady, about two-thirds of Range USA locations were included in the Demand Letter 2 program between 2022 and 2023.

Gun industry figures consistently deny responsibility for straw sales, putting the blame on the buyers who are breaking the law by lying about their intentions. Part of their solution rests on educational programs and training for retailers on how to spot signs of straw buyers.

In 2021, under President Joe Biden, the ATF began a new strategy — sometimes referred to as the “zero-tolerance policy” — of conducting more frequent inspections and applying harsher penalties to retailers who repeatedly failed to comply with federal guidelines governing gun sales.

After it was adopted, the industry saw a huge increase in the number of recommendations for gun-store license revocations issued by the ATF. Those do not lead to immediate closures, as stores are allowed to fight the revocations through administrative hearings and court appeals that can last years. The revocations plummeted under Trump last year.

Whether the Biden-era policies effectively reduced gun trafficking is still a matter of debate. One expert reached by ProPublica said that the enhanced enforcement didn’t begin in earnest until the middle years of the Biden administration. Before it could take root, they said, the Trump administration upended the policy.

Last month, Trump officials gathered in Washington, D.C., to mark the agency’s pivot away from the Biden-era enforcement measures and usher in a more industry-friendly approach. ATF Director Robert Cekada said that as part of its new direction, the agency will streamline and modernize gun-sale paperwork to help cut down on clerical errors and make consequences for good-faith mistakes more lenient.

“We are proposing to remove unnecessary hurdles that were standing in the way of law-abiding citizens and businesses,” Cekada said. “We are proposing to restore clarity and predictability in our standards.”

He also stressed that public safety remains one of its top priorities. “ATF remains the greatest friend to state and local law enforcement officers, and we believe that these rules will not negatively impact public safety,” he said.

Asked to comment on the end of the zero-tolerance policy, an ATF spokesperson told ProPublica in an emailed statement: “These are administrative and regulatory changes to processes and definitions, not changes to the underlying prohibitions that keep firearms out of dangerous hands. The ATF does not believe any recently released proposed rules will jeopardize public safety.”

Professor Daniel Webster, a longtime researcher of gun trafficking at Johns Hopkins University, said the ATF’s new direction sends a “dangerous signal” to retailers and the public that surveillance of straw sales is no longer a priority. The new rules tell retailers, “Do whatever you want,” he said. “My take is that this ATF is more interested in protecting the industry than in the American public.”

In an emailed statement, NSSF spokesperson Mark Oliva said the organization and its members are “committed to ensuring firearms remain beyond the reach of those who cannot be trusted to possess them. That category includes criminals.”

The post This Gun Shop Stayed Open Despite Repeated Violations. Then a Cop Was Killed With One of Its Guns. appeared first on ProPublica.

At the beginning of his three-year federal prison sentence for felony tax evasion, Roger Shoffstall lost his telephone privileges when a guard caught him running his small Alaska phone company from behind bars.

He’s lost a lot of privileges over the years. Shoffstall, 75, can’t serve on a federal jury. Unlike most Alaskans, he doesn’t receive an annual Permanent Fund dividend check. And he is not allowed to own a gun.

One thing never changes, however: Each year, the federal government sends his company, Summit Telephone, more than $1 million.

The money comes from a special government subsidy program that Congress created to bring fast, affordable phone and internet service to hard-to-reach places. You help pay for it.

Pull up your latest phone bill and look for a line labeled “Universal Service Fund.” Some phone companies list it as a “Universal Connectivity Charge” or fold it into a “Regulatory Programs & Telco Recovery Fee.” It’s all the same thing: a surcharge added to the monthly bill of phone customers throughout the United States.

The federal government and phone companies don’t call it a tax — but it acts like one. Carriers must currently contribute 37 cents of every dollar of their interstate and international phone revenues to the fund.

In Alaska, where many communities can only be reached by plane or boat, the Federal Communications Commission has given telecommunications companies $4.6 billion in these subsidies since 2016. That’s more than $600 per Alaskan per year. More per resident than in any other state.

Yet after all that spending, Alaska still ranks near the bottom for access to the very land-based, high-speed internet service the money was meant to deliver.

Some communities have yet to be wired at all. In others, fiber-optic cables or microwave towers offer internet with speeds that were recently clocked, statewide, as the slowest in the country. Even with the subsidies, the service comes at a steep price to customers: often hundreds of dollars a month for internet one-tenth what the FCC considers broadband quality.

The federal program has kept money flowing to companies like Shoffstall’s whose operators have troubled pasts. It also gives money to companies like Shoffstall’s regardless of how many people use their services. And fewer and fewer Alaskans have done so since low-earth satellites from Starlink entered the market at better prices. (Satellite internet doesn’t qualify for the subsidy but costs about $90 to $130 per month for download speeds up to 280 megabits per second in the same service area as Summit Telephone. According to Summit’s website, its fastest internet plan in the same region maxes out at 25 Mbps and costs $135 a month.)

All of these excesses appear to fall within the program’s rules or the FCC’s discretion.

A telecom on the Aleutian island of Adak receives more than $350,000 a year to provide phone and low-speed internet services to 306 buildings, according to FCC records, even though the state Department of Labor says the island is home to fewer than 80 people. One business owner said everyone he knows on the island has moved on to Starlink anyway.

GCI, the state’s largest telecom and its largest subsidy recipient, got $466 million just two years after its settlement with the federal government for alleged fraud related to the same subsidy program. (The settlement said it was neither an admission of guilt by GCI nor a concession by the Justice Department that the claims were not well founded.)

Shoffstall and his attorney did not respond to repeated interview requests or answer detailed questions sent by email. On Thursday, Shoffstall sent two documents to the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica asserting that he is a sovereign citizen of the United States, an ideology that the FBI has described as “those who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or ‘sovereign’ from the United States.” The FBI has categorized the extremist version of this movement as “domestic terrorism.”

Larry Mayes, the owner of Adak Eagle Enterprises, the company that receives the subsidy to provide internet on Adak, declined to answer questions about the funding. “You’ll have to talk to the FCC about that,” he said, hanging up the phone.

In a written response to questions, GCI said it and other Alaska telecoms depend heavily on the subsidies to provide services across the state.

“Before and after the settlement, GCI continued to work with the FCC and customers to provide high-quality communications services in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations,” the GCI statement said. “The settlement did not change Alaskans’ growing demand for these services, GCI’s willingness to provide them, or the criticality of USF funding to the sustainability of those services.”

The FCC did not respond to requests for comment. The agency is weighing the future of the program and recently circulated a proposal to overhaul or potentially sunset elements of the subsidy that funds companies like Summit.

Alaska telecom lobbyists and executives said that the state provides some of the most challenging geography to serve in the United States, and that they have made great progress in bringing internet access to Alaska.

Christine O’Connor, executive director of the Alaska Telecom Association, said the subsidies have improved access and lowered costs for rural Alaskans.

“There is simply no way that rural Alaskan communities could be connected with Anchorage or with the rest of the United States and the world” if consumers living in rural Alaska communities had to pay the full cost, she wrote in a statement to the Daily News and ProPublica.

But Daniel Lyons, a former attorney whose law firm represented Verizon and AT&T and who now teaches internet law at Boston College Law School, said the subsidy program is broken. The fundamental problem: No one has ever rigorously tested whether it works.

“It’s not proven how successful it is,” said Lyons, who specializes in telecommunications and internet law, “because the FCC is not very good at auditing its program.”

In Shoffstall’s case, the FCC pays his company what works out to about $800 per month per customer. Lyons has advocated scrapping this approach and sending the subsidy directly to consumers instead, letting them choose which provider gets their money. In Alaska, that might mean Starlink, though some new users say they are being charged a “high demand” fee of $1,500 to sign up, or its future satellite competitors like Amazon Leo.

“If the goal is to make sure everybody gets online,” Lyons said, “you try to find the families that can’t afford service at market rates and you give subsidies to them directly.”

Money for Homes With No Internet

Alaska’s outsized share of the subsidy traces back to a man memorialized with a life-sized bronze statue in the Anchorage airport.

Sen. Ted Stevens — “Uncle Ted” — spent 40 years delivering federal money to Alaska and was nearing the height of his power in 1996 when Congress passed the Telecommunications Act, creating the modern Universal Service Fund.

It was before smartphones or Netflix. Most homes in America had no internet, and by the late 1990s “high-speed” service meant 200 kilobits per second — faster than dial-up modems but too slow to play high-definition video. Today, the FCC defines broadband, which is just another way of saying high-speed internet, as 100 Mbps. That’s 500 times faster than in the ’90s.

As chair of the committee that controlled the FCC’s budget, Stevens ensured Alaska telecoms received special treatment, according to Carol Mattey, a former FCC official who oversaw efforts to reform the subsidy.

“It would be suicidal to do something to make the head of the Appropriations Committee angry at you,” said Mattey, who served as deputy chief of the commission’s Wireline Competition Bureau.

Stevens lost reelection in 2008 while under a corruption indictment that was later dropped. He died two years later in a plane crash on a trip from a private lodge owned by GCI, the Alaska telecom giant. GCI’s current president and chief operating officer, Gregory Chapados, is Stevens’ former chief of staff.

A GCI spokesperson wrote that while Stevens chaired the Appropriations Committee, he did not at the time chair the Senate Commerce Committee, which drafted the Telecommunications Act and oversees the subsidy program. Chapados, who served as chief of staff for Stevens from 1986 to 1992, was not involved in developing the Telecommunications Act, the company said.

The company said it “maintains constructive working relationships with all members of our delegation to advocate on behalf of our customers and all other Alaskans.”

Nationally, the subsidy program allows payments to any company that the FCC or state regulators have designated as an “eligible telecommunications carrier.” How much they get depends on whether they want to provide internet to village schools, health care clinics or simply remote communities.

In its statement to ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News, GCI said, “There are no provisions in the Telecom Act extending special treatment for Alaska.” But the state is treated differently in practice. In 2016, the FCC created a program called the Alaska Plan specifically for carriers here, allowing them to negotiate their own performance targets rather than being subject to the same cost models applied elsewhere.

Alaska’s geography made it especially difficult for the agency to estimate the cost of serving customers in the state, Mattey said. The FCC assumed the companies would only set goals that they would be able to achieve.

They tried to adjust the national formula for distributing money to account for this factor, Mattey said, but Alaska telecoms kept pushing back and FCC officials gave up.

“We tried so hard not to treat Alaska differently because our goal was to create defined deployment obligations for all companies, and we failed,” she said of the 2016 reforms. “The political pressure was too strong.”

Summit has received $12 million over the past decade by promising to deliver internet to 337 locations across a collection of woodsy, roadside neighborhoods just north of Fairbanks. Filings by Summit report dozens of new connections in some years, a combined total of 271 as of 2025.

But according to the FCC’s interactive map of all locations U.S. telecoms report actually serving with internet, the number of customers using Shoffstall’s service is far smaller. In a phone interview, the company’s acting general manager, James Perry, said that Summit has about 120 internet customers and 160 in total.

Mattey said the rules of the program say nothing about making sure the lines that a subsidy recipient builds actually get used — only that they get built.

Companies that fall behind on building out their network can have their subsidies reduced. But they are allowed to go on collecting cash long after the technology they use has become outdated, customers have moved on to cheaper and faster alternatives or their community has become a ghost town.

“They’re playing by the rules, so to speak,” Mattey said. “It’s a flat amount of money the government has decided they are entitled to.”

Off the Grid

Shoffstall’s penchant for setting his own rules first landed him in trouble in 1996. State prosecutors charged him with a misdemeanor when he mailed documents whose tone and language mimicked court orders to an Alaska bank, demanding money.

The trial ended without a verdict when Shoffstall agreed to change his plea from not guilty to no contest. He received a suspended imposition of sentence, a judgment entering a conviction with no jail time, contingent upon completing probation. Over the decades since, he has continued to file paperwork in state court, federal court and with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources claiming to be a sovereign citizen not bound by the same court systems as other Alaskans.

An electrical technician by trade, Shoffstall bought the business for about $675,000 in 2000.

Shoffstall’s customers live mainly in the hillsides north of Fairbanks. Some right off the highway. Some at the end of snowy roads littered with warning signs like: “You are no longer a trespasser. You are a target.”

People moved here when the famously independent and rough-edged city of Fairbanks felt too urbane. They moved here to get off the grid. Not on it.

Among Shoffstall’s customers was a Sunday school teacher who’d arrived in Alaska in 1981, answering phones for a small insurance company.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, still the days of landlines and dial tones, Lois Sannes found herself frustrated with a surcharge added to calls in the Summit service area. She began complaining to the Regulatory Commission of Alaska.

She wrote so many letters to the governor that someone wrote back. Sannes met with an attorney, who she said told her the IRS had launched a criminal investigation into Shoffstall.

Separately, Shoffstall’s company was under scrutiny from the regulatory commission itself.

When Summit sought approval for the rates it charged other telecom companies to use its phone lines, the commission allowed them to look at Summit’s unredacted financial reports. A consultant hired by the rival telecom companies testified to the commission that Summit’s spending appeared unusually high, poorly documented and in some cases tied to transactions between the company and Shoffstall himself.

Roughly 95% of the company’s revenue around this period came not from phone customers but the federal subsidy program and payments redistributed through the telecom industry itself, according to audited financial statements Summit filed with state regulators.

The dispute before the regulatory commission ended when Summit and its competitors agreed to a settlement. The commission issued no findings on whether there were indeed problems with Summit’s books, as the consultant’s report had outlined.

But a new legal issue arose for Shoffstall — this time from the IRS, whose investigation Sannes had heard about. On Sept. 15, 2009, a federal grand jury indicted Shoffstall on allegations of felony tax evasion. The charges said he “willfully evaded the payment of his income taxes” for at least eight years beginning in 1996.

Shoffstall’s former accountants testified against him.

“I told him that he was going to get nailed, that’s not a question,” certified public accountant Garry Hutchison told the jury. “The only question is whether or not it would bring the company down.”

A Fairbanks jury found Shoffstall guilty on Feb. 5, 2010, after a five-day trial.

The FCC has the power to cut off subsidies to recipients convicted of fraud and other financial crimes related to the subsidy program. How closely related the crime must be to the subsidy payments is up for interpretation by the agency.

On one hand, Shoffstall’s indictment said he used his position running a federally subsidized company to obstruct the IRS investigation. On the other, the conviction was for tax evasion related to money he personally owed the IRS.

There is precedent for the FCC closely scrutinizing a subsidy recipient who’s been convicted of evading personal income taxes.

The FCC Wireline Competition Bureau directed the Universal Service Fund’s administrator to look into whether Hawaii-based Sandwich Isles Communications misused its subsidy dollars. The action followed owner Albert Hee’s conviction on federal tax crimes in 2015.

The FCC fined Sandwich Isles and Hee $49.6 million and ordered the company to repay $27 million in what it described as improperly received subsidies. Hee’s attorneys contested the charges, arguing that he had concealed nothing and that the government mistook accounting errors for criminal intent. A jury disagreed.

It’s not clear whether the FCC investigated Shoffstall after his conviction; the agency did not respond to questions about the case.

But records show that Shoffstall’s company steadily continued to receive Universal Service Fund subsidies, even while Shoffstall was in prison. Two months after his release in January 2013, Summit reported collecting $1.1 million in annual subsidies.

When Shoffstall’s probation officer told a federal judge that Shoffstall was ignoring his probation requirements, he was arrested on Dec. 9, 2013, and went back to prison for several months. His company received $859,393 in Universal Service Fund subsidies during that time.

In the years that followed, the subsidies to Summit grew. FCC data shows Summit in 2016 received one of the highest levels of federal subsidies per customer in the country.

As of that year, Shoffstall’s company paid him an annual salary of up to $121,000 and paid an annual dividend of up to $155,000 to a holding company for which he was the sole shareholder. His company stopped publicly disclosing that information after 2016, as the Regulatory Commission of Alaska stopped requiring detailed annual reporting, leaving far less financial information available to the public.

Sannes, the former Summit customer who once pressured state regulators to take a closer look at the company, now lives in Wisconsin. Asked if she was surprised to learn that the company’s subsidies not only continue today, but have increased to $1.5 million a year, Sannes said she had assumed his criminal conviction alone would have been enough to cut off the money.

“I’m horrified,” she said.

Unplugged

Summit Telephone is named for a mountaintop, Cleary Summit, outside Fairbanks. Sled dogs can be heard howling from their plywood houses, and every so often a semitruck barrels down the highway, swirling snow as it hauls gold ore from open-pit mines.

In the winter, you might see a rocket launch from a valley a few miles north, from the world’s only rocket launch site operated by a university. The hills are known for world-famous aurora borealis displays, and a collection of Airbnbs and lodges line winding roads.

As the subsidies flowed to Summit, Shoffstall continued to create and distribute documents intended to look like court orders. He submitted paperwork in federal court arguing he didn’t have to pay taxes — in one 2017 filing accusing the federal government of “high crimes” against him, in another issuing what he called a “summary judgment” against President Donald Trump for “fraud, collusion and conspiracy.”

None of this stopped the state’s telecom industry from spotlighting him as a poster child. O’Connor, the executive director of the Alaska Telecom Association, cited Summit to state lawmakers in 2018 as an example of a company forced to “muddle along with the obsolete technology” rather than upgrade its network due the burden of state overregulation. Raising the rates to provide upgrades would have required Summit to make its case to regulators that the fee increases were necessary.

Asked whether it was an appropriate use of public funds for a company like Summit to receive roughly $10,000 per customer per year in federal subsidies, O’Connor did not directly answer. In a written response, the Alaska Telecom Association said the program “is specifically designed to support building and operating telecommunications networks in high-cost areas” and that participating providers “are subject to FCC program requirements, reporting obligations, and oversight.” Asked whether it stood by its 2018 characterization of Summit, O’Connor said her testimony was focused on the challenges facing smaller providers generally.

Shoffstall never upgraded to expand its service. According to the FCC broadband map, Summit’s equipment today remains incapable of delivering internet faster than 25 Mbps — one-fourth the FCC’s current definition of broadband.

Meanwhile, the internet marketplace has changed. Some Alaskans no longer need or want the slower subsidized service.

One recent Saturday, 74-year-old Philip Marshall shoveled a waist-high tunnel through the snow to a cabin near the top of the mountain. A wood carver, he wore a red ski cap decorated with the flag of Denmark. Asked about his internet access, he invited a reporter inside and made a pot of black tea.

Marshall said his wife, Janet, moved into this cabin before he met her. The construction boom for the 800-mile trans-Alaska oil pipeline had raised rents so high within Fairbanks’ city limits during the mid-1970s that she moved here out of town. Like many cabins outside Fairbanks, the home is “dry,” meaning there’s no running water. Old-timers hauled the building itself up the side of the mountain on sleds.

In interviews, several of Marshall’s neighbors said they have no complaints about the internet speeds Summit provides. One said she pays Summit $95 a month and the internet is fine for her needs. Another, who retired after a career working on remote Alaska radar sites, said he uses the service too. But he’s recently added satellite internet.

Others who have opted for the low-orbit satellite dishes, which deliver speeds up to 10 times faster than Summit for about the same price, have dropped their Summit plans altogether. One especially clear evening recently, Marshall stood in the snow and counted 18 satellites passing overhead within nine minutes. “Starlink,” he said.

The company and corporate parent SpaceX did not respond to questions and do not publicly release the number of users in Alaska. But Ookla, a company that offers tools people can use to test their internet speed, offered a proxy measure: About 1 in 10 Alaskans who tested their home internet speed through Ookla connected via Starlink, compared with roughly 1 in 67 in California.

The Marshalls haven’t felt the need to pay for either service. Their cellphones give five-bar, 5G service from a nearby tower. Finishing his tea, Marshall pulled on his jacket to head back outside. Still have to shovel a path to the outhouse, he said.

In the corner of the room, a plastic box the size and color of a concrete brick sat near the floor. It was for the Summit internet line that public subsidies pay the company roughly $10,000 a year to provide. Unplugged and unused.

The post This Convicted Felon Gets $1 Million a Year to Sell Obsolete Internet Service. You Pay for It. appeared first on ProPublica.

We’re investigating Alaska internet companies this year, and we need your help. 

Alaskans pay higher costs for slower internet speeds than most Americans. The government has spent billions of dollars of public money to try to fix the problem, and we want to know how it’s really going in your community. Please fill out this quick survey to share how much it costs you to get online and what you think of the service. 

Take our quick survey to help in the reporting.

If you know someone in Alaska who is not able to access the internet and wants to share their experience, they can contact reporter Kyle Hopkins at 907-854-8540 (phone or WhatsApp). We will add more options for participation soon — stay tuned!

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

The post We’re Investigating Alaska Internet Companies. We Need Your Help. appeared first on ProPublica.

Milique Wagner always insisted that his 2013 murder conviction was built on an informant’s lie. But Wagner said he couldn’t persuade his trial lawyer to investigate that, even after the informant confessed to the murder and testified that Philadelphia police and prosecutors knew the truth.  

In 2015, Wagner’s appeal failed, and he faced life in prison.

But Wagner had another chance at freedom under a state law that allowed him to get a new court-appointed lawyer to help him challenge his conviction. Court records show that the attorney never spoke with the informant or looked into the detective on the case, who made headlines after being benched for secretly paying a witness. Instead, Wagner’s lawyer urged the judge to shut down his client’s petition, writing in June 2017, “There are no meritorious issues that could be raised.” 

Wagner would remain in prison another six years before prosecutors acknowledged that police had hidden evidence suggesting that the informant had committed the murder and the detective was corrupt. Although Wagner maintains his innocence, he agreed to a plea deal for third-degree murder that allowed him to leave prison.

The opposition Wagner faced from his own lawyer is permitted under Pennsylvania’s Post Conviction Relief Act, the law that allows people in prison to raise newly discovered evidence or argue that their previous lawyer mishandled the case. The state provides a lawyer in these cases, but with a catch: The attorney can argue against the client’s claims and withdraw from the case by filing what’s known as a “no-merit” letter.

A Philadelphia Inquirer and ProPublica investigation found case after case in which court-appointed attorneys did minimal work to examine their clients’ claims and rejected what later turned out to be legitimate legal issues. The findings reveal that Philadelphia’s post-conviction system repeatedly delayed or denied justice for wrongfully convicted people who then spent years or decades behind bars.

The news organizations reviewed 250 of Philadelphia’s reversed convictions and sentences since 2018 in violent felony cases. Wagner was one of at least 50 people whose lawyers said there was no basis to challenge their cases, only for judges to later decide they deserved new trials or sentences. 

While in some cases the exonerating evidence did not emerge until years after the no-merit letter was filed, a majority were tossed out based on issues the PCRA lawyers overlooked or rejected. 

Three years of invoices appointed attorneys submitted to the court, covering 83 homicide PCRA cases in which the lawyers filed no-merit letters, show the extent of lawyers’ efforts.

Those attorneys did not arrange a single phone call with the client, contact the trial lawyer or obtain the police or prosecution case files about three-quarters of the time. Those case files have been a key source of evidence in overturned convictions since Philadelphia’s district attorney began making them available to lawyers six years ago.

Lawyers Did Little Before Declaring Cases Meritless

Homicide cases are the most serious ones a lawyer can handle. But many lawyers handling homicide Post Conviction Relief Act cases never spoke with their clients before rejecting their claims. Here’s how often they took basic steps in 83 cases.

In some cases, records show the attorneys rejected their clients’ claims just days or weeks after being appointed and submitted filings with factual errors, including the wrong defendant’s name. They filed no-merit letters despite red flags, such as a client’s co-defendant having already been exonerated or a detective who locked the client up having been arrested for assaulting witnesses or tampering with evidence. 

Daniel Anders, the administrative judge who oversees Philadelphia’s court-appointed counsel system, did not respond to requests for comment. 

Judge Barbara McDermott, who oversaw many PCRA cases before recently retiring from Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas, defended the system and said it is working as intended. 

“We’re never going to be a perfect system, but within the system we’ve had we’ve done the best we can,” she said, adding that no-merit letters play an important role in shutting down pointless challenges. “At some point, there has to be finality to cases.”

In Pennsylvania, a person looking to challenge their conviction starts by filing a PCRA petition, often handwritten on a state-issued form. If it’s a person’s first PCRA, a judge will assign a lawyer to amend it. 

Robert Dunham, a lawyer who spent years training attorneys across the state to litigate death-penalty appeals, said appointed lawyers are too often limiting their review to the issues their clients raised. He said the job is to reinvestigate the entire case to catch things previous lawyers missed.

“[The clients are] not lawyers. In many cases they are impaired,” Dunham said. “They don’t have the ability to conduct a factual investigation because they’re in jail.”

Stephen T. O’Hanlon, the attorney appointed to Wagner’s case, sent no-merit letters to nine clients who would later have their convictions or sentences overturned. That was more than any other attorney identified in the Inquirer and ProPublica examination, but O’Hanlon also handled among the most PCRA cases. 

Five of the nine cases were later overturned in state or federal court based on issues with the trial or plea he rejected or did not raise.

O’Hanlon said the attorney code of ethics prevents him from making arguments he knows to be false or frivolous and that, in each case, the judge and prosecutor agreed with him at the time. 

“Yes, it’s good that they got off on some kind of five-years-later technicality,” he said, “but it’s wrong to suggest there was any problem with” the no-merit letters.

O’Hanlon said he conducted a diligent review of Wagner’s case and exchanged numerous letters with him. According to court records, he sent an investigator to interview multiple witnesses.

Wagner provided the Inquirer and ProPublica a copy of a letter he said he wrote to O’Hanlon in 2016, asking him to look into Philip Nordo, the corrupt homicide detective who’d typed up the informant’s statement. O’Hanlon said Wagner never raised Nordo as an issue at the time. Pointing to Wagner’s eventual plea deal, he said Wagner is “factually guilty” of the murder.

Wagner said O’Hanlon seemed to be against him from the outset. He pointed to a letter O’Hanlon wrote him, six weeks after he was appointed, seemingly unaware that Wagner had been convicted by a jury. “Didn’t you eventually enter a plea on your case? I’m having a hard time understanding how your issues can get around [that].”

Wagner asked the judge for a new lawyer, arguing the letter proved O’Hanlon was not interested in advocating for him.  

“I knew he wasn’t going to fight for me,” Wagner said in a recent interview. 

The judge kept O’Hanlon on the case.

“A Meaningless Ritual”

The roots of Pennsylvania’s no-merit letter go back to the case of Dorothy Finley, who in 1979 filed a PCRA challenging her conviction for a robbery-murder in North Philadelphia. As required in Pennsylvania, a judge appointed her a lawyer.

After Finley’s lawyer decided her conviction was sound and asked to be taken off the case, a Philadelphia judge told him to file a letter with the court explaining why there was no merit to the issues she raised. 

The state appeals courts agreed with Finley that her post-conviction lawyer didn’t do his job adequately. But in 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case and ruled that she did not have a constitutional right to a lawyer once her case hit the post-conviction stage. The decision left it to Pennsylvania to decide what counts as effective representation and what’s required of a lawyer who wants to drop a case.

Justice William Brennan Jr., in dissent, warned that the ruling would create a double standard in the justice system. Guaranteeing a lawyer to people who couldn’t afford one and then allowing that lawyer to oppose their client’s case turns the right to counsel into “a meaningless ritual,” he said. Meanwhile, a defendant who can afford private counsel would receive a “meaningful review” of their claims.

Finley died in prison a decade later. The no-merit letter that attorneys file in PCRA cases is now commonly known as a Finley letter.

The requirements to file a Finley letter are minimal: A lawyer only needs to describe what was done to review the case, list each claim the client wants raised, explain why the claims are bogus and notify the client of their rights.

Nationally, few states have set standards for post-conviction representation. But appeals standards published in at least 10 other states urge lawyers to avoid filing no-merit briefs when possible. The National Legal Aid & Defender Association says there should be “extremely strict” limits on them and that they should never be filed if clients are serving life terms. In Philadelphia, court data and invoices show, appointed lawyers file them in about half of all homicide PCRA matters.

Court records are filled with examples of Philadelphia lawyers filing letters attacking clients who would eventually prevail in court, calling their claims “self-serving and unfounded,” “unfathomable,” “outrageous” and “specious.” 

“The fault lies with [my client,] not the courts,” lawyer Earl Kauffman wrote in a 2021 Finley letter. Pennsylvania’s Superior Court rejected Kauffman’s determination in a 2023 opinion.

In an interview, Kauffman said he didn’t recall the case but stands behind his work.

“Whatever they decide, they decide — whether they agree with me or disagree with me,” Kauffman said of the higher court’s opinion. “I did what I did. I saw what I saw. I analyzed what I analyzed.”

O’Hanlon wrote a 2015 no-merit letter calling his client’s actions unjustifiable, in that he “emptied his gun, firing eight shots, at a fleeing car in a public street” — even though a federal judge, in ruling that he deserved a new trial, would interpret the same evidence as supporting the client’s self-defense claim. Asked about that finding, O’Hanlon said the judge’s observation had no bearing on the case. 

Jennifer Merrigan, a co-founder of the nonprofit law firm Phillips Black, said Finley letters routinely contain adversarial language and often breach confidentiality to use information lawyers have uncovered against the clients. She viewed these as “some of the most egregious ethical violations I’ve seen in my career.”

“Some read like a prosecutor’s closing argument,” she said. “It puts the burden on the client, and it sets up the defense lawyer as an extra prosecutor.”

Merrigan helped analyze 100 Finley letters filed in Philadelphia homicide cases for a recent Harvard Law Review article. The authors of the study — an attorney at Merrigan’s firm and a Finley letter recipient who later got his conviction overturned — concluded that the letters revealed “entrenched routine disloyalty and incompetence, even in extremely high-stakes criminal cases.”

Clients can pay a steep price, said Dunham, the longtime appeals lawyer. “Sometimes any lawyer is better than having no lawyer — but sometimes having any lawyer is worse than having no lawyer,” he said. “What happens when you get a bad lawyer in the Finley process is you lose your rights.”

That’s because if a lawyer discards a valid issue, it is forfeited forever. 

That’s what happened to Quahir Trice, who argued that when Philadelphia prosecutors used a statement by his co-defendant to convict him, the move improperly prevented Trice’s lawyer from cross-examining the witness against him.

Trice’s new lawyer, appointed by the court to handle his PCRA, filed a Finley letter. But by the time Trice’s case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, the justices wrote that although Trice would have had a winning claim, the issue was dead. Trice’s lawyer had missed an “obvious means” to raise it in his PCRA and was now barred from doing so.

Trice was ultimately freed in 2022 after the Philadelphia district attorney’s office let his lawyers access his police file, which contained long-hidden evidence that police had alternative suspects and that witnesses lied at his trial.

But five lawyers who handle court-appointed cases said the process set up by the Pennsylvania courts has made clear that their duties in PCRA cases are limited, and that digging into the police file or even speaking with the client is, in many cases, unnecessary. 

George S. Yacoubian Jr., who has filed close to 100 Finley letters since 2018, said the courts have made those parameters clear. “A PCRA attorney is not supposed to be going back to the very beginning and investigating every possible thing,” he said. He added that while he has an ethical duty to his client, he has a “higher obligation to the system of law” to not present frivolous cases.  

Yacoubian has written Finley letters in about 80% of his PCRA cases since 2018, court records show. He said that’s to be expected.

“If a client pleads guilty and there is nothing in the transcript to suggest the plea was coerced or forced or involuntary or unknowing, there is very little if anything that can be done for those defendants,” Yacoubian said.

However, dockets showed that a majority of his Finley letters were for clients who had gone to trial, not taken pleas. 

Three Yacoubian clients, whose claims he rejected, would later be granted new trials after privately retained lawyers found valid claims to raise. Teri Himebaugh, the lawyer who won one of those PCRA cases, said it “really wasn’t all that difficult” to crack, but she said the prior lawyers had done little to investigate the case.

Pennsylvania’s Superior Court sent three other Yacoubian cases back to the lower court. Twice they determined his clients deserved a hearing on the issues Yacoubian had rejected. In the other case, the higher court said it was unclear whether he’d understood his client’s claim, because there was no indication they had ever spoken.

Yacoubian declined to discuss specific cases but said his filings were based on the issues in front of him.

“There are some claims that a petitioner makes that are completely baseless,” he said. “Sometimes Finley letters are just necessary.”

“You’re Supposed to Be Fighting for Me” 

O’Hanlon, the lawyer who handled Milique Wagner’s case, has filed more than 100 Finley letters since 2018. Half, dockets show, were filed less than a month after he was formally appointed. 

That’s a tight window in which to thoroughly investigate a case, said attorney Daniel Silverman, who in 2021 won a new trial for one of O’Hanlon’s Finley letter recipients. In a court filing, Silverman wrote that O’Hanlon’s Finley letters suggest he “often performs little or no investigation in these cases and views his role more as an agent of the courts, helping to quickly dispose of cases, than as an advocate for his client.”

That case was thrown out based on a flawed jury instruction. The federal court partly blamed O’Hanlon for “overlooking obvious issues.”

In another case that was overturned, prosecutors wrote in a court filing that O’Hanlon had “failed to fully read” a PCRA by a client who said his lawyer had neglected to call a key defense witness. O’Hanlon wrote, incorrectly, that his client had not named any such witness. A federal judge agreed to toss out the conviction.

O’Hanlon said in an interview that he didn’t overlook the issues, but based his Finley letters on Pennsylvania court precedent and the factual circumstances of each case.

O’Hanlon said that Finley letters often result from clients having missed filing deadlines. And, he said, he had to work with the issues his clients raised, not manufacture new ones.

“If there are negotiated guilty pleas, almost all of those should be Finleys,” he added, because those clients have stated on the record that that plea was knowing and voluntary. But in three guilty-plea cases, the Superior Court later disagreed with him and said his clients’ issues at least merited a hearing. In one, the appeals court eventually threw out the client’s sentence altogether. 

O’Hanlon said he has won relief for numerous clients in PCRA cases and digs deep into each case, but sometimes he uncovers more evidence of guilt. He emphasized that even those who won new trials ended up taking pleas. “They’re still substantively guilty of murder,” he said.

In seven of the nine cases that would later be overturned, O’Hanlon’s Finley letters reflect his certainty that his clients are guilty, often describing the evidence of guilt as “overwhelming” or “compelling.”

One client O’Hanlon said had no claims that could outweigh his “overwhelming” guilt was Byshere Lawrence, who was 15 when he was arrested for murder in 2011. Court records show that his trial lawyer never met with him, which Lawrence claimed resulted in an unfair trial.

Another, Ronald Rogers, argued his lawyer should have objected when the judge overseeing his 2011 murder trial threatened a recanting witness with a perjury charge and “the maximum consecutive sentence” unless he reverted to his prior testimony accusing Rogers. 

O’Hanlon sent Finley letters to both rejecting those claims. Judges would later throw out each conviction based on the ineffectiveness of each man’s trial lawyer, and both took plea deals rather than continue fighting their cases.

Rogers described that as a decision born of desperation. 

“I thought, I gotta get home,” he said. “I gotta see the people I love one more time.”

He was released in December after nearly 17 years in prison. His two children had to grow up with their father behind bars. 

O’Hanlon said that he could not have raised the issues that later won the clients’ relief, either due to the clients’ instructions at the time or due to state court precedent.  

“There are years and years of subsequent procedural history, with multiple courts agreeing with me and some not agreeing with me,” he said.  

But former clients said the letters undermined one of their last shots at freedom.

Hakeem Moore, who received one of those letters before his family finally hired a lawyer who uncovered evidence that led to his conviction being overturned, said getting that letter in his prison legal mail was devastating. O’Hanlon noted Moore ultimately took a guilty-plea deal, and said the evidence that freed him was not available when he handled the case. 

“It’s like a betrayal. You’re supposed to be fighting for me,” Moore said. “I was scared that I was going to have to die in jail.”

Left to Their Own Devices

For almost 40 years, the requirements created in the Finley case have set the minimum for what’s required of court-appointed PCRA lawyers in Pennsylvania. Beyond that, lawyers are largely left to decide what constitutes a meaningful review. 

They are subject to some oversight: Pennsylvania courts require judges to independently review the record before accepting a Finley letter. And the whole court-appointed system is overseen by a supervising judge who has the power to review complaints and remove lawyers. 

The analysis of invoices in homicide PCRA cases showed that even though most lawyers filing Finley letters did not take basic investigative steps, judges approved of the work that attorneys had done in more than 90% of the letters filed.

And even if judges take issue with lawyers’ work, that does not necessarily affect their ability to take more cases. Once on Philadelphia’s court-appointment list, lawyers can remain there indefinitely. 

That’s a sharp contrast to the federal court for Pennsylvania’s Eastern District, where lawyers must reapply every three years, self-reporting everything from previous case outcomes to disciplinary actions to judicial findings that they were ineffective in court. 

In Philadelphia, the supervising judge has the authority to remove lawyers from the list in response to complaints. But formal reprimands from the state disciplinary board and criticism from the state appeals court have not affected some lawyers’ eligibility to continue taking appointed cases.

One lawyer, Lee Mandell, was officially reprimanded last year for waiting six years to schedule a PCRA hearing, during which time two key witnesses died. James Lloyd was reprimanded in 2020 for failing to contact his client for 10 months after being appointed, then making up a letter to cover up that fact. 

Judges still appointed both to handle cases, and Philadelphia’s court leadership in 2022 tapped Lloyd to lead a training on PCRAs for other lawyers.

Lloyd did not respond to emails or phone calls requesting an interview. Mandell declined to comment. 

Also continuing to receive appointments is attorney Douglas Dolfman. The state Superior Court criticized his PCRA work six times over the last six years, finding he abandoned two clients and “deprived [another] of meaningful representation.” In one case, the Superior Court said the lower court could consider “sanctions including, but not limited to, reporting him to the disciplinary board.” The state bar directory shows no disciplinary action followed. 

In an interview, Dolfman said he diligently investigates each case and fights hard for his clients.

“If the person has been in jail for 20 years, you’re pretty much not finding anything. Most likely everything has been exhausted already,” Dolfman said. He didn’t address the appellate court’s criticism.

As for Milique Wagner, after receiving the Finley letter he’d spend another nine years in prison for the murder to which the prosecution’s star witness had confessed.

But in 2022, the disgraced detective who built the case against him, Nordo, was convicted of raping informants and funneling them crime reward money.

A year later, the district attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit agreed that the prosecutor’s failure to disclose evidence about Nordo and the informant who testified against Wagner had resulted in an unfair trial. 

Wagner came home from prison in January. He’s starting over in life at age 37 and looking for work. He married a woman who has been taking care of his ailing grandmother. 

He said he has not given up on clearing his name in court, but he’s decided to represent himself going forward. He no longer has faith that a lawyer would help him. 

“It’s like a game to them,” he said. “I’m not going to gamble. I know how it turned out before.”

The post With a Chance at Freedom, They Faced an Unexpected Obstacle: Their Own Lawyers appeared first on ProPublica.

Far more American children have likely been separated from their parents during immigration sweeps than previously understood, according to a report by the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Brookings.

The report published Monday estimates more than 100,000 U.S. citizen children have had a parent detained since President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign began last year. The analysis cites reporting from ProPublica on the detention of parents, which can often lead to family separations.

During Trump’s first administration, a policy of family separation at the U.S.-Mexico border ended after widespread outrage. Now, the breakup of families is happening amid sweeps by immigration agents across the country.

About 400,000 people have been detained by immigration agents since Trump returned to office, Brookings noted. But it’s nearly impossible to know how many family separations that has caused, since the administration does not track it.

Families are also now being split up in ways that are more dispersed, more hidden and harder to track.

Brookings created its estimate by using census information to approximate the number of children that detainees have. It estimated that roughly 200,000 children, including 145,000 American kids, have had a parent detained. The think tank notes that the actual number could be somewhat higher or lower.

ProPublica used a different, more conservative, approach that relied on government data obtained through a public information lawsuit by the University of Washington. We found that in just the first seven months of Trump’s second term, at least 11,000 American children had a parent detained. We also found that Trump has been deporting about four times as many mothers of American children per day as President Joe Biden did.

As we noted, our figures are almost certainly undercounts. For instance, the government data relies on detainees self-reporting whether they have children. In some cases, agents may not ask and parents may not share details about their families out of fear of what might happen to their children.

“There are a lot of families that are in the situation that are not being written down,” said Tara Watson, one of the authors of the Brookings report. It’s “important both for transparency and from a child health and wellbeing perspective to know what’s happening to the kids. How many of them are leaving the U.S.? How many of them are staying in the U.S. with close family? How many of them do we really not know what their situation is?”

ProPublica also followed multiple families through their sudden separations and found a wide variety of outcomes for the children.

Doris Flores, a mother from Honduras, was separated from her breastfeeding infant after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested her and her fiance at the same time. In the rush to find someone to care for the baby and Flores’ 8-year-old daughter, she called on their local pastor to take the children in.

In response to the Brookings findings, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, sent an oft-repeated statement that the agency “does not separate families,” adding that parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or instead to have them placed with a person the parent designates. DHS said this is consistent with the practices of past administrations.

However, guidelines for ICE officers encountering parents have changed. A document known as the Parental Interests Directive was given a new name under Trump — the Detained Parents Directive. Its preamble, which once instructed agents to handle immigrant parents in a way that was “humane,” has been stripped of the word.

The post More Than 100,000 American Kids Have Had a Parent Detained in Immigration Sweeps, Report Estimates appeared first on ProPublica.

Eleven journalists from across the country join the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program, which seeks to expand the ranks of editors in newsrooms across the country whose work is aimed at accountability and impact.  

Established in 2023, the program has trained more than 31 journalists to date. It begins with a five-day intensive editing boot camp in New York, with courses and panel discussions led by ProPublica’s senior editors. After the boot camp, participants will gather virtually throughout the course of the year for continuing development seminars and be assigned a ProPublica senior editor as a mentor for advice on their work and careers. 

Alumni continue to work in the field in newsrooms like The Boston Globe, KQED, The Texas Tribune, ESPN and ProPublica. This year, more than 130 journalists applied for a spot in the program.  

“Each year, we are thrilled by the number of people who reach out to us for this training,” Managing Editor Ginger Thompson said. “It’s ProPublica’s way of supporting investigative reporting at a time when our mission couldn’t be more vital.”

Introducing the 2026 cohort of the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program: 

Aaron Sankin is the data editor at The Marshall Project, a criminal-justice-focused nonprofit news organization. He was previously an investigative reporter with The Markup, where he won the Edward R. Murrow Award for reporting on predictive policing, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Philip Meyer Journalism Award for an investigation into racial and socioeconomic disparities in internet service pricing, and the Gerald Loeb Award for an innovative online privacy inspection tool. He also covered online extremism at The Center for Investigative Reporting and helped launch HuffPost’s San Francisco vertical. He is a graduate of Rice University and lives in New York.

Deblina Chakraborty is senior science editor at CNN, where she oversees coverage of science and space, leading a team of writers and editors who explore intriguing discoveries, scientific breakthroughs and daring missions. Previously, she was a general features editor and an off-platform editor for CNN. She’s also managed editorial teams at Denver7 and HLN Digital and hosted the award-winning podcast “Stuff You Missed in History Class.”

Josh McGhee is the Chicago bureau chief of MindSite News and covers the intersection of criminal justice and mental health with an emphasis on public records and data reporting. He previously reported for Injustice Watch, The Chicago Reporter, DNAinfo Chicago and WVON covering criminal justice, courts, policing, race, inequality and politics.

Kynala Phillips is the editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Neighborhood Dispatch, a new initiative that partners with residents to cover community voices, concerns and improvements. Previously, she led the events program at Kansas City PBS, and worked as a service journalism reporter at The Kansas City Star, where she covered housing, public services and marijuana legalization. She holds a master’s degree in engagement journalism from the City University of New York and an undergraduate journalism degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

Karen Chávez is executive editor of USA Today’s Asheville Citizen Times in North Carolina. During her more than 20-year career at the paper, she served as investigations editor, assistant sports editor and an outdoors and environment editor. Previously, Chávez, a New York native, also worked as a reporter in Montana, Idaho and Arizona. Chávez’s reporting exposed a district attorney’s wrongdoing and led to his removal for willful misconduct in office (which won a Society of Professional Journalists Green Eyeshade Award). Her reporting also exposed a decadeslong pattern of alleged sexual abuse of students at the Asheville School by faculty and other students (which won North Carolina Press Association awards). At the Citizen Times, Chávez led national coverage of Tropical Storm Helene, the deadliest and costliest natural disaster in North Carolina history. The team she led was honored for their dogged coverage, including a first place National Headliner Award for public service journalism. 

Kevin Uhrmacher is the deputy news applications editor at ProPublica, where he leads a team of developers who use code to report and build interactive stories and databases. He joined ProPublica in August 2025 after 11 years at The Washington Post as a reporter and editor on the graphics team focused on politics and public policy. At ProPublica, he led the development of the Rx Inspector database that shows patients which factories made their prescription generics. He has edited graphics for three Pulitzer Prize-winning projects. Uhrmacher graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Margaret Ho is an assistant editor in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, where she collaborates with reporters who cover the Justice Department, the rule of law and political fact-checking. She started at the Times in 2010 as a copy editor on the business desk after working as a grant writer for a charter school in Harlem, New York.

Padma Rama is a senior political editor at NPR focused on national politics. She works with NPR’s network of member stations. Previously, she was a congressional reporter and senior producer at The Associated Press and worked at CNN’s D.C. bureau. 

Rosalie Chan is a senior editor helping to drive editorial strategy for Business Insider’s tech coverage. She joined the company as an enterprise tech and cloud reporter, reporting on key industry players like Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Broadcom, VMware and more. As a reporter, she has broken scoops on those companies and delved into a wide array of topics, like the open source licensing wars, the rise and fall of various developer startups, coding boot camps and sexual harassment in tech. Most recently, she was an editor on a Business Insider team investigation into the environmental and economic impacts of data centers that won the George Polk Award. Chan holds a bachelor of science degree in journalism and computer science and a master of science in law from Northwestern University. 

Thy Vo is an investigative editor for InvestigateWest, a nonprofit newsroom covering the Pacific Northwest. She’s worked as a community journalist in the West for nearly a decade, covering government, politics, courts and immigrant communities for outlets like The Colorado Sun, Law360, The Mercury News and Voice of OC. Vo grew up in Anaheim, California, and now lives in Colorado. 

Yoohyun Jung is The Boston Globe’s data editor, leading a team of computational journalists focused on delivering compelling data-driven journalism. She was part of the Spotlight team honored as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2025 for its investigation on Steward Health Care, a troubled Boston-born hospital chain that ultimately collapsed. Previously, she was the deputy data editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she worked on some of the organization’s most ambitious data-driven storytelling projects. Born in Seoul, South Korea, Jung began her journalism career in Arizona, where she worked for two of the state’s largest newspapers in Phoenix and Tucson covering numerous beats, including criminal justice and education.

The post ProPublica Selects 11 Journalists for Investigative Editor Training appeared first on ProPublica.

It was their dream home, a newly built, 2,500-square-foot modern farmhouse with a playroom that Mitch and Kara Meredith had saved for 12 years to buy for their growing family. During construction, family members had written their favorite Bible verses on studs throughout the house. For four idyllic years on Darlene Lane, the couple hosted birthday parties for their two young daughters, who became fast friends with the other children in the recently built subdivision in Fort Gibson.

Then one evening last summer, five weeks after the couple’s third child was born, their bathroom flooded.

When their 7-year-old ran into the garage to report that water was all over the floor, Mitch assumed a pipe had burst, or perhaps the toilet was backed up.  

Then he entered the bathroom. A thick, black fluid with an oily sheen covered the floor. Kara yelled from their bedroom for him to come quickly; the same substance was flowing out of the floor next to their bed.

Mitch, along with several family members, fought the flood all night, vacuuming up the sludge and emptying buckets out the window. Black goo covered their arms. Shiny rainbow patterns covered their shoes. After pulling the bathtub away from the wall, Mitch saw that the substance was gushing through the house’s foundation. It was clear this wasn’t a plumbing problem.

Around 5 a.m., Mitch’s uncle turned to him. “I think this is oil,” he said. The family called the fire department, and Kara rushed their three children, including their infant, to her grandmother’s house.  

“And that’s the last time we got to be in our home,” Mitch said.

The Frontier and ProPublica’s reporting on oil and gas pollution in Oklahoma over the last year has shown how old oil wells abandoned by the industry pose severe public and environmental health risks. Officially, the state lists 19,000 orphan wells that state regulators are responsible for cleaning up, but the true figure is likely over 300,000, according to federal researchers. 

State records suggest that the Merediths’ house may have been built on top of an improperly plugged oil well drilled in the 1940s. And on that fateful Saturday last August, something woke it up. 

Mitch drilled a hole into his home’s concrete foundation in hopes of diverting the sludge out of the house and into the yard. It worked: The foul-smelling water began to pour out of the cavity, filling a deep trench they had dug. 

Many of their possessions were ruined. A strong smell of gas hung throughout the house, permeating clothes, sheets and mattresses. 

After leaving Darlene Lane, the family moved four times in four months — at times paying their mortgage and rent simultaneously. 

At the outset of the crisis, the family had pinned most of their hopes on the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the regulatory agency responsible for overseeing oil and gas — including pollution from the industry and plugging old wells. They wanted the agency to figure out what happened — and help them clean it up. 

It did not take long for their hopes to transform into anger.

State regulators, according to the family, have done little to help them. 

“They wanted to act like it would go away,” Mitch said. 

In October, more than a month after the flooding began, Jeremy Hodges, the director of the commission’s oil and gas division, met with Mitch and Kara at the house. 

He told them that when his team stuck a gas reader into the hole in their bathroom floor, where the oily water continued to flow, it showed gas concentrations at explosive levels, according to a recording that the Merediths provided to The Frontier and ProPublica. 

The local public works authority had also brought out a gas reader. It found gas levels that constituted a “serious and immediate hazard,” according to a report. 

Old, unplugged wells — like the one that state records indicate is near or possibly under the Merediths’ house — are known to leak gas and toxic fluids. 

Hodges also told the couple that the agency would likely have to tear down the house to look for the well and plug it. Subsequent sampling conducted by the commission showed salt readings that suggested the presence of wastewater resulting from the production of oil and gas. Other testing by the state’s environmental quality department found elevated levels of heavy metals commonly found in oil field wastewater including barium and bromide. Mitch took his own samples and paid an environmental lab to test them. The results also pointed to oil and gas pollution.

But as the months wore on, the agency never stated explicitly that the mysterious substance contaminating the Merediths’ home was the byproduct of oil and gas production. It simply referred to the pollution as “water” in public statements. 

In a packed town hall in March convened after the family began criticizing the agency on social media, community members grilled Hodges and several other high-ranking agency representatives about the Merediths’ situation for two hours, pressing them about the environmental risks and demanding action. About half of Oklahomans live within 1 mile of oil and gas wells. 

“Would you live there?” a woman in the audience asked Hodges.

“I’m not going to answer that,” he responded, prompting jeers from the crowd.

“So you’re saying that you don’t want to answer the question of whether you would actually live in that house?” asked Mitch’s brother, Matt Meredith.

“That’s a hypothetical,” Hodges said. “I’m not going to answer that.”

Homeowners facing such an event should file damages with their insurance companies, Jim Marshall, an administrator with the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, said from the front of the community center conference room. But the family’s insurance company had denied their claim last fall — citing exclusions for pollution and water damage — without ever inspecting the damage, according to the Merediths’ attorney. The Merediths have sued American Mercury, their insurance company, which did not answer questions about the case because of pending litigation, as well as their developers, who did not respond to requests for comment.  

At the public meeting, Marshall suggested underground water sources could be pushing fluid into the home, noting that the Merediths’ neighborhood once contained several ponds. If the culprit is not oil and gas, that would shift the responsibility for cleanup to other state agencies. Marshall, Hodges and an agency attorney repeatedly told the crowd that with the house likely blocking access to the well, the agency had reached the end of its legal ability to help the Merediths. 

Jack Damrill, a spokesperson for the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, did not answer questions about what the agency thinks is causing the pollution but said it “recognizes the seriousness of the concerns raised regarding the Meredith family matter, as well as the broader public interest.” The agency, he said in a statement, has “devoted significant investigative time, technical expertise, and regulatory resources to reviewing the situation and will continue to evaluate any new, relevant information as it becomes available.”

Last week, Oklahoma lawmakers passed a bill introduced by the Merediths’ state senator, Avery Frix, that would create a fund to compensate homeowners whose houses have been damaged by oil and gas pollution. While hopeful that the legislation will help them, Mitch noted that it requires the commission to confirm the presence of an old well, something the agency has yet to do at the Merediths’ home.

On Darlene Lane, the flow of contamination increased in late April and continues to seep into their neighbor’s yard. 

“What I’ve begged for from the beginning is for them to help me contain it,” Mitch said. “They have refused to do anything.” 

Nine months after they were forced to flee their dream home, the family of five is crammed into a 900-square-foot, two-bedroom bungalow on Mitch’s parents’ farm where the couple had lived as newlyweds. The girls share a bunk bed. The baby sleeps in Mitch and Kara’s room.

The girls often ask to play with the neighbors they had to leave behind, along with many of their possessions. Their toys still line the shelves of their bedrooms in the house on Darlene Lane, awaiting their return. Wet clothes sat in the washer for months. Half-packed boxes are scattered around the floor, evidence of the family’s panicked retreat last August. 

The house is stuck in time, like a museum of the Merediths’ old life.

The post Oily Sludge Is Flooding Their Dream Home. Oklahoma Regulators Say They Can’t Help. appeared first on ProPublica.

I recently wrote about babies dying from a rare but fatal condition called vitamin K deficiency bleeding. To report the story, I analyzed hundreds of rows of data, contacted more than 50 hospitals and birthing centers, and filed nearly 90 public records requests. But autopsy reports — one record of how these babies died — painted the clearest picture of these tragedies.

I’m sharing some of the most critical lessons I learned from the autopsy reports in hopes of creating a greater awareness of this condition and highlighting what decades of research and interviews with dozens of doctors found: In almost every case, the deaths could have been prevented with a simple shot of vitamin K at birth.

ProPublica is not sharing the babies’ names, the dates or years of death, or the locations within a state to protect the families’ privacy.

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

Babies need vitamin K to help their blood clot, but they aren’t born with enough of it in their system. Two researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1943 for their discovery of vitamin K and its ability to form clots and stop bleeding in babies, and the vitamin K shot has been a standard intervention for newborns in the U.S. since the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended it more than 60 years ago.

But in recent years, parents have started refusing the shot. Although the vitamin K shot is not a vaccine, it has become entangled in the anti-vaccine movement. False and misleading information online has led some parents to believe the shot is harmful. In addition, some parents have voiced a desire for a more natural birthing experience, one without pharmaceutical intervention. And some simply don’t want their babies to go through the pain of an injection that they don’t believe is necessary.

Hospital data and research studies have documented this shift. In December, a national study of more than 5 million births found that the rate of babies not receiving vitamin K jumped 77% from 2017 to 2024. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that newborns who don’t get the shot are 81 times more likely than those who do to develop late vitamin K deficiency bleeding. In many cases, there are no warning signs. The babies are healthy and happy just days and sometimes hours before they suffer catastrophic bleeding.

1. The role vitamin K deficiency played in the babies’ deaths

Not all deaths are investigated by a medical examiner or coroner, but I filed open records requests in several states and counties to obtain those that were. One of the first things that stood out was how clear the role of vitamin K was in many of the cases. Vitamin K deficiency was listed in the autopsies as the immediate cause of death or as contributing to it. Details about parents refusing the vitamin K shot also were usually included.

In this autopsy from Minnesota, the medical examiner determined the baby died of vitamin K deficiency bleeding. The second line included the fact that vitamin K was not received as part of preventive care after the baby was born.

Seeing vitamin K deficiency listed as a cause of death was important because it removed doubt that the bleeding could have been caused by another factor, such as an injury. The other autopsies I examined also used similar language.

One of the challenges around vitamin K deficiency bleeding is the data. State and federal agencies don’t track which babies don’t get the shot and which babies suffer bleeds or die. Many medical experts told me that the number of deaths directly attributed to vitamin K — fewer than a dozen annually — are only part of the story. Hundreds of babies die every year from spontaneous bleeding in the brain. Some of those deaths, these experts said, likely are related to vitamin K deficiency bleeding. This has led doctors to call for better reporting and tracking.

2. What items accompanied the babies

Most of the autopsies didn’t just list medical findings. They contained summaries and descriptions, including a baby’s weight, length, hair and eye color. One of the details that struck me is what the babies came to the morgue with: a hospital band around the ankle, an unsoiled diaper, a blue blanket.

It reminded me of Tim O’Brien’s classic collection of linked short stories, “The Things They Carried,” about what soldiers take with them, both physically and emotionally. These items were a heartbreaking reminder that these babies were just that — babies who had yet to take their first step or kick their first soccer ball.

3. What the babies endured

The autopsies described, often in painstaking detail, what the babies endured. In this case of a 1-month-old from Alabama, the autopsy found that the baby had suffered subdural and subarachnoid hemorrhage, which are types of bleeds that occur in different areas immediately on top of the brain. The first, subdural, occurs when blood collects under one of the layers of tissue inside the skull that protect the brain. A subarachnoid bleed occurs in the space below a different layer. A cerebral edema is a type of swelling in the brain, and necrosis of the brain is the death of living brain tissue. The autopsy also described the cause as “hemorrhagic disease of newborn,” the previous name of vitamin K deficiency bleeding, which some clinicians still use.

Autopsies are official records and often are written as such. I reached out to pathologists and other doctors to help me understand and translate the medical terminology. As agonizing as it was, it was important to document. Our job as reporters is to bear witness to the truth, as distressing as it may be.

4. How hard doctors tried to save them

Some of the autopsies had a section titled “Evidence of Medical Intervention.” In it, the pathologists described what steps the doctors and nurses took to try to save the babies. Doctors inserted tubes into the babies’ airways, connected them to IVs, ordered blood transfusions. It’s an excruciating section to read because if things had gone differently, the baby may have survived.

In this case from Kentucky, the medical team attempted several lifesaving measures. Still, the baby coded twice. Doctors were able to resuscitate him the first time, but the second time, after about half an hour of trying to bring him back again, his parents finally told them they could stop.

5. How tiny the babies were when they died

The autopsies underscored just how preventable these deaths could have been. Seeing the tiny footprints of one of those babies in the autopsy records is a haunting reminder of that.

Parents frame their baby’s footprints to hang on the wall or tuck into keepsake boxes. The footprints often elicit a rush of happy memories.

But when those footprints appear in autopsy records, they transform into a tragic reminder of how tiny the babies were when they died.

The post Tiny Footprints, a Blue Blanket: What I Can’t Forget About the Babies Who Died of Vitamin K Deficiency appeared first on ProPublica.

When immigration agents pulled U.S. citizen Leonardo Garcia Venegas from his car this month and shackled him, he wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t scared. 

He was tired.

As ProPublica detailed last fall, he had already been detained twice before.

A year ago, Garcia Venegas was filming his brother’s arrest during a raid on their coastal Alabama construction site when he was tackled by agents, who ignored his pleas that he was a citizen. A few weeks later, an officer entered the home Garcia Venegas was building and refused to trust the now-26-year-old’s Alabama REAL ID, which only citizens and legal residents can get.

Videos of the incidents went viral. He appeared before Congress. He also has a suit pending against the Trump administration. 

But all the attention hasn’t changed much. On May 2, agents followed him back to his home. They again didn’t believe his claims of citizenship or the REAL ID he once again tried to show them.

Now, after that latest detention, Garcia Venegas sounds demoralized.

“Honestly, it feels terrible,”  Garcia Venegas told ProPublica. The mental burden of wondering when it will happen again weighs on him, bringing stress and depression. “I drive to work every morning and I know, at any moment, they could pull me over again.”

While immigration sweeps have receded from the headlines, Garcia Venegas’ most recent incident highlights how the mistaken detention of Americans has continued despite congressional inquiries and denials by senior immigration officials. 

Days after Garcia Venegas’ latest detention, masked agents tackled an American teen in the Bronx. When they finally realized he was a citizen, they left him in an unfamiliar neighborhood, bloody and bruised.

The same week both citizens were held, administration officials spoke on a panel at a border security conference in Phoenix and downplayed and denied that citizens have been mistakenly detained. Recordings of the conference were shared with ProPublica. 

“Since the start of this administration, we have not had any arrests of U.S. citizens for false identification, where we thought they were an illegal alien but they were actually a U.S. citizen,” said Matthew Elliston, a top Immigration and Customs Enforcement official. “That’s happened zero times.”

In another panel, the outgoing head of ICE, Todd Lyons, acknowledged immigration agents sometimes detained American citizens in cases where those citizens allegedly put “hands on law enforcement.” He also said the arrests operated as “a deterrent.” 

As ProPublica and others have reported, citizens — including Garcia Venegas — accused of assaulting officers have not always been charged with assault. Video footage has often also contradicted Department of Homeland Security claims that its agents were attacked.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a DHS spokesperson said in a statement that despite the shackles, Garcia Venegas was “NOT detained.” The statement continued: “ICE conducted a routine vehicle stop on a car registered to an illegal alien. After Venegas’ identity was established, he was released.” DHS also stated that the teen in the Bronx was “NOT arrested” but rather “temporarily detained.” 

The agency said it is “NOT arresting U.S. citizens by mistake. DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted.” 

But it’s not clear what, if any, intel agents have used in the repeated detention of Garcia Venegas. 

Garcia Venegas said agents and local law enforcement at the scene blamed him for his most recent arrest because he was driving a car registered to his brother.

“The officers told me that I risk being stopped again until I register the license plates in my own name,” Garcia Venegas said in a recent filing in his lawsuit. “But the officers could have known immediately that I was not my brother just by checking the REAL ID that was in my hand when they pulled me from the truck and tackled me to the ground.”

Garcia Venegas’ incidents bear the hallmarks of what have become known as “Kavanaugh stops.” Those are stops in which, Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh wrote in a case last fall, agents are allowed to stop people based in part on their “apparent ethnicity” (Garcia Venegas is Latino), job (he works in construction) and language (he primarily speaks Spanish).

Americans, Kavanaugh said, have no reason to worry. Agents will establish their citizenship and “promptly let the individual go.” (In a later case on another issue, Kavanaugh included a footnote that “officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity.”)

In his latest stop, Garcia Venegas was let go after about 15 minutes. But the fallout is far from over. 

Even though he was born in Florida and graduated high school in the same county where keeps getting detained, Garcia Venegas sometimes wonders if he should pick up and move to his family’s home in Mexico. 

“I just want to live in peace,” he said. 

Last fall, when Garcia Venegas filed his federal lawsuit against the government, he demanded more than compensation. He has insisted agents stop “unconstitutional” raids in his area. The government said in court that the immigration sweeps are “based on reasonable suspicion and probable cause and the Constitution.”

After Garcia Venegas was held for the third time, his lawyers rushed to update his lawsuit with details of his latest detention. But the government’s lawyers have argued that Garcia Venegas’ case still has no merit.

Garcia Venegas also filed a separate claim for damages with the government last fall. He received a denial from ICE in mid-April that contained no explanation. His third detention came roughly two weeks later.  

During the border security conference this month, the head of Customs and Border Protection,   Rodney Scott, was asked about ProPublica’s reporting on citizens’ detentions and how the agency is addressing them.  

“I’m not going to do anything to not arrest U.S. citizens,” he said. “Because we arrest criminals, period.”

The post Why Have Immigration Agents Detained This American Citizen Three Times? appeared first on ProPublica.

A top regulator for Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Division acknowledged in a private meeting with industry representatives that the amount of chemically converted hemp being illegally sold as marijuana is far greater than the agency has publicly disclosed.

The remarks confirmed testing by The Denver Gazette and ProPublica, which found signs of hemp in marijuana vapes sold at dispensaries, as well as reporting that regulators have discovered that some hemp-derived vapes were contaminated with a toxic chemical.

The virtual meeting, an audio recording of which was reviewed by the news organizations, was convened by members of Colorado Leads, a marijuana industry trade group, in March to discuss a problem they said had “metastasized” and now posed an “existential threat” to the nation’s first legal recreational marijuana market.

During the meeting, Kyle Lambert, the enforcement division’s deputy senior director, said the number of hemp-derived products is “larger than we can quantify.” He said the agency feared the prevalence of banned hemp was driving down the price of marijuana in the state and helping facilitate the diversion of high-grade marijuana out of Colorado and into the black market in other states.

Describing anomalies in the system the state uses to track marijuana production and sales, Lambert told the industry players that the extent of suspicious transactions in the system “would probably explode your minds.”

Two weeks after that meeting, the division sent a bulletin to the industry that it plans to crack down on companies that illegally sell cheaper and potentially hazardous hemp products as marijuana and that it would pursue emergency rules.

But it hasn’t done so yet, and other reform efforts failed during this year’s legislative session. Despite the regulators’ concerns, Colorado lawmakers, who weren’t at the March briefing, abandoned a bill that would have let voters decide whether to overhaul how marijuana products are tested for contaminants. (The Denver Gazette and ProPublica investigation found that other states have adopted stronger safety measures.)

Dominique Mendiola, the senior director of the Marijuana Enforcement Division, said in a statement that the agency has “consistently been proactive in pursuing the necessary rules, legislation and authority to combat this issue.”

“Lambert was speaking frankly to highlight the scale and complexity of the problem, as nominal-dollar transactions do not amount to definitive evidence of non-compliance,” Mendiola said. She added that investigations into such transactions require extensive resources and can take significant time.

The problem of companies substituting hemp for marijuana dates to 2018, when Congress legalized hemp, a close cousin of marijuana that has only trace amounts of THC, the psychoactive compound that makes people high. Federal lawmakers had hoped to support farmers while satisfying advocates who believe the high levels of the nonintoxicating compound CBD in hemp help with seizures, pain and sleep.

But hemp manufacturers quickly figured out how to convert CBD in hemp into THC through a process that involves toxic solvents, creating products that sometimes contain harmful chemicals and that can be more potent than products made from marijuana.

Colorado became one of the first states to ban that chemical conversion process and prohibit the sale of intoxicating hemp products to its residents.

But manufacturers were allowed to produce hemp products for export to other states, and some companies continue to rely on hemp within Colorado because it is cheaper than using marijuana to make the honey-colored THC distillate that goes into vapes and edibles, industry insiders say.

“This has become pervasive to where it’s, like, half the market,” said Jordan Wellington, a marijuana industry lobbyist and consultant, during the meeting with Lambert and a four-person investigative team that handles the agency’s most difficult cases. “We’re past Stage 1 cancer of it being, like, one spot. It’s fully metastasized.”

He said “rampant” use of hemp and other illicit material was putting pressure on honest manufacturers to cut corners to survive.

“It might be the most important and existential threat we’ve ever faced as an industry,” Wellington said.

When the state legalized recreational marijuana in 2012, it promised to establish a “seed-to-sale” system to track marijuana from the initial planting to the purchase of pot, vapes and other products in dispensaries. Close tracking would prevent marijuana grown in Colorado from being diverted to states where it remained illegal, supporters promised. Tracking also was supposed to assure consumers that they were buying safe, quality products.

But during the March video conference, Colorado regulators confided to industry lobbyists that the tool for rooting out fraud isn’t working.

“There’s a lot of really crap data in there that is hard for us to proactively go take action on,” Lambert said of the tracking system.

Extensive fraud in sales transaction reporting likely means the state has lost out on millions of dollars in marijuana excise tax revenue while businesses that follow the law have paid more than their fair share, industry insiders claim.

Unprocessed marijuana typically can fetch more than $600 a pound on the open market, depending on the category, but manufacturers often report to the state’s tracking system unrealistic nominal sales, often as low as a penny or dollar a pound, Lambert said.

When pressed by regulators, businesses typically defended those valuations, arguing that they had submitted placeholder numbers while they were still negotiating the price of products, Lambert said.

The division, which employs 26 investigators to monitor roughly 2,100 marijuana businesses, doesn’t have the resources to investigate all cases adequately, he said.

“We’d love to set up, you know, surveillance on places and track vehicles and see where they come from,” he said. “Did they come from a hemp plant? Did it come from here? Where did it go? We’re not resourced or equipped to do those types of investigations.”

In April, state Sens. Kyle Mullica, D-Thornton, and Marc Snyder, D–Colorado Springs, introduced the Cannabis Consumer Protection Act, which would have placed a ballot measure before voters this fall to overhaul how marijuana products are tested for contaminants, bringing Colorado in line with other states.

The ballot measure would have put private labs in charge of collecting marijuana samples for the testing required before products go to dispensaries. Currently, manufacturers can select their own samples. Regulators have caught companies gaming that system by substituting samples that were different from what they sold in stores or by treating the samples with chemicals.

The act also would have shifted oversight of safety and testing from the Marijuana Enforcement Division to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and funded a program in which regulators would randomly collect marijuana products from dispensaries to test them for contaminants.

But the legislation collapsed as different segments of the marijuana industry clashed over a provision tucked into the bill that would have increased taxes on products with higher amounts of THC. Manufacturers of highly concentrated THC products argued that the proposed potency tax would cut into their profits while lowering costs for manufacturers of edibles like gummies. Consumer safety groups also weren’t satisfied and wanted the bill to be tougher, pushing for a strict cap on potency like Vermont has.

Ultimately, the main industry trade group opposed it, and Gov. Jared Polis, through a spokesperson, said he feared the bill would cause too much regulation.

The bill died, though Snyder, the cosponsor of Senate Bill 26-161, said he plans to revisit the issue in the 2027 legislative session.

Snyder said he had hoped to give regulators more tools to tackle fraud.

“One of the problems in being first, like Colorado was, into the legalizing of cannabis,” he said, “is that you have to learn all the unintended consequences and unforeseen outcomes the hard way.”

The post In a Private Meeting, Colorado Marijuana Regulators Acknowledge the Extent of Illegal Hemp Sales appeared first on ProPublica.

Charles Mauldin remembers that his lungs felt like they were imploding when he breathed in tear gas more than 60 years ago. It was Sunday, March 7, 1965, when Mauldin, who was 17, joined hundreds of other demonstrators in a march from Selma, Alabama, to the state Capitol in Montgomery to demand voting rights for Black Americans.

Mauldin stood near the front of the line — just two rows behind John Lewis, who would go on to become a civil rights icon and U.S. representative — when the march attempted to cross Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. Law enforcement officers waited on the other side. They ordered the group to disperse. After about a minute and half, Mauldin said, police began to attack the demonstrators with billy clubs. They also launched tear gas into the crowd, which included teenagers like Mauldin. 

“We didn’t know what to expect,” Mauldin recalled. “I was fearful. We had to put ourselves in a place beyond fear.”

Now 78, Mauldin watches the news and sees videos and pictures of children being tear-gassed again — not by local police in 1965, but by federal immigration officers in 2026.   

“Having people like ICE treat people the way we were treated 61 years ago, it’s horrible,” Mauldin said. “It’s traumatizing for young kids, and I’m just starting to realize how traumatizing it is for me.”

We reached out to Mauldin because we recently published an investigation that found at least 79 children have been physically harmed by tear gas and pepper spray during President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts. The children include a 6-month-old baby who briefly stopped breathing, a 12-year-old boy who developed hives and a 17-year-old who suffered from a severe asthma attack. 

They were mostly going about their days when they were exposed to the tear gas or pepper spray. The 6-month-old was in his family’s car when a tear gas canister rolled underneath it, and the 12- and 17-year-olds were in their respective homes. 

There is no national standard governing the use of tear gas and pepper spray, leaving federal immigration officers with more latitude to deploy the weapons than some local police departments have. 

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

Read More

Kids Are Being Harmed by Tear Gas, Pepper Spray Under Trump. There Could Be Long-Term Consequences.

“DHS is taking appropriate and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers and the public from dangerous rioters,” a spokesperson for the agency said. “We remind the public that rioting is dangerous. Obstructing law enforcement is a federal crime and assaulting law enforcement is a federal crime and felony.”

We interviewed dozens of witnesses and people with firsthand knowledge of the harm, reviewed videos from bystanders and officer-worn cameras, and closely examined lawsuits. And we kept asking experts: Have children ever been harmed by tear gas or pepper spray on the scale we’re seeing now? Is this unprecedented? 

We quickly realized there is no single entity that tracks every instance when law enforcement officers use tear gas or pepper spray. There is no requirement to identify or follow up with the people who were harmed. We also learned that there isn’t much research on the long-term consequences of exposure to these weapons.

Some historians we spoke with suggested the Civil Rights Movement as a point of comparison. So, we turned to Mauldin to help us understand how being tear-gassed as a teenager during that time has affected him.

As police began beating people around him, Mauldin said, he remembers Lewis being struck over the head with a club. 

“I’ll never forget the sound of his head being cracked,” he recalled. 

Then, troopers turned to tear gas. 

“What tear gas does, it makes your skin burn, it forces you to run away from it — it makes your lungs seem to implode,” Mauldin continued. 

He got as low to the ground as possible. Then, he said, he and others ran to the river and  eventually made their way back to the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church. 

There was “nothing to do unless you can escape it,” Mauldin said. “It’s a pretty harrowing experience, especially for kids.”

In the years after Mauldin was tear gassed, he was diagnosed with asthma. There’s no research that shows tear gas as the cause of an asthma diagnosis, but it’s technically possible since the chemicals can cause lung injury, Sven Jordt, a professor at Duke University School of Medicine who’s an expert on tear gas, told ProPublica. In one of the court declarations we read as part of our reporting, the mother of the 12-year-old who broke out in hives said her son also  developed “chronic respiratory issues” and now needed an inhaler after months of breathing in tear gas that seeped into their home. The family lives near an ICE facility in Portland, Oregon, where federal officers routinely shot chemical munitions at protesters. 

Another parent living near an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, told us she’s taken her 7-year-old daughter to urgent care about five times since last fall, when officers repeatedly used tear gas against protesters. “She’s been complaining about her throat,” the mother said of her daughter. “It gets to the point she can’t breathe.”

For Mauldin, who said he is the last living person from the front of the line on that Sunday in 1965, being tear-gassed at a young age left an emotional toll — one he said he is still coming to terms with.

Experts we spoke with emphasized how important it is for children who were recently tear-gassed or pepper-sprayed to seek help for their mental health. That includes children who were not only directly harmed by these chemicals but also those who saw other people hurt by law enforcement, said Dr. Sarita Chung of Boston Children’s Hospital, who studies pediatric disaster preparedness and response. “Without support, this could be a lifelong burden.”

At first, children may struggle to sleep or eat, or have difficulty concentrating after experiencing a traumatic event, said Dr. Andrew Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics. That’s especially true for younger children who can’t grasp what’s happening, he said. These reactions may dissipate over time, but the core event may stick with a child for much longer: “Some of them will remember this for a very, very, very long time.” 

Mauldin only recently began sharing his experience about what happened at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, an event of police brutality that became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Processing that trauma began after visiting the bridge some years ago with historians, who Mauldin said helped get him to open up memories and emotions he had suppressed. 

“If you don’t realize it, and you don’t get help with it … it’ll limit your experience to grow and be the best that you can be,” Mauldin said. “You have to be able to kill a part of yourself to be able to sustain that trauma.”

The post At 17, He Was Tear-Gassed at Selma. At 78, He’s Watching Kids Tear-Gassed During Trump’s Deportation Campaign. appeared first on ProPublica.

For a year, White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka promoted the national strategy he was drafting, saying he was pouring his “life’s work” into a “massive” blueprint that would overhaul the U.S. approach to combating terrorist threats.

The finished product, released May 6 after months of delays, is a 16-page, typo-sprinkled document that ranks threats based on politics rather than intelligence assessments, according to several current and former counterterrorism officials and threat analysts.

Islamist militant groups, the perennial top concern, now come second to Latin American drug cartels. The violent far right, which the FBI has repeatedly called the leading domestic threat, doesn’t merit a mention. Meanwhile, militant leftists, a small subset of extremist violence in the United States, are portrayed as a threat on par with global terrorist networks such as al-Qaida.

“A new type of domestic terrorism has emerged,” the document says, “driven by violent extremists who have adopted ideologies antithetical to freedom and the American way of life.”

Gorka’s strategy — the subject of a recent ProPublica report — lavishes praise on President Donald Trump’s national security agenda but offers few details about plans to tackle the administration’s top priorities: Latin American “narcoterrorists,” Islamist militant groups, and violent leftist antifascists and anarchists.

Gorka, who coordinates White House counterterrorism policy at the National Security Council, has called the document a “return to common sense” after a 2021 strategy by President Joe Biden centered on mostly far-right domestic threats. The new strategy mentions Biden seven times.

“What it tells me is that this administration is not paying attention to the data, to what our allies are seeing globally, or to where the biggest threats of violence come from or how they might be prevented,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University.

Republican leaders often portrayed Biden’s focus on the violent far right as the Democrats cracking down on conservative organizing. That idea fueled Trump’s blanket pardon of more than 1,500 defendants, including those who attacked police, in the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol.

Gorka did not reply to a request for comment. The White House, asked about criticisms of the plan, referred to a number of Gorka’s public statements touting it. Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, added in an email, “President Trump is crushing terrorist threats to the United States and will never let cartels, Jihadists, or the governments who support them plot against our citizens with impunity.”

Here are five notable aspects of the plan, compiled from interviews with counterterrorism personnel and researchers’ published critiques:

1. It’s about Trump, not terrorism.

The counterterrorism strategy begins with a signed foreword by Trump, who sets the tone by claiming credit for ending “four years of weakness, failure, surrender, and humiliation under the last administration.”

Analysts say the rest of the strategy often reads like a valentine rather than a sober national security communique. Under Trump’s leadership, it states, “America is again the world’s most powerful nation, with the largest economy in history, the most advanced technologies, and the bravest and most skilled warfighters the world has ever seen.”

The strategy’s top threat categories align with the president’s pet issues, including the villainizing of Democrats and leftist dissent. The language also echoes debunked right-wing conspiracy theories the president has shared about a stolen election, a purported genocide of Christians and existential threats to Western civilization by what the strategy calls “alien cultures.” One section refers to Christians as “the most persecuted people on Earth.”

“This was once a serious document written by serious people” across Democratic and Republican presidencies, veteran terrorism analyst and former Obama administration official Juliette Kayyem lamented on X. “Now it reads like a partisan screed.”

2. Data counter the priorities.

Analysts say the most obvious hole is the omission of violent far-right movements. Federal authorities have said for years that neo-Nazi and anti-government militia groups pose the most active and lethal domestic threats, though recently authorities have noted increases in leftist and mixed-motive attacks.

For example, on Sept. 10, the same day conservative youth leader Charlie Kirk was assassinated at an outdoor event in Utah, a 16-year-old gunman who was steeped in online forums for white supremacy and mass-shooter fandom opened fire at a Colorado high school, critically wounding two students before killing himself.

The strategy is concerned only with the kind of violent extremism the White House ascribes to Kirk’s alleged shooter, who is labeled a violent left-wing “radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.” Terrorism analysts say the attack motives do not appear so clear-cut; the suspect, who has yet to go to trial, reportedly comes from a Republican family but had shifted politically and had expressed opposition to the “hatred” he said Kirk spread.

Just last week, a lawsuit related to a deadly shooting last year at Florida State University revealed that the gunman had used ChatGPT to explore “his interests in Hitler, Nazis, fascism” and other far-right topics.

In a social media post, Jacob Ware, a terrorism researcher who has written extensively about the militant right, called the case a “friendly reminder that the #Trump administration’s new United States Counterterrorism Strategy does not mention far-right violent extremism.”

3. Policies undermine strategy.

Several of the White House’s stated counterterrorism objectives conflict with the president’s own actions, analysts say.

For one, the pledge of stepped-up efforts to thwart plots doesn’t factor in the diminished capacity of federal agencies since Trump slashed the national security workforce last year and diverted counterterrorism resources to his mass deportation campaign.

Terrorism analyst Colin Clarke, executive director of the security-focused Soufan Center and a Gorka critic, summarized the document as “highly partisan & mostly incoherent.”

It touts the seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a U.S. military operation as the important capture of a “narco-terrorist outlaw.” But weeks before the Maduro raid, Trump had granted a pardon to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving 45 years for trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.

Another U.S. goal is to aggressively counter anti-American propaganda by Islamist extremist groups, which the administration says have been driven from strongholds in the Middle East and are “exploiting the ungoverned spaces” across Africa. Places where “a resurgent terror threat is the reality,” according to the strategy, include West Africa, the Sahel region, Sudan and Somalia.

Yet efforts to counter anti-American messaging are undermined by increased U.S. airstrikes with civilian casualties, particularly in Somalia and Yemen, and the cutoff of humanitarian programs across the continent, conflict monitors say. U.S. aid has been a lifeline for communities whose desperation can be exploited by militant recruiters.

The strategy calls for a “light military footprint” in Africa, with the expectation that African leaders will take on a greater share of counterterrorism work. But Trump’s halting of foreign aid hobbled regional counterterrorism programs. Conflict monitors, now watching with alarm as Islamist militants capture territory and stage attacks in Mali, urge the administration to pay closer attention to the restive Sahel region and other hot spots.

“Terrorists are on the verge of recreating a new caliphate sanctuary that could serve as an incubator for attacks against the US homeland and interests abroad,” Alex Plitsas, a security analyst and former Obama-era Pentagon official, wrote this month after visiting U.S. Africa Command.

“The result is a warning for Washington: when the United States and its partners step back, jihadist groups and adversarial powers fill the space,” Plitsas wrote.

The strategy also disparages “failed ‘forever war’ policies” at a time Trump’s base is wrestling with his decision to launch the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism.

In a call with reporters after his plan was released, Gorka got defensive when asked how the Iran operation was not a “forever war” that could endanger Americans. He called critics “testicularly challenged.”

Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, drew a distinction: “Unlike the ‘forever wars’ of the past with vague objectives and ever-expanding timelines, President Trump is leading the most transparent administration in history, and he kept Americans apprised of the scope and defined objectives for Operation Epic Fury.”

4. Successes are exaggerated.

Trump’s preface opens by celebrating counterterrorism achievements that analysts describe as inflated or lacking in nuance.

One example is the claim that, within 43 days of Trump’s return to office, the U.S. had apprehended “the terrorist mastermind” of the deadly Abbey Gate attack in Kabul. In 2021, a suicide bomber detonated in a crowd of civilians outside an airport gate during the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, killing more than 150 Afghans and 13 American service members.

In March, the Justice Department hailed the arrest of Afghan national Mohammad Sharifullah, an Islamist militant it said had “orchestrated” the attack. Gorka has publicly recounted the dramatic scene of waiting on the tarmac in the cold at 3 a.m., alongside several Cabinet members, to welcome the plane carrying the handcuffed “man who was responsible for the murder, the massacre.”

Last month, just before Gorka’s strategy was released, a federal jury dealt a blow to the “mastermind” narrative by returning a mixed verdict. Sharifullah was convicted of aiding the terrorist group known as Islamic State Khorasan, but the jury deadlocked on whether there was sufficient evidence to hold him responsible for the Abbey Gate deaths. The difference shapes how much time Sharifullah could spend behind bars — the more serious charge was eligible for a life sentence.

A Justice Department news release about the conviction (but not the deadlock) was scrubbed of references to Sharifullah as an orchestrator and did not use the “mastermind” language that appeared days later in the White House strategy.

Analysts also expressed skepticism about the blueprint’s claim that “hundreds of Jihadist terrorists in multiple countries” had been killed in recent U.S. counterterrorism operations. The administration releases virtually no details about the identities of those targeted or the circumstances of their deaths. Humanitarian groups say they fear the operations could be causing uncounted civilian casualties.

5. Opponents are targeted.

Rights watchdogs say the strategy hints at ways Trump administration officials will attempt to build terrorism cases against U.S. leftist and Muslim activists through nebulous or nonexistent ties to transnational militant movements.

A link to a foreign entity formally designated as a terrorist group opens the door for government surveillance and potential charges related to providing aid — “material support” in legal jargon — to a foreign terrorist organization.

Analysts say that’s why the Trump administration has pursued designations targeting leftist militant groups in Europe under the label of antifa, as well as some branches of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood is a century-old Islamist group that renounced violence in the 1970s, though spinoffs such as Hamas remain active and on the U.S. blacklist. Republicans have long tried to portray U.S.-based Muslim advocacy groups as a foothold for the Brotherhood.

The document also calls for the rapid “neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” Researchers called the terms ill-defined and said they aren’t used in international counterterrorism work.

Miller-Idriss’ overarching concern about the Trump counterterrorism doctrine: “How damaging could it be? Both in the things it’s ignoring and the things that it’s emphasizing.”

The post Counterterrorism Czar’s Blueprint Targets Leftists, Ignores Far-Right Violence and Heaps Praise on Trump appeared first on ProPublica.

Dana Gibbon was 18 weeks pregnant with her first baby when her OB-GYN told her at an appointment that she wouldn’t be her doctor anymore.

OB-GYN services were ending at the clinic in Corvallis, a college town of 60,000 in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The doctor said all of the Corvallis Clinic’s OB-GYNs were resigning. 

“We have appreciated the opportunity to participate in your care and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause,” the clinic said in a subsequent letter to patients.

The closure of the Corvallis OB-GYN practice came two years after a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest health insurance company, bought the clinic. The subsidiary, Optum Oregon, cited a national shortage of physicians that made it hard to replace doctors who left and increased the workload for those who remained.

Gibbon frantically looked for another doctor. Friends recommended two other obstetrics practices, but both had closed. Gibbon settled on a small hospital close to home with four dedicated maternity beds — all of which were full when she was due to deliver in April, delaying her induction three times. Her healthy baby boy was eventually born on April 29 by cesarean section, a procedure she’d hoped to avoid.

“It’s impossible not to wonder if things may have gone differently if there had been more labor and delivery beds in the area,” she said.

Corvallis patients like Gibbon faced this disruption despite a unique Oregon law intended to prevent it.

In 2021, the state became the first in the country to give its state health department the broad power to block acquisitions and mergers of hospitals, hospices and medical practices, an effort to counteract the consolidation that research shows is cutting competition and driving up costs nationwide.

Lawmakers said Oregon’s novel oversight power would stop multibillion-dollar deals from reducing care and increasing costs. State regulators got the authority to reject transactions or to add conditions and levy fines if companies disregarded them. The law was hailed as a national model.

Five years later, Oregon has not formally blocked a single transaction or issued any fines. While the new oversight is credited with leading to the withdrawal of two high-profile transactions — a merger of two Portland-area hospital systems and the acquisition of a nonprofit that provides Medicaid benefits to half a million Oregonians — some people who supported the law say it has not been nearly as effective as hoped.

Dr. John Santa, a retired physician and former member of the Oregon Health Policy Board, which oversees the state agency responsible for implementing the new law, said his interactions with the program were “so disappointing and fell so short of what I expected. I never imagined it would perform as poorly as it has.”

Of the nine healthcare deals for which regulators have done follow-up reviews, at least three had outcomes the law was meant to forestall, ProPublica’s examination of state records found. 

UnitedHealth Group acquired a home health provider, LHC Group, for $5.4 billion in 2023. It shuttered a rural hospice agency in Central Oregon two months later, funneling staff and patients to a location nearly 30 miles away. The state later said the move raised concerns about a potential reduction in access. A UnitedHealth spokesperson said the closure did not reduce services because patients and staff were reassigned and it continued to serve the same areas.

After Amazon bought One Medical for $3.9 billion that same year, it closed the group’s downtown Portland practice while cutting $100 million in operating expenses nationwide. It saw a drop in Oregon patient satisfaction scores, as measured by an outside group, a state review noted. Amazon declined to comment on the One Medical deal.

Oregon in 2022 approved the acquisition of a hospice provider by a private equity firm, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. The firm told regulators that it wouldn’t change locations or staffing. Oregon took the company at its word — then watched it close a Salem hospice after the deal closed. 

In a follow-up report, the state noted the closure and alluded to “some changes” in Oregon staffing; it would not disclose whether this referred to adding employees or cutting them, saying the companies involved had designated the information confidential.

A spokesperson for Clayton, Dubilier & Rice didn’t address the closure but said in a statement that its hospice acquisition was “premised on the company delivering high-quality care.” The firm’s hospice providers in 2024 and 2025 received higher ratings than any other national provider in standardized consumer surveys, the spokesperson said, and the company improved its ratio of nurses to patients by 5.5% over its ownership period.

Clare Pierce-Wrobel, the health policy and analytics director for Oregon’s health department, the Oregon Health Authority, acknowledged that the state held some mergers to a lower standard while the program was just getting started. 

“I think if those notices were received when the program was fully up and running, there may have been a different result,” she said.

Dr. Nicole Kruppa had a thriving OB-GYN practice at the Corvallis Clinic before it was taken over by Optum. She told ProPublica that she quit after the sale because her workload grew unsustainable. She said burnout became so intense that she worried she would either make a medical mistake or get in a late-night car accident while driving to deliver a baby.

Optum didn’t fill vacancies when medical staff went out on planned leave, she said. Annual medical exams had to be postponed so the remaining OB-GYN staff could attend to emergencies, she said. 

“I felt I could no longer provide my patients the care that they deserved,” Kruppa said.

A UnitedHealth spokesperson, Tyler Mason, said Optum helped keep the Corvallis Clinic’s doors open. “Our focus has been stabilizing practices, expanding access, and strengthening clinical services to preserve local care, maintain critical services and ensure patients can continue receiving the care they depend on close to home,” Mason said.

When Oregon lawmakers created the merger and acquisition oversight program in 2021, they said they weren’t trying to stop every healthcare deal — just to ensure that those transactions made sense.

Consolidation in the healthcare industry is rife. About 50% of the country’s doctors were employed by a hospital system in 2024, research has shown, up from less than 30% in 2012. As competition narrows, studies show, prices can increase, the quality of care can decline and treatment can be harder to access, especially in rural areas.

Following Oregon’s example, five states last year approved laws that expanded their authorities over healthcare consolidation. One of them, Maine, adopted a bill this April that requires state review and approval of the sale of healthcare facilities when private equity firms are involved. New Mexico in 2024 also adopted a bill similar to Oregon’s.

Pierce-Wrobel, the health authority official, said Oregon is clearly a national leader. “People in Oregon are lucky to have a program like this in place,” she said. 

“The ability to actually see how these decisions are made and how it’s actually impacting your healthcare before it happens is novel and addresses a real, pressing issue,” she said, “which is affordability in healthcare, which impacts all of us.”

Although Oregon hasn’t blocked any of the 65 transactions it has evaluated, it has imposed conditions on 15. It has required doctors to continue serving patients covered by Medicare, the federal insurance program for seniors and the disabled. It has required reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare to continue and ordered detailed annual reporting.

The state also has required a deeper six-month review in seven cases, three of which are still underway. The other four deals were withdrawn, notably: the proposed merger of Oregon Health & Science University and Legacy Health, two major Portland-area hospital systems; and a proposed merger involving CareOregon, which administers Medicaid plans for more than 500,000 low-income people. Facing a public outcry, the healthcare organizations canceled their deals.

Dr. Jane Zhu, a primary care physician and associate professor of medicine at Oregon Health & Science University who studies healthcare access, said programs like Oregon’s add sorely needed transparency to medical dealmaking. 

But they “don’t necessarily change the equation” when it comes to the trend toward consolidation, she said in an email. Especially in rural areas, the fact remains that “regulators can approve the merger and prices go up and consolidation worsens, or they can block a merger and maybe there’s an immediate effect on the clinic’s solvency or sustainability.”

According to Larry Kirsch, a health economist, one problem is that Oregon regulators have typically chosen the fastest option for reviewing acquisitions allowed under the law, 30 days. Kirsch said that’s not enough time to adequately study what a transaction will do to medical care.

“I was gobsmacked by how superficial, how inconclusive, how nonrobust the investigation was,” said Kirsch, who has examined dozens of Oregon’s oversight reviews. “Some of them were so outrageous, you’d have to say that their eyes were totally closed.”

Pierce-Wrobel said Oregon welcomes “public input to inform our review of individual transactions — as well as opportunities to improve how we implement this new program — in order to advance Oregon’s goals of health equity, lower costs, increased access and better care. That said, the program must operate within its statutory limits.”

Nowhere are the limitations of the review process more evident than in the city of Corvallis, home to both Oregon State University and the Corvallis Clinic, which had operated as an independent, doctor-owned practice since 1947. 

Perhaps ironically, one of the clinic’s executives testified against the law in 2021 on behalf of the Oregon Independent Medical Coalition, a lobbying group for private practices. Scott Shollenbarger said that the group’s members were committed to remaining independent.

“We passionately believe that healthcare is best delivered in an independent business model that is owned and governed by the owners of the business that also are responsible for the delivery of medical services to our respective populations,” he wrote at the time.

But by 2023, the clinic’s finances had deteriorated and it struck a deal to be acquired by Optum Oregon. Kruppa, the former Corvallis employee and shareholder, said the clinic was losing up to $1 million a month at the time.

With hundreds writing to the state to oppose the acquisition, regulators developed conditions to protect patients. They drew up requirements for the new owner to preserve existing clinical programs and accept an independent monitor to ensure compliance.

As Oregon reviewed the deal, the clinic’s finances worsened, Kruppa told ProPublica. Doctors went without paychecks in the month before the deal went through, she said, in order to keep the clinic’s doors open until the transaction was approved.

Then a Russian-linked ransomware hack targeted Change Healthcare, a UnitedHealth subsidiary that provides payment and claims processing to hospitals and doctors’ offices. The attack disrupted medical practices across the country, including the Corvallis Clinic. Kruppa said the clinic was preparing for a bankruptcy filing, worried that the hack would further delay closing the deal.

UnitedHealth said after the hack that it extended $9 billion in no-interest loans to hospitals and medical practices nationwide. In testimony to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, then-CEO Andrew Witty said: “I want this committee and the American public to know that the people of UnitedHealth Group will not rest — I will not rest — until we fix this.” 

Two weeks after the hack, the clinic told the state it was at risk of going under and asked for an emergency exemption from the ongoing review of the sale. Clinic attorneys assured the state the transaction was “expected to maintain essential services at or above current levels.” By creating a more stable operation, they wrote, the sale would also “improve the Clinic’s ability to attract and retain high-quality candidates for open positions.”

Oregon’s oversight program agreed to dispense with its review — the only exemption it has granted — in just five days. The state jettisoned the guardrails it proposed previously.

Pierce-Wrobel said the state cannot apply conditions to emergency requests that meet exemption criteria specified in the statute, nor can it review the deals afterward to measure their impacts.

“I understand and hear the criticism, but we are responsible for implementing the law that established this program, and that is what was done,” she said.

A UnitedHealth spokesperson said the company extended a zero-interest loan to the Corvallis Clinic within three weeks of the hack. 

The practice was “facing serious operational and financial challenges that put patient access at risk” before the hack, the spokesperson said. Since the purchase, “we’ve been working to stabilize practices, recruit clinicians, expand services and improve systems to help ensure patients continue to get the care they need.”

The Corvallis Clinic’s changes became apparent soon after the sale. 

ProPublica spoke to more than 10 current or former patients. They described sometimes extensive disruptions to their care after the practice was sold: procedures delayed, longer waits for appointments and a steady stream of doctors leaving.

One woman said her scheduled pap smear at the Corvallis Clinic was delayed more than six months.

Another said she lost a doctor she trusted so deeply to deal sensitively with her history of trauma that she had no desire to find another doctor, even though she’s supposed to get frequent cancer screenings.

Rebecca Geier, 67, said she has lost four doctors at the clinic in the last year.

“It wasn’t just an inconvenience, it was disruptive to my continued care with these doctors,” she told ProPublica in an email. “The dreaded letters from Optum informing me that my doctor had left or was soon leaving the clinic just kept coming, one after another.”

Three doctors at Mid-Valley Gastroenterology, a local practice, wrote to state regulators in March 2025 to say that two of the Corvallis Clinic’s gastroenterologists had withdrawn from a pool of area physicians who handled on-call care for emergencies at a major regional hospital system. They said Optum made the specialists opt out to save money.

Optum “prioritized corporate profit and physician convenience over the well-being of both the patients they serve and the other medical professionals they work alongside,” the doctors wrote.

Mason, the UnitedHealth spokesperson, said Optum did not interfere with or direct the physicians’ decisions. “Physicians make their own decisions about participating in on-call coverage based on what they can reasonably manage alongside caring for their patients,” Mason said.

If Oregon hadn’t exempted the transaction from its oversight, it’s the type of impact that would have faced regulatory scrutiny during a follow-up review.

The state convened a public forum about the deal, hearing testimony about what had happened. But regulators said they couldn’t investigate any further.

The post A Unique Oregon Law Allows It to Block Healthcare Deals. In Five Years, the State Hasn’t Done So Once. appeared first on ProPublica.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Student Complaints Start Piling Up 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Agan Returned to the Classroom 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Middle School Student Details Unwanted Touching 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How We Reported This Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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