Every Tuesday, almost like clockwork, the U.S. Department of Education would update a public list of schools and colleges it was investigating for possible violations of students’ civil rights.

Every Tuesday, that is, until Jan. 14, 2025, six days before President Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term. Today, that online list remains as it was that week before inauguration: frozen in time.

My colleagues Jodi Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards, both longtime education reporters, used that list regularly in their work. “You would get a call or a tip about a school district, and you would go and look up the school district to see if it was under investigation,” Cohen told me recently.

The data also allowed the public to spot patterns in what types of investigations were being opened and where, Smith Richards said. 

For decades, the Office for Civil Rights has worked to uphold students’ constitutional rights against discrimination based on disability, race, national origin and gender. Now, without a publicly accessible way to track the office’s investigations, journalists, education watchdogs and parents could be left in the dark. 

Early last year, Cohen and Smith Richards reached out to sources inside the Department of Education. They learned the department had significantly cut back its efforts to investigate some types of discrimination in schools. They published a story about how the department, under the Trump administration, is now focused on investigations relating to curbing antisemitism, ending participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports and combating alleged discrimination against white students. Complaints about transgender students playing sports and using girls’ bathrooms at school had been fast-tracked while cases of racial harassment of Black students last year were ignored.

Throughout last year, the reporters asked the new Department of Education leadership for updates on investigations. And they filed Freedom of Information Act requests, seeking records regarding new investigations and those related to agreements with universities and school districts that detailed their plans to stay in compliance with federal anti-discrimination law. They also requested communications with specific private groups.

Although the department selectively sends press releases about some cases, the work mostly remains hidden. We have no definitive way of knowing which types of civil rights complaints it is prioritizing.

By late February 2026 — a year after we published our first story about the issue and after asking repeatedly for information — the department had failed to produce a single record. ProPublica sued. 

The Education Department asked a judge this month to dismiss the case. It said in a court filing that it was still evaluating the reporters’ requests and searching for “potentially responsive” records.

Suing government agencies is not a first choice for most reporters and news organizations. It’s costly, time consuming and may not produce records for months or even years — longer than most reporters spend on a story or project.

I know this firsthand. ProPublica filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on my behalf in 2016 seeking records related to the agency’s handling of Agent Orange, a defoliant used during the Vietnam War. We had written articles about how veterans believed the department had mishandled claims related to health issues they and their offspring faced. We got records in dribs and drabs over years, but the lawsuit didn’t come to a close until 2021, well after our reporting on the topic had tapered off.

Over the years, ProPublica also has sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services over their failure to turn over records under FOIA. And that’s just a partial list. We recently won a suit against the U.S. Navy seeking access to military court records it was blocking.

Prying records from government agencies has been challenging for a long time, in both Democratic and Republican administrations. But we do it because these records belong to us, the public. And they’re a critical tool for the journalism we do to expose abuses of power.

One particular challenge journalists face today is that layoffs across the federal government under Trump have hit FOIA offices particularly hard. And FOIA requests appear to be going into what seems like a black hole. Regardless, we don’t intend to back down. We will continue to fight for data and information to which we believe the public is entitled, and we are fortunate to have outstanding lawyers and outside law firms ready to help us. 

I asked Cohen and Smith Richards why the Department of Education data was so important. Smith Richards gave me a concrete example: The department has been terminating civil rights resolution agreements with schools and other educational institutions, but it sometimes hasn’t told the public it has done so. For example, the department had ruled in 2024 that the bullying of a Washington sixth grader was based on race and sex, and amounted to a civil rights violation. The school district then entered into an agreement with the department to protect students from sex- and race-based discrimination. But this year, the department ended the agreement. And though it did announce the change via press release, there’s no indication in its online database that the original settlement is no longer in force. In many cases, there are no press releases, either.

So how would the public even find out about situations like this, I asked. “Either a school district has raised their hand and said the federal government has terminated its resolution agreement,” Smith Richards said, “or it’s gotten whispered to somebody.”

How often has this happened? It’s almost impossible to know the full scope. “There’s not some sort of transparent process here,” Smith Richards said.

The loss of data goes beyond new investigations and resolution agreements. For example, through the department’s Civil Rights Data Collection, Cohen and Smith Richards were able to determine that a special-education district in Illinois had the highest rate of student arrests of any school in the country. Knowing this allowed them to dig deeper into what was causing the high arrest rate. They ultimately published an investigation that also found that in one school, more than half of its students were arrested during the 2017-18 academic year.

But the most recent data on the department’s website is from 2020-21, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. And given that the Trump administration plans to shut down the Department of Education, it’s unclear if future data will be released.

Cohen and Smith Richards continue to seek information from the Education Department. In late March, they filed another FOIA request for what they described as “very basic information.” 

The Education Department acknowledged receiving the request. Here’s roughly when it told them to expect a response: 262 BUSINESS DAYS. 

Until then, we’ll keep at it.

The post Why We Are Suing the Department of Education appeared first on ProPublica.

When Texas dedicated $22 million to host the 2017 Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons, state officials expected a return on their investment.

But a state analysis after the Patriots’ thrilling comeback win said it was “impossible” to tell if Texas taxpayers broke even on their investments. 

If anything, Texas came up $14 million short, according to a breakdown of tax revenues in the same analysis.

Texas taxpayers likely will be on the hook again when Houston and Dallas welcome the FIFA World Cup this June and July. The cities are among 11 in the U.S. that have agreed to shoulder hundreds of millions of dollars in costs for the soccer tournament, subsidizing a World Cup expected to generate $11 billion in profits for FIFA. 

Host cities and their local organizing committees will pay for security at the matches, cover the cost of retrofitting their stadiums to better accommodate soccer and operate fan festivals in addition to the main matches. Originally, they were supposed to pay to transport FIFA officials to all matches, as well, though that requirement has been waived, according to Houston organizers.

The cities get little tangible benefit in return. They do not see a slice of game-day revenues from ticket sales, concessions and merchandise, or parking. Even selling tickets or suites in exchange for corporate sponsorships — usually a key revenue generator for local organizers — was restricted by FIFA this year. 

Cities had to agree to FIFA’s demands before the U.S., Mexico and Canada even submitted their bid in 2017 to host the World Cup, and many of those host city contracts remain secret. Now, as the event nears, some cities are questioning whether those agreements will leave them paying for more than they get in return. 

“Everybody signed an agreement that was very, very one-sided,” said Alan Rothenberg, who is on the Los Angeles host committee for the 2026 World Cup and was the president of U.S. Soccer the last time the country hosted the tournament in 1994.

Then, some host cities would get a slice of game-day revenues, such as a share of the money made from selling food and drinks at the matches. U.S. Soccer also covered the bill for security at the games and other organizing expenses, Rothenberg said. That helped cities take in more money than they spent, making hosting a more attractive endeavor.

This time around, the agreement was so lopsided that at least one city, Chicago, withdrew during the bidding. And in some cities that moved forward, concerns have grown as the matches near. Officials in Foxborough, Massachusetts, threatened in February to withhold permits for the matches unless FIFA or the owner of the Patriots committed to paying $7.8 million in security costs ahead of time. Foxborough ultimately approved the permits after local World Cup organizers agreed to pay the bill in advance.

“At this point, I think a lot of people are looking at Chicago and thinking they were the smart ones,” Rothenberg said. “They looked at the terms of the agreement and said, ‘No, thanks.’ I don’t think anybody in the 11 host cities thought it would be as tough as it seems to be.”

FIFA did not respond to questions about those criticisms. Instead, it provided a written response stating that it is working closely with its host sponsors and expects cities to benefit.

“The FIFA World Cup 2026 is projected to generate significant economic activity across Canada, Mexico and the United States, spanning tourism, hospitality, employment and long-term global visibility,” said Jhamie Chin, a FIFA spokesperson.

The host cities use external nonprofits to organize and run the tournament’s logistics and raise money for the costs of hosting. Chris Canetti, who runs Houston’s host committee, said the city’s organizers have been able to overcome any challenges the contract has presented. 

“This event is going to have a substantial economic impact on our region, from hundreds of thousands of visitors coming through,” Canetti said. “We’re making an investment in that. I think this is good for our community at the end of the day.”   

The Houston Chronicle sought to better understand the agreements cities made with FIFA and their implications for taxpayers by reviewing records from all U.S. host cities. Most refused to hand over the contracts, including Houston, which argued that releasing the documents would undercut its ability to negotiate for future events; Dallas did not oppose the release but sent the request to the Texas attorney general to allow third parties to object if they wanted. 

The two cities asked the Texas attorney general for permission to keep them out of the public’s view. The attorney general’s office ruled that Houston and Dallas must release their contracts, though they were allowed to redact key financial figures, including how much FIFA is paying to rent stadiums for the event.

The Chronicle reviewed the two Texas contracts, along with those of four other host sites — Kansas City, New York/New Jersey, Philadelphia and Seattle — that made their agreements available. Together, the contracts show that almost all of the costs for organizing the tournament fall on the cities, whose ability to collect revenue is limited.

Those agreements, according to Rothenberg and other experts, lock host cities out of prospective revenues more than ever, leaving FIFA with a larger share of the revenue.

Texas Taxpayers on the Hook

In Houston, at least, most of the organizing costs are not expected to be borne by local governments. 

“The host committee holds the contract with FIFA. We are 100% responsible for finding the funding to cover all of those expenses, and none of that comes from the city or the county,” Canetti said about the agreements.

The contracts do not make clear who is on the hook if the host committee cannot cover the costs. Canetti said he is confident Houston’s committee will have more money than it needs for the expenses, and any surplus funds would be donated to charitable efforts. The host committee that Canetti runs uses a mix of revenue generated from corporate sponsorships, the money FIFA pays to rent NRG Stadium and subsidies from state and federal governments.

That includes $65 million from the federal government to help Houston pay for security, part of a broader $625 million investment by American taxpayers in the World Cup.

The committee also expects to draw tens of millions of dollars from Texas’ Major Events Reimbursement Program, an offshoot of the state’s Event Trust Funds established in 1999 when Texas was vying to host the Olympics. Canetti did not reveal the precise amount Houston believes it will receive, and the Chronicle is still waiting for the governor’s office to respond to records requests for its communications with the committee.

The reimbursement fund was key to ensuring Houston did not lose money when it hosted the Super Bowl. It is expected to be a difference-maker again in covering World Cup costs, helping ensure Houston and Dallas are in a better position than other host cities that don’t receive state money. But it means Texas taxpayers bear a significant share of the costs.

Kelly Dowe, the city’s finance director when it hosted the Super Bowl in 2017, assumed the city would be left with the costs. He was surprised when the host committee for that event effectively paid the full bill, in large part with $22 million in state funds. But these big events, while a boon to specific industries like hotels, bars and restaurants, are hardly a driver in a city’s budget.

“It doesn’t make money for the city, per se,” Dowe said. “You’re glad to break even.”

Texas has made available about $263 million since 2015 to help cities cover the costs of dozens of events, subsidizing everything from a Super Bowl to Junior Olympics and cutting horse competitions. But program administrators have consistently struggled to verify that the events are creating a positive return on investment for taxpayers.

Under the program, cities seeking to host competitive sporting events apply for state funding, using estimates of how much they think revenue from sales, liquor and other state taxes will increase as a result of an event. That amount forms the basis of how much money the city is eligible for, and then it can submit expenses for reimbursement after the event. That included $21.9 million to Houston’s Super Bowl in 2017, $23 million to Austin’s Formula 1 United States Grand Prix event in 2019 and $31 million to the same event in 2021.

As the program grew, it began drawing criticism from across the political spectrum. Then-state Sen. Wendy Davis, a Democrat, pushed a bill in 2013 to audit the program, saying, “We’re handing these things out like candy.” The bill did not pass, but state auditors reviewed the program in 2015.

The audit suggested that officials in the Texas comptroller’s office, which originally administered the program, were not vetting the number of out-of-town visitors stringently enough to ensure an economic benefit. It also found they were not verifying that invoices sent by cities were directly related to the events they were hosting. 

The comptroller’s office added rules in late 2014 clarifying what kinds of spending would be allowable for reimbursement, and, in 2015, the Legislature moved the trust funds to the governor’s office of economic development and tourism.

But the move has not made it any easier for the state officials who administer the program to distill complicated economic data, and they continue to write in their reports that they cannot tell whether the events bring a positive impact. In 2020, five years after the program was transferred to the governor’s office, the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, which has been a strong supporter of Gov. Greg Abbott, released a report criticizing the program, saying its vision “points to a misunderstanding of how economies work.”

Andrew Mahaleris, an Abbott spokesperson, said the governor’s office commissioned an economic impact analysis for the 2024 fiscal year that showed 840,000 nonlocal visitors spending more than $615 million in Texas, with a positive economic impact of more than $1.2 billion. 

It’s unclear how the numbers in that study were calculated, and Mahaleris did not respond to requests to provide the study to the Chronicle.

“Event Trust Funds are critical tools that help Texas communities attract events to the state,” Mahaleris said. 

When state officials review the taxes they collect after the events, they come to a different conclusion. State officials are limited in the types of economic indicators they assess. For example, they look at the amount of sales taxes collected in cities and counties, but that data does not identify how much comes from out-of-state visitors for the specific events the state is subsidizing. 

“Houston is a giant economy, a region as big as some states,” said Dowe, the former Houston finance director. “As big a deal as the Super Bowl or the World Cup would be, it doesn’t move the overall economy as much as other factors — manufacturing, oil and gas, the refining that goes on at the ship channel. Any movement on those would far outweigh the noise in the signal from the World Cup.”

After every one of the last 40 events the state program has helped fund since 2015, state officials said that “neither a positive nor negative impact is determinable.”

FIFA Projection Is “Insanity”

Supporters of using taxpayer dollars to attract major sporting events maintain that host cities get economic benefits from the exposure that comes with the spotlight of widely watched matches.

Those figures are not insignificant, according to FIFA, which points to a study it released in April with the World Trade Organization that estimates the tournament will bring $47 billion in economic impact across the United States. FIFA deferred questions about the study to the WTO, which directed questions to OpenEconomics, an Italian firm that it said prepared the report. OpenEconomics did not respond to a request for comment.

Experts say such calculations are almost always exaggerated and that the true numbers are difficult to pinpoint. The billions promised in the report by FIFA and the WTO are “insanity,” said Victor Matheson, a professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, who has studied the economics of big sporting events like the Super Bowl and the World Cup for decades.

“This would mean every game is generating $400 million, or roughly $5,000 to $7,000 per fan,” he said. “But the most telling thing is that FIFA is right on the front cover as an author/sponsor of a report that says that FIFA is awesome. This report is better thought of as a press release rather than a serious piece of economic research.”

Recent reports have shown hotel prices dropping as the tournament nears, which could indicate fewer people plan to travel for the games. That would be a major factor for host cities, since out-of-town visitors are key to driving a positive economic impact.

Houston does not receive a net benefit from its own residents attending the World Cup. Those people are spending money they likely would have spent in the city anyway, a principle economists call substitution. An event like the World Cup can also crowd out other events, like conferences, that would have drawn out-of-towners to the city. And, of course, much of the money spent at the games flows to entities like FIFA that are not based in Houston.

All of those factors make it difficult to assess the true economic impact on a city or state, Matheson said. That math requires a large set of assumptions, and promoters will usually tweak those assumptions in their favor to drive up the total. 

It can be even harder to fully track the public spending needed to cover the hosting duties. 

The contracts reviewed by the Chronicle include a clause under which cities promise to “agree to do all things necessary to preserve their confidentiality,” unless required by local law to release them. And the nonprofit organizing committees generally are not subject to public disclosure laws.

Chin, the FIFA spokesperson, said the contracts contain information that is “commercially sensitive,” and it is standard to withhold them for “global events of this scale.”

As a result, many of the details about taxpayers’ investments remain out of public view. They include figures about how much FIFA will pay each city to use its stadium, which local companies have agreed to donate millions toward preparations and what benefits they receive in return, the tax breaks that FIFA will enjoy from each city, and how each host committee plans to pay for the extensive preparations that go into hosting the tournament.

The contracts the Chronicle obtained provide broad categories of responsibility that fall under a host city’s purview — security, transportation and retrofitting stadiums, among them. But the documents rarely attach dollar figures to those efforts. 

Academic experts say the system’s secrecy is by design.

“It’s atrocious how secretive they are with these sorts of taxpayer-funded events,” said David Cuillier, director of The Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida. “These cities are going to invest a lot of money in hosting FIFA, and the people who are paying for that should know. They should know how much money and how it’s being spent. That’s why we have open records laws.”

The post FIFA Could Make Billions From the World Cup. Host Cities Will Get Little in Return. appeared first on ProPublica.

As an asylum-seeker living in the U.S., Jasmir Urbina worried as she watched violence break out amid the military-style immigration sweeps across the country. Then she read about legal residents being arrested at immigration court and wondered when federal agents would set their sights on her city.

Urbina had fled Nicaragua in 2022 and legally resided with her husband, a fellow asylum-seeker, in New Orleans while reporting to immigration agents for check-ins as she awaited her day in court. Finally, the date was approaching, in late November 2025. Days later, the Trump administration would flood the region with federal officers in “Operation Swamp Sweep.”

Urbina, 35, began searching for a Spanish speaker who could help her, and said she stumbled on a Facebook post advertising the services of Catholic Charities, a prominent aid organization whose services include assisting immigrants. After a few clicks, she connected via WhatsApp with “Susan Millan,” who claimed to have a law degree. The woman’s photo looked professional, showing a small library in the blurry background, according to a screenshot Urbina shared with ProPublica. The asylum-seeker said she discussed her predicament with the woman she thought was an attorney.

Millan told Urbina the ordeal could be settled over a virtual hearing with U.S. immigration authorities. Millan sprinkled in details about her own life — a sick husband, two kids, a supportive church — so Urbina felt comfortable. In an interview, Urbina said she completed paperwork to be sent to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, for a fee. Millan’s organization asked her for documentation, including five character references; for another fee, it would submit these up the line. Through the payment app Zelle, Urbina and her husband paid nearly $10,000, according to her financial records, money they had set aside to buy their first home.

On Nov. 21, Urbina made the case that a “credible fear” was keeping her from going home. In the virtual hearing, which lasted five minutes, she said she spoke to a man dressed in a green uniform, stitched with what looked like government insignia, seated in front of an American flag. A day later, via WhatsApp, Millan told her she “won residency.” Her documents would be in the mail.

In an instant, Urbina’s fears had been assuaged. She asked if she should still attend her court date, Nov. 24. “No, don’t worry,” she remembers the woman replying. “There’s no need.”

But when Urbina asked to speak with someone in a message to Millan’s phone number the next day, according to screenshots she shared with ProPublica, the WhatsApp chat fell silent. After two days, she suspected she’d been duped and wrote in anger: “God is with us and He fights for His children; today you messed with the wrong person and you will get your payment from the Most High, you cowards.”

There was no attorney named Susan Millan associated with Catholic Charities, and the deceit was just one example of hundreds that the group has become aware of when desperate immigrants eventually reach the real organization.

“There’s a reason why we have a good reputation,” said Chris Ross, vice president of migration and refugee resettlement services at Catholic Charities. “And so for someone to be trading on that goodwill with nefarious intent is very frustrating.”

Urbina had fallen prey to “notario fraud,” in which scammers provide legal advice, often by saying they’re public notaries or other legal professionals. In many Latin American countries, a public notary is the equivalent of a lawyer, and notario fraudsters rely on this mistranslation to fake credentials.

Urbina shared documents that detail how she was lured into the scam, and ProPublica corroborated her story with her husband and Catholic Charities. After Urbina told local and federal authorities she had been tricked out of her day in court, Immigration and Customs Enforcement switched her scheduled December virtual check-in to an in-person meeting. When she showed up, agents arrested her. In January, she said, officers shackled her hands and feet and loaded her on a plane to Nicaragua.

She’d been scammed, then deported.

A spokesperson with the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not respond to questions about Urbina’s case but said, “Anyone caught impersonating a federal immigration agent will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” New Orleans police did not answer ProPublica’s questions about a complaint she filed.

Scams like those that destroyed Urbina’s dreams are on the rise, federal data analyzed by ProPublica shows, as profiteers seize on the fear and confusion wrought by President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Complaints of immigration scams have doubled since Trump was elected, ProPublica found in analyzing more than 6,200 complaints filed with the Federal Trade Commission by victims and advocates over the last five years.

From the start of 2021 through the election in fall of 2024, the FTC — the nation’s top consumer protection agency — fielded about 960 immigration complaints per year, such as reports of fake attorneys offering services or people impersonating federal officers. In 2025, the commission received nearly 2,000 complaints.

In all, at least $94.4 million was reported stolen in complaints to the FTC over five years. That number is certainly an undercount, as not all immigrants report wrongdoing for fear of deportation, and not every report included dollar amounts.

The spike in complaints is so severe that many states and legal organizations have alerted the public about them. California’s and North Carolina’s attorneys general released statements in late 2025, as did the American Bar Association and AARP. In June 2025, the New York City Council passed legislation increasing notario fraud penalties, and a similar law passed in Florida.

“Immigration scammers contribute to a lawless environment, undermining our immigration system,” said Zach Kahler, a spokesperson for Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency Urbina falsely thought had awarded her residency. Online, the agency provides guides on how to spot immigration fraud and warns consumers that it does not use WhatsApp. The agency tells people who think they’ve been scammed to complain to the FTC.

Old Problem, New Sophistication

Scams targeting those mired in the U.S. immigration system are not new, but advocates say predators have become more sophisticated, using technologies like artificial intelligence and targeted ads. At the same time, immigrants have become increasingly anxious about speedy mass deportations, creating a bonanza for those looking to cash in.

“I believe AI is being utilized in these scams pretty effectively. People think they’re talking to a real person, or the logos and stuff look pretty professional to the untrained eye,” said Ross, of Catholic Charities.

Many victims say they were duped by scammers who had professional-looking photos, wore immigration uniforms and staged realistic virtual hearings.

A review of the image of the person named Millan who was supposedly helping Urbina suggests that it was AI-generated.

Ross added: “The biggest thing is the desperation — that’s really what’s driving this.”

In San Diego, attorneys working for the city have been impersonated by scammers. City Attorney Heather Ferbert told ProPublica her office has forwarded these cases to the FBI and warned residents to be on the lookout for advertisements that promise a government official or lawyer can help with immigration proceedings. The FBI declined to comment.

“When you add the title and you add the government weight behind it — the city attorney’s office, the district attorney’s office, for example — the targets are sort of lulled,” Ferbert said. “We’ve heard stories where they promise that they can solve their immigration problems for them. No real lawyer is ever going to promise an outcome to you.”

Other scams extend beyond impersonating lawyers. The FTC complaints include a case in which people posing as Department of Homeland Security immigration officers received more than $600,000 from a family by claiming one of the relatives’ identities had been stolen and they needed to pay to protect it. In West Virginia, a “federal agent” threatened to deport a college student who was close to graduating unless they paid nearly $4,000 in gift cards.

“They claimed that if I did not comply immediately, I would be arrested, detained or deported,” wrote the student, who was legally residing in the U.S. on a student visa. The student, whose name was not disclosed in federal data, used prepaid Dollar General gift cards and then went broke and turned to family for help.

Immigrants from India and Bangladesh were told they had failed to update a necessary form and would be arrested and deported immediately unless they shared their Social Security numbers. Other scammers claimed the government had intercepted packages full of money and drugs addressed to immigrants, who were told to make a payment or face arrest.

“Well-Oiled Machine”

Most victims find the fake attorneys advertising on Facebook or TikTok. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has pledged to delete scam accounts and announced new tools to track them.

Charity Anastasio, practice and ethics counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the ads are often pay-per-click and targeted at Spanish-speaking users.

“They’ve designed such a well-oiled machine,” Anastasio said.

The ads appealed to those in deportation proceedings, clinging to any means to stay in the U.S., but also those who may have wanted to get their paperwork in order ahead of Trump’s crackdown, said Adonia Simpson, an attorney with the American Bar Association.

“A lot of people are trying to preemptively get representation to see what their options are,” Simpson told ProPublica. “The enforcement has been a big driver. It’s caused a lot of people to be very fearful.”

The White House declined to comment.

In October 2024, 56-year-old José Aguilar, who had been granted temporary protected status under George W. Bush’s administration, was in just that position when he came upon a Facebook ad. The advertiser claimed to work for Jorge Rivera, a well-known Miami immigration attorney, and promised Aguilar they could get him permanent residency. It would take $15,000. ProPublica sought comment from the real Rivera, who is not accused of wrongdoing; he did not respond.

A leather factory worker in Minnesota who had fled El Salvador, Aguilar cobbled together the money in installments through loans from friends and that year’s tax refund. Over several months, he had four video calls with the fake attorney and two calls with immigration agent impersonators. He was initially skeptical but became convinced when they sent him videos of residency cards with the Citizenship and Immigration Services logo.

“Don’t try to deceive me, because I’m borrowing money, I’m a man of faith, and I’m a person who has had a heart transplant, so I can’t get angry because it hurts me,” Aguilar remembered saying.

“No, don’t worry, sir,” Aguilar said the scammer responded. “This is real. It’s super real.”

During one of their last conversations, Aguilar says the scammer appealed to their shared Christian faith, thanking God for approving the paperwork and earning him residency.

By February 2025, the scammers had stopped responding. A month later, Aguilar realized he was probably never going to get the residency cards and contacted an attorney who confirmed he had been duped. Aguilar, who has two young daughters, says his family is subsisting on food banks and relies on donations for rent.

“It’s unforgivable,” Aguilar said. “Even bringing God into it.” 

Mother and Daughter Torn Apart

For Mariela, an undocumented Honduran mother of three, financial stress began long ago. In 2021, the father of her children headed for the U.S. along with one of their daughters, seeking construction work. Two years later, when she traveled 2,000 miles in blistering heat to join them, she broke her arm in three places after falling into the Rio Grande while crossing the border. ProPublica is withholding her last name because she fears being deported.

And then, in October 2025, immigration agents detained her 20-year-old daughter. Desperate, the mother reached out to what she thought was a Catholic Charities Facebook page.

She was pulled into a scheme involving a man who posed as a priest, another posing as an immigration judge, and another posing as Oscar Carrillo, an attorney licensed in Texas who practices tax law.

The real Carrillo told ProPublica he began getting calls from frustrated immigrants last spring, all of them Spanish speakers who claimed they had been referred by Catholic Charities. When he realized his name and photo were being misused, he alerted the FBI and FTC. The State Bar of Texas has posted a public warning on its webpage about Carrillo impersonators.

“Most of these clients, because of their immigration status, are afraid to report this to the police,” Carrillo said. “I feel sorry for these clients. We’re not talking about wealthy individuals.”

In January, after her daughter was deported, Mariela realized the fraudsters had cheated her out of more than $18,000 over three months.

She said she had borrowed $3,000 from an uncle in Honduras, another $1,500 from a cousin, a few thousand from her boss, and another $2,000 from a friend from her Honduran hometown who had also emigrated to the U.S. In addition, she burned through her savings and her daughter’s.

Public Alerts, Little Recourse

Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, local law enforcement, advocacy groups, state attorneys general and law firms have published notices warning immigrants about an uptick in scams.

“Our best advice is to make direct contact, outside of social media channels, with the organization you’re seeking help from,” said Kevin Brennan, vice president for media relations at Catholic Charities. “Call the organization on the phone or visit an office in person.”

Scammers show no signs of retreat.

In April, three months after her deportation to Nicaragua, Urbina received a call from someone claiming to be a lawyer. He said that he’d been referred to her by a bishop with Catholic Charities and that he’d help her obtain immigration papers.

The stress of being scammed and separated from her husband, who remains in the U.S., had taken a toll. “I’ve been through a lot of things, one right after the other,” Urbina said. She’s living with her mother in a remote village, afraid to step outside in a country where the government has ramped up surveillance of those who previously moved to the U.S.

Desperate, she gave the “lawyer” her personal information.

After earlier saying his help would be free, he then asked for money, she said.

“Where did you get my number?” she asked.

Intrigued but skeptical, Urbina followed up with WhatsApp messages, hoping he might really be an immigration attorney.

She never heard from him again.

The post Fear and Opportunity: Immigration Scams Surged as Trump’s Sweeps Lured Desperate People to Eager Defrauders appeared first on ProPublica.

Even a glance at Shy’tyra Burton’s life reveals her need for the sort of federal government assistance that helps disabled Americans stay in their homes. Born two months prematurely into a poor family in Philadelphia, unable to breathe or swallow without tubes and largely confined to medical facilities until age 4, Burton was diagnosed with a litany of developmental and intellectual disabilities that left her with an IQ below 70.

She persevered and graduated from a high school special education program, then attempted community college. But she struggled to grasp basic tasks and information. She couldn’t get hired, including at McDonald’s. After multiple medical and psychological evaluations and a hearing before a judge, the federal government approved her for the Supplemental Security Income program, which provides a basic income to those with severe disabilities and to indigent older people.

For Burton, now 22, the $994 monthly benefit is lifesaving but not enough to completely support herself on her own. So, like many SSI recipients, she has continued to live with her father, who makes around $2,000 a month as a Philadelphia sanitation worker.

Now, President Donald Trump’s administration is poised to penalize people like Burton simply for living in the same home as their families, according to four federal officials, internal emails and a federal regulatory listing. The administration is working on a rule change that would deduct the value of a disabled adult’s bedroom from their SSI allotment, even if the family members they live with are poor enough to qualify for food stamps. This would mean slashing the benefits of some of the most low-income SSI recipients by up to a third — about $330 a month in Burton’s case — or ending their support altogether.

The effort to cut SSI for families who also rely on food stamps, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, was initiated by top White House and Department of Government Efficiency officials last year, multiple Social Security officials said. It marks a second attempt by the Trump administration to quietly but dramatically downsize disability benefit programs overseen by the Social Security Administration, despite those programs’ strict eligibility standards and minimal instances of fraud. White House Budget Director Russell Vought and Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano abandoned a different proposed regulation involving disability payments last year after ProPublica and other news outlets reported on the harm that the plan would cause to hundreds of thousands of largely blue-collar workers in red states. (The disability programs are administered by the Social Security Administration but separate from the retirement program for which the agency is named. The Trump administration has promised not to cut Social Security retirement payments.)

The likely SSI cut will affect not just younger adults with disabilities such as Down syndrome and severe autism who are still living at home with their low-income parents, but also older people with health or financial problems who have had to move in with their adult children on tight budgets. All told, as many as 400,000 poor and disabled people and indigent older people across the United States could have their support cut or eliminated, according to a ProPublica analysis of actuarial figures from the Social Security Administration.

Protecting the SSI program from such a fate is “about how the faithful will be judged, and our care for the most vulnerable,” said Galen Carey, vice president of government relations for the National Association of Evangelicals and himself the father of a 35-year-old son with Down syndrome who lives at home and receives SSI. Carey said it’s wrong to reduce a disabled person’s SSI benefits for choosing or needing to live with loved ones. “Knowing that they are contributing and not a burden to the family can be a source of great pride,” he said. (Some 40 Down syndrome organizations recently sent a letter to Bisignano expressing their opposition to the planned change.)

The reason this will especially affect SNAP families is complicated. Essentially, under a long-standing federal policy that was updated during the Biden administration, if a household has already demonstrated its poverty via SNAP or other public assistance programs’ own extensive income-reporting requirements, then the family is officially deemed unable to financially support a disabled loved one living at home. (The typical SNAP household that is also supporting a person who receives SSI has an annual total income of just $17,000, according to the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)

The Trump rule will undo this approach. It won’t matter if the SNAP program has already determined a family is poor enough to receive aid; anyone living at home beyond age 18 without paying full rent will be treated as if they have a benefactor. The value of their bedroom as well as any income and assets their family may have will be calculated and recalculated as often as every month and deducted from their SSI check.

The SSI rule change is being reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget, a process that involves editing the draft regulation and considering where it falls on the list of the president’s priorities. Once it’s returned to the Social Security Administration for initial publication, there will be an opportunity for public comment; it could take until next year to be finalized, depending on the amount of opposition it faces.

Presented with a detailed list of this article’s findings, Rachel Cauley, the OMB’s communications director, asserted that “this story is false because it speculates about policies that have not yet been decided.” Asked to specify what was false, Cauley did not identify anything, instead reiterating that the story is “trash.” A Social Security Administration spokesperson said “Commissioner Bisignano remains committed to protecting and strengthening Social Security and serving America’s most vulnerable populations.”

ProPublica interviewed families who rely on the SSI program in Philadelphia and across the country. We talked to a young couple struggling to support not just their kids but also a parent with Alzheimer’s. We heard from a mother, Opal Foster, whose 18-year-old son has Down syndrome and lives at home as he strives to become a chef. And we spoke with a middle-aged woman with schizophrenia and panic disorder who lives with her brother’s family because she can’t hold down a job and fears being left alone in a nursing home.

All of these people could have their SSI benefits cut because they live with family, even though disability advocates, evangelicals and budget experts agree that it’s more humane and less expensive for adults with disabilities to live at home rather than in institutional facilities. The potential cut to Burton’s SSI benefit, for example, would save taxpayers about $11 a day. But if her dad as a result of the reduced support can’t afford to provide for her anymore, then it could cost taxpayers many hundreds of dollars a day or more to house her at a residential facility, according to the state of Pennsylvania’s fee schedules.

Supplemental Security Income, which serves 7.5 million Americans who are unable to make a living because of severe disabilities or destitution in old age, has never been easy to qualify for. Fewer than a third of applicants are approved, and the process often takes years. Recipients of these benefits in turn regularly have their finances reevaluated, and are also intermittently examined by medical and vocational experts, to determine whether their payments will continue.

This paperwork-and-review-heavy process generates hefty overhead. The SSI program distributes just 5% of all Social Security Administration benefits yet accounts for nearly 35% of the agency’s administrative budget. Month after month, staffers have to pore over microscopic changes to SSI beneficiaries’ living arrangements and family members’ incomes and assets.

Current and former Social Security officials have told ProPublica over the past year that the SSI program’s complexities and absurdities remain perhaps the agency’s biggest bureaucratic headache. As ProPublica reported last summer, DOGE did nothing to address this, mostly ignoring SSI despite its obvious inefficiencies. In fact, DOGE and the White House pushed out roughly 7,000 Social Security employees, many of whom had been working on SSI reforms and backlogs.

The Biden administration had tried to do something about SSI’s excessive red tape. Under existing law, disabled people whose families have already established themselves to be poor by qualifying for certain other public assistance programs, such as veterans’ benefits or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, don’t have to do all of the same check-ins, over and over again, to receive SSI. In 2024, Biden added SNAP — which is more widely used now than when these SSI rules were created — to the list of such programs.

This was ultimately an act of government efficiency, said Marianna LaCanfora, who was for years the deputy commissioner for retirement and disability policy at the Social Security Administration, including during Trump’s first term. Safety net programs like SSI don’t have to be so complicated and thus expensive, LaCanfora and others at the agency said. But they often are that way because of all the effort spent triple-checking that the poor are actually poor.

Nevertheless, conservative think tanks opposed the Biden SNAP policy, with some claiming that paying these low-income SSI beneficiaries less could save the federal government $20 billion over the next decade. And the White House included the rule change as one of its agenda items for the SSA heading into 2025. It was part of a broader push by the administration and DOGE to undo anything that the Biden administration had touched.

If enacted, the change will require intellectually disabled young people like Burton as well as very elderly people to file extensive monthly reports if they want to continue their benefits even at the reduced level. They’ll have to provide details about the property where they live: whether it’s leased or owned, as well as the names of anyone in the home, and whether any of these people has any new income or assets. They’ll also have to include documentation of all household bills and expenses, showing how much they do or don’t contribute personally, as well as financial documents such as bank statements and any pay stubs.

Burton will likely have to make an appointment and report in person at a Social Security field office any time her father’s hours or wages change even slightly; any time she and he switch up how they split utility bills; and any time an adult sibling spends even a few nights at the house and helps her with living expenses. If she doesn’t, she could later receive bills accusing her of having been overpaid by Social Security.

For his part, Bisignano, the Social Security commissioner, wants to be seen as a leader who’s making the agency more businesslike and efficient, according to interviews with agency staff and recordings of him speaking in private executive meetings. But the SSI rule change, by all accounts, will increase the administrative burden not just on families like Burton’s but also on the staff who’ll have to constantly assess the living arrangements and family incomes of her and millions of other people.

Given the tension between what the rule will do and the sense of efficiency that Bisignano says he wants to instill at Social Security, some agency insiders told ProPublica that he could still push the White House to drop the plan.

Shy’tyra Burton’s monthly SSI support check is what allows her to contribute to her household, by paying her own phone and internet bills and buying many of her own meals, according to her father, Rondell. “I’m still barely managing, though,” he said. He has largely been a single parent to Shy’tyra and her siblings, who need some support too, although they’re more self-sufficient. Groceries and gas have only gotten more expensive.

Burton is calmer and better at managing her disabilities when she can sense that her family’s economic circumstances are relatively stable, her father said. When he blew out his shoulder last year trying to hurl a heavy recycling bin onto a garbage truck, and had to have surgery and take time off work, the loss of income soon manifested in her behavior, he said. “It’s a trickle-down effect,” he explained. “My daughter absorbs money stress in her body.”

One recent 75-degree afternoon, sitting on the front stoop of the rowhouse where she lives with her dad, Burton was rubbing her hands together vigorously, as if it were cold out. When asked why, she claimed it reminded her of being a baby in the neonatal intensive care unit and touching her parents’ hands through the small opening in her incubator.

Burton still has some childlike ways. She grips her stuffed animals when she’s nervous, which is often. She talks to imaginary friends out loud, the same ones she talked to when she was a girl. What she likes about living at home is in part that she can be herself, and her family will still be there to care for her. She doesn’t like the lack of freedom and that she can’t truly be “out there” like her adult siblings.

Burton wanted to go into the child development field, to help kids growing up with disabilities like hers, but some of the concepts were a bit too difficult. Now, she’s excited by cosmetology and intends to support herself one day as a hair stylist. She spends much of her time practicing on mannequin heads in her childhood room.

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For 30 minutes, Brian Tracey lay naked and unable to breathe on the floor of the medical ward at the St. Johns County Detention Center, a low-roofed building south of Jacksonville, Florida. It was Dec. 15, 2023, the day Tracey was supposed to be released from jail. 

By the time deputies noticed him, it was too late. His girlfriend, who’d posted bond for Tracey after nine days, waited outside for him but was instead greeted by a deputy and chaplain, who told her Tracey was dead.

Medical staff working for the jail’s health provider, Armor Health of St. Johns County LLC, an affiliate of Miami-based Armor Health, said Tracey, 62, was showing flu-like symptoms and suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a lung condition that makes it difficult to breathe. In the days and hours before his death, Tracey had passed out and appeared confused, according to a police report from the county sheriff’s office, which investigated the death. Much of what is known about how he died comes from this report, which includes Tracey’s autopsy, interviews with deputies and medical staff, and a description of a video of Tracey in the medical ward.

Four experts reviewed available detention and autopsy records for The Florida Trib and ProPublica. All four — two retired jail commanders and two medical doctors with extensive knowledge of jail treatment — determined that Tracey should have been hospitalized based on the symptoms he showed at the jail, which were later determined by an autopsy to be caused by pneumonia with COVID-19. 

He never was.

For people like Tracey, who arrive in poor health, jails can be particularly dangerous, according to a growing body of medical research. Jailhouse deaths have been rising in the United States for the past decade, with about half due to illness, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. 

Yet even as the death rate climbs, improving healthcare in jails has proven difficult. Many jails have turned to private contractors to care for inmates. But when those contractors perform poorly, there’s little pressure on the sheriffs or local governments to make a change. That’s even more true in Florida, where the vast majority of jails are run by elected sheriffs with little oversight from local and state officials.

“Healthcare overall in Florida prisons and jails is a difficult and frankly ignored issue that’s put on the back burner,” said former Republican state Sen. Jeff Brandes, who was vice chair of the state’s Criminal Justice Committee. “And it’s one that has no independent accountability or oversight. It’s kind of a black box that operates in the state.”

Contracts Despite a Conviction

In the decade leading up to Tracey’s death, Armor Health Management LLC, known as Armor Health, and its predecessor, Armor Correctional Health Services Inc., faced allegations that they failed to hospitalize patients who needed more intensive care, according to court records obtained by The Florida Trib and ProPublica. (Armor Health had previously been operating as Armor Correctional Health Services Inc. until legally converting to an LLC in 2021.)

From 2014 to early 2021, Armor Correctional Health Services was sued over 450 times, the company reported in documents submitted to St. Johns County as part of a contract-bidding process in 2021. Lawsuits over subpar jailhouse healthcare are frequently filed and often dismissed, as was the case in two-thirds of the suits filed against Armor. The bid documents show the company has settled at least 56 suits that alleged medical negligence or inappropriate medical care. Court records show that at least 13 of those cases alleged a delay in hospital care. More than 100 cases are still pending, according to the documents. In a 2020 wrongful death suit against Armor Correctional Health Services, lawyers hired a medical expert to review internal company reports of inmate deaths at Armor facilities obtained through discovery. The expert claimed the company failed to hospitalize patients in more than 70 instances, according to court documents. 

Armor denied claims that it has provided poor care or that its staff failed to hospitalize people, saying of the expert review that “each case involves unique medical circumstances, and deaths referenced were related to drug overdoses, natural causes, or other clinical conditions that were not associated with decisions regarding hospital transfer.” 

Other states have taken action against Armor. After 14 inmates died at two county jails in New York where Armor Correctional Health Services of New York Inc. provided healthcare, the state sued the company in 2016 for breach of contract and fraud. The New York State Commission of Correction’s Medical Review Board found what it called “egregious lapses in medical care” in seven of the deaths, and a separate investigation by the state attorney general found that the company failed to keep accurate records. Armor settled the suit and denied responsibility, but the agreement barred the company from doing business in New York for three years. Armor is now allowed to operate in the state. 

In Wisconsin, prosecutors said Armor Correctional Health Services failed one jail inmate to such a degree that they charged it with a felony. In December 2018, Milwaukee prosecutors levied eight criminal counts against the company for its role in the death of a Wisconsin inmate who died from dehydration while under its care. The charges included seven counts of falsifying a record and one felony count of abuse of a resident of a penal facility. A jury in 2022 found the company guilty of all charges.

Prosecutors had hoped the conviction would push jails to cancel contracts with Armor, they said in an interview. And at least in Florida, they had reason to believe that might happen. Under Florida law, companies convicted of crimes directly related to transactions with government agencies must report the conviction to the state within 30 days and are barred from working with Florida public entities. Barred companies are also placed on a public list of convicted vendors. But the Florida Department of Management Services told reporters in 2023 that the company did not report its conviction to the state — a claim the company rejects. The company also continued to do work in Florida under a range of names linked to entities that had similar leadership and structure. 

After it was charged but prior to its conviction, the company filed paperwork with Florida converting itself to a new corporation under the name Armor Health Management LLC, according to corporate records. When the verdict came down in December 2022, it was against the defunct company. A series of new LLCs, which were formed under the holding company Armor Health and have Armor Health in their names, then signed new contracts with seven Florida jails. Florida business records show those limited liability companies have the same chief executive officer and street address in Miami as Armor Health. Manuel Fernandez, chief operating officer of Armor Health, also testified in court that the new entities assumed the liabilities of Armor Correctional Health Services Inc. after that company dissolved. Fernandez said the LLCs were created for tax purposes. 

In at least one document, the company seemed to acknowledge a connection between the defunct company and one of its newly formed companies. When Armor Health of St. Johns County LLC was asked in bid documents to provide a list of all litigation for the past seven years, the company listed hundreds of suits filed against the defunct Armor Correctional Health Services.

Within three years of the company’s conviction, six of the seven Florida jails using an Armor entity stopped contracting with those companies, with at least two ending their contracts early: one citing poor performance and contract violations, and the other saying the termination was in the county’s best interest.

St. Johns County, where Tracey died, holds the only known remaining contract with an Armor entity in Florida. Sheriff Robert A. Hardwick, who is responsible for signing contracts with vendors, declined to comment. 

An attorney for Armor defended the ongoing contract, telling the news organizations last month that it disclosed the conviction to the state and that the convicted company no longer exists. “Each Armor entity is in full compliance with all applicable State of Florida requirements and each remains eligible to operate in the state,” J. Alfredo Armas, the attorney for Armor Health of St. Johns County LLC, wrote in an email to The Florida Trib.

The state of Florida does have safeguards to ensure its contractors are providing good services. However, in multiple ways, the state did not employ those tools when it came to Armor. In 2023, the state’s Department of Management Services, which is responsible for maintaining the list of convicted state vendors, said that it was investigating the company after a man died in the Duval County jail under Armor’s care. The inmate’s family alleged in a lawsuit filed in 2024 against the sheriff that the man was denied life-sustaining medication for a heart transplant. Armor said at the time that it had located and ordered the medication, but it arrived after the man had been released. That suit was later settled. The Department of Management Services has declined repeated inquiries over two years to say whether it has investigated Armor Correctional Health Services or Armor Health Management, or if it ever took action against any of the company’s entities. Armor does not appear on a public list of banned companies on the department’s webpage.

The state has also failed to reply to public records requests that might shed light on how it handled its investigation, if one was conducted. When a reporter went to the Department of Management Services headquarters in Tallahassee in February, the department would not make any agency representative available and told the reporter to contact the same spokesperson who has repeatedly declined to answer questions.

In addition, at the time of the transplant patient’s death, former Jacksonville state Rep. Angie Nixon and a state senator wrote to the U.S. Department of Justice and stated that Armor had failed to report its conviction and should be barred from operating in the state. They asked the DOJ to conduct an investigation into “potential violations of federal law” by Armor. The DOJ acknowledged receipt of the letter to Nixon, but she said they never heard from the department again. The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment. 

The office of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who appointed the interim Department of Management Services secretary, Tom Berger, declined through a spokesperson to comment about the agency’s investigation, or to say if the governor has a stance on convicted companies working in Florida. The Florida attorney general, who represents state agencies and issues formal legal opinions, also declined to comment. 

Nixon, who is now running for a seat in the U.S. Senate, said she would be raising the issue of Armor again with the DOJ, the Department of Management Services and the governor’s office.

“The fact that there is a known vendor that has basically allowed people to die while under their care and they can continue to work in our prisons and jails is something that I have a problem with,” said Nixon. 

“Repetitive Conduct of Delaying” 

When Jose “Pepe” Armas, a Miami physician and business owner, started Armor Correctional Health Services in 2004, he had very different ambitions. He had learned about jail deaths and substandard care that plagued the Broward County jail in South Florida for decades. So he consulted with other physicians and told a medical professor whom he attempted to recruit that he wanted to raise the standard of correctional care across the country. 

Armor’s first contract was a $127 million deal in Broward County to handle medical care for all of its roughly 5,000 inmates. The company grew rapidly, winning additional contracts in Brevard, Hillsborough, Martin, Palm Beach and Sarasota counties and, in 2007, St. Johns County. By 2011, Armor had also signed contracts in at least 12 other states. 

In a 2021 wrongful death lawsuit, Pensacola attorney Joe Zarzaur argued that those contracts incentivize Armor entities to keep sick inmates in the jails because Armor is paid a flat fee to provide healthcare; that means, he argued, there’s no billable benefit for adding additional services, such as hospitalization. 

“This is why Armor’s contractual partners, inmates, and families see this repetitive conduct of delaying or outright denying inmates medical care, which leads to their deaths,” Zarzaur argued in court filings. In that case, 44-year-old Misty Williamson died of pneumonia with sepsis after she was sick for five days at the Santa Rosa County jail. 

Armor said no Armor entity assumes financial responsibility for offsite medical costs, therefore there is no financial incentive to delay or avoid sending a patient to the hospital, adding that delaying hospital care is counterproductive. 

“Allowing a serious condition to deteriorate only increases the likelihood that the patient will ultimately require more intensive, expensive and specialized treatment,” Armor’s attorney, J. Alfredo Armas, said. The suit alleged in court records that since 2011, at least 72 people died under the care of Armor Correctional Health Services after they were not hospitalized or their hospitalization was delayed, including 11 other people who died from pneumonia or sepsis. The analysis was conducted by an expert in jailhouse medical care who reviewed hundreds of pages of Armor’s internal death reports gained through discovery. Armor attempted to block the analysis from being used in the trial by arguing the allegations had no bearing on whether the medical treatment its employees provided to Williamson met its standard of care. A judge allowed the death reports and a written affidavit by the expert to be entered as exhibits in the trial. 

A jury sided with the family of Williamson, whose estate was awarded $6 million in compensatory damages. Jurors found both Armor and its employees were negligent in delaying her transfer to a hospital and awarded her family an additional $10 million in punitive damages. 

But there was a larger issue at play: Was it individual employees or a larger company policy that was at fault? During the Williamson trial, Amy Dixon, a former Santa Rosa County jail nurse, testified that Armor had an ambiguous standard for sending patients to the hospital without preapproval, and that she could transfer someone if they were having a heart attack, but that something like a seizure should wait. Jurors ruled against Armor, saying the company’s policies and its employees were at fault for Williamson’s death. But the judge overruled that, striking down the $10 million award and finding that attorneys did not prove Armor’s policies led to Williamson’s death. Armor said the deaths in the analysis involved unique medical conditions and were related to drug overdoses, natural causes or other clinical conditions that were not associated with decisions regarding hospital transfer.

Despite that outcome, in other cases nurses have similarly testified that Armor delayed transfers to hospitals. Carolyn Rubin testified in a Sarasota case that “there was a strong corporate push for the doctor not to send patients out.” She added, “It was our duty to keep them there as long as possible, to prevent costs of the hospital.” Armor denied the allegations that it failed to hospitalize a detainee who died of a brain hemorrhage after she complained for days about health problems including trouble walking. The lawsuit was later settled and Armor made no admission of wrongdoing. 

In 2018, Katherine McCormack Grange, an Armor nurse working at a New York jail where an inmate died of a heart attack, testified in a civil trial that she was personally told by an Armor manager that the company did not want patients to be sent to the hospital because of the expense. The lawsuit accused Armor Correctional Health Services of a “long and pervasive history of deficient health and medical care” at the Nassau County jail, which the company denied. The case was eventually settled and Armor made no admission of wrongdoing. The New York State Commission of Correction later determined the man’s death may have been prevented if he received proper care, according to the commission’s report, and that Armor Correctional Health Services staff did not properly fill out documentation after his collapse, which the company also denied.

Sheriffs Canceled Contracts

In the years leading up to Tracey’s death but before the conviction in Milwaukee, a handful of Florida sheriffs dumped Armor, blaming the company for inmate deaths and failed accreditations, and claiming it provided lax medical care.

Flagler County Sheriff Rick Staly publicly fired Armor Correctional Health Services in 2019 after a 23-year-old was found seizing and unresponsive in his cell earlier that year; he had been complaining of a high fever. He was taken to a hospital and died there. Staly said the medical provider failed to recognize the man “was having a reaction to medicine they had prescribed to him and the seriousness of his illness.” 

“In response to this tragedy, Armor has shown little interest in anything other than denying responsibility and trying to bill us for even more money,” Staly said then. The next year, an annual audit by the Florida Model Jail Standards at the Flagler County jail “found expired medications, lapses in medical care by Armor and other deficiencies in Armor’s services.” 

In 2020, Sarasota County Sheriff Thomas Knight wrote in a declaration during a civil employment case that Armor filed against an employee that he fired Armor because he was “not satisfied with their performance,” including lack of proper medical staffing. Wakulla County Sheriff Jared Miller also wrote a declaration, explaining that he was “not satisfied with the service levels the WCSO had been receiving from Armor” when he ended the contract.

Then, in 2022, Armor Correctional Health Services was criminally convicted in Milwaukee for abuse and falsifying records after a man died of dehydration in a Wisconsin jail. 

“We understood that this would likely have some broader impact if we were successful,” Milwaukee prosecutor Nicolas Heitman told The Trib, adding that the district attorney’s office wanted to make sure the company could not operate in other jails. “If you look at the history and their performance as a corporate partner with these institutions, you see they have a history of problems and an inability to reform themselves.”

One sheriff cited the conviction as a reason for ending a contract. Duval County first hired Armor in 2017, but Sheriff T.K. Waters ended a renewed contract early, saying that Armor failed to disclose its felony conviction, failed to maintain accreditation with the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, and failed to comply with Florida’s open record laws. The decision came after the heart transplant recipient died after not getting antirejection medications while in the Duval County jail. Waters did not cite the death as a reason to cancel the contract.

Mariloly Muller, a spokesperson for Armor Health, said the canceled contracts “relate to a prior leadership team and legacy operations that are not reflective of the current organization, its leadership, or its ongoing business practices.”

Piecing Together a Death

The only public record of Tracey’s nine days in jail comes from a 26-page police report from the St. Johns County sheriff’s major crimes unit, which investigates in-custody deaths. 

Tracey had been taken to jail on Dec. 6, 2023, for pushing an elderly woman he had been dating. The report shows that upon his arrival, jailers placed him in the infirmary to monitor a dog bite wound that doctors at University of Florida Health Flagler Hospital had treated shortly after he was arrested. 

Soon after he arrived at the infirmary, medical staff noticed Tracey was having trouble breathing and prescribed him an oxygen mask, according to the report. A nurse said that on Dec. 14, Tracey was sweaty and complained of shortness of breath. The report noted that Tracey repeatedly removed his mask, something nurses interpreted in the report as noncompliance, and reprimanded him. The nurse who treated Tracey noted that his blood oxygen level dropped to 89%. The Cleveland Clinic, an academic medical center, recommends on its website that people seek immediate medical treatment when their blood oxygen level falls below that. 

The next day, a different nurse told medical staff that Tracey needed to be watched because of his “decline in health,” that his blood oxygen levels were still “very low,” and that Tracey had passed out in his cell, according to the sheriff’s incident report.

According to the report, the nurse practitioner on staff later told investigators he was never told Tracey passed out. Another staffer quoted in the report said no one had discussed whether to send Tracey to the hospital. One person told investigators that Tracey was asked if he’d want to be hospitalized, but he declined. There is no standard “refusal” form that detainees have to sign if they say no to medical care, the report noted.

About an hour after he passed out, at 7:09 p.m. on Dec. 15, Tracey’s girlfriend had paid his bond and the deputy went to his cell to give him street clothes. He was found naked and lying in his bed. Investigators noted that it took “a lot of effort” for Tracey to get dressed. At 7:56 p.m., Tracey, who was still in the cell, appeared to yell something, waved his hands and then used an inhaler and put his hand on his chest, investigators saw in the videotape. 

By 8:16 p.m., Tracey had removed his pants and was visibly struggling to breathe, the report says. 

However three minutes later, in the inmate log report, a separate document maintained by sheriff’s deputies who conduct routine checks of medical patients, deputies noted they checked on Tracey and he was “OK.” 

Over the next 26 minutes, as Tracey lay alone in his cell, nobody came to his aid. 

At 8:35, Tracey appeared to stop breathing, according to investigators who watched the surveillance video. Investigators noted two deputies went into his cell two minutes later, then left. They came and went three more times over the course of a few minutes, without giving Tracy medical care, the report says.

In the jail log, deputies wrote that they checked on all medical inmates at 8:45 — 10 minutes after investigators noted Tracey stopped breathing — and wrote that “all appears secure.” 

No one gave Tracey CPR until 9 p.m., when he had already lost his pulse, according to the investigative report. 

An ambulance was called, but Tracey was declared dead at the jail.

Dr. Marc Stern, a correctional healthcare expert and University of Washington Public Health professor, said based on the information known about Tracey’s symptoms from the investigative report, Tracey should have been hospitalized.

Rich Forbus, a former jail commander who currently serves as vice president at the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, reviewed the sheriff’s report at the request of The Trib and agreed with Stern. The private nonprofit company offers accreditation services to jails upon request. While some Florida county jails, such as Duval, have received accreditation from the company, St. Johns confirmed it doesn’t use the firm now, though its 2022 contract with Armor Health of St. Johns County LLC required the company to maintain accreditation with the commission. 

“You know the person’s a COPD patient and you know he’s sick, I’ll be honest, I question why he didn’t go out” to a hospital, Forbus said. “If I’m the jail commander, I’m questioning why he’s not at the hospital.”

“He Just Fell Over and Died”

That’s a question that Tracey’s sister, Lillian Scharf, is also asking. About five hours after he died, at 1:30 a.m. on Dec. 16, 2023, Maryland police went to her house.

Scharf, Tracey’s closest remaining relative, said police told her to call the Florida sheriff for more information. 

“They told us he died of a heart issue, that it was sudden, he just fell over and died,” her daughter, Tracey Letourneau, recalled being told.

But when Scharf asked for her brother’s full medical documents, the sheriff declined to give them because she’s not his legal next of kin. Tracey’s wife, Brenda, died a year before he did.

When asked about Tracey’s death, J. Alfredo Armas, the attorney for Armor Health of St. Johns County LLC, cautioned against drawing conclusions regarding Tracey’s death because his medical records have not been released. The company has withheld those medical records from The Florida Trib, ProPublica and Tracey’s sister, citing medical privacy laws. 

Scharf also contacted a handful of attorneys in Florida and Maryland, but because the jail told her he died of a heart issue, each attorney turned her away. 

Scharf didn’t learn the true details of her brother’s death until this year, when The Trib and ProPublica sent her the autopsy and police report, obtained through a record request. By then, the two-year statute of limitations to sue for a wrongful death or neglect had passed. Florida also doesn’t allow monetary lawsuits in cases where the deceased doesn’t have a spouse or children.

Her younger brother’s ashes are now in Glen Burnie, Maryland, in a box in Scharf’s closet. His pug, Thor, lives with Brenda’s sister.

“You know, only the Lord knows the truth as far as if he would have survived or if he would have died, but I just feel like they didn’t give him the opportunity to try to save his life,” Scharf said.

The post Inmates Have Died in the Care of Armor Health Companies. Jails Keep Contracting With Them Anyway. appeared first on ProPublica.

In February, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit accusing Dallas officials of failing to adequately fund the city’s police department and violating a voter-approved measure requiring it to hire up to 900 new officers.

“I filed this lawsuit to ensure that the City of Dallas fully funds law enforcement, upholds public safety, and is accountable to its constituents,” Paxton said in a news release demanding that the city adhere to a 2024 change in its charter. “When voters demand more funding for law enforcement, local officials must immediately comply.”

The reason Paxton could pursue such action, the reason the Dallas city charter even requires hiring more officers, was due in large part to a man named Art Martinez de Vara. A private attorney with a law practice based in Houston and a tiny South Texas town called Von Ormy, Martinez de Vara was one of the driving forces behind the changes in the charter that opened Dallas up to such a lawsuit in the first place.

Martinez de Vara’s personal website lists him as a state historian, an anthropologist and an attorney, in that order. He’s also the mayor of Von Ormy, a community of 1,100 people. But over the past two decades, Martinez de Vara has been much more than that. He has made a name for himself in Texas conservative circles as the architect behind the formation of a handful of small towns with austere — nearly nonexistent — local governments.

His push for limited-government concepts is not out of the norm in Texas, a state that has long worn that badge with pride. But the so-called “liberty city” experiment, in which communities agree to lean governments, little to no taxation and scant regulation, never grew into a large-scale movement. So in recent years, Martinez de Vara and other limited-government advocates have taken a different tack: They’ve ramped up efforts to restrict local governments’ ability to decide how they spend their money and which policies they can adopt.

That’s what happened in Dallas.

Two years ago, Martinez de Vara joined a coalition of power players associated with a nonprofit called Dallas HERO, a group funded in part by Republican megadonor and Dallas-area hotelier Monty Bennett.

As HERO’s attorney, Martinez de Vara helped draft and lobby for ballot measures that required the city to dedicate a large share of its budget to hiring more police officers and significantly increase starting pay, even if it meant cutting other public services. Last year, the city agreed to fund hiring 350 more officers to begin meeting the new requirement, which has no timeline for compliance.

Another measure Martinez de Vara helped draft made the city more vulnerable to lawsuits from opponents of its actions, by stripping the city of its immunity from litigation.

The measures, the group argued, would make Dallas safer and ensure local officials were more accountable to their constituents. But Dallas’s elected officials, nearly all of whom were opposed to the measures, say the reality has been detrimental. They are cutting city services and staff to ensure they have the money for the new recruits, even as crime continues to drop. And they’ve already had to spend additional money to defend themselves against a lawsuit brought by a couple who argued that the city violated its own noise regulations by allowing the construction of a church basketball court near their home. (A judge dismissed the couple’s claims tied to the city charter amendment, but that ruling is now on appeal.) Paxton’s lawsuit — which Dallas maintains it still has immunity from — now puts a new microscope on the city more than a year after the propositions passed.

“The Republican officials running Texas have long sought to gain leverage over the Democrat officials running the state’s largest cities, so I am not surprised that Attorney General Paxton joined with HERO lawyers to sue Dallas,” said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University.

Dallas is not the only city dealing with the fallout from efforts pushed by Martinez de Vara.

Earlier in his career, he persuaded five small towns to incorporate. At least two of them still struggle to provide basic services.

In Von Ormy, just outside of San Antonio, the town still doesn’t have a sewer system 18 years after it was created, relying entirely on septic tanks. And about 60 miles away in the town of Kingsbury, Mayor Shirley Nolen, a supporter of Martinez de Vara, acknowledged that the low-tax, small-government model has been hard to maintain. “That’s kind of a double-edged sword,” she said. “There’s no regulation.”

During the past year, Martinez de Vara also served as the attorney for the nonprofit Texas Government Accountability Association. According to Republican former Texas Rep. Matt Krause, previously a member of the association board, the organization is funded in part by Bennett, who has used his fortune to advocate for the passage of school vouchers, end transgender care for youth and upend homeless services in big cities.

Bennett and Martinez de Vara declined to talk to WFAA for this story. When WFAA traveled to Von Ormy to ask Martinez de Vara about HERO, he declined to talk, citing pending litigation. When asked about his work in Von Ormy, he said, “I can’t because it’s all tied in.”

The accountability association’s leaders spent most of 2025 trying to entice, and sometimes force with petition drives, various cities and other government entities across Texas to enter into contracts that required them to pay membership fees to the organization and adhere to a set of prescribed accountability and transparency requirements. If they failed to do so, they risked being sued.

Odessa, a Republican stronghold in West Texas, became one of the first cities to sign on. But the city quickly sued TGAA to get out of the deal, arguing in court documents that the group sought to “illegally transfer” local rulemaking power to itself and wanted the right to veto decisions made by city leaders.

Elected officials should not give up government immunity or their ability to make their own decisions, said Bill Helfand, a municipal law expert and Houston attorney.

“I cannot imagine how any responsible government official or body would agree that they are not capable of self-governance, literally,” Helfand said. “I would vote against any person running for any elective office who agreed they need outside oversight to ensure they are doing their elected duties.”

The Rise of the “Liberty City”

Over the course of a career that began nearly two decades ago, Martinez de Vara has worked for two state lawmakers and served as assistant general counsel for the Republican Party of Texas. He also has at least 15 years of experience in local government, including terms as either mayor or city attorney in several small towns near San Antonio.

That journey started in 2006, when Martinez de Vara was still a law school student at St. Mary’s University and he began a campaign to incorporate Von Ormy, a 2-square-mile community just southwest of San Antonio on Interstate Highway 35. By forming their own local government, Von Ormy citizens would have the legal authority to make their own laws.

Martinez de Vara worked with residents who feared annexation from sprawling San Antonio, framing the effort as an example of how Texans could resist what he saw as creeping municipal overreach. Von Ormy, he said, would form a government that would work toward eliminating property taxes while still providing basic services to its residents, and would offer free business permitting and few regulations.

“We were fighting not only for sewer, potholes and police protection but for self-determination and empowerment of our community,” Martinez de Vara wrote in a firsthand account of the incorporation campaign. In May 2008, Von Ormy residents said yes to becoming their own city in a vote of 117 to 16.

Martinez de Vara, who did not grow up in Von Ormy but whose family has lived there for generations, became its first mayor. The town’s incorporation and his election garnered statewide attention for the model of government he proposed, one he said made Von Ormy the “freest little city in Texas,” according to a 2017 story in the Texas Observer. He later called the community “a unique opportunity to experiment with democracy,” describing it as the kind of place where people can freely set off fireworks and smoke cigars wherever they want.

But cracks quickly began to form. Martinez de Vara had pushed incorporation partly to help fund construction of a sewer system for the community, whose residents relied on septic tanks. But the sewer service was going to cost millions of dollars and would require the city to borrow money. Martinez de Vara opposed taking on any extra debt.

Tensions escalated over Martinez de Vara’s plan to eliminate property taxes, according to interviews, City Council minutes and previous news accounts. Some City Council members began to question whether the zero property tax approach was sustainable, possibly creating an overreliance on sales taxes.

Martinez de Vara eventually succeeded in eliminating the city’s property taxes. But the move threw the City Council into disarray and eventually led to misdemeanor charges against council members who were charged with violating the Texas Open Meetings Act in an attempt to override his action. Those charges were later dropped, and Martinez de Vara eventually decided not to seek a subsequent term as mayor amid the turmoil. Council members reinstated the property tax in his absence.

The challenges, however, were not a deterrent for his vision of expanding the liberty cities model. Over the years, he helped various communities in some capacity to incorporate and eventually started working to enshrine the liberty cities model into law.

Doing so, Martinez de Vara told attendees at a January 2015 forum sponsored by the influential conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, would prevent future elected leaders from abandoning the model by, for instance, raising taxes. The group supported such legislation in a policy brief calling the liberty city model a “new concept for self-governance.”

Martinez de Vara by then had become chief of staff for state Sen. Konni Burton, a Republican who represented portions of North Texas west of Dallas and was a leader in one of the founding tea party chapters. In February 2015, Burton filed a bill that would bar leaders of liberty cities from adopting a property tax without approval from at least 60% of voters, mandate voter approval before taking on public debt and allow a citizen’s bill of rights “expressly limiting” city authority. The bill did not pass. Burton, who left office in 2019, declined to speak to WFAA for this story.

The idea behind the liberty city movement in Texas, especially for small rural cities, was to promote incorporation for basic public services at low cost. But in practice, the model has not proven successful, said Jillson, the SMU political science professor.

“A few towns, like Von Ormy, tried it, but the results were disappointing,” Jillson said. “Turns out meaningful public services do cost money, so mayors and city councils were left fighting over tax cuts and poor services until everyone simply threw up their hands.”

More than a decade after its formation in 2015, the town of Kingsbury, which Martinez de Vara helped to incorporate, has only one paid employee. Everything else is handled by volunteers. “We don’t have water or sewer. We don’t have trash pickup,” said Nolen, the town’s longtime mayor. “It’s all very self-reliant farmers and ranchers out here. We don’t want any property tax.”

The liberty cities model of fewer regulations, however, has also brought with it the challenge of dealing with a landfill that moved in just outside the tiny city’s boundaries. Some balked when Nolen began talking about passing zoning rules, she said.

“People are like, ‘Well, I don’t want anybody telling me what to do on my own property,’ and I’m like, ‘I don’t either.’ However, I don’t want Joe Bob’s unlined-hole-in-the-ground battery disposal coming in next to my house,” she said.

Sixty miles away in Von Ormy, two truck stops make up a significant part of the city’s revenue. Residents and businesses still rely on septic tanks, and locals say larger businesses have been hesitant to relocate there because of the lack of sewer service.

“I’m sure you’ve driven around,” said Alex Quintanilla, a former city commissioner. “There’s nothing around here. What is there?”

A New Tactic, an Uncertain Future

Martinez de Vara’s vision for a liberty city, and whether he can carry it out, will be tested once again. Von Ormy reelected him as mayor last year, a few months after the passage of the Dallas HERO initiatives.

Even as he returned to the leadership role of the town, Martinez de Vara and his allies, through the Texas Government Accountability Association, continued efforts to dictate how other cities make budget and policy decisions.

The TGAA branded itself as an initiative focused on helping local governments embrace stronger ethics and transparency. But officials in cities that encountered the new organization questioned that goal. Some argued the organization’s real aim was to find a way to control cities, similar to what happened with Dallas HERO in 2024.

The connections between Dallas HERO and TGAA go beyond kindred philosophies and the legal services of Martinez, who also served as TGAA’s lawyer. The man who handles finances for TGAA is the chief accounting officer for a hotel company founded by Bennett, the business owner who provided financial support for the Dallas HERO propositions. Dallas HERO and TGAA share a mailing address, according to the organizations’ 990 tax forms from 2024. The same mailing address is also listed on the 2024 IRS filing for Dallas Express Media, the parent company for the conservative online site Dallas Express, of which Bennett is publisher. The website posted several pieces championing Dallas HERO and lambasting city leaders who opposed it. Similarly, the site criticized city council members of one community for declining to join TGAA.

Krause, the former state representative and former TGAA board member, said he has known Bennett and Martinez de Vara for years through his work in conservative politics. As with HERO, he said, Bennett financially supports the accountability association.

“When I knew I was going to be working with Art again on TGAA, I was really excited,” Krause said. “He’s just a brilliant guy. It doesn’t surprise me that that’s somebody that Monty would have trusted and respected to be kind of the final voice on these kinds of things.”

TGAA’s model has been to hold cities to frequent audits and, in general, bind future councils to an externally written rulebook that limits local officials’ discretion, critics say. If a member entity is accused of violating the agreement, the TGAA agreement requires it to waive governmental immunity from citizen lawsuits.

TGAA tapped at least two of the cities Martinez de Vara had helped incorporate to sign on, including Kingsbury, where he is still city attorney. The town was the first to join.

The group also approached Providence Village, a planned community in North Texas that Martinez de Vara had helped to incorporate more than a decade earlier. Leaders of the town declined. Representatives from TGAA started a door-to-door campaign in the small city. They sought to gather signatures to “force the town to hold and pay for, at taxpayers’ expense, an election to add a provision to our town charter requiring TGAA membership,” Mayor Linda Inman posted on Facebook last June.

Inman, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, wrote on Facebook that TGAA was using a recruitment strategy “that relies on buzzwords and scare tactics to mislead voters into signing their tax dollars away to a nonpublic, third-party entity with no interest in the towns and cities they’re targeting.”

In the end, only Kingsbury and Odessa, a city of 124,000 people, joined the organization. Von Ormy officials considered joining but took no action.

Odessa signed on at the behest of its conservative city manager, John Beckmeyer, former head of the state GOP. Beckmeyer did not return messages seeking comment for this story.

After new City Council members were elected in Odessa in November 2024, the city sued to get out of the deal. The terms of the contract were steep: After a grace period, Odessa would have to pay roughly $24,000 annually to maintain its membership, an amount that could increase and had no cap. The contract had no end date. And the only way the city could get out of the agreement was to hold a citywide election.

Layne Rouse, an attorney representing Odessa in the case, said the TGAA is an example of “dark money controlling politics through a backdoor contract” because its donors aren’t public.

In December, a judge declared Odessa’s TGAA contract “void and unenforceable.” The association appealed the ruling but, on Feb. 12, withdrew the appeal without explanation.

TGAA officials did not respond to questions about the lawsuit or its efforts to recruit cities.

Now TGAA’s future, and Martinez de Vara’s role with the group, appear up in the air. Besides withdrawing its appeal of the Odessa lawsuit, the group hasn’t had any meetings since December. Recent efforts to contact TGAA employees and board members have resulted in emails bouncing back.

But Martinez de Vara remains busy. When Paxton, the state attorney general, filed the lawsuit in February suing Dallas, a P.O. Box associated with Martinez de Vara’s law office in Von Ormy was listed on the petition. He represents two Dallas residents in the lawsuit who say they’ve been harmed by the city’s failure to grow its police force.

He told The Dallas Morning News that Dallas HERO had “no formal role in the litigation” but confirmed that he remains its attorney.

“I coordinated with the attorney general’s office. They were in need of someone to represent the private plaintiffs and I agreed to do so,” Martinez de Vara said. “I was a logical person to reach out to.”

The post Meet the Mayor of a Tiny Texas Town Who Wants to Limit How Cities Can Govern appeared first on ProPublica.

Connecticut legislators overhauled the state’s towing law last year to make it more fair for low-income residents who couldn’t afford the fees to get their cars back. Those residents sometimes saw their cars sold after being towed for breaking one of their landlord’s parking rules.

The new law, which took effect in October, requires tow truck companies to give owners notice before hauling away a car for minor issues like failing to display an apartment complex’s parking permit or parking in the wrong space. They also now have to be available after hours to allow people to retrieve their vehicles. They have to accept credit cards and provide change when people pay in cash.

But when Elias Natal went to work one evening in December, he discovered his Buick had been towed from his home at Sunset Ridge Apartments in New Haven. And the towing company seemed to ignore the new rules.

The law requires apartment complexes to post signs warning of towing, but interviews with tenants and visits to Sunset Ridge show there were none at the complex, where many people receive state or federal rental aid. The towing company, Lombard Motors, told Natal he was towed for not having a parking permit, even though Natal has photos showing the sticker was displayed on the windshield, as he said the apartment manager instructed him.

When Natal and his partner, Jasmin Flores, discovered where the car was and went to pick it up, Lombard was already closed, and no one was available to return their car, triggering additional storage fees.

By the time they got the money together to pay the fees, it had only been four days, and the tow didn’t require excessive mileage charges since Lombard’s lot was a few blocks away. But Lombard’s fees stacked up to nearly $500. The company demanded cash, which the couple paid. They got their car back but had to argue to get any change.

“Especially after the copious amounts of money that they asked of us, to then not give us back like our minuscule change is just, it’s dehumanizing,” Natal said.

Over the past year and a half, the Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica have investigated towing practices in Connecticut, revealing how state laws favored towing companies, particularly at the expense of people with low incomes. The stories led to a new law, but reporting shows that some towing companies aren’t following it. While the legislature required most involuntary tows from apartments to be triggered by specific complaints, residents said towing companies are continuing to patrol public housing and low-income apartment complexes and tow cars for minor violations.

Few landlords had more tows in New Haven from 2022 to 2024 than the company that owns Sunset Ridge. And residents say the frequency of towing has picked up even more in recent months after the owner, Capital Realty Group, became more aggressive in response to the formation of a tenants union. In the five months since the new law took effect, Sunset Ridge has had 64 tows, compared with 146 from 2022 to 2024, according to police data. Capital Realty did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.

Whether landlords and towers are following the law matters because towing in Connecticut has disproportionately occurred in low-income areas. In many cities, public housing complexes and low-income apartments were some of the biggest hot spots for towing before the reforms passed, according to a new CT Mirror and ProPublica analysis of police department tow logs.

The analysis of data from nine of the largest Connecticut cities showed that census tracts where the most tows occurred from 2022 to 2024 tended to have larger populations of renters, larger Black and Hispanic populations and much higher rates of poverty than the state as a whole. The census tract where Natal and Flores live had the second-most tows in the city and a high population of Hispanic and Black residents. In Norwalk, the top seven property parcels for tows belong to the public housing authority.

“It’s such a fish-in-a-barrel situation where people have to put their car somewhere,” said Luke Melonakos, vice president of the Connecticut Tenants Union, about the difficulty finding parking in some of these housing complexes. “They have no choice but to try to abide by these often very arduous, confusing, often-changing-frequently parking rules.”

Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles spokesperson Shaun Formica said that the agency hasn’t received any complaints of towing companies not following the law, but that complaints about towing overall have gone down. Since the law went into effect in October, there have been seven complaints, compared with 32 from October 2024 to March 2025, records show. Natal did not file a complaint.

Lombard Motors and another company owned by the same group, Anthony’s Hightech Auto Center, were the subject of nine complaints that resulted in fines between 2023 and 2025 before the law took effect, records show. In two cases, the DMV fined them a total of $5,000 for overcharging people to get their vehicles after a tow and ordered Lombard to return more than $1,000 to the vehicle owners. Lombard did not attend the hearings to offer a defense in either case, records show.

The owners of Lombard and Anthony’s did not respond to multiple calls for comment.

The Biggest Towing Hot Spots

Like at Sunset Ridge, the effects of towing have been felt most by people of color and poor families in Connecticut, in part because they are more likely to rent than own their home.

Statewide, about a third of people are renters. In census tracts where the most tows occurred, more than three-quarters are renters. The 50 census tracts where tows occurred most were about 27% Black and 38% Hispanic, compared with 10% and 18% statewide. Connecticut’s overall poverty rate is 10%, but it’s 26% in these census tracts.

Residents of these areas say they face higher levels of towing because public housing authorities and landlords of low-income apartment complexes often have towing companies on contract to patrol their areas. Though the intent might be to deal with abandoned cars or a lack of parking for residents, they say it’s led to overly aggressive towing for minor mistakes that people in wealthier neighborhoods don’t have to worry about.

One of the most common towing spots in Waterbury from 2022 to 2024 was the Berkeley Heights public housing complex with 318 tows — more than one tow for each of the 254 apartments there.

Dyshawn Key was visiting his mother there in April 2024 when shortly after 11 p.m. he noticed a tow truck lifting his car, which was parked outside his mother’s apartment.

He had forgotten to move his car from his mother’s spot, which required a parking permit, and rushed out and begged the driver to stop, but it was too late. Key’s car has been towed at least eight times from Berkeley Heights since 2022, mostly for parking without a sticker.

“They make sure that people are sleeping and there’s nobody around, and they just tiptoe through here and take your vehicle,” Key said. Data shows that almost 90% of tows there happened between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., when apartment offices are typically closed and it’s unlikely that property managers would complain about parking.

Fewer tows have happened at Berkeley Heights since the law passed, according to Waterbury tow logs.

Waterbury Housing Authority executive director Chris D’Orso said there is a public road that runs between two of the buildings at Berkeley Heights, and the city monitors it carefully to ensure that people don’t block emergency vehicle or bus access. He said there have also been problems with people leaving stolen cars in the parking lot.

“We were turned into a dumping ground for stolen cars for a while,” D’Orso said.

Still, there isn’t enough parking, he conceded. Though he said most of the tows are driven by complaints, the agency contracts with a towing company.

Like Capital Realty in New Haven, several other landlords showed up multiple times in the data. Zvi Horowitz, a New Jersey-based landlord, through several companies, owns three of the biggest towing locations in Waterbury — Diamond Court Apartments, Wyndham Court Apartments and Bunker Hill Apartments. The three locations, which have 256 apartments combined, had 522 tows over two years.

Horowitz also owns Seramonte Estates in Hamden, a large town north of New Haven, where a tenants union held protests after residents said they were frequently towed for small infractions. The complex accounted for more than half the city’s tows from January 2022 to June 2024.

Paul Boudreau, one of the tenants union’s founders, said it had negotiated for towing to stop at all of Horowitz’s apartments. But since then, he’s gotten calls from tenants who say the towing hasn’t stopped despite the new law.

Horowitz didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Boudreau said that in his work as an organizer around the state, he often hears of people getting towed soon after asking for repairs or reporting problems with housing conditions at their properties.

“They’re still using these tow trucks like hired hitmen to go after tenants, to take their stuff when they complain,” Boudreau said.

“It’s So Retaliatory”

Natal and Flores said they believe they were targeted by their landlord in retaliation for joining a tenants union that is trying to improve conditions at Sunset Ridge.

The day before their car was towed they had canvassed the complex with neighbors and outside organizers as part of the Sunset Ridge Tenants Union, a group of renters calling on Capital Realty to make changes at the apartment complex. In addition to requesting repairs at the complex, tenants said they have been towed unfairly.

“Everyone has had an issue with management or with parking or with the towing company, because it’s so retaliatory,” Flores said.

Tawana Galberth, a union leader, said one of the top complaints about the apartment complex when the union polled residents was towing. Many people reported being towed for small reasons, like being parked over the line. A tow truck driver often patrols the complex at night to look for vehicles, she said.

“When I moved in, I never received clarification. How do we park? Where do we park? Where do we have visitors?” Galberth asked.

Kristy Kaik said the use of parking stickers at the Rockview public housing complex in New Haven hadn’t been enforced for more than a decade. But when her son came home from college for Christmas after the new law took effect, he discovered his car had been towed for not having a sticker.

“I live there for a reason,” she said, describing the assistance including the public health insurance she receives. “I have food stamp benefits, Husky medical, my son is in school. I’m struggling.”

Kaik said there were no signs about parking rules at the complex, which a visit to the site confirmed. So Kaik asked the housing authority to reimburse her for what she says was a wrongful tow. It refused.

The New Haven housing authority, Elm City Communities, did not respond to requests for comment.

Like Flores and Natal, Kaik found that the company, York Service & Towing, would only take cash, telling her that sometimes, people would pay with a credit card then cancel the card before payment went through. She said she also had to argue to get them to hand over her change.

Cheryl Maselli, owner of York, said her company follows all the new laws, although something like what happened to Kaik could occur if the person working doesn’t know how to use the credit card machine. She said some of the drivers “are not capable of learning new things.” They also don’t keep much cash on hand in case of robbery, she said, which could have led to the issue with change.

Maselli said her company is “one of the nicest towing companies out there.”

But she said she has to respond to her clients. “My client is a property manager. They want their property neat, clean,” Maselli said. “They don’t want people hanging out. They don’t want cars with faulty equipment, and these are some of the rules that we enforce. So when we do tow a car, the people are obviously angry.”

The post Some Connecticut Towing Companies Are Ignoring New Law Aimed at Helping Low-Income Residents appeared first on ProPublica.

Kevin Heath had hoped there would be solar panels by now on his family farm in southeastern Michigan, roughly 50 miles outside Detroit.

About six years ago, he agreed to lease part of his land for a solar project. It would help him pay off debt and keep the farm in the family, he said. But the opportunity was thwarted when, in 2023, following pushback from some local residents, his township passed an ordinance that banned large solar projects from land zoned for agriculture.

In the fight over solar development, Heath said he was bombarded by just about every argument from critics — including claims that solar fields are a health hazard. “I’ve heard them say that, but I’ve never heard anybody prove that,” Heath said.

“The health and safety issue,” he added, “that is just a joke.”

Michigan has big prospects in solar farming — measured by the expected growth in the capacity of its farms to add electricity directly to the grid. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, most of the nation’s new capacity from this type of solar farm is planned this year for four states, including Michigan. The others, with their hot deserts and big-sky plains, seem more obvious: Texas, Arizona and California.

To some, in Michigan and beyond, this growth feels dangerous. They pressure public officials to stop, stall or otherwise complicate new solar projects with an array of arguments that now go beyond just land use to include public health.

There is little reputable evidence to back their claims. But health concerns have helped power a solar backlash that undercuts efforts to broaden energy sources even as customer costs are rising.

Restrictions on solar development are proliferating nationwide, “often rooted in misinformation or unfounded fears,” including ones that involve “potential environmental and human safety risks,” according to an article published late last year in the Brigham Young University Law Review.

To generate electricity, solar projects harvest energy from the sun. “And that’s really not that different from what a field of corn or alfalfa does,” said Troy Rule, the Arizona State University law professor who authored the article. “In fact, arguably, it’s even more environmentally friendly.”

Still, a state board in Ohio rejected an application for a solar project last month, citing local opposition, even though its staff initially said it met all requirements. Along with other concerns, according to the board, opponents “testified about the potential impacts on the health of residents.”

A bill in Missouri would halt commercial solar projects in the state, including those under construction, through at least 2027, as a state agency develops new regulations. The bill’s emergency clause says this is “deemed necessary for the immediate preservation of the public health, welfare, peace, and safety.”

And, on the eastern edge of Michigan, St. Clair County adopted a novel public health regulation last year that set limits on solar development and battery storage. The move was encouraged by the county’s medical director who, in a memo, warned of the threat of noise, visual pollution and potential sources of contamination. Some local residents have long pressed leaders to act, saying that intrusive noise could worsen post-traumatic stress disorder and other ailments.

Public officials don’t always examine the validity of health claims, according to Rule. And local deliberations rarely compare the impact of solar farms to common agricultural practices, which can lead to runoff from fertilizers and herbicides, for example, or waste lagoons from concentrated animal feeding operations.

People have many reasons for taking issue with large-scale solar development, said Michael Gerrard, an environmental lawyer and founder of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. But as for the feared health impact, he said, “there’s no basis for that.”

“People try to come up with a rationale to justify their dislike of things they dislike for other reasons,” Gerrard added.

President Donald Trump’s administration, meanwhile, is adding to the skepticism that renewable energy is worthwhile. Among other moves, it’s phasing out federal tax credits for the solar and wind industries.

It all takes a toll on the effort to build out solar infrastructure. Last year, new solar installations in the U.S. dropped by 14%.

Fear vs. Science

Large solar developments can transform hundreds, or even thousands, of acres of rural land, paneling them with crystalline silicon and tempered glass.

It’s a big change, and people have questions.

Locals worry that electromagnetism and even glare can pose a health risk. They wonder if toxic materials could leach into the soil and contaminate groundwater, if not while the solar site is operational, then some decades in the future, when it reaches the end of its life. That certainly has been the case with orphaned oil wells, which also were built with promises of safety.

But researchers point out that the most common types of panels have only small amounts of such materials, if any. They are encased and unlikely to leach into the soil. Rather than sitting in landfills when a site is decommissioned, most of the materials used in solar panels can be recycled (though the process can be costly).

Craig Adair, vice president of development at Open Road Renewables, which has pursued renewable energy projects in several states, has fielded a range of concerns over the years — from how soil could be contaminated to the possibility of electromagnetic fields causing cancer.

“Those questions, in just about every case, have an answer,” Adair said. “There is rigorous academic study, and there are examples of projects that have been operating.”

While the future farmability of the land is often a concern, many researchers — and farmers — say that a solar lease will help preserve it.

With proper planning on the front end, equipment can be removed from a decommissioned solar site and green space restored, said Steve Kalland, executive director of the NC Clean Energy Technology Center, which, along with its partners, provides technical assistance to local governments in the Carolinas.

And a person’s exposure to the electromagnetic field, or EMF, from a solar farm is roughly the same as what they would encounter from ordinary household appliances, according to researchers. EMF levels also decrease rapidly with distance.

Chronic exposure to noise is also a recurring complaint from critics. In challenging a proposed project from Adair’s company in Morrow County, Ohio, one woman said in a brief to the state siting board that she was troubled about how noise from the facility might affect people with neurological noise sensitivities, including her daughter.

A piece of equipment called an inverter is usually the source of noise on a solar site. It converts the current into the form that’s used on the grid.

But noise, as well as glare, are typically buffered with vegetative landscaping and setbacks, or the distance between the property line and the nearest structure. Inverters can also be placed far from the ears of neighbors.

Noise modeling for the Morrow County project showed that its inverter “will basically be inaudible to the public,” Adair said, and if it ever generated noise above a certain limit, the permit would require the company to bring it back into compliance.

The problem, Adair said, is that evidence-based answers and solutions can get lost in the fervor. They can be drowned out by “opposition activists wanting to try to scare local politicians into opposing a project, even if the concerns that they’re raising are not legitimate concerns,” he said.

Last month, the Ohio Power Siting Board denied a permit to Adair’s Morrow County project. Its order acknowledged that the proposal offered positive benefits, but, it said, “these benefits are outweighed by the consistent and substantial opposition.”

It didn’t specifically cite health concerns as the reason for the denial, but rather, “the varied and numerous concerns raised by both the local government entities and public in the project area.”

But, Adair said in an email, those local governments “cited (unfounded) public health concerns as a reason for their opposition to the project.”

Open Road Renewables plans to apply for a rehearing from the board, Adair said. The company has eight permitted solar projects in Ohio, but because of a siting process that he said is subject to “manipulation and misinformation,” Adair said it won’t initiate any more.

Intense Battles in Michigan

In Michigan’s St. Clair County, it isn’t just a number of residents who are worried about large solar facilities. The Health Department’s medical director echoed their concerns.

In two memos to other county officials, Dr. Remington Nevin said that large solar sites are a public health risk for the area’s predominantly rural residents. The state’s solar standards, he wrote, weren’t enough to protect them from “environmental health hazards, the spread of sources of contamination, nuisance potentially injurious to the public health, health problems, and other conditions or practices which could reasonably be expected to cause disease.”

Any detectable tonal noise, he added, must be considered an unreasonable threat to public health. He recommended new regulations.

The county administrator at the time, Karry Hepting, noted that Nevin’s initial memo “does not address the question or provide support for what are the potential health/environmental risks,” according to internal emails provided to ProPublica. “It appears we will need to hire an outside expert to get the level of detail and supporting data necessary to consider potential next steps,” she added. Hepting said that she’d begun researching prospects.

But County Commissioner Steven Simasko — now the county board’s chair — wrote in an internal email that he accepted Nevin’s medical opinion “as a good standard for the protection of the public health of our citizens” and disagreed with the need for outside input.

Simasko told ProPublica in an email that he believed it wasn’t the role of the administrator to get involved in a public health matter, and that he objected “to essentially paying for a second public health medical opinion” more to Hepting’s liking. 

Hepting, who has since retired from her post at the county, disputed Simasko’s depiction of her motivations in a message to ProPublica. “Nothing could be farther from the truth,” she wrote. “It had nothing to do with shopping for a different opinion. Mr. Nevin’s initial memo did not address the initial question posed by the Board. It did not state what the health risks were and what negative health impacts exist. It basically said it’s a risk because he said so.”

To legally justify the adoption of health regulations, Nevin said in his second memo, it wasn’t necessary for his department “to prove, with a precise scientific or medical rationale, that eligible facilities pose an unreasonable threat to the public’s health.” Instead, expert opinion, public comment and the consent of the local government were reason enough, he wrote.

In the end, county officials were persuaded to act. The commissioners approved the Health Department’s new policy for solar energy and battery facilities, including a nonrefundable $25,000 fee to cover the cost of reviewing a proposed project. It also said that policy violations were punishable by up to six months in prison.

An electric utility promptly sued, and a solar company joined the case. The Health Department, they argued, has no authority to issue what are, in effect, zoning regulations. What’s more, they said in legal filings, the county can’t override the solar standards established by the state.

In its legal filings, the county said the health regulations were adopted properly and supported by “substantial, competent, and material evidence.” Facilities that don’t meet its standards “pose a threat to public health,” the county argued.

In response to ProPublica’s detailed queries, a public information officer said that the Health Department would not comment due to litigation.

Nevin said in a podcast interview last year that he wasn’t opposed to solar projects. “The purpose,” he said, “is to identify risks, unreasonable risks, to the public’s health posed by the construction or operation of the facilities, and then take reasonable, measured steps to attempt to mitigate those risks, ideally in a fashion that would continue to allow the facility to be constructed and to operate.”

Solar capacity in Michigan continues to grow, despite local pushback, but so far, only 2.55% of the state’s electricity comes from solar. In Ohio, it’s nearly 6%, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group. In Texas, it’s nearly 11%. Michigan is requiring electricity providers to reach an 80% clean energy portfolio by 2035, and 100% by 2040.

Michigan has more local restrictions on renewable energy than any other state, according to the Sabin Center. “Practically nowhere in the country has seen more conflict” about where to allow large solar farms that add electricity directly to the grid than rural Michigan, according to a 2024 article in the Case Western Reserve Law Review authored by a Sabin Center senior fellow.

That includes the conflict in Milan Township, where Heath grew up on an 1,100-acre farm. “I always wanted to farm,” Heath said. He saw leasing part of his land to a solar company as a way to stay afloat and keep the land in the family.

In 2020, Milan Township passed an ordinance that would allow the project to go forward, with Heath’s brother, the township supervisor, abstaining.

But opposition mounted. Critics built a website that argued, among other things, that the project would unleash dangerous electromagnetic radiation. Heath and his siblings were rebuked by their neighbors, Heath said, to the point that his brother, Phil, told the township attorney he was thinking about resigning as supervisor. That same night, he died of a heart attack at age 67.

A few months later, with a new supervisor in place, the township board banned large solar development from land that’s zoned for agriculture. The terms were restrictive enough to effectively ban such a project not only from land owned by Heath and his sister, but from all but the small portion of the township that’s zoned for industry.

Stephanie Kozar, Milan Township’s clerk, said in an email to ProPublica that most residents opposed solar projects on agricultural land, and that the initial ordinance passed during the coronavirus pandemic, before officials had adequately informed residents about potential changes. The updated policy, she said, would “protect the township and allow for responsible development of clean energy in the area.”

To overcome severe local restrictions, the state set standards in 2023 for noise, height, fencing, setbacks and other elements of a large solar project. It also created a pathway where developers, in certain cases, can get a permit from the Michigan Public Service Commission, the state’s regulating authority, rather than from local governments. 

In an order, the commission laid out details for how the process would work. But nearly 80 local and county governments, including Milan Township, challenged it in court, arguing the commission was overstepping its authority. 

In support of the state, Heath and his sister are represented in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by a legal team affiliated with the Sabin Center, along with local attorneys.

Also part of that brief is Clara Ostrander, who had hoped a solar project would help protect two farmsteads in Milan Township that have been in her family for over 150 years. “We need a responsible neutral party like the Michigan Public Service Commission to review these projects based on facts, not fear or falsehoods,” she testified to state officials ahead of the bill’s passage.

Even with the state process, rising energy demand and eye-popping electricity costs, no new large solar installation has yet been built in Milan Township.

And in February, as snow melted around the “No Industrial Solar” signs that stud the long country roads, a circuit court judge ruled that St. Clair County’s health regulation is “invalid, null, and void.”

But county officials soon opted to appeal, unanimously. “This is very important for the health of St. Clair County and the residents,” said one commissioner before casting his vote.

The post Unfounded Health Concerns Are Powering a Solar Backlash appeared first on ProPublica.

Mary Jannotta sliced meat and cheese behind deli counters at Acme and Pathmark supermarkets in the Philadelphia suburbs for decades, developing aches that came with working on her feet. A botched back surgery in 2008 made the pain worse. Her doctor repeatedly prescribed OxyContin, Purdue Pharma’s marquee painkiller — the high-dose opioid the company later admitted it criminally marketed and distributed.   

Jannotta said she soon became dependent on opioids. Cut off by her doctors, she found her way to Kensington, home of Philadelphia’s dangerous open-air drug market, to score pills. She eventually lost her car, her home — and her grandson. Tyler Cordeiro first pilfered Jannotta’s prescription pills as a teenager. He was 24 when he died of an overdose. 

When Purdue filed for bankruptcy in 2019, Jannotta, along with nearly 140,000 other people, filed claims against the company for the harm they said its drugs caused. Though the money could not bring back what they lost, a financial settlement represented an opportunity to get justice from the company and its multibillionaire owners, the Sackler family.

Then they waited. The Supreme Court in 2024 rejected the first bankruptcy settlement because it shielded the Sacklers from future lawsuits. Finally, last November, a federal judge approved a new plan that would allow the payouts to start.

But this $7.4 billion bankruptcy plan — including $870 million that has been set aside for individual victims — will shut out tens of thousands of those who originally applied for a settlement, ProPublica and The Philadelphia Inquirer found. Fewer than half of those who filed claims against Purdue will get any kind of help under the new plan, despite the company touting it as “the only opioid settlement to date that meaningfully compensates individual victims.”

Court records show the new plan slashed payments for victims, imposed tougher eligibility requirements and eliminated compensation for teenagers who bought Purdue drugs on the street. Estimated settlement amounts for people whose family members fatally overdosed dropped to as little as $8,000; the previous payout for an OxyContin death had been $48,000.

Most significantly, the new plan removed a key provision that allowed victims to submit a sworn affidavit, in lieu of a prescription or other medical or legal records, to prove they purchased Purdue opioids.

Similar sworn statements have been permitted in other major bankruptcy cases — such as those driven by sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church — to account for harm done years earlier where physical evidence is scant or impossible to obtain.  

Several victims told ProPublica and the Inquirer that the loss of the affidavit option meant they had no hope of receiving a settlement. Purdue sold painkillers for decades, and, while laws vary by state, generally doctors, hospitals and pharmacies must keep prescription records for only a few years.

“I can’t turn up prescriptions for my son back when he was young, years ago,” Michigan resident Ellen Isaacs said. “They’re not available anymore.”

Her son, Ryan, died from an overdose at 33 in 2018 in Florida, the result of an addiction she said began when he was prescribed OxyContin after a high school injury.

The changes between the initial and revised settlement agreements were negotiated out of the public eye for months, with key details later scattered across thousands of pages of court filings, hearing transcripts and sworn declarations. To date, they have not received any media attention or public scrutiny. The winnowing of victims has been the result of byzantine legal procedures, strict vetting and tightened eligibility rules, which victims told ProPublica and the Inquirer took them by surprise. 

To receive compensation, victims also have had to face a series of deadlines twice — once in connection with Purdue’s first bankruptcy plan and then again once a new plan was approved to address the Supreme Court decision. First, to qualify for a settlement at all, victims had to have used Purdue opioids before Sept. 15, 2019, the day Purdue declared bankruptcy. The deadline to file a claim was in June 2020. But that deadline changed multiple times, once to July 2020 and then again to September 2021. After that, the door to a settlement under the bankruptcy plan shut for good. 

Just under 140,000 people met that final deadline, but years of litigation ensued and it wasn’t until almost four years later, by late July 2025, that they had to file evidence for their claims. About 63,000 did, according to a November court filing from settlement trust administrator Edward Gentle. 

Purdue and its attorneys moved to formally eliminate most of the 80,000 individuals who missed the deadline from any payout under this settlement plan, and the judge approved the expungement motion Tuesday. Under certain circumstances, these excluded victims and others who missed earlier filing deadlines can still sue the Sacklers directly. 

Purdue’s attorneys said in court that the company played no role in designing the claims process. The company referred questions for this story to Akin, the major Washington D.C.-based firm representing the victims and other creditors. Akin endorsed the new bankruptcy plan despite the tighter eligibility criteria and lower survivors’ benefits. The firm declined to speak on the record. It said the official creditors’ committee had no comment.

Andrews & Higgins, a firm that also represented victims, did not respond to requests for comment.

Edward E. Neiger, the co-managing partner of ASK LLP, another major firm representing victims, also endorsed the plan. His firm twice praised the 2021 affidavit option in early court pleadings but made no mention in hearings of its disappearance from the new plan.

Neiger said “contractual and court-imposed confidentiality provisions” prevented him from discussing the changes. He said in a written statement that his firm is “proud of helping facilitate the record-breaking and historic $850 million-plus settlement on behalf of the actual, human victims of the opioid crisis.” The Purdue fund is more than eight times as big as the combined victims’ funds financed by the two other big bankrupt opioid makers, Endo and Mallinckrodt.  

More than 300,000 people have died from opioid prescription drug overdoses and millions more became addicted. Federal prosecutors have twice brought charges against Purdue itself. The drug firm pleaded guilty in 2007 to misleading the public about the dangers of its opioids. 

A federal judge on Tuesday delayed until next week the sentencing of Purdue on three felony charges related to paying kickbacks to doctors and reckless sales of its opioids.

The Sacklers, who have never been criminally charged, have denied wrongdoing. 

A Gut Punch

Under standard procedure, those who filed a claim against Purdue with the bankruptcy court in the first round — including cities, hospitals and individual opioid victims — were entitled to vote on the new bankruptcy plan. Proponents of the new plan point to a higher minimum payment for all qualifying claimants of $8,000, up from the previous $3,500. They also say it will streamline the settlement process so payments go out faster and in full. The Sacklers also put an additional $100 million in the victims’ fund. 

About 58,000 of the 140,000 individual claimants voted on the plan last September, nearly all in favor. But nearly two dozen victims — a mix of people who voted for and against the plan and who didn’t vote at all — said they were unaware of the tighter evidence requirements until ProPublica and the Inquirer contacted them. 

Shortly before the judge approved the revised bankruptcy plan, Jannotta appeared via video call in November to address the court, delivering a statement that her daughter, Susan Ousterman, helped craft.

The Bucks County, Pennsylvania, grandmother, then 76, looked frail but resolute. She had voted against approval of the plan.

“The legal system should be where the powerless can finally be heard, but in this courtroom it’s being used to shield the powerful,” she told a session packed with more than 100 lawyers and victims.

The day after Jannotta spoke, U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Sean H. Lane hailed the new plan. He said it imposed a “very modest burden of substantiation” for victims to show Purdue had harmed them, “an exceedingly low bar.”

The trust for Purdue’s victims has twice indicated that it plans to reject Jannotta’s claim, once for missing a 2021 claim deadline that had been changed at least twice, and then again for inadequate proof of prescriptions.

But Jannotta shared with ProPublica and the Inquirer a pharmacy record of her prescriptions that she says she sent to the trust. It includes 16 qualifying prescriptions for Purdue opioids listed on the trust’s website. Gentle, an Alabama lawyer who specializes in running trusts to compensate victims of disasters and corporate scandals, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Jannotta is fuming.

“After everything I went through, what my family went through, and to find out nobody was really being held responsible really hit me in the gut,” Jannotta said. “It was a punch in the gut.”

Crossed-Out Text 

After the Supreme Court rejected the original 2021 bankruptcy plan, Purdue attorney Marshall S. Huebner said that the task ahead was straightforward: to undo immunity for the Sacklers but “not to go back to ground zero.”

Attorneys representing Purdue, the Sackler family and other stakeholder groups, including victims, began months of confidential mediations. Court records do not explain why the more generous benefit and eligibility requirements in the first plan underwent significant revisions.

What they do show is that after years of litigation, hearings, negotiations and delays, dramatic changes to the claim criteria occurred in a matter of five weeks. 

In a flurry of activity beginning on March 8, 2025, Purdue filed documents that show lines crossing out the eligibility criteria and victim compensation amounts, with no explanation or substitute language. Purdue then filed additional documents with new requirements but no mention of the earlier affidavit option for adults or teens. In April, Lane approved the changes to the claim process and, in the same hearing, approved requests from Purdue, with the support of victims’ attorneys, to hire Gentle and jump-start his review of claims.  

That meant victims started to submit claims with accompanying evidence even before Lane approved the new bankruptcy plan in November 2025. Trust administrator Gentle already had been sending letters to potential claimants stating they could be denied unless qualifying evidence was provided within 30 days.

A ProPublica and Inquirer examination of nearly 1,000 pages of transcripts covering 10 open court hearings about the plan found that Lane and lawyers representing Purdue and opioid claimants held no in-depth public discussions about the differences in criteria between the original and revised plans — or their potential impact. 

Florida resident Cindy Singer was among the claimants who voted for the plan and now regrets it. She said her son, Rory, began taking OxyContin after a construction accident and died three years later, in 2015, of an overdose at age 28. According to the letter she received from the trust, she failed to produce a prescription linking him to a Purdue opioid. 

Singer said she didn’t understand how critical the affidavit option would be to her claim. 

“We never even knew it existed,” she said.

Cheryl Juaire of Massachusetts lost two sons to overdoses. She served on Akin’s oversight committee as a representative for victims. Juaire is waiting to hear whether her claims will be approved.

She said she does not recall Akin lawyers telling her about the changes to eligibility. Even so, Juaire said she stands by her support for the new plan because the Purdue case had dragged on too long.

But she acknowledged that the loss of the affidavit option seems to have caught fellow claimants by surprise.

“I’m being bombarded with calls from folks saying, ‘Hey, I put in a claim and I’m getting rejected. I can’t get that prescription,’” Juaire said. “It’s breaking my heart.”

Holdbacks, Lawyer Fees and Smaller Checks

What is especially galling, some victims said, is that their compensation for years of fighting for justice will boil down to a day’s pay for a Purdue attorney like Huebner, who charges $2,935 an hour.

Well over $100 million of the settlement money will go to the plaintiff law firms that have represented Purdue victims through the bankruptcy and to cover the cost of running the trust. Administration fees in similar opioid victim funds, also run by Gentle, range from about 15% to more than one-quarter of the victims’awards, according to documents from those trusts. 

ASK LLP and its partner, Andrews & Higgins, signed up 30,000 Purdue victims in exchange for up to 40% of their individual awards. 

“To me, it’s appalling. It adds further injury to the family of the victims,” said Maureen Kielian of Florida. “Many of us buried children and you are going to walk away with more money than we will ever see.” 

She became a vocal critic of the opioid industry after helping her son recover from addiction. In November, Gentle faulted her claim for lack of evidence. She has appealed to the trust but isn’t optimistic.

Connecticut couple Beverly and David Melenski, whose son was addicted to opioids for 20 years, were on an 8,000-page list of late filers whom Purdue and Akin, the court-appointed victims’ lawyers, sought to expunge.

They didn’t have the prescription records that told the story of their son’s decades of dependency on opioids. But they did have a letter they wrote a doctor in 2009 pleading with him to stop giving their son OxyContin. That doctor, records show, lost his license two years later for recklessly prescribing Purdue drugs and other opioids.

The Melenskis have since successfully appealed, and Gentle is vetting their claim.

The Purdue money won’t cover even a fraction of what they spent on rehab, but David Melenski said it would “at least it would be an acknowledgment of their wrongdoing.” 

They are waiting for a decision from the trust.

The post “A Punch in the Gut”: After Years of Waiting, Many Opioid Victims Will Be Shut Out of Purdue Settlement appeared first on ProPublica.

ProPublica and The Philadelphia Inquirer are looking into how individual opioid victims have been compensated for addiction and other harm as a result of the tens of billions of pills distributed throughout the United States during the prescription-opioid crisis. Please tell us about your experience seeking payment from the court-appointed trusts funded by the drugmakers Purdue, Mallinckrodt and Endo.

About us: Craig R. McCoy was a veteran corruption reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Bob Fernandez was an enterprise and investigative business reporter, also at the Inquirer. We previously wrote for ProPublica and the Inquirer about the Endo bankruptcy. Our most recent story investigates the impact of Purdue’s new bankruptcy plan on victims seeking compensation for the harm they said its drugs caused. 

The post Are You Waiting for Opioid Settlement Money From Purdue, Mallinckrodt or Endo? Get in Touch. appeared first on ProPublica.

I wasn’t looking for a revelation on a country road in southeastern Illinois. But on the outskirts of Galatia — a tiny town where Appalachian hardship seems to have drifted west and settled in — that’s what I found.

It was not a burning bush in some biblical wilderness, but an industrial 3D printer the size of a small garage — a machine, I would learn, that took a $1.1 million investment to get to Illinois, carrying with it the promise of an affordable housing renaissance across the region known as Little Egypt.

And it called to me.

I drove past it again and again. A year prior, in August 2024, this printer was at the center of a groundbreaking ceremony attended by more than 100 people, myself included. I covered the event for Capitol News Illinois and watched as the machine laid down the first layers of what was supposed to be a new beginning. Two local men had promised to help save Cairo, Illinois, by using the machine to print new homes in a town that desperately needed them. 

I watched as state and local politicians ceremoniously tossed dirt. Officials posed for photographs beside the machine, holding it up as proof that a new era had arrived. They promised fast, efficient, modern homes — and with them, the sense that someone, at last, was paying attention to this corner of the state.

A year later, though, the printer had produced the framing for exactly one duplex — but the project was abandoned before the interior was finished. Before anyone could move in, the walls cracked.

When I started to investigate what had gone wrong, I found the printer disassembled on a flatbed truck at a country repair shop that doesn’t need to advertise because you either know it’s there or you wouldn’t be going anyway.

The more I stared at it, and continued to drive by it, I wondered how a promise as large as housing had been left to rust in the sun and rain. What did this abandoned printer say about false promises so often made in the name of saving rural America? About officials who insist they are trying to help? And, at the heart of it, how did this quite expensive piece of modern technology become abandoned here in the first place?

For an investigation I published with ProPublica in collaboration with Capitol News Illinois, I sought answers to those questions. I followed what became one of the most windy and wild reporting journeys of my life. I learned that, behind the scenes, the project to build 3D housing in Cairo had been ushered along by political connections: State Sen. Dale Fowler, whose district includes Cairo, helped introduce the 3D printing company to top leaders, including Gov. JB Pritzker and U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s office. The company, Prestige Project Management Inc. — in the same Harrisburg, Illinois, high rise as Fowler’s district office — pitched the project as part of the state’s housing future.

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3D-Printed Homes, an Abandoned $590,000 Deposit, the FBI: What Really Happened in This Small Town?

A Pritzker spokesperson said the governor’s office took no action after meeting with Prestige. A Duckworth spokesperson said the senator’s office had just revived discussions about how to address Cairo’s housing crisis when Fowler reached out and that the office did not have additional involvement with the company. Fowler took an active role boosting the company’s project in Cairo but said he just wanted to see housing development in the city and wasn’t otherwise involved in Prestige’s business dealings. 

What I assumed would be a simple story instead got weird — part Old Testament prophecy, part Facebook rumor mill weird.

I’d learn that within a few months of that groundbreaking party, the work stopped on the duplex. After the owners of Prestige said dozens of cracks started running through the walls, a half-dozen employees quit the company. Not long after, the FBI launched an investigation into Prestige’s broader business dealings. There have been no charges or arrests, and the owners say they have fully cooperated with investigators and have done nothing wrong. They also said the concrete “ink” that came with the printer was faulty and that’s why the printer has been idle since. Black Buffalo 3D, the printer supplier, said it has offered Prestige a new concrete solution and to find a buyer for the printer if Prestige no longer wants it. 

I spent months digging through records and speaking with Prestige’s owners, former employees and others who’d done business with the company, trying to piece together a timeline of the company’s dealings in Cairo and beyond. Along the way, I encountered intense interviews, moments of tears, strange contradictions and a swamp of rumors. 

And in the middle of it all, I found myself pulled in, too — whispering prayers in my car, chasing the truth like a storm rolling off the Shawnee, loving this place with my whole chest and still wondering: What in the hell happened here?

At the same time, maybe part of me already knew what happened, in a way. The failed promise of housing in Cairo is a story I’ve written over and over, for more than a decade.

I’ve written about how mold, mice, lead-tainted water and decay persisted in the city’s public housing, at one time home to a fourth of the town, for generations. I’ve written about misspending by public housing officials, the federal takeover that followed and the long, painful effort to tear down what could not be salvaged. For years, federal officials promised even as housing was being torn down that it would be rebuilt. The plan, they said, depended on private companies working alongside government agencies, and on innovation. In this light, things like 3D construction printers seemed to fit exactly with their vision. 

So when Prestige Project Management Inc. in Harrisburg, backed by a state senator, offered to buy a printer and deliver it straight to Cairo — on what one of its owners described as a mission from God — people believed.

What was the alternative?

In Cairo, I’ve learned, progress (and the illusion of it) carries its own kind of grief. The demolition of public housing less than a decade before hollowed out a town already on its knees. People were forced to choose between opportunity elsewhere and home, between safer housing and the place that made them. 

And the emotional gravity of this story wasn’t from the strangest things I encountered, but from the ones that were the most real and heartbreaking: a town that raised its hopes, only to see them, once again, dashed. A mother living in a cramped one-bedroom unit across town who’d dreamed of moving into one of the duplex’s two-bedroom units, finally able to give her 6-year-old daughter a space of her own.

Some towns, I’ve heard people say, cannot be saved.

I understand the argument. I’ve felt it myself, driving the backroads of southern Illinois between the two great rivers that meet at Cairo, through a landscape marked by poverty, abandonment and a stubborn struggle to hang on. But Cairo has always seemed worth saving to me, because of its history, its suffering and its resilience, a word that can feel too neat for what Black residents there have endured: racism and exclusion that lingered long after much of the South began to change.

Is an unfinished 3D-printed housing spectacle really the best we have to offer?

I’ve written thousands of stories by now. Most disappear as soon as they’re filed. But a few stay in the bones.

This is one of them.

The post They Said a 3D Printer Would Bring Housing to This Town. It Was Yet Another Broken Promise. appeared first on ProPublica.

March unfolded like a stress test for U.S. counterterrorism authorities.

The month opened with a gunman in an Iranian-flag shirt killing three people at a bar in Texas. Then, an attack with homemade explosives outside the mayor’s mansion in New York City. Next came a deadly shooting March 12 on a Virginia college campus and, the same afternoon, a car-ramming at a Michigan synagogue. Days later, agents arrested a man charged with threatening a mass shooting at an Ohio mosque.

To current and former national security officials, these were omens, signs of the dangers they predicted last year when President Donald Trump began redirecting counterterrorism resources toward his mass deportation campaign.

They had warned of a diminished ability to respond should major global events inflame threats at home and abroad. Now, they say, the war in Iran has locked the Trump administration into a showdown with a sophisticated state sponsor of terrorism at a time when U.S. security agencies have hemorrhaged expertise and leadership is in flux.

The urgency of the moment has trained a spotlight on Sebastian Gorka, the White House counterterrorism adviser tasked with drafting a blueprint for fighting homegrown and international threats. Nearly a year ago, Gorka declared a national counterterrorism strategy “imminent.” By July, he was “on the cusp” of unveiling the plan — a phrase he repeated three months later in October. And again in January.

To date, no strategy has appeared, and no explanation for the delay. When it is finally released, current and former counterterrorism personnel say, they expect a document rooted in politics rather than intelligence, with little detail on how to combat threats after a year of deep cuts across national security agencies.

“Strategies are only worth the amount of resources you put into them,” said a former senior official who served in the first Trump administration. “We’re entering very dangerous territory.”

The shifting promises are unsurprising to colleagues familiar with the brash, quick-tempered Gorka, a gate crasher in Washington’s buttoned-up defense establishment. His threats and boasts are laced with grandiose language and delivered in a booming, British-accented voice.

ProPublica interviewed more than two dozen national security specialists across party lines to trace Gorka’s path to one of the most sensitive jobs in government. Nearly all spoke on condition of anonymity because of the Trump administration’s record of retaliation.

His ascent, they said, tells the story of a startling transformation of the U.S. counterterrorism agenda in Trump’s second term. Eye-rolling over Gorka’s bombast has given way to anxiety about the administration’s preparedness to identify and stop major plots.

In the first Trump administration, Gorka lasted just seven months before being forced out by the “adults in the room,” as some staffers referred to the more moderate gatekeepers then around the president. In that brief stint, he reportedly struggled to obtain security clearance and faced an outcry over ties — which he denies — to a far-right group in Hungary.

After the exit, he hosted a right-wing podcast and popped up in ads selling fish-oil pills for pain relief. Then his fortunes changed again with the 2024 election that swept Trump back to power, this time with a more conspiratorially minded wing of the Make America Great Again movement. Gorka’s loyalty paid off with a phoenixlike return to the White House in a role sometimes called “counterterrorism czar.”

“I’ve been waiting 25 years for this job,” he confided on his podcast before taking office.

The first year of Trump’s second term was so frenzied that even the colorful Gorka faded into the background as the administration dismantled federal agencies and created a secretive, sometimes deadly immigration force. Now, however, the counterterrorism director’s role is coming back to light as hostilities roil the Middle East and heighten the risk of attacks in the United States or against American interests or allies overseas.

Days before U.S. military operations began in Iran, FBI Director Kash Patel fired a dozen personnel from a counterintelligence unit that monitored threats from Iran, CNN reported — part of a wider purge of some 300 agents specializing in counterterrorism.

Former officials said the sudden loss of that many colleagues is devastating to the sensitive, granular work of preventing attacks.

“I don’t think about it in raw numbers. I think about it in the wealth of expertise and knowledge that has been cut across all levels,” a former senior Justice Department official said. “What you lose is that nuance — with a smaller team, you can only go so deep.”

An FBI spokesperson said the bureau does not comment on personnel numbers but that agents are “working around the clock” and had disrupted four alleged U.S.-based terrorist plots in December alone. “The FBI continuously assesses and realigns our resources to ensure the safety of the American people,” the statement said.

ProPublica sought an interview with Gorka directly and via the White House. He did not respond to a detailed list of questions but assailed the requests in two posts on X, where he has 1.8 million followers. The first was a “no,” along with insults, addressed to several journalists who had asked him to comment on the strategy. In the second post, directed at ProPublica, Gorka accused the reporter of writing a “putrid piece of hackery.”

“If the criticism is we’re killing too many Jihadis (759) since 20th January 2024, or rescuing more US hostages in 12 months (106) than Biden did in 4 years, I stand by our historic wins for AMERICA First,” Gorka wrote, with an apparent typo. Trump took office in January 2025.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in an email that the restructuring of agencies “has made the entire foreign policy apparatus even more responsive to potential threats” and praised Gorka for “an incredible job” leading interagency talks.

“Anyone attempting to smear him and the President’s national security team is only revealing that they haven’t been paying attention for the past year,” Kelly wrote, “as anyone with eyes can see that our homeland is more secure than ever.”

Inattention “Can Be Deadly”

Gorka has emerged as one of the last men standing after a tumultuous stretch for U.S. counterterrorism leadership.

His original boss, national security adviser Mike Waltz, was booted to the United Nations after the Signalgate scandal, leaving the role to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was already juggling portfolios and is busier now with Iran.

Another blow came when Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned last month in protest of the war in Iran, which he said was pushing the United States “further toward decline and chaos.”

Gorka was livid. He told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations that he called Kent the day of his resignation and left a message calling him an “utter disgrace” for criticizing the president in wartime.

“At the end of my voicemail,” Gorka recounted, “I said, ‘Good riddance to you, Joe.’”

Within days, Gorka was angling for Kent’s old job at the counterterrorism center, the government’s hub for analyzing terrorist threats, The Washington Post reported. Colleagues said they weren’t surprised — the role brings more power — but added that Gorka would likely face a tough Senate confirmation process if nominated.

The leadership disarray compounds the risks of hollowed-out counterterrorism operations, say national security analysts.

At a time when hundreds of personnel typically would’ve been assigned to thwarting attacks amid international conflict, the administration “has gutted this capacity through firings, forced resignations, and slashed budgets,” a panel of national security analysts wrote in the journal Lawfare.

The Justice Department acknowledged in budget proposal documents that its National Security Division is facing “unprecedented personnel constraints,” struggling to keep up with increasing caseloads and a 40% drop in the number of prosecutors.

At the State Department, former officials said, Iran specialists at the counterterrorism bureau were dispersed to regional offices where counterterrorism is one of many priorities. The entire team focused on threat prevention was eliminated. As a senior official who recently left put it, “They keep saying we can do it all even though they have half an arm now, and no legs.”

Since the Iran war started, officials say, some counterterrorism specialists who had been reassigned to immigration have returned to their old roles, creating a whiplash that can disrupt investigations and analysis.

“If you’ve dropped all the cases and have taken people off the target set for an extended period of time, you can’t just drop back in and pick up where you left off,” said Ben Connable, a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who leads the nonprofit Battle Research Group. “The men and women who are back on that portfolio are going to have to play catch-up, and that conveys risk.”

The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t published any national terrorism advisory bulletins, periodic updates to alert the public to the current threat level, since September. It has not released the annual Homeland Threat Assessment since Trump returned to office, according to Colin Clarke, executive director of the security-focused Soufan Center, and fellow terrorism scholar Jacob Ware. A DHS spokesperson said updates on the documents “will be provided following the end of the Democrat DHS shutdown.”

Gorka’s long-awaited strategy, Clarke and Ware said in an op-ed, could help clarify White House thinking on how to handle threats when “defenses are divided, disorganized and under-resourced.”

“This is the moment for the Trump administration to demonstrate that it recognizes the stakes,” the researchers wrote. “In counterterrorism, inattention can be deadly.”

Winding Path to White House

Gorka’s path to the White House began in the cottage industry of self-styled terrorism experts that sprang up after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

He became a regular on a training circuit where speakers received lucrative contracts from international governments and law enforcement agencies to teach about the threat of militant Islamist movements. Many trainers of that era maligned Islam and backed policies that violated the rights of ordinary American Muslims in the name of counterterrorism, according to civil liberties watchdogs.

“For him, counterterrorism is kinetic and it’s against one type of enemy: the jihadist enemy,” said an associate who has known Gorka for two decades.

Born in the United Kingdom to Hungarian parents, he attended college in London and served as a reserve intelligence soldier in the British military. He later spent time in Hungary, dabbling in nationalist politics and earning a doctorate degree.

In 2008, Gorka moved to the United States with his American wife, also a counterterrorism specialist, and eventually became a naturalized citizen — “a legal immigrant,” as he is introduced at events.

As an instructor at think tanks and military institutes, he pushed an image of Muslims as inherently violent, according to current and former colleagues. They say his fixation on Islamist militancy crosses into a more generalized bigotry, a claim Gorka has dismissed as “absurd.” He insists that his focus is “the war inside Islam” between radicals and Western-aligned Muslim leaders. “We want to see our friends win that war,” he has said.

A former senior Justice Department official recalled an FBI agent lobbying hard to get Gorka hired as a counterterrorism trainer several years ago. The official “didn’t feel comfortable clearing him in on my credentials” for an office visit so instead drove over an hour to watch a lecture.

Gorka’s talk was “reductionist” in its portrayals of Islam as locked in a civilizational war with the West, the former official recalled. Immediately after the event, the official advised against hiring Gorka because his teachings potentially violated department principles against bias in training.

“I came back and said to the U.S. attorneys, ‘Let’s be careful here,’” the former official said. “They put a flag.”

Concerns about Gorka’s approach flared again when he joined the first Trump administration through the MAGA strategist Steve Bannon. Gorka, who had worked at Bannon’s right-wing Breitbart outlet, was appointed to the Strategic Initiatives Group, an in-house think tank at the White House.

The appointment prompted 55 House Democrats to demand his firing in a letter calling his association with far-right groups “deeply troubling.” They focused on the Hungarian nationalist group Vitézi Rend, whose medal Gorka wore on a military tunic to Trump’s inaugural events. Gorka has denied belonging to the organization, which had Nazi ties during World War II, and said the medal honors his father’s escape from communism.

Gorka’s qualifications for the job also came under scrutiny. Critics dug out and posted his dissertation, which was pilloried by other academics for a simplistic chart that placed terrorism on a spectrum somewhere between “peacekeeping” and “thermonuclear war.”

He eventually was ousted in August 2017, days after Bannon, in an internal power struggle. In his resignation letter, Gorka blamed his departure on the idea that “forces that do not support the MAGA promise are — for now — ascendant within the White House.”

Reporters spotted him outside loading his belongings into the back of a Mustang convertible with vanity plates “ART WAR.”

Dream Job

Gorka’s comeback symbolizes the hard-right swing of Trump’s second term.

Even some prominent conservatives were shocked by Gorka’s return. Michael Anton, who also served in the last Trump administration, reportedly withdrew from consideration for a senior national security role rather than work alongside him.

The jabs don’t seem to faze Gorka, who tells a story of standing outside the White House in January 2025, ready to swipe his badge the moment it was activated after Trump’s swearing-in. He has referred to his role as a dream job.

“I pinch myself every single day,” Gorka told the “Triggernometry” podcast.

The counterterrorism director’s responsibilities include coordinating policy for external threats as well as leading efforts to free wrongfully detained Americans around the globe. Gorka can be remarkably candid and mercurial for a senior official with such a sensitive remit, according to hours of his public remarks reviewed by ProPublica.

He has exploded at journalists (“Go to hell!”) and cut off interviews when he didn’t like the questioning (“We’re done!”). He repeats anti-immigrant tropes and boasts that “Judeo-Christian civilization is the ultimate form of human existence.” He has urged Christians and Jews to buy guns to defend themselves “on the front line of the war between civilization and barbarity.”

Gorka’s public remarks also offer behind-the-scenes glimpses of working for a boss he calls “the most consequential American president” of modern times. At one event, he pulled out his phone to let the audience hear his ringtone: Trump delivering his classic “tired of winning” line.

Gorka has said his workday begins with a drive to the White House while listening to his favorite podcast, hosted by pro-Trump military historian Victor Davis Hanson. Upon arrival, he has to turn in his cellphone before spending up to 12 hours a day in “my SCIF,” the acronym for the secure chambers where senior officials discuss classified matters.

On Thursdays, he convenes an interagency discussion of the latest threats. He name drops “Marco,” “Kash” and other friends in senior roles: “They ask me as I bump into them in the West Wing: ‘Have you killed more jihadis today?’”

In his office, Gorka keeps a globe on his desk and a large poster of the Twin Towers on the wall, an ever-present reminder of 9/11. His team’s custom lanyards are printed with “WWFY & WWKY” in honor of a Trump line: “We will find you and we will kill you.”

Cloud of “Red Mist”

On Gorka’s watch, targeted militants don’t simply die.

They are “human filth” who are “obliterated,” he tells audiences, describing bodies stacked “like cordwood” after receiving “eternal justice” from the Trump administration’s “hammers of hell.”

Before the Iran conflict, Gorka was focused on a revival of the “war on terror” in parts of Africa and the Middle East. He claims U.S. strikes have killed more than 750 militants he has described as “leading jihadis” with “American blood on their hands or who were plotting attacks against Americans.”

“If we know where you are, anywhere in the world, we can kill you within 72 hours if the president says so,” he boasted last spring.

In the example Gorka shares most often, he briefed the president on a militant recruiter in Somalia who had been under surveillance for over a year during President Joe Biden’s administration. On the spot, he said, Trump ordered the fighter killed. Around 30 hours later, on Feb. 1, 2025, Gorka says, he watched live from the White House Situation Room as a U.S. strike vaporized the fighter into “a cloud of red mist,” a description he has repeated at least half a dozen times.

He sometimes screens declassified video of the militant being blown to pieces, as several State Department staffers found out when they watched him speak last year. Unsettled, they tried to rush out after the event but were corralled to flank Gorka in a photo op. “I look like a hostage,” one person in the picture said.

The staffers — since pushed out of government by cuts — said they had expected Gorka’s bravado but were horrified by his glee over what they described as a “snuff film.” Many other personnel expressed similar concerns that issues requiring level-headed professionalism were entrusted to someone they regarded as a volatile ideologue openly preaching bloodlust.

“He’s trying to show off” to the president, one longtime counterterrorism official said. “‘I nuked another 100 jihadis — pay attention to me.’”

Gorka’s claims of battlefield victories are often exaggerated or misleading about who was targeted and why, according to security officials and counterterrorism analysts. They say there are fewer than 10 “leading” Islamist militants in the world, and the idea of killing hundreds is absurd. The White House did not address a question about whether the numbers are inflated.

“It’s the word ‘leading’ that gets me,” said Clarke, of the Soufan Center. “I have no doubt they’re killing people, but they’re probably foot soldiers.”

Reports of civilian casualties from U.S. operations also muddy the death tolls, especially in Somalia and Yemen. But the Trump administration has shown little interest in investigating; it gutted a Pentagon office tasked with addressing civilian harm.

Take the “red mist” strike, for example. It targeted Ahmed Maeleninine, an Islamic State group recruiter who was hiding out in a cave complex in Somalia. Gorka said the Biden administration had surveilled Maeleninine for more than a year without striking. That’s true, said one former counterterrorism official with direct knowledge of the intelligence involved, but there was more to the story.

“He left out the part about the women and children,” said the official, who recently left government. “I knew the reason we hadn’t gone after him before was because he had his wife and children around him 24/7. Now, maybe they got lucky and found one time where they got a clear strike.”

U.S. Africa Command, which oversees the military’s Somalia operations, said in announcing the February 2025 strike that “approximately 14 ISIS-Somalia operatives were killed and no civilians were harmed.”

New Urgency

Gorka’s formal title is deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council.

The role was upgraded from “special assistant” in recent years, though officials say the powers of the office have weakened since the days of early counterterrorism czars like Richard Clarke, who served under three presidents and revealed that senior leaders had ignored repeated warnings about al-Qaida before the 9/11 attacks.

Christopher Costa, a retired Army intelligence officer who spent a year in the same job under the first Trump administration, described the role as “the convening authority for all things counterterrorism for the president of the United States.”

“It was rolling up your sleeves,” Costa recalled. “It was more than just policy work — it was mitigating current threats.”

Iranian threats against U.S. targets have brought renewed attention to the lack of a Trump counterterrorism doctrine.

Gorka has been tight-lipped about the contents of his strategy. Officials who typically would’ve been involved in interagency discussions say they haven’t been consulted. One person briefed on a working draft summed it up as “Sunnis. Shiites. Cartels.” Others said they expected the addition of far-left antifascist militants, a tiny subset of the extremist threat that receives disproportionate attention from the Trump administration.

Gorka told another colleague he was writing the document himself, without traditional input from partner federal agencies. “There was no ‘U.S. government strategy’ involved,” the colleague said. “It might as well have been a new book he was writing.”

At his recent Council on Foreign Relations appearance, Gorka was asked — again — when the strategy would be released. He glanced at his staff and shifted in his seat.

He confided that he had “put my life’s work into this massive document” but had received feedback in recent days to “Cut it down, Gorka!” He said he would make trims and send the draft back to senior aides in hopes of getting a presidential signoff.

“Keep your fingers crossed,” Gorka told the audience.

The post The Counterterrorism Czar Without a Counterterrorism Plan appeared first on ProPublica.

When Amanda Coulson was a child, she visited her mother at work at a hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas. Doris Coulson was a nurse, and one memory never left her daughter. A code blue was called, and suddenly her mother was racing alongside a patient’s bed. 

“She jumped into the middle of the bed and was doing CPR in the bed as it flew down the hallway,” Amanda Coulson said years later in court. “I realized she didn’t play at work all day.”

That was the kind of caregiver her mother was: someone who understood what quality care meant because she had spent her life giving it to others. 

After Doris Coulson retired, she became a patient at a nursing home owned by Joseph Schwartz, a New Jersey businessman who was buying up nursing homes across the country. The staff wasn’t supposed to serve her solid food, but they did, and she died. Doctors told the family they found scrambled eggs in her lungs.

Nine years after Coulson’s death, President Donald Trump pardoned Schwartz in a federal case in which he had admitted to withholding $39 million in employee payroll taxes from his nursing home empire and diverting the money for other purposes. Schwartz’s lawyers argued that his actions were not an attempt at personal enrichment but to save his company. The White House said Schwartz was “an example of over prosecution” and argued that a third-party entity had managed the tax filings and that serving all three years of his prison sentence would have been detrimental for someone of his age and poor health. 

Behind the tax charge was a business that families and lawsuits said had left real people neglected, injured and dead. 

The Coulson family sued Schwartz and his company for wrongful death. Schwartz did not appear in court to challenge the case. Six years ago, a judge awarded Amanda Coulson and her sister and brother nearly $19 million. (He later claimed he never received key filings and had mistaken the complaint for the same lawsuit first filed in 2017. He argued the company that took over the home was the proper defendant.) Schwartz never paid. Amanda has since died.

Stories about pardons are often told as stories about presidential power — who got mercy, who had access, who persuaded a president to intervene. What drew me to Schwartz’s pardon was the people on the other side of that act of grace: people like Doris Coulson and her family, whose lives had already been shattered long before the White House celebrated Schwartz’s first Shabbat with his family after Trump freed him from prison and a top Justice Department official declared him “free to rebuild.” 

The pardon for Schwartz came while I was reporting on Trump’s broader clemency spree, which has favored allies, donors and other well-connected defendants, including people convicted in serious financial fraud cases. 

This pardon felt different to me. 

To understand the human toll, I turned to court records. In states where Schwartz owned nursing homes, I found harrowing accounts of patients suffering and insiders desperately trying to protect them as problems piled up. 

The damage reached workers, too: As facilities fell apart, some employees said they were buying food for residents out of their own pockets. Others were left with medical bills after insurance premiums were taken from their paychecks but the coverage was never funded.

And yet, Schwartz still appears to have money, perhaps even great sums. Lobbying disclosure forms showed he had paid more than $1 million to lobbyists to help secure his pardon. And even after his business collapsed, prosecutors said he still had $58 million in assets, though none was in his own name.

The White House has said the president does not issue pardons at the request of lobbyists.

After the pardon, Schwartz still had to return to Arkansas in late December to serve nine months in prison for defrauding the state’s Medicaid program.

I saw his return as a chance to speak with him. The prison system said I could reach him only by mail. In the first week of January, I sent a letter requesting an interview by phone, email or in person, noting that I could easily drive from my home in Missouri to meet him.

A lawyer for the Coulson family saw that same narrow window as a chance to do something more consequential: serve Schwartz with a subpoena for a deposition and records that might help locate his assets and force payment of judgments he had ignored.

The window for both of us closed almost immediately. One of Schwartz’s lobbyists had also been hired to seek relief for him in Arkansas. Within three weeks, the parole board released him.

My letter came back as undeliverable. The lawyer had no better luck tracking him down.

That episode helped me understand the story more clearly. At first it felt like a reporting failure. The more I sat with it, the more I realized that the missed window was actually a mirror of the broader story. Even after criminal convictions, civil judgments and years of litigation, Schwartz remained elusive to the people seeking answers or accountability. 

There was a machinery working to shorten his punishment. But nothing to help the victims.

Read More

A Nursing Home Owner Got a Trump Pardon. The Families of His Patients Got Nothing.

The post Trump Pardoned a Nursing Home Owner Who Owed Almost $19 Million to a Grieving Family appeared first on ProPublica.

The Texas Medical Board has disciplined three doctors ProPublica previously investigated whose patients died after receiving delayed or inappropriate pregnancy care under the state’s strict abortion ban.

Two of the doctors failed to properly intervene as a pregnant teenager repeatedly sought care for life-threatening complications, the board found. The third did not provide a dilation and curettage procedure to empty a miscarrying patient’s uterus, and she ultimately bled to death.

As ProPublica investigated those preventable deaths and five others across three states in the past few years, reporters found that abortion bans have influenced how doctors and hospitals respond to pregnancy complications. Facing risks of prison time and professional ruin, doctors have delayed key interventions until they can document that a fetus’ heart is no longer beating or that a case meets a narrow legal exception. Some physicians say their colleagues are discharging or transferring pregnant patients instead of taking responsibility for their care.

Doctors and lawyers have questioned why medical boards, which oversee physician licensing and investigate substandard care, have not played a more active role in guiding doctors on how to uphold medical standards within the constraints of the law. When asked by ProPublica in 2024 what recourse miscarrying patients had when a doctor denied them necessary treatment, the president of the Texas Medical Board said it had no say over criminal law but that patients could file a complaint and “vote with their feet” to seek care from another doctor.

Since then, the Texas board has taken more steps than those in other states, publishing guidance this year that provides case studies on how doctors can legally provide abortions to patients with certain medical complications. The state Legislature ordered the board to create the training materials as part of the Life of the Mother Act, which was passed after ProPublica’s reporting and made modest adjustments to the state’s abortion restrictions in an attempt to prevent additional maternal deaths.

Georgia, where Amber Thurman died after doctors did not try to empty her septic uterus for 20 hours, has not revisited its ban or disciplined key doctors involved.

Maternal care experts say health care providers will continue to hesitate to offer standard care as long as bans carry serious criminal consequences — Texas’ law can put a physician behind bars for 99 years. But those who spoke to ProPublica say that medical board sanctions are one of the few levers that can provide a counterweight, pushing hospitals and doctors to provide standard care despite uncertainty over vaguely written laws.

Michelle Maloney, who is representing the families of both Texas patients in malpractice lawsuits, said she was pleasantly surprised by the board’s recent actions. “Over the course of my career, I’ve had many horrific, horrific death cases. For someone to get disciplined by the medical board, especially while there’s ongoing litigation, is just extraordinarily rare,” she said.

In 2024, ProPublica reported on the case of 18-year-old Nevaeh Crain, who began experiencing severe pregnancy complications when she was six months pregnant in 2023. Although she exhibited clear signs of an infection, doctors at two hospitals sent her home. On her third visit, as Crain’s condition deteriorated, a doctor did not send Crain to the intensive care unit until he could confirm fetal demise with two ultrasounds. Texas law requires doctors to create extra documentation before performing procedures that could end a pregnancy. By the time the doctor had logged there was no fetal heartbeat, the medical record shows, Crain was too unstable for surgery. She died with her fetus still in her womb.

Dr. Ali Mohamed Osman, an emergency medicine doctor who saw Crain at Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas during her first emergency room visit, sent her home with a prescription for antibiotics for strep throat without investigating her stomach cramps, ProPublica reported. The medical board cited him for failing to appropriately treat her infection or check the health of the fetus.

Dr. William Noel Hawkins, an OB-GYN who saw Crain at Christus Southeast Texas St. Elizabeth hospital during her second ER visit hours later, was cited for discharging Crain even though she had a 103-degree fever, screened positive for sepsis and had a fetus with an abnormally high heart rate.

For both Osman and Hawkins, the board wrote, “this delay in care ultimately resulted in the death of both the patient and her unborn child due to complications of pregnancy.”

A board spokesperson would not say whether it investigated Dr. Marcelo Totorica, who saw Crain at her third visit to an ER, at Christus, and required two fetal ultrasounds, 90 minutes apart, before wheeling Crain into the ICU for an operation. The board does not disclose open investigations or cases when a doctor has been cleared of wrongdoing. Totorica did not respond to a request for comment.

ProPublica also investigated the case of Porsha Ngumezi, who died at Houston Methodist Sugar Land Hospital in 2023 after bleeding heavily during a miscarriage at 11 weeks. An OB-GYN overseeing her care, Dr. Andrew Ryan Davis, gave her misoprostol, a medication that can be used to complete low-risk miscarriages. More than a dozen experts who reviewed the case for ProPublica, however, said that this was a high-risk case and she should have immediately been given a D&C — a procedure that has become fraught in states with abortion bans. Clearing the uterus is standard care to stop hemorrhaging; misoprostol would only make the bleeding worse, they said.

The board investigation confirmed those findings, citing Davis for failing to quantify the volume of blood loss and choosing to monitor Ngumezi’s condition instead of immediately taking her for a D&C procedure. The board wrote, “This delay in care led to the patient’s death.” It added that it could not determine if Ngumezi would have survived if she received an emergency D&C.

The board has the power to levy fines up to $5,000 and, in the most extreme cases, suspend or revoke doctors’ licenses. In these cases, however, each doctor was ordered to take eight hours of continuing education courses within a year. While under the terms of the order, all must notify any employers of the board’s findings against them. Davis and Hawkins were disciplined in October, and Osman was disciplined in March. None of the doctors or hospitals responded to requests for comment. In the medical board orders, the doctors neither admit nor deny the board’s findings and agree to comply with the discipline.

Hope Ngumezi, Porsha Ngumezi’s husband, said the board’s order felt like “a slap in the face.”

“What kind of justice is this for Porsha?” he said. “I feel like the doctor shouldn’t be practicing anymore.”

Hawkins, who failed to meet the standard of care in Crain’s case, according to the board, had previously been disciplined by the board for improper care in several other cases, including failing to provide a tubal ligation and failing to diagnose a syphilis infection. The board issued an order to have Hawkins’ medical practice monitored in 2015; it was lifted two years later.

Reproductive rights advocates welcomed the Texas board’s recent actions but said that it and medical boards in other states should do more. None of the Texas discipline orders, for example, directly sanction a doctor for failing to offer or provide an abortion for a high-risk medical condition.

The board has disciplined some doctors in recent years for failing to provide D&Cs to patients after a confirmed miscarriage or for substandard care of pregnant patients experiencing emergencies, and the orders are typically released quietly. The board could be making public statements and sharing more robust guidance to remind doctors of the consequences, said Molly Duane, the litigation director of Amplify Legal, which is part of the reproductive rights advocacy group Abortion in America.

“They should be saying loudly: This is what can happen if you don’t provide care in these circumstances,” Duane said. At the Center for Reproductive Rights, Duane represented 20 Texas women in a case against the state who alleged doctors inappropriately denied them abortions during medical emergencies. The Texas Supreme Court sided with the state and blamed doctors for misinterpreting the law. Duane is not aware of any doctors in those cases who received discipline from the board.

ProPublica reported on the deaths of other Texas women, including Josseli Barnica and Tierra Walker, which experts said could have been prevented had the women been offered abortions for their high-risk medical conditions. And data analyses by ProPublica showed that sepsis rates and blood transfusions spiked among miscarrying women after the ban went into effect — an indicator of dangerous delays in care across the state.

The board would not say whether it has opened investigations into doctors involved in those cases or any others in which pregnant patients may have received substandard care due to abortion restrictions.

The post Texas Medical Board Sanctions Three Doctors for Delayed Care That Led to the Deaths of Two Pregnant Women appeared first on ProPublica.

Five days after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot activist Renee Good, tensions were running high in the Minneapolis neighborhood where she was killed. 

As federal immigration agents surrounded and questioned a man whose car they had stopped, people emerged from their homes onto the snow-lined sidewalks and street. They shouted obscenities, told the agents to leave and filmed what was happening on their phones.

A crew from FRONTLINE and ProPublica was filming, too.

The man being questioned, a U.S. citizen named Christian Molina, told ProPublica reporter A.C. Thompson that federal agents had followed him and rammed his car: “They looked at me and they decided to pull me over for no reason,” Molina said.

What happened next can be seen in footage from FRONTLINE and ProPublica’s new documentary “Caught in the Crackdown.” 

Someone threw a snowball in the direction of the agents — and one of them responded by tossing a tear gas canister into the crowd. 

“You’re tear-gassing a fucking neighborhood,” a protester yelled. “People live here.”

As the toxic haze rose, an agent pepper-sprayed protesters and a news photographer at close range. Another agent fired pepper balls into the crowd, hitting Thompson three times. One shot struck him above the right eye. Federal use of force guidelines generally instruct agents not to target people’s heads and faces with these weapons.

Then, as the agents drove away, one of them shot pepper spray from a car window, hitting others on the film team, including FRONTLINE’s director Gabrielle Schonder and director of photography Tim Grucza, who was sprayed in the face. 

The Jan. 12 confrontation is one of many chaotic clashes documented in “Caught in the Crackdown.” Premiering April 14, the joint investigation examines how federal agents handled protesters and bystanders during the Trump administration’s immigration sweeps in major cities across the U.S., from Los Angeles to Chicago to Minneapolis — including by using tactics that experts say violated officers’ own rules. 

As the documentary explores, President Donald Trump’s administration said its immigration crackdown was protecting U.S. citizens by targeting criminals and people who had entered the country illegally. Through on-the-ground reporting and interviews with officials, experts, insiders and eyewitnesses, “Caught in the Crackdown” traces how federal forces arrested hundreds of U.S. citizens who were protesting or observing the raids, routinely portrayed those citizens as domestic terrorists or extremists, and repeatedly deployed weaponry like tear gas and pepper balls.

The man heading the enforcement operations was unapologetic about his agents’ approach.

“We’re here to conduct that Title 8 mission,” Greg Bovino, then-commander-at-large for Border Patrol, told a local TV station, referring to immigration enforcement. “It won’t stop despite rioters, agitators, and vast amounts of violence against federal officers. We’re not going to stop.”  

But when Thompson shared the footage from Jan. 12 with former law enforcement officials, they expressed concern. 

“We see, just, use of excessive force after use of excess force,” said Christy Lopez, who spent years investigating law enforcement misconduct for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “In no scenario is it OK to be pepper-spraying people as you’re leaving the scene.”

“It’s pretty awful,” said Chris Magnus, a former head of Customs and Border Protection who once oversaw Bovino. Magnus, who served as a police chief in multiple cities, pointed to the principle of proportionality when using force in law enforcement: “People may well get under your skin under a lot of circumstances,” he said. “You don’t like it, but professionals don’t react to it.”

As the documentary reports, ProPublica and FRONTLINE found that legal cases against many protesters have been falling apart, as the accusations against them have been contradicted by video evidence and witness testimony. 

Bovino was ultimately moved out of his role after federal agents shot and killed a second protester in Minneapolis — Alex Pretti. The Trump administration said it “recognized that certain improvements could and should be made” to its immigration enforcement operations. Bovino has since retired, but many of the questions raised on the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis under his watch remain unresolved. 

“Even if Gregory Bovino is gone, I wonder if his imprint will last through all the federal agencies that are continuing to go out on the street,” journalist Sergio Olmos, who reported on Bovino for the nonprofit news outlets CalMatters and Evident Media, says in the documentary. “I wonder if anything will change, really. He was the one who was the tip of the spear for this new type of immigration enforcement across the country.”

The post A Protester Threw a Snowball. Federal Agents Responded With Tear Gas and Pepper Balls. appeared first on ProPublica.

Outside a repair shop in rural southeastern Illinois, the parts of a massive 3D construction printer sat disassembled on a flatbed trailer, weeds climbing the wheels.

The $1.1 million investment wasn’t meant to end up there, abandoned.

Two local men had taken out a loan from a tiny bank to buy the printer, promising it would spark an affordable-housing revival across hard-pressed southern Illinois. Their first stop was Cairo, at the state’s southern tip — a historic river town beset by the loss of jobs and safe housing, now home to fewer than 2,000 mostly Black residents.

In August 2024, after months of negotiations, the city finalized a deal with their company, Prestige Project Management Inc., to build 30 duplexes. Days later, the printer arrived and crews assembled it on a vacant corner lot at 17th Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue. 

More than 100 people showed up for the groundbreaking. Children clutched cotton candy and popcorn. Pallets of Amazon giveaways spilled from a truck. Behind a chain-link fence, the towering printer hummed to life, two American flags clipped to its steel legs, laying down the base of what was billed as the first new home built in Cairo in at least 30 years. The crowd cheered.

Kaneesha Mallory pressed against the fence. She had grown up in Cairo, moved away, then returned after her daughter was born. Living in a cramped one-bedroom public housing unit across town, she imagined a bedroom her 6-year-old could finally call her own.

Mayor Thomas Simpson called the project “just the beginning.” State Sen. Dale Fowler, whose district incorporates some of Illinois’ most destitute counties, described it as an “extraordinary project” — the start of more development to come. His nonprofit organization, which serves low-income children and families, had secured a $40,000 donation to help pay for the event.

Mallory couldn’t bring herself to leave while her future seemed to be taking shape. She stayed in the August heat so long that she fainted and was taken to the emergency room by ambulance.

Crews worked overnight to avoid the heat. Within about a month, the walls went up. Interior work followed.

But then the work stopped before the duplex was finished. The owners would later say cracks — dozens of them — had begun running through the walls and that they needed to make sure the structure was sound. The printer disappeared.

A year later, no one had moved into the duplex. It stood alone in a wide lot along a sun-bleached road.

As I began to examine what happened, the story grew complicated.

I learned that before the 3D printer arrived in Cairo, the Prestige owners had forfeited about $590,000 as a deposit for a different printer when they ended up canceling the order, a fact that would quickly turn the atmosphere tense as I pressed the company’s owners, the bank, Fowler and others for answers. 

I also learned that not long after the groundbreaking, several employees left Prestige around the same time a spray of anonymous emails hit inboxes across the region. The emails called the Cairo duplex project little more than a publicity stunt and alleged fraud tied to Prestige’s other construction projects.

I also wasn’t the only one asking questions. I discovered that the FBI has launched an investigation into Prestige led by an agent in southern Illinois who specializes in white-collar and public corruption investigations. To date, there have been no charges filed or arrests made, and Prestige’s owners deny any wrongdoing. 

Over the past eight months, the more questions I asked, the more public officials distanced themselves from the project and the company. The broader housing plan — the one that had fueled speeches and celebration — started to look increasingly uncertain.

I was determined to know: Was this simply another failed pitch to this dirt-poor delta town — or something more?

“God Sent Us”

Jamie Hayes, who inherited a Ford dealership from his father, and Erik Burtis, who had long supplied labor to coal mines, founded Prestige in 2021 in Harrisburg, Illinois, a town of fewer than 8,000 people about 80 miles northeast of Cairo. 

It is one of seven companies Hayes has started since 2020, three of them co-owned with Burtis, according to Illinois business records. The two, business partners since 2012, have taken on an eclectic mix of projects: school construction management, solar farm fencing and the 3D printing venture. Hayes provides the capital; Burtis runs the day-to-day operations. 

Burtis said he landed on 3D printing in early 2023 after asking his son Josh, who works for the company, to find out what was hot in construction. He reported back that it was 3D construction — based on trends in Europe. “Usually we’re five, maybe six, seven years behind what happens there,” Burtis said. 

Burtis said God then laid it on his heart to start building in Cairo by donating the first home his company would print. Fowler, the state senator whose district office is in the same building as Prestige, said he listened to Burtis’ plan as they drove to Cairo to meet with town officials a few years ago. Fowler said he suggested building a duplex instead of a single home so two families could benefit. Burtis was moved by that idea.

“He literally started tearing up,” Fowler said. He told me the story in August as we talked in the back booth of a local barbecue restaurant. 

“Did you cry, too?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Fowler said. “I’m about to right now just thinking about it.”

Cairo’s housing crisis is rooted in a long and complicated history. In 1972, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights visited the town and documented how racism had harmed Black families, including through neglect of their segregated public housing. Those problems only worsened over time.

I grew up nearby and have reported on Cairo’s housing problems for more than a decade. In 2015, I documented how conditions in those once-segregated developments had withered into mice-infested slums, overrun with mold and contaminated with lead, while federal overseers looked the other way.

In 2016, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development took over the local housing authority and then demolished those apartment homes, displacing nearly 400 residents. In 2022, HUD evacuated another high-rise for seniors, then home to about 60 people. In less than five years, more than 300 apartment units were razed, accelerating the county’s decline into one of the fastest-shrinking places in America. 

Cairo had seen ambitious promises before the 3D printer arrived. At the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, it draws entrepreneurs who see unrealized potential in its vacant storefronts and magnolia-lined streets of dilapidated mansions built by river barons in another era. Some come to help, others to take advantage — it can be hard to tell. Residents have grown wary of outsiders with big ideas.

City Council member Connie Williams, a retired school principal, said city leaders had warned the Prestige owners not to make promises they couldn’t keep.

“We kept saying to them, ‘Look, we’ve had enough people come through Cairo talking all this crazy stuff and then back out,’” she said. “And they were just like, ‘No, no, oh no, that’s not us. We are here. God sent us.’”

The project attracted attention from Illinois’ top powerbrokers: Gov. JB Pritzker met privately with Burtis and Fowler in Harrisburg. Fowler also invited staff from U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s office to learn about the project. Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza toured the unfinished duplex and praised the effort on social media. 

To help manage the project in Cairo, the company hired Bucky Miller, a broad-shouldered lineman with a baritone voice. He said part of his job was to craft development plans and an agreement with city officials. Miller regularly drove 300 miles round trip from his home near St. Louis to meet with city officials. He told residents at a housing task force meeting that he took the job after reading about the decades of failed promises made to Cairo, and “because of what I’m good at: keeping my word.” 

But he had no experience developing affordable housing, and neither did anyone else at Prestige. Burtis acknowledged the inexperience but said he planned to partner with developers who would secure financing and hire his company to handle construction.

Before the Party, an Unraveling 

The block party in August 2024 — kids clutching cotton candy, everyone in a jubilant mood — made it look like everything was on track. But I have now learned that significant parts of the project already were shaky even before the printer squeezed out the first cement.

One big problem was acquiring the printer to begin with. In October 2023, Grand Rivers Community Bank approved the $1.1 million loan to purchase the printer — a big bet for the rural lender in Karnak, Illinois, population 450, about 25 miles north of Cairo. The loan was nearly double the bank’s single-customer limit, requiring another regional bank to join in.

That month, Grand Rivers sent half the cost of the printer, about $590,000, to Peri 3D Construction, which operated out of Texas, to purchase one of its most expensive models. Their agreement stated that delivery of the printer would occur six months “at the earliest” from receipt of the deposit. The exchange of funds triggered Peri 3D to commission a large-scale commercial printer from COBOD International, a Danish company that bills itself as the world’s leader in 3D construction printing technology. 

By January 2024, Hayes and Burtis said, they had become impatient. It had been only three months, but they said they’d given Cairo their word they’d start building that spring and felt the printer wasn’t progressing fast enough. Hayes said, “‘Here we go again’ is what Cairo is thinking.”

Fowler emailed the governor’s office a few days ahead of a visit Pritzker had scheduled that month in southern Illinois, calling the new 3D printer business “a major humanitarian mission” and asking for an opportunity to introduce the governor to Burtis, records show. Fowler and Burtis met with Pritzker at Harrisburg City Hall and discussed with Pritzker whether he had contacts in Germany, where Peri is headquartered, who could help speed production, according to Burtis. A Pritzker spokesperson said the governor’s office took no action after the meeting.

Days later, a Peri 3D sales rep emailed Burtis’ son that the printer was on track for delivery that April. 

Then, shortly after, Burtis and other Prestige employees traveled to Las Vegas to a concrete industry expo. Fowler said that Prestige paid for him to come along and that he agreed because he wanted to see demonstrations of the 3D printer technology. He did not report the trip on his annual economic disclosure form; he amended the form after I asked him about it last year. 

Burtis said a COBOD engineer at the expo told them that their printer was only 10% complete, though a COBOD executive said it did not have any engineers present at the expo that year. While there, Burtis also met with one of the few other potential printer suppliers, Black Buffalo 3D. That New Jersey-based company said it had printers available that it could deliver right away, according to Burtis. 

Shortly after the conference, Prestige tried to cancel the order for the original printer. Peri 3D did not appear to respond to Prestige’s requests, according to an email exchange that Hayes shared with me. 

Two months later, Prestige’s lawyer sent a letter to Peri 3D saying the company’s request had been “blown off” and proposed Peri 3D keep about $60,000 — 10% — and return the rest. When Peri 3D responded in April, just as the printer was due, it said none of the $590,000 deposit would be returned. Prestige did not write back, according to email records the company provided.

Burtis and Hayes hadn’t yet spent about $500,000 of their loan. Hayes told me they were ultimately “no worse for the wear” since Black Buffalo 3D agreed to sell a printer for what they had left. 

“If I get 10 grand for a car,” Hayes said. “Say I pay 5 grand for a car and I don’t get my money back, but I can buy another car that does the same exact thing, and I only pay another 5 thousand. What do I give a shit if I can get back and forth to work?”

He called the bank. 

“We don’t need any more money,” Hayes said he told them. “Can we get this taken care of?”

The bank agreed and wired the remaining funds to Black Buffalo 3D in April 2024.

A Flimsy Plan

Getting the printer to Cairo was one problem — it wouldn’t arrive until August 2024. Getting it to make sense financially was another entirely. 

For months before the printer arrived, Miller, the Prestige employee managing the project in Cairo, had been telling city leaders that Prestige would secure financing to build the remaining 29 homes after donating the first duplex.

But city attorney Rick Abell said he couldn’t get straight answers about how the development would be paid for or what it might look like.

Typically, housing tax credits are used to build affordable housing in the U.S. But acquiring those is a highly competitive process that can take years to complete, a process that would be made even more challenging using an unproven construction technology and in a rural community. There’s no record that Prestige applied for any housing program funding. 

Phillip Matthews, who chaired the town’s housing task force, said he repeatedly asked for a project rendering but “never got it.” That was strange, Matthews said, “because normally, when a company determines they’re going to develop a piece of property, they have designs.”

Abell and city officials grew frustrated with the lack of clarity around the deal. 

Weeks before the kickoff party, city officials visited Prestige’s office in Harrisburg. According to Abell and Matthews, Burtis told them Cairo would need to come up with the financing to build the other homes.  

The city did not have that kind of money.  

Simpson, the mayor, was perplexed. He said Burtis offered to help the city apply for grants for a fee but offered no specifics. “I’ve been getting grants for all kinds of stuff, but there’s nothing for building housing,” Simpson said. 

Burtis would later say that Miller had made unauthorized promises that Prestige would secure financing for the project; Miller disputes this. 

Despite the uncertain financing, the city wrote up a contract: Cairo would sell a vacant lot to Prestige for $1. Prestige would build one duplex, manage it for 18 months and then transfer ownership back to the city. The contract called for 29 more over the next three years, with no details on how they would be funded. 

The mayor signed the contract, hopeful the project would build momentum in a place that hadn’t experienced much. 

Cairo’s Last Hope: Not “Some Big Serious Whatever”

I first met Hayes, the Harrisburg car dealer who co-founded Prestige, in early September 2025, more than a year after Cairo’s 3D printer party. At the time, I didn’t know about the abandoned $590,000 deposit or that there had never been a real plan for additional housing. I didn’t know Prestige and its suite of sister companies had drawn the attention of the FBI.  

But I had already visited the defunct printer in the middle of nowhere late last summer. A former Prestige employee had sent me a Google pin to show me where it had been parked for nearly a year.

So I was taken aback when Hayes told me the printer, the size of a small garage when assembled, was stored on his lot.  

I asked if he’d show it to me, a request that seemed to take him by surprise. Outside, we walked past rows of vehicles to the back lot. There was no printer — just heat shimmering off blacktop and a long chain-link fence.

He squinted into the sun, looked at me and shrugged. “I don’t see it, do you?” 

He’d later tell me it had been there at one point, and he didn’t realize it was gone. That strange episode would set the stage for the interviews that followed. 

Over many weeks, we’d spend hours talking in the corner office of his car dealership in Muddy, Illinois — population 40, a fading patch of coal country just outside Harrisburg near the Indiana border.

With an easy, elastic charm, Hayes slid between humor and confession, candor and confusion. He told me Prestige was named after the fictional do-nothing company in the Will Ferrell comedy “Step Brothers.” “It’s just stupid,” he said. “I’m not like some big serious whatever.”

Eventually, he’d blame everyone else — including both printer suppliers — for what happened: the stalled project, the cracks and the fact that Cairo still has no new housing.

Hayes told me Prestige had sued Peri 3D to recover its printer deposit. But for weeks he was vague about it. He said he hadn’t seen the lawsuit and didn’t know where it was filed — “nowhere around here,” he told me. 

He flew into a rage when I told him the Peri 3D salesperson they’d worked closely with had called his company “shady.” At that point, he promised to find out where it was filed, but over multiple visits, he’d tell me he still hadn’t located it. 

I found the lawsuit during a records search at the Saline County Courthouse, steps from Prestige’s office. It turned out that Prestige had filed the suit in early 2025, just as Peri 3D was laying off its U.S. staff. Prestige claimed in the lawsuit that it signed a “mock document,” not a real contract, and that it never received the language Peri 3D later claimed made clear the deposit was nonrefundable. 

Five months later, in August, a judge ruled in Prestige’s favor after Peri 3D failed to respond to the lawsuit. In Saline County, where the poverty rate hovers around 20%, nearly double the statewide rate, the lost money stood out. “That’s a lot of money,” the judge remarked, according to a court transcript. 

“It’s a bad situation,” Prestige’s lawyer said. The judge replied, “I guess good luck trying to collect it.” 

Before I could tell Hayes that I had located the lawsuit, he texted me that afternoon: “Looks like we did sue and won!!!” he wrote. “Who’s the shady one now?” (He later said he couldn’t tell me where the lawsuit had been filed because he’d largely left the business to Burtis to manage.)

Still, he said he was resigned to the fact that they’d likely never collect their money — and to date they haven’t. 

Burtis said they can’t locate anyone from Peri 3D. When I followed up with Hayes this month, he acknowledged that the contract made the deposit nonrefundable and said he regrets not reading the fine print. “Every time I’ve done that, I’m like, you know what, gahhh, why do I get screwed? Next time I’m going to read through everything,” he said.

Burtis said Prestige owes the bank roughly $13,000 a month under the terms of its 10-year lending agreement to pay for the original $1.1 million printer; over the full term, the company would pay more than $400,000 in interest. Prestige can’t afford the note; Hayes said he’s paying it out of one of his other business accounts. 

In an emailed statement from its German headquarters, Peri 3D said in October that it had conducted business “in accordance with the terms and conditions” of its contract with Prestige but would “investigate the matter diligently in the coming weeks.” When I followed up recently, the company declined to comment further. COBOD said it had not been delayed in constructing the printer and that it had no knowledge of a lawsuit since its contractual obligation was to Peri 3D and not Prestige.  

As I continued to ask Hayes questions, he told me the state senator could vouch for the deal. 

“Ask Dale Fowler if there’s any-fucking-thing going wrong,” he said. 

A Modern-Day Daniel

When I reached out to Fowler in October, he wasn’t vouching for much. He described Burtis and Hayes as acquaintances and himself as “just a guy that wants to help people.” He scoffed at Hayes’ claim that he could speak to any of their business dealings. And he said his role with the Cairo duplex project was minimal, limited to that of a cheerleader. 

His attempts to distance himself from the housing plan and company struck me as odd.

The month after Prestige secured a loan for the printer, Fowler’s office emailed promotional materials for Prestige’s 3D printing business to the Illinois Housing Development Agency and touted the project before the state poverty commission he sat on, public records show. 

He brought other top state officials into the orbit as well. Three months after Cairo’s duplex block party, Fowler led Mendoza, the comptroller, on a tour of the property with Burtis and his son. In since-deleted social media posts, she called them “visionaries.” A Mendoza spokesperson said Fowler asked if she wanted to tour the duplex, but she was not otherwise involved with the company or its owners, and they’ve received no state funding. The posts were removed after I asked the spokesperson if Mendoza had been aware that FBI agents had delivered a subpoena to Prestige’s office just days before her tour.

Fowler didn’t tell me, but I’d later also find out he’d convened Duckworth’s staff to a meeting with Prestige’s owners and the president of Grand Rivers Community Bank in early 2023 — 18 months before the 3D groundbreaking party in Cairo. A Duckworth spokesperson said the senator’s office had just revived discussions about how to address Cairo’s housing crisis when Fowler reached out and that the office did not have additional involvement with the company. 

People in Cairo also saw Fowler as key to the deal and reached out to him after it became clear the duplex had been left unfinished. 

“When it fell through, we were all calling Sen. Fowler personally, because he brought them here,” said Williams, the council member. According to Williams, Fowler told Cairo officials he was oblivious to Prestige’s business dealings. 

Since its founding in September 2021, Prestige has been Fowler’s largest source of campaign donations, not including those from political action and other committees. The company, and others owned by Burtis and Hayes, gave him $22,000 between May 2022 and August 2024. Its final donation of $6,500 was made to Fowler five days after the groundbreaking party for the 3D-printed duplex. Fowler said he doesn’t track who donates to his campaign; he and Burtis said the donation was for Prestige co-sponsoring a golf fundraiser two months earlier. 

Fowler, a decadelong state senator who plays a key role shaping his caucus’ legislative priorities as a Republican assistant leader, announced last summer that he wouldn’t seek reelection, citing a 10-year term limit pledge; his term expires in January. 

Fowler also told me in October that he had no knowledge of the federal probe of Prestige and had never been approached by investigators. “Are they grabbing for straws?” he said of the FBI. 

Fowler said he’d known Hayes and Burtis for decades and doesn’t believe they’ve done anything wrong. 

Still, he said he’d taken some unfair heat over the ordeal — “guilty by affiliation, I guess.” 

But Fowler told me it wasn’t the first time he’d been criticized as an elected official, leading him to believe in his “spiritual soul” that he is the modern-day Daniel. In the Old Testament, Daniel was a virtuous believer thrown into the lion’s den by his enemies. But angels closed the lion’s mouth, saving Daniel, while his enemies ended up being “chomped, mutilated, by the lions.” Fowler said the story put him “at peace.” 

“I’ve never told this to anyone,” he added. “I’ve never told this to my wife.”

The FBI Comes Knocking 

Not long after I began digging into what happened to the duplex in Cairo, I learned the FBI was also looking into Prestige’s broader business dealings. 

Within weeks of the block party, six employees — more than half Prestige’s staff — quit. Then Prestige received a federal grand jury subpoena asking for its financial records, Hayes and Burtis said.

The FBI has also subpoenaed two school districts and the city of Harrisburg for their contracts with and payments to Prestige for work unrelated to the duplex project, according to records obtained under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. The FBI declined to comment on the status of its investigation. 

Harrisburg Mayor John McPeek said the city did two projects with Prestige, though he said Fowler had encouraged the city to use the company more. A school district in Eldorado, one of those subpoenaed, ousted the former superintendent in September, in part for failing to get school board approval for about $2 million in payments to Prestige and related companies, public records show. The district declined to comment, and the former superintendent did not respond to requests for comment. 

Miller, the Prestige employee who hyped the 3D printing project to Cairo residents, was one of the employees who quit. When we first met up late last summer, he told me he had become an FBI whistleblower. 

Miller told me he’d been taken advantage of, sent to Cairo to sell a false promise the company had no intentions of standing behind. He also told me about a flurry of anonymous emails sent via Proton, an encrypted email service, that accused Prestige of fraud not long after Cairo’s block party. The emails went out to various businesses and schools that had contracted with Prestige.

I, too, had received a Proton email about Prestige. It wasn’t anonymous like the others, but was instead from someone claiming to be a COBOD executive. It directed me to open a DropBox file, but the link didn’t work. That executive told me she’d been impersonated; the company said it takes the matter “very seriously.”

At one point, Miller claimed to me that he was the one who sent the Proton emails — under instructions from the FBI, in an attempt to drum up investigatory leads. The FBI declined to comment, though three law enforcement experts told me this would be highly unlikely. Miller later changed his story, saying he hadn’t sent the emails. 

Burtis initially refused to answer my calls, texts and knocks on his door, but he called me back in October and said he wanted to talk. 

“For some reason, I woke up today, and after praying, it was like, ‘You need to go ahead and talk to her,’” he said. Tears streaked his face. His aunt sat beside him, taking notes on a legal pad. He blamed Miller for trying to ruin his company and for spreading unfounded rumors about him and Hayes. Miller did not respond when I asked him about Burtis’ claims.

Burtis also said he and Hayes have fully cooperated with the FBI, handing over all the financial records requested in the subpoena, though he said they’d never been interviewed by agents. “If I was really in trouble, don’t you think I’d have been handed an indictment by now?” Burtis said. 

His son Josh, who had been put in charge of the 3D printing venture, said the construction issues had been disappointing but they had been keeping the city updated. Hayes said he’d been fully transparent with me and investigators. 

As I asked questions last fall, the printer sat outside on the flatbed, though some parts of it recently moved to Hayes’ car lot.

The cracked house remained abandoned. 

Hayes said the concrete “ink” that came with the Black Buffalo 3D printer was faulty and that’s why the printer has been idle since. Black Buffalo 3D said it has offered Prestige a new concrete solution and to find a buyer for the printer if Prestige no longer wants it. 

Prestige and Black Buffalo told me in a joint email in September that they would return to Cairo by the end of October to fix the cracks, which they said were nonstructural. But Black Buffalo never showed up, saying its engineer couldn’t sign off on a repair plan without city permits, which don’t exist because they aren’t required. The company, which has sold only two printers in the U.S. since its founding in 2020, filed for bankruptcy in December. 

Burtis later said he engaged his own engineering firm to sign off on a remediation plan to fill the cracks with a hydraulic cement, though he declined to share that plan or the company name. Crews were recently working on the duplex; Burtis said the cabinets they ordered did not fit. 

Once the duplex is finished, Burtis said, he plans to turn the keys over to the city. Simpson said he will be ready. Still optimistic, the mayor said he hopes someone else will eventually follow through and build homes in Cairo.

Abell, Cairo’s city attorney, said the failed venture has never sat right with him. “I’ve seen a lot of deals fall through,” Abell said. “But we always knew why. Here, we got nothing.”

“Even today,” he added, “I probably have a lot more questions than I’ve got answers.”

While some questions remain unanswered, one set of facts is undisputed: When HUD began dismantling housing here a decade ago, officials promised there would be an effort to build back. Today, the only thing that has been built is one duplex, still unfinished.

Mallory, the mother who’d hoped to have a two-bedroom home one day, said she is tired of waiting, as much as Cairo has always felt like home. In mid-March, she applied for a housing assistance program in Chicago. She worries Cairo can’t give her daughter all she needs to thrive. “I want more for her,” she said. “I thought I was going to be able to get a two-bedroom apartment.”

But in the end, she sighed, with the kind of resignation that comes from being disappointed too many times, it was just “a bunch of broken promises.”

The post 3D-Printed Homes, an Abandoned $590,000 Deposit, the FBI: What Really Happened in This Small Town? appeared first on ProPublica.

For more than a century, a lead smelter and other factories in downtown Omaha, Nebraska, spewed toxic dust across the city, contaminating the soil and causing lead poisoning. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the city of Omaha have spent decades trying to clean it up.

But in 2019, the EPA acknowledged its plan may not do enough to protect kids, and the agency is reexamining the site to potentially expand the cleanup, which could result in more residential yards being remediated.

Journalists at the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica teamed up to report on how well the cleanup effort is going. This included collecting soil samples from more than 600 yards in and around the affected area, called the Superfund site. Many people we met in the process told us they had never heard of the Superfund site and had no idea they could be at risk from lead exposure. They asked a lot of questions about how to stay safe. 

So we talked to experts and got answers below.

1. What is lead poisoning?

Lead poisoning occurs when lead, a toxic metal that was used in paint, gasoline and plumbing for decades, is ingested and builds up in the body, causing issues like developmental delays and behavioral problems in kids. It’s more of a concern for children because their bodies are still developing and they absorb more of the lead they inhale or ingest than adults. But lead poisoning can also affect adults, causing problems like high blood pressure, memory impairment and joint and muscle pain. 

2. What are considered unsafe lead levels?

There is no “safe” level of exposure to lead. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines a high level as 3.5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. 

If your child’s test shows lead levels above that, the Douglas County Health Department will schedule an environmental risk assessment, which will include a home inspection and education about how to prevent exposure. The nonprofit National Center for Healthy Housing also has a good checklist for how to reduce lead exposure.

If you live within the Superfund site, you can check your soil levels on the Omaha Lead Registry. An EPA risk model predicts a soil lead concentration of 100 parts per million or less would protect kids from developing what the CDC currently considers a high blood lead value, assuming there are no other exposures.

3. What should I know about the lead Superfund site in Omaha? 

The Superfund site is generally located north of Harrison Street, south of Read Street and between 45th Street and the Missouri River. It was designated a Superfund site in 2003, meaning the federal government would oversee a cleanup of the toxic waste there and try to get the polluters to pay for it. 

The EPA drew boundaries for the Superfund site based on where fewer than 5% of residential properties tested above 400 parts per million of lead in the soil, the concentration of lead at which the government would conduct a cleanup. That’s roughly the size of a marble in a 10-pound bucket of dirt. People who live beyond the boundary may still have elevated soil levels and can contact the city if they’re interested in testing and possible cleanup.

4. Is my soil contaminated with lead? How can I get my soil tested?

If you live in the Omaha Superfund site, you can check the Omaha Lead Registry to see the highest level of lead found in your yard through soil sampling of every property done by either the EPA or the city of Omaha. You can request a detailed diagram of your home from the city, showing average lead levels in different areas of your yard. These levels may have changed over time if you have flaking lead paint on your home or have added, removed or covered up dirt in your yard.

If your soil hasn’t been tested and you live within or near the boundaries of the Superfund site, you can contact the city’s Lead Information Office. Midwest Laboratories in Omaha also provides heavy metal screening for a fee through its garden and lawn soil testing program. 

5. Is there lead in my house? Is there lead in my water?

Homes built before 1978 likely contain lead paint. You can test for lead with at-home kits approved by the EPA. A common sign you might have lead paint is if it chips in a geometric pattern called “alligatoring” because it looks like scaly alligator skin.

East Omaha has extensive lead plumbing. You can use this map to see if your home is eligible for service line replacement. If you have lead service lines, you can request a free water test from the Metropolitan Utilities District.

6. What is the city’s process for remediation? 

If the soil has a high enough lead concentration to qualify for cleanup, the city will also assess the exterior of the dwelling for lead-based paint. If the home has lead-based paint, a contractor hired by the city will remove flaking paint and repaint the surface before the soil is remediated. 

Contractors remediate properties by removing 4 inches of soil and testing it. If levels are still concerning, they keep digging and testing to a depth of 1 foot. If contamination still exists, contractors put down a barrier like landscaping fabric before adding fill dirt and laying sod on top.

Following the city’s work, the Douglas County Health Department will also reach out to see if the property owner would like a dust assessment of the home and a free vacuum cleaner with a filter that captures small particles. 

We’re reporting on how this remediation process is going. If you have a story or concerns about your remediation process, contact the Flatwater Free Press. 

7. My yard was remediated, should I still be concerned? Will it be retested? 

The EPA remediated yards in Omaha by digging up and replacing areas that had more than 400 parts per million of lead in the soil. Most properties do not require resampling, EPA spokesperson Kellen Ashford said. However, the EPA and the city of Omaha have resampled properties on a case-by-case basis. One example is when a structure has been demolished, exposing lead-contaminated soil or spreading dust from lead paint.

Tens of thousands of properties that had high levels of lead contamination but that were under the 400-parts-per-million benchmark were not remediated. The Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica are investigating how effective the cleanup has been. If you have questions or concerns, contact the Flatwater Free Press. 

8. If I’m outside the Superfund site, should I still be concerned?

The EPA is analyzing whether to expand the bounds of the Omaha Superfund site, a Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica investigation found.

The agency currently allows for some remediation beyond the Superfund site’s bounds. Testing and remediation would need to be approved by the EPA, but the process would look the same as it does for properties within the site. If you live within city limits, you can contact the city of Omaha if you’re interested in testing and remediation outside the Superfund site.

9. Is it safe for me, my kids and my pets to be in the yard with contaminated soil?

Spending time outdoors in the Superfund site can be safe if you manage risks, said Naudia McCracken, supervisor of Douglas County’s Lead Poisoning Prevention Program.

Read More

The EPA Was Considering a Massive Lead Cleanup in Omaha. Then Trump Shifted Guidance.

Omaha Is Home to a Massive Superfund Site. Most Kids Living There Aren’t Tested for Lead.

“Casual outdoor activity like walking through a yard, sitting on grass or brief play on covered surfaces does not by itself represent a high-risk exposure scenario,” she said. “The concern is repeated or prolonged contact with bare contaminated soil, especially activities like digging or play that result in soil on hands, faces or objects that enter the mouth.”

You can reduce risks by keeping bare soil covered, washing hands, taking off your shoes at the door, cleaning indoor dust and preventing pet contact with bare soil when possible, McCracken said. 

10. Is it safe to garden if my soil is contaminated? 

Safe gardening starts with limiting contact with the dirt. Wash your produce well, peel root vegetables and discard the outer parts of leafy vegetables like cabbage and lettuce, the EPA recommends. Wear gloves while working in the garden, wash your hands and take your shoes off when you enter the home.

The best way to avoid contamination is to build a raised bed, said Shannon Kyler, community programs manager at the urban farm group City Sprouts. An 18-inch bed with a layer of landscape fabric below should keep roots away from the base soil. Mixing compost into soil will also dilute lead levels and improve soil health. It’s a good idea to retest soil every year, she said.

While crops absorb some lead, it’s usually a small amount in well-maintained soil, studies from Washington and Kansas found.

With the right precautions, gardening can be a low-risk activity, Kyler said. Several resources like the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Nebraska Extension and City Sprouts can also help answer questions. 

11. Is blowing dust a concern for lead contamination? 

Lead is particularly dangerous in small dust particles because it can be more easily absorbed in the body, said Gabriel Filippelli, executive director of Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute and a lead and Superfund researcher for decades. Contaminated dust that blows into homes or is tracked in through dirt can deposit on surfaces like floors and tables where kids can reach it.

12. Does lead go away over time?

Lead generally does not break down in the environment. Once ingested or inhaled, some of it will naturally leave the body, though that depends on factors such as age and diet. Most of it is stored in bones for decades and can be released back into the bloodstream, especially in times of stress like pregnancy.

Health institutions like the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic write that the damage lead causes cannot be reversed. But some recent studies suggest exercise, educational experiences like going to a museum or taking art lessons, and a nutrient found in many fruits and vegetables can counter some of the effects.

The post What You Should Know About Lead Contamination in Omaha, Nebraska appeared first on ProPublica.

On an overcast Saturday in February, a street vendor named Elmer lined up dozens of pairs of worn but carefully cleaned tennis shoes on tables next to a convenience store. 

The 44-year-old father from Honduras felt like his head was on a swivel, greeting the handful of shoppers that approached while also scanning the busy thoroughfare behind him. He was ready to serve — or to run.

Last fall, as Elmer and his son were setting up their shoe stand, he said, agents wearing Homeland Security vests arrested two Guatemalan men in a nearby parking lot. A few hours later, the Mexican owner of a taco truck across the street was also detained by immigration authorities. 

Then in December, Elmer’s 19-year-old nephew was taken, too, following a traffic stop; he remains incarcerated in a Tennessee detention center. Elmer worries that he and his son could be next. They fled Honduras seven years ago to escape gang violence and are not authorized to be in the United States. Elmer spoke with MLK50: Justice Through Journalism and ProPublica on the condition that only his first name be used. 

Those around Elmer were swept up as part of President Donald Trump’s September order deploying more than two dozen state, local and federal law enforcement agencies, including the National Guard, to neighborhoods in Memphis, Tennessee. Unlike federal operations in Minneapolis, Chicago and other cities where immigration officers flooded the streets to ramp up deportations, the stated mission of the Memphis Safe Task Force was different: “to end street and violent crime in Memphis to the greatest possible extent.”

But just over a quarter of the more than 5,200 arrests made by the task force in and around Memphis have been for violent crimes, according to an MLK50 and ProPublica analysis of nearly four months of daily arrest reports from October through the beginning of February. The vast majority of violent crime arrests stemmed from outstanding warrants.

And despite casting violent criminals as the task force’s primary target, the operation has swept up more than 800 immigrants whom law enforcement deemed to be unlawfully present in the United States. Of those, just 2% — or 17 — were also arrested for violent crimes, our analysis found. Being unlawfully present on its own is a civil, not a criminal, offense.

More immigration arrests occurred in and around Parkway Village, the neighborhood where Elmer sells shoes, than in any other part of Memphis, according to our analysis. This majority Black community on the outskirts of the city’s core is also one of the fastest growing Hispanic neighborhoods in Memphis. It is dotted with immigrant-owned businesses — barber shops, grocery stores, a tax preparer — that serve a predominantly Spanish-speaking clientele. Other vendors sell tamales and cheese from the trunks of their cars. Overall, 81% of the neighborhood’s task force arrests have been for nonviolent crimes, including immigration violations, drug offenses, theft and illegal possession of weapons.

Trump has repeatedly proclaimed success in Memphis, crediting the task force for a more than 30% decline in homicides, aggravated assaults and sexual assaults compared with the same period last year. 

While some research has shown that a surge in policing could deter crime, Memphis Police Department data indicates that crime had already been dropping steadily since 2023, hitting a 25-year low before the task force began its operations last fall. Criminologists say more analysis is needed to determine how much impact the task force has had on crime rates in Memphis. 

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said crime rates continued to drop due to “the great work of President Trump’s task force.”

“Every local leader should want to mimic this success,” she said in a written statement.

Jackson did not answer questions about the gap between the task force’s stated mission to end violent crime and the fact that so few of the immigrants arrested were suspected of committing such crimes. Nor did Brady McCarron, a spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service, which leads the task force. Instead, he reiterated Trump’s claims that the task force has restored law and order to Memphis.

“All Memphians are safer today than they were seven months ago because of the Memphis Safe Task Force,” McCarron said in a written statement. “Calls for service are down 18% since last year. Meaning less crimes are being committed that residents must call in for law enforcement response.”

In response to some Memphians saying that the task force’s immigration activity makes them feel unsafe and discourages immigrants from reporting crimes and cooperating with police, McCarron said: “We are aware of concerns raised by community advocates. Our focus remains on removing violent offenders, recovering illegal firearms, and protecting all Memphis residents, including communities who are disproportionately victimized by violent crime.”

What the Trump administration celebrates as a successful crime-fighting campaign, Latino advocacy groups and civil rights organizations argue is a crusade that’s left much of the Hispanic community in turmoil and fear, as it grapples with the social isolation, economic instability and trauma the task force has brought.

The task force has shrunk Elmer’s world to work, church and a drafty rental home near the railroad tracks that he shares with his 20-year-old son, whom he raised alone. 

Three of Elmer’s siblings also live in Memphis, but since the task force arrived, family gatherings have been few. No one wants to risk being detained while driving across town.

During the week, Elmer shops for used Nikes, New Balances and other sneakers at thrift stores, then sells them in front of the neighborhood convenience store on the weekends. Elmer said he used to sell 100 pairs of shoes a week. Now, he’s lucky if he sells 20 — bringing home $500 a month instead of his usual $2,400.

Elmer said his father, a former police officer who had a car rental business in Honduras’ capital city, was gunned down after refusing to pay off a local gang. Elmer tilted his chin up as he spoke to keep tears from falling. 

“Sometimes I ask my son, ‘What would your life be like if we never left?’” Elmer said through a Spanish interpreter. “He answered, ‘I would probably be dead,’” killed by the same gang that took his grandfather.

Ever vigilant still, Elmer has mapped three escape routes from his shoe stand, just in case the task force reappears. As he pointed them out, a Tennessee Highway Patrol SUV flew down the road behind him, lights flashing and sirens blaring. 

On a recent Friday afternoon, while Elmer was working, an unmarked white SUV leaving the parking lot slowed to a stop a few feet from his shoe stand. Immigration officers wearing bulky green vests sat inside the vehicle and stared at Elmer and the Hispanic men standing with him. 

The agents didn’t say a word, Elmer recalled, but “I could feel the intimidation because I know who they are.”

Although it felt like forever, Elmer said, the federal agents only looked at them for 10 or so seconds — long enough for Elmer to abandon the escape routes he had planned and remember his son’s advice: Don’t run, or they may chase you.

So he froze, waiting for the moment to pass.

Violent Crime Campaign Swept Up Immigrants 

Last month, Trump came to Memphis and declared victory from a stage decorated with seized weapons and cardboard boxes stamped “DEA EVIDENCE.” 

“You have now developed a reputation as a city that’s coming back stronger than any city in the country because of what’s happened with crime, and because your political leaders have the courage to do what they did,” Trump told hundreds of National Guard troops, law enforcement officers and local and state Republican leaders gathered in a Tennessee Air National Guard hangar.

Armored vehicles and a law enforcement helicopter were parked next to the stage, framing the president and other administration officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. Miller has worked closely with Tennessee Republicans as they try to pass bills to require courts, public health clinics and law enforcement to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Trump administration has praised the proposed legislation and the task force as possible models for the rest of the country.

The influx of law enforcement has created a political minefield for Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat in a blue corner of a Republican-led state. Hours after Trump’s appearance, which the mayor did not attend, Young said during a press conference that the task force has “amplified” the work Memphis police had already been doing to reduce crime and that the increased law enforcement presence has led to “greater results,” especially in executing warrants. About half of all task force arrests have been for outstanding warrants.

But Young said he disagreed with the task force’s immigration enforcement role. “That’s not a part of those efforts that I am supportive of,” he told reporters. “I think that immigrants in our community have been a vital part of the growth of our city for the past 10 to 15 years, and we want them to feel welcome in our community.”

For immigrants without proper documentation, some say one of the riskiest things they can do since the task force arrived is to get behind the wheel. Of the task force’s immigration arrests, about 4 out of 5 followed traffic stops, the MLK50 and ProPublica analysis found. The Tennessee Highway Patrol, which leads the task force’s traffic enforcement efforts, usually initiates the traffic stops — often for minor violations such as a broken taillight or windows tinted too dark. Then immigration officers, who are often following the state troopers or riding with them, interrogate the driver and passengers, according to Vecindarios 901, an immigration rapid-response organization that has witnessed dozens of stops. Those who cannot provide proper documentation are arrested. 

The task force did not answer questions about the use of traffic stops as a primary means of arresting immigrants who are not authorized to be in the United States.

As law enforcement descended upon Parkway Village, church attendance dipped, according to a pastor with a primarily indigenous Guatemalan congregation; parishioners too scared to leave home chose instead to submit prayer requests through online services, she said. Pastors have agreed to serve as guardians to their members’ U.S.-born children in case their parents get deported.

Business owners and grocery store workers say sales have plummeted, forcing some to cut back on staffing. In the first weeks of task force operations, Hispanic student attendance at a neighborhood school fell by half, one administrator said.

At another neighborhood school, its communications coordinator, Paola, used to start her workday at the front desk, greeting students. Now she often starts it in her car, shuttling a pair of siblings to school. The 21-year-old from Venezuela stepped in to help after the children’s father was arrested in October during an appointment at immigration court. Their mother is afraid to drive them to school.

Paola and her father worried at first that she, too, might be detained even though she is authorized to work in the United States. She agreed to be interviewed on the condition that only her middle name be used to protect her and her family.

“Our role is not political,” she said. “We are here to care for students and their families.” 

Minutes away off Winchester Road, a busy street in Parkway Village, the Rev. Rolando Rostro is also watching out for his community. Rostro pastors Iglesia Nueva Vida, the largest Hispanic church in the Memphis area, where Sunday attendance fell from 800 to 500 during the first several months of the task force. Parishioners still live in fear, but attendance has gradually increased, he said. “We have to go to church.”

Alerted to traffic stops through phone calls or an online system set up by Vecindarios 901, Rostro often responds to the scene after state troopers or county sheriff’s officers — followed by federal agents — have pulled drivers over. It’s part of his “assignment” as a pastor during a difficult period for his community, he said; he goes to bear witness and ask that immigrants arrested be released. “The Bible says ask and you will receive,” he said. 

Sometimes, he recognizes his parishioners. 

“Hey, that’s not ‘the worst of the worst,’” Rostro said he has told the law enforcement officers, rebutting the Trump administration’s characterization of the immigrants federal officials are targeting. “I know him. He goes to my church. He’s a good man,” Rostro has said — in hopes that sharing details about the people’s lives would “plant a seed of a different way of seeing things.” 

During Trump’s first administration, Rostro said one of his parishioners was released from ICE detention after he spoke with agents.

But that hasn’t happened this time.

So he checks in with church members who are detained, learning they are held in cold, rat-infested conditions and pressured to return to their home countries. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons but would not address the conditions at the detention centers in which Rostro’s parishioners are held.

“This is a family community,” Rostro said, “so the breakup of that is very detrimental to the children and to the whole family structure.”

A Community Hub Unnerved

A few miles down the street from the church, Juan Hernandez, who is originally from Mexico, led a reporter through El Mercadito, the sprawling indoor shopping center he opened in 2005. Vendors in the normally bustling commercial hub had few customers to greet one afternoon in early March.

With dozens of immigrant-run booths selling everything from neon safety vests for construction workers to frilly dresses for little girls, El Mercadito also rents space for events, including lucha libre (Mexican wrestling) and quinceañeras.

But since October, there have been fewer bookings for birthday parties. As shoppers stayed home, some booth owners struggled to keep up with the rent, Hernandez said. Two Guatemalan booth owners were so fearful to come to work that they shuttered their clothing stands.

In the task force’s first weeks, Hernandez tried to calm the fears of shoppers, vendors and his employees at the Mexican restaurant inside the market. He hired private security to guard the doors and to monitor video cameras for signs of task force agents. Then he realized that it was the traffic stops by state troopers that were most often leading to immigration arrests, so he no longer needed the guards.

Two or three times a week, federal agents would show up at his restaurant for breakfast. First one, then a pair, then eight or more, pushing tables together. When they left to get in their cars, Hernandez saw them putting on vests marked HSI: Homeland Security Investigations.

On two occasions, someone — he’s not sure if it was a customer or a booth owner — posted photos of the agents at El Mercadito on social media, as a warning to customers to stay away.

Hernandez understands why people are wary: Two of his friends have been deported by immigration authorities across town, leaving behind teenage children. The sister of one of his servers was detained.

But, as he has explained to his vendors and employees in a meeting, no shoppers or diners means no income for the booth owners or the restaurant. He said restaurant sales have fallen by 40% since the task force’s launch.

“I used to have these feelings of anger like, you know, they are looking for us, and then they come to eat here,” Hernandez said through a Spanish interpreter, but there was nothing he could do. “They were paying for the food, so we have to serve.”

Hernandez typically offers police officers 10% off their checks, but not for this group. “I decided I don’t give discounts to them because of the harm they are doing in our community.”

Hernandez had received amnesty under Republican President Ronald Reagan when he came to the United States more than 40 years ago. He said he’s now been forced to consider the unthinkable.

“I have never had the thought of coming back to my country,” he said. “Now I do — because of the government.”

The post Trump’s Memphis Crime Task Force Arrested Over 800 Immigrants, Records Show. Only 2% of the Arrests Were for Violent Crimes. appeared first on ProPublica.

Belinda Daniels panicked in 2018 when the pediatrician said her 1-year-old son, Jovanni, had lead in his body. The toxic metal could stunt his brain, the doctor told her, but catching it early meant she could prevent more damage.

Daniels moved out of her Omaha, Nebraska, apartment that had chipping lead paint. The doctor continued testing Jovanni periodically while Daniels followed instructions on cleaning, handwashing and keeping Jovanni away from contaminated dirt.

Eventually, the lead level in Jovanni’s blood dropped. While the now-8-year-old has anger and impulse-control issues, Daniels said it could have been a lot worse.

“They told me that the side effects of it would be him being autistic” or having “very delayed behaviors,” she said.

Not every child’s high lead levels are caught as early as Jovanni’s. In Nebraska, it’s largely up to the doctor or health system to decide whether to test a child’s blood for lead. As a result, local public health officials say, not enough kids are getting tested, given Omaha’s lead problems, which include being home to the largest residential lead cleanup site in the country.

For more than a century, smoke from a lead smelter and other factories deposited 400 million pounds of the toxic metal across the city’s east side. That prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to begin investigating the pollution in 1999, and a few years later, the agency declared 27 square miles of east Omaha to be a Superfund site. Over more than two decades, the EPA and the city have dug up and replaced nearly 14,000 yards, from about a third of the site’s residential properties.

Faced with similar public health concerns about lead, 13 states, including New Jersey, Louisiana and neighboring Iowa, have passed laws requiring universal lead screening, meaning all kids would get a blood test before entering kindergarten.

But not Nebraska.

Most places passed these laws after recognizing that they were reaching too few kids by simply targeting high-risk groups like children who live in old housing. Every state with available data saw increases in the number of kids tested after passing these laws, the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica found. Some identified more kids with elevated blood lead levels.

A lack of consistent testing nationally leads health officials to miss about half the kids with high levels, according to research by the American Academy of Pediatrics. The academy and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend testing in areas that have a high prevalence of lead or older housing.

Over the years, Omaha public health officials have raised awareness about blood testing with billboards and community events about the risks of lead. But a bill to require that every child be tested failed in the Nebraska Legislature in 2011. Since then, there have been no efforts to revive it.

Naudia McCracken, supervisor of the Douglas County Health Department’s Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, said she is planning to propose an ordinance to the Omaha City Council this summer. That could require health workers to test all kids up to age 7 who live in the Superfund site itself and a broader area east of 72nd Street, generally thought of as the dividing line between the city’s urban east side and suburban west side. Right now, fewer than half of kids under 7 in that area are tested for lead.

As a whole, the county’s testing rate is better than most, CDC data shows. But that’s not comforting to local health workers. “That number is abysmally low,” said Peg Schneider, a physician assistant who has been testing Omaha kids for lead since 1989 and believes every kid should be tested.

McCracken said the city “needs to come to grips” with its lead problems. Not only is it home to the Superfund site, but the majority of east Omaha’s housing was built before lead paint was banned, and many residents’ drinking water travels through lead pipes. While Daniels lived in the Superfund site, she believes her baby might have been exposed to the apartment’s lead paint.

Since the cleanup began, the percentage of kids in the Superfund site whose tests showed high lead levels has decreased from 33% in 2000 to 2.4% in 2025. That mirrors national trends over the same time period.

But east Omaha still has a higher rate of children with elevated blood lead levels than the national average, according to the most recent CDC data. 

Without mandatory testing, there’s no way to know if health workers are missing kids with potentially life-changing exposures to lead, said Dr. Jennifer Sample, a Kansas City, Missouri-area pediatrician and former chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Environmental Health and Climate Change. 

“That’s why I support universal testing: so we can actually see where those kids are,” she said. “We need better data.”

Getting an accurate picture of the community’s blood lead levels is not only important for public health. While levels of lead in soil are the main drivers for EPA action, the data on children’s blood lead levels can inform decisions like lowering cleanup thresholds, said Kellen Ashford, an EPA spokesperson. The EPA is currently reassessing the site, and tens of thousands more Omaha properties could be cleaned up.

Jim Woolford, who led the EPA’s Superfund program from 2006 to 2020, worries that if kids with lead poisoning aren’t being tested and the community’s levels appear low, EPA officials may use that data as a reason not to carry out a remediation project that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Instead, Woolford said, they could “declare victory” and “move on.”

“That Opportunity Was Lost”

In 1977, Douglas County, which contains Omaha, took advantage of a new federal grant and started a screening program to test kids for lead. By then many communities in the U.S. recognized the dangers of the toxic metal and had begun passing laws to catch and address its effects.

But in Omaha, local officials struggled to test enough kids with limited resources. Four health workers went door to door with suitcases full of swabs and vials. Dr. John Walburn, who treated lead-poisoned kids at the time, tried to convince doctors at Omaha’s clinics and hospitals to test, but, outside poor areas, “they did not see it as their problem,” he said.

After the EPA proved lead contamination was a far-reaching problem and began the Omaha cleanup in 1999, testing increased dramatically as the EPA and local government recommended kids in the Superfund site be screened. But many still went unchecked, said Brenda Council, a longtime lead poisoning prevention advocate in the city.

So when she won a seat in the Nebraska Legislature, she proposed that every child in the state undergo at least one blood lead test before kindergarten unless a health care worker determined the child to be at low risk for lead poisoning using a questionnaire. Some believed the survey would flag too many kids and result in unneeded tests.

“Among the things in that checklist are that they’ve never ingested a nonfood product,” Paul Schumacher, a state senator from Columbus, Nebraska, said at the time. “It would be un-American for a kid not to have eaten dirt or grass at some time in its life.”

The bill eventually passed the Legislature but was vetoed by then-Gov. Dave Heineman, who said it was unnecessary and would be too costly. 

“There could have been so much prevention,” Council said. “That opportunity was lost.”

Heineman did not return phone calls, texts or emails requesting comment. Schumacher said in an interview that he still believes a one-size-fits-all approach would test kids unnecessarily but said a local policy for a place with lead issues would make more sense. 

Without universal testing, Nebraska policymakers and health institutions have taken different approaches. The state recommends testing every kid who lives within the Superfund site at ages 1 and 2. Douglas County recommends kids be tested annually until age 7. 

Only 1- and 2-year-olds with Medicaid insurance are required to be tested — and even then, only two-thirds of eligible kids in the county are tested each year, according to state data.

Providers in the biggest medical systems are left to follow individual policies. OneWorld Community Health Centers, which serves primarily low-income and Latino patients in South Omaha, requires its providers to try to test every 1- and 2-year-old. Children’s Nebraska, the state’s only independent pediatric hospital, requires one test by 2 years old. Nebraska Medicine, the state’s largest hospital network, does not have its own policy, according to a spokesperson. But Schneider, the physician assistant at Nebraska Medicine’s Fontenelle Health Center in North Omaha, said she tests kids annually until the age of 5.

In recent years, several states that had similar approaches realized they weren’t catching enough kids with high lead levels. In Maine, more than 160 such children were likely missed due to inconsistent screening across the state, according to a 2019 report by a Maine affordable housing group. Since then, the state has passed a universal testing law and its health department reported that its testing rate, which had been stagnant for years, was now rising. 

Michigan passed a new universal testing law in 2023. The state previously relied on recommendations similar to Nebraska’s, and parents had to push doctors to get their kids tested, said Ellen Vial, a Detroit program manager at the Michigan Environmental Council, which lobbied for the law. She hopes the new law will do as much to prevent exposure there as banning lead from paint did.

Nebraska state Sen. Ashlei Spivey of North Omaha said she’s considering introducing lead-related policies again in the Legislature, such as bills to increase testing, provide tax credits to fix lead paint issues inside homes and enforce the replacement of water service lines that contain lead.

Cleanups and Blood Tests

The EPA has been reexamining Omaha’s Superfund site, particularly how contaminated dirt has to be to qualify for cleanup. One factor that may influence the cleanup decision is local blood lead data. In 2019, the EPA wrote in a review of the Omaha site that its plan “may not protect children,” given that the CDC had lowered the concentration at which it considers someone’s blood lead level “high.” 

Nearly 27,000 Omaha properties could have qualified for cleanup if the EPA applied guidance that had been set under the Biden administration to better match the updated advice on blood lead levels, according to documents obtained by the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica. But those guidelines were rolled back last fall by the Trump administration, tempering some experts’ expectations and residents’ hopes for additional cleanup. The EPA plans to have updates on its Omaha cleanup plans by the end of the year, agency spokesperson Ashford said. 

Ashford also said the EPA uses local blood lead data, when it’s available, to set or lower cleanup levels. The local data also helps establish whether other remedies are needed, such as interior dust screenings or repainting homes that have lead paint.

But using blood data to understand the prevalence of lead is problematic, said Danielle Land, a University of Iowa public health researcher. Lead only stays in the blood for about 30 days, meaning an exposure can be missed even though it can continue to cause damage. Testing kids in winter when they spend more time inside versus summer when they’re playing outside can also provide different results. Isolating how someone was exposed or whether a cleanup is behind a decline in blood lead levels can be difficult.

Despite those issues, Land said she’s seen declines in the number of kids with high blood lead levels “shape public and institutional narratives” about whether to investigate or fix hazards in places like Flint, Michigan, where millions have been spent replacing lead pipes, or Anniston, Alabama, where the soil was contaminated. In 2018, the EPA said blood lead data in Omaha could shape how the agency conducts cleanups elsewhere.

Industries and local government officials have used low blood lead levels to avoid cleanups before, said Larry Zaragoza, a retired EPA employee who spent decades analyzing and developing policies relating to lead risk. 

In the 1990s, a Colorado county and the state argued against widespread cleanup in the town of Leadville, Zaragoza said. Residents spent years criticizing the EPA’s research and felt the agency was unfairly saddling corporations that owned local mining operations with cleanup costs, news reports show. Cleanups only happened at homes where kids’ blood tests came back as high or where yards contained nearly nine times the levels required to qualify for a cleanup in Omaha. 

Still, the agency needs a way to measure success, said Woolford, the former Superfund program director. The data can be valuable if enough kids are tested and they generally represent the area. 

“You’re going to need, even with all its uncertainties, some indicator of what’s happened over time,” he said.

As Jovanni gets older, Daniels said her fear for his health has dissipated. Her son loves Ferraris and Dodge Challengers. He wrestles, plays soccer and rides his bike. 

But he was also exposed to lead, which can carry lifelong consequences similar to the behavioral issues he’s dealing with. Daniels wonders how many other parents have kids like him but may never know why.

“I think that needs to be standard across the board — all kids getting tested,” she said.

The post Omaha Is Home to a Massive Superfund Site. Most Kids Living There Aren’t Tested for Lead. appeared first on ProPublica.

Colorado regulators announced on Monday that they plan to crack down on companies that illegally sell cheaper and potentially hazardous hemp products as marijuana.

The state’s Marijuana Enforcement Division said it had detected “regulatory compliance issues” that threaten to unravel the marijuana industry in the nation’s first legal retail market.

These issues “present serious risks to public safety, market integrity and the tax revenue framework that supports Colorado’s regulated cannabis industry,” the agency stated in an industry bulletin.

A Denver Gazette and ProPublica investigation in January reported that, despite Colorado being one of the first states to ban the sale of intoxicating hemp products, the legislature and regulators failed to adopt many regulations that other states have employed to keep hemp products off marijuana dispensary shelves.

Creating the liquid distillate for vapes and edibles from hemp is much cheaper than using marijuana, giving companies a competitive advantage.

But regulators say they’re worried because manufacturers rely on toxic and potentially hazardous chemicals to convert the nonintoxicating compound CBD that is prevalent in hemp into THC, the psychoactive compound that makes people feel high. Regulators have banned such chemical synthesis because they say they fear chemical residues could remain in finished products, imperiling consumers.

Colorado manufacturers have exploited gaps in the state’s testing and enforcement system to continue using hemp to make products marketed as marijuana, even though doing so is against state law, according to regulatory investigations, previous agency bulletins and testimony and lab results contained in several lawsuits.

In 2024, state investigators found that one popular brand of marijuana vapes sold in dispensaries was not only derived from hemp, but also contaminated with methylene chloride, a chemical often used to convert CBD from hemp into THC. It is prohibited by Colorado’s marijuana regulators and banned for most uses by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency because it can cause liver and lung cancer and damage the nervous, immune and reproductive systems.

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Ware Hause, the company that manufactured those vapes, surrendered its marijuana license in response to the investigation. Ware Hause’s owner, Thanh Hau, and the company’s lawyer have declined to comment.

Congress passed a law last November banning nearly all intoxicating hemp products throughout the country starting this fall, but it’s unclear how the government will implement that ban, and hemp manufacturers are pushing to overturn it.

In December, President Donald Trump issued an executive order telling his aides to work with Congress on developing regulations that could allow some hemp products.

Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Division announced in the Monday bulletin that agency officials had “identified and investigated evidence” indicating marijuana businesses are using illicit practices and banned methods to manufacture products instead of relying on marijuana, which is supposed to be tracked for safety.

The Colorado Hemp Association and the Colorado Hemp Education Association did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Beyond the safety issues, the bulletin also noted that some marijuana manufacturers and cultivators are avoiding marijuana tax obligations through “a pattern of noncompliance” in the sales transactions they report to the state’s “seed-to-sale” tracking system, which follows marijuana from initial planting to the sale of pot, vapes and other products in dispensaries.

Companies are misreporting their bulk marijuana sales at nominal prices, in some cases as low as $1 a pound for unprocessed marijuana material, the bulletin stated. Those products typically fetch as much as $600 a pound on the open market, depending on the category of marijuana, according to industry insiders.

Such fraudulent reporting has robbed the state and local governments of millions of dollars in marijuana tax revenue, industry insiders say, though there’s no official estimate.

The agency said it would pursue emergency rules to address such problems. Suspicious and anomalous transactions and inventories the state detects will prompt investigations, the bulletin stressed. Companies caught using hemp or other illicit material they pass off as marijuana face “immediate product embargo, license suspension or revocation, significant monetary penalties and referral to law enforcement,” the regulators warned.

The Denver Gazette and ProPublica have attempted to track anomalous transactions, but the Marijuana Enforcement Division has maintained that the sales transaction records, even those that don’t identify companies, are not public. 

Marijuana industry representatives met with division regulators late last month to press for a more aggressive response to hemp substitution from the agency, even though it could affect some companies in the industry. The representatives argued that bad actors are unfairly driving down prices and shifting the tax burden to manufacturers and cultivators who are trying to follow the rules. The bulletin was released a couple of weeks after that meeting.

“The division is also exploring additional modifications to its testing and screening protocols to detect” illicit products and banned methods, and it may require additional lab testing “of products throughout the supply chain as needed,” the agency’s bulletin stated.

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