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Chris Colfer is ready for Coachella!The hilarious actor is showing off his gym progress as he gears up for the iconic festival this weekend in Indio, California.While this isn't the first time Colfer has shown muscle on main, the Instagram picture below is sending fans into a frenzy with many people in his comment section popping off.Dylan Mulvaney spoke for all of us when she commented, "F***ing SEXY," and Ada Vox even went as far to say "Okay DADDY Chris ."Check out the spicy pic for yourself below. We can't wait to see all of the outfits Colfer has prepared for all of the iconic sets at Coachella! See on Instagram

Where do these diamonds go from here?The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills is about to conclude their 14th season and the tense reunion comes to an explosive end next week.With the recent news of Garcelle Beauvais' departure from the series, Erika Jayne believes RHOBH should continue casting new women for future seasons of the show."I think that it's someone brand new! I think new blood is always good. Look at Boz, she's been a great addition. I think someone else new shakes up the friend group a bit. I would give anything for that," Jayne tells PRIDE. See on Instagram Jayne has also famously gone head-to-head with her RHOBH co-star Sutton Stracke over the years. With Stracke's bestie Beauvais no longer by her side, it'll be interesting to see how the group dynamic shifts."I don't know what's coming for this show. I don't know how Sutton will feel without Garcelle. I guess we will all find out."Besides her evolving friendships with the other ladies on the show, Jayne's personal life has also faced intense scrutiny over many public lawsuits and controversies. However, she's trying to maneuver all of her hurdles by staying true to herself."I was told a long time ago by a very famous person you don't believe either one. You just remain neutral. When it's good, it's good. When it's bad, it's bad but you remain yourself. You don't fall in love with the good. You don't run from the bad. Be very confident in who you are and you'll be okay."The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills airs Tuesday nights on Bravo. To see the full interview with Erika Jayne, check out the video at the top of the page.

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon made headlines this week, but not for the reason youd hope from the nations top education official. While speaking on a panel at the ASU+GSV Summitan annual global conference focused on the future of education and innovationMcMahon repeatedly confused AI (artificial intelligence) with A1, the beloved steak sauce. Yes, really.Source

Its that time againPride and Prejudice is getting a fresh new makeover, and were already obsessed. A brand-new cast, a dreamy six-episode run, and yes, Emma Corrin as Lizzie Bennet? This adaptation is giving us everything weve ever wanted. This week, Netflix revealed the cast for its new six-part limited series based on Jane Austens iconic novel. And playing our favorite sharp-wittedSource

Buckle up (and maybe bring a safe word). The 2025 Cannes Film Festival has revealed its official lineupand this year, its bringing a thrilling wave of queer stories, including one scandalously seductive motorcycle romance thats already revving engines. Among the buzziest world premieres is Pillion, the debut feature from director Harry Lighton. The film, which Variety has cheekily describedSource

In February, Iowa became the first state to remove gender identity protections from its civil rights code. This decision, which strips transgender and nonbinary Iowans of legal protections from gender-based discrimination, was signed into law by the states Republican Governor Kim Reynolds.In a video posted to X, Reynolds echoed much of President Donald Trumps rhetoric about the trans community, stating that the civil rights code blurred the biological line between the sexes and has also forced Iowa taxpayers to pay for gender reassignment surgeries, and thats unacceptable to me.Uncloseted Media wanted to understand how trans Iowans are reacting and coping in the current political climate. Dawn, Selina, Luke, Max and Jo agreed to speak with us andwith intense candortold us about the struggles of being a trans Iowan in America today.Subscribe nowWatch the full interview above or read the transcript here:Spencer Macnaughton: Hi, everyone. I am here today with a panel of five trans people who live in Iowa right now. Iowa is under fire with a litany of anti-trans laws. So we wanted to speak to the folks who live in Iowa and who are directly affected. So everyone, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. So I want to start by just asking a kind of warmup, basic question. As someone who's never been to Iowa, tell me about Iowa as a state. How does it differ from the rest of the United States?Maxwell Mowicz: A thing that I think is interesting about our state overall is that we tend to have a relatively progressive history. We have a progressive past in terms of LGBTQ rights and access. So we were the third state in the country to access same-sex marriage. And so for me, when I think about Iowa and how it's kind of unique in the Midwest is that, we do tend to have more progressive history and policies and as we're seeing that rolling back right now, we're really realizing how much we had to lose. But I also think like we're just kind of a scrappy little state, just like in the middle of the Midwest. So I love that for Iowa as well.SM: So to take a little bit of a turn, obviously the federal government has been attacking trans rights since the first day in office with numerous executive orders that aim to eliminate the idea that trans people even exist and you all do live in a red and rural state where your lawmakers are passing even more aggressive laws. How are you guys as trans-Iowans holding up in the current climate? How are you doing?Dawn: For me, it's been pretty rough. There's a lot of despair out there, a lot of helplessness, confusion about what some of the legislation means and how it's directly going to affect us. You know, it's pretty hard. It's hard to stay positive when it feels like you're being attacked constantly.Selina Ulvanova: It's definitely been causing a lot of anxieties, worries. The rural area where I live here has had a very unfortunate history with the LGBT community. Someone I personally knew in high school was. Ugh. He didn't exactly make it. And I'm really worried with the way the rural community is, with the possibility of a dark alley, a little after sundown, that kind of stuff. Violence is a very real possibility.SM: Tell me more about that in the rural areas, what it's like.SM: These small rural towns out here are very tight-knit communities. Everybody knows everyone. You got maybe one or two churches in the town that just about everyone goes to. Personally, something I've always thought with the rural communities, especially over the last few election cycles, is just how disconnected things are out here. People get certain ideas in their head. Its hard for them to break it because they just aren't around as much diversity. It's mostly just cis, white folk out here, and it's really easy for them to basically just have their own echo chambers in the real world, not just online. I've definitely had to deal with and listen to a lot of hurtful and just generally unpleasant degradations.SM: I'm so sorry. It's not okay and it's not fair at all and it shouldn't be this way. A bunch of LGBTQ-specific laws have been passed in Iowa in recent years. These include a ban on teaching about gender identity and sexual orientation before the seventh grade, a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, a ban on allowing students and adults from using school bathrooms that match their gender identity, requiring school officials to get permission from parents before using a student's chosen name, and a ban on trans girls from participating in high school and college sports. It feels relentless nationally right now but you guys in Iowa are in the belly of the beast. Tell me about, granularly, for you on a personal level, how all these laws affect you in your day-to-day.Luke: So I'm in college, and if I wanted to go into a sport, I'm not even sure if I would be allowed to. Because the actual wording of the bill is just very vague when it comes to trans people. And I don't wanna go into sport only for them to say, Oh, you're not allowed, or Oh, you can't be here, but then it's like, Where do I go? Because you're not gonna let me in this women's team because I look like this. But if I go on the men's team, you guys are gonna throw an uproar. I just want to have fun and make friends, that's basically what I wanna do.Subscribe nowDawn: I'm an elementary teacher and I just came out over the past few months, so it's really hard especially for me not being allowed to teach about how everything's working. So it's just the kids and everyone has just kind of seen the changes going on, but I can't just sit down with the classroom and say, This is who I am, this what it means, this exactly what's going on. So I just share the very basics. The furthest I've gone is just that change that I'm doing right now, just going from Mister to Miss with the kids. And they wanna know why, and I don't know clearly legally what I can say, so I just don't touch the subject at all.SM: What do you think it would do if you were able to tell your students, Hey, this is who I am, I'm trans, and let me explain to you what that means?Dawn: I think it would just give them a little more clarity about what's going on. Just that it's really not that big of a deal. It's not a huge mystery. We have wonderful, amazing kids at my school and I think they would really understand. You know, and as things have changed and kids have figured it out without saying anything, I've had nothing but acceptance and love from them along with the other teachers at my school and my administration. So, I just think it would be less confusing for them.SM: Being a teacher, the rhetoric about grooming, indoctrination, obviously these things that are not rooted in any truth, how has that affected you as a trans teacher?Dawn: It's absolutely terrifying. When I first accepted that I was trans about two years ago, my first thought was, I have to quit. I can't safely do my job. And I spent hours and hours in therapy trying to figure out some path forward for that. And eventually I kind of set on the goal to just do like a slow-motion transition and try to last until I retire and, you know, then transition at that point. And as that went on, just the really low dose of hormone therapy I was on had such amazing mental effects for me that I knew I couldn't drag it out for seven or eight more years. So I just moved faster. I started sharing with some co-workers just at the end of last school year and then gradually this year, sharing it with everybody. But it's terrifying.SM: As you all know, in February, Iowa became the first state to remove gender identity protections from its civil rights code. And this bill will make it much harder for trans folks to bring forth claims of discrimination in areas such as employment, housing, wages, public accommodations like bathrooms. This is the first state to do this in the nation. It made national news. How did you guys react when you learned this news? And what does that mean for you?SM: My first reaction was to just break down crying, honestly. What little of the future I had been looking forward to and could plan for had just shattered. And after that, I had immediately fallen into a depressive episode. I stayed in bed, didn't eat for days afterwards before I could just pull myself back up and start looking into other solutions. It's been a lot of weight weighing down on me.Luke: I was watching it and was like, Oh, this is bad. And then, Oh this has got worse. And then it was, Oh, now I really need to get out of this state but we don't have the funds to move. And it just kind of like fight or flight kicked in. And I felt I needed to leave but I don't know anybody in any other state that I could live with.SM: Why does this bill take it to the next level? What about it goes to that extra level that makes it more dangerous and more scary for trans folks right now?MM: I think part of the reason that this threat feels more heightened is because when you remove, of course, a protected class from the Iowa Civil Rights Code or any civil rights code, it really is a day-to-day issue. And I think the interesting thing about the bill and now the law is that it's anyone that's trans or perceived to be trans, and so this also impacts people that are not in the trans community that could be perceived as being trans, like masculine women, for example. But all of this is to say that it makes it legal for someone to deny someone a car loan. It makes it legal for someone to deny someone access to a coffee shop. It can make it possible if I drive to rural Iowa, which I often do for my job, and I walk into a hotel, and they perceive me as trans, they can deny me access to that hotel. And so I think the reason that this feels even more scary is because it genuinely is more dangerous. I do think this is whole scale something that is really going to impact people's day to day. I think this really kind of preys on some of the fears around trans people and gives folks a blank check to discriminate. And that's really just not acceptable.SM: Your governor, Republican Kim Reynolds, said in a video that this bill she signed into law is safeguarding the rights of women and girls and that it's common sense to acknowledge the obvious biological differences between men and women and necessary to secure genuine equal protection for women and girls. I want to hear what you make of that response and what would you say to Governor Reynolds if you could sit down and talk to her?Luke: Where's the concern about our safety? Where's the concern about our well-being, our mental health?SM: If I could, I would just bluntly put it [out] there that her views and opinions on our community are directly contradictory to the facts. It's not supported by the science or the evidence. It's supported by a fear-mongering attitude and a religious doctrine that's supposed to be separate from our government. And honestly, I think she's unfit for office just on those grounds alone.MM: So there's kind of two parts, of course, like within my professional role, I have to interact with the legislature and her more often than I would love to. We have tried every message. And so I'm very aware of the fact that if I sat down with her, nothing that I said would impact the way that she feels. And I think that ultimately, I'd probably take the perspective of what it means, Iowan to Iowan, how it feels and why it is that she is moving so far away from actual Iowa concerns. We have farmers that aren't able to make their mortgage payments. We have people that are dying of cancer. We're the worst in the country for cancer and cancer care. We're shutting down maternity wards. Like, why are we focusing on trans folks?Jo Allen: I wanna bounce off your back a little bit there with that, because we can have however many people testify, share their personal stories, speak about whatever, and she's just not gonna listen.SM: Why do people put so much focus on this community when it's 1% or less in many states across this country? What's the point?JA: It is that ignorance that some of us just are raised up with. I will say that I grew up in a Catholic environment. Don't know if anyone else here in a Catholic environment, but yeah, you get a lot of things ingrained into you and you have to really bloom and grow from those dark spaces.Uncloseted Media is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.SM: Nearly half of trans people in the U.S. have considered moving to another state because of legislation, and this is actually data from pre-Trump 2.0. I want you guys just to raise your hands if you have considered recently moving out of state or out of country because of the spate of anti-trans legislation. So raise your hand if you've thought about that. Everyone but Max raises their hand. Talk to me a little bit more about that, about your thoughts on thinking about having to move out.Dawn: For me, it's a safety issue. I wanna live somewhere where I'm welcomed and accepted and safe. But at the same time, I love my job. This is my 27th year of teaching. I've been at my school literally since we opened the doors. So I don't wanna give that up. And I'm gonna try to make it work as long as I can. It's hard, but I feel like I have to try. So much of my life has changed since I started transitioning. I've lost family, lost friends. My marriage is ending. I don't wanna give up the job that I love on top of everything else.SM: I'm sorry you're going through all that and you're obviously, I'm sure, an amazing teacher. Where would you move and why if you were to?Dawn: I've looked into Canada. There is some demand for teachers there. So, you know, I would have a chance to immigrate there. I lived in Germany when I was a child, I think it would be kind of cool to live in Europe again, but I would rather visit. I'd rather not be forced out of my home.SM: It sounds like you're a proud Iowan and you're a proud teacher in Iowa.Dawn: I'm a proud teacher, yeah, and I'm not so proud of Iowa anymore.SM: Selina, why did you raise your hand?SM: Like I said, I live in a rural area here, and it's pretty poor and impoverished. Like I mostly get by thanks to supportive family, friends, odd jobs that I can manage. And those are probably going to dry up pretty fast when I come out more publicly. I am still pretty closeted, really only told like the closest of the close people I can trust. So, it's mostly a financial [issue] for me on top of, again, the threats of violence, the being a pariah from these tiny tight-knit communities, the discrimination. I don't really want to have to leave, this is where I was born and raised and everyone and everything I've ever known is out here. But if I have to, I have to.JA: My partner and I are both trans and we have been here all our life, for them 25 years, for me 27. And I think the hardest thing is leaving Iowa not on my own accord, not on their accord. My partner and I have made the decision that we will be leaving. This wall behind me is actually a countdown until July 1st hits and we've been ripping down the days until I leave. I think we started at 130 days, something like that. And so we've been ripping down the days. Our friends have been ripping down day by day as it goes by. And it's just unfortunate because the community here that I've built over the course of my entire life, I feel like I'm at the peak of it right now. And even though I'm leaving, I'm being introduced to so many queer people at this time. And it feels so unfortunate that there's this home that I have to pull away from. Because if it was my choice, I would stay here a little bit longer if I could. But I don't feel like it's gonna get safer. I've already dealt with harassment in public spaces. And at the end of the day, I just want to know that my rights are protected, my basic human rights are protected in a blue state. And that's all that I can ask for. And Iowa, unfortunately, cannot provide that anymore for me and my partner. It's just unfortunate because we don't have the funds to move. I do not have the money to move. I think most of us can say that we do not have the funds to move. And so it puts us in a very difficult state of just trying to survive financially, but also like we need to get out of here and get elsewhere, but that has a burden of cost as well.SM: From the president of the United States down to state lawmakers, there has been a dis- and misinformation campaign about trans folks, a monstor-fication of trans folks. What can we do at this point to combat this miss and disinformation?MM: One of the things that our org has a rich history of is telling peoples stories and we did that when we were fighting for marriage equality but now we really focus on that with trans folks. Because at the end of the day everyone here is a lot more than just a trans person. You're a teacher, you're an artist, and it's something that I think is so special when we are able to harness the power of peoples stories, and not just like really sad stories but also all the things that make someone excited or all the things that they do in their community that I think is really beautiful. And we've been able to especially kind of shift perspectives on that when we're able to talk about the experiences of rural LGBTQ Iowans. Because a lot of these legislators think that there are no trans people in their district and that's not true. And so when they do meet a trans person from their district, it changes their world. When I'm thinking about it, I'm trying to figure out how can we humanize folks without using their stories in ways that don't feel comfortable to them. Like empower people to share their stories as it feels good and to let people know that were just trans folks that also go home and hang out with our dog and like need the exact same things that everyone else needs. So I think that's really powerful.Dawn: More than half of the people I came out to directly, I was literally the first trans person they had ever known or even met. And this is in the Des Moines area. That's one of the things that's kind of motivated me to be fairly open about my transition is just letting people see that I'm just a person. There are things changing about me, but there's a lot that's not. You know, I still have a lot of the same hopes and dreams that I did before, just being accessible to people and answering questions. Sometimes some of the more intrusive questions come up, but I just kind of roll with those because I know a lot it is coming out of ignorance. And I think it helps open their eyes a little bit about our existence. Just seeing and hearing some of the things that we have to go through just to live our lives.SM: Who or what are you leaning on in this difficult time? What are your coping mechanisms?JA: I've been just trying to find more communal spaces for my community to meet, finding joy and laughter there. I remember after the bill passed, I was having a really hard time too. I definitely went into a depressive episode and it's to me, it's being able to tell my friends like, Hey, I know you've been waiting on me all day, you know, to get going, but can you just give me 15 minutes to shower? Because I don't remember the last time I showered. And it's friends that are like, Yeah, of course, go ahead, instead of getting mad at me because I'm taking all day. It's just, I need that extra time. And it just means a lot to me to have people that understand me right now and that are able to support me, because it's a lot.SM: How about allies in folks' corner right now? Does anyone have any stories about allies being there for you and what that's meant?Luke: My family and my grandmother especially have been really good at supporting me.JA: I don't think I would ever imagine myself using the word ally for him, but my dad has, in a way, become an ally. A Black Catholic man raised in the 70s, so trans to him is not really even a word that he uses. But when I post about what's going on in our community in Des Moines on Facebook, he's there. He's like, Here's money to help your friends do this, or Here's money to, you know, print this off. It's like a very indirect weird way of him like showing up without ever having to say the word trans, you know, like he's there and he just understands that people are people and that it's not right what's happening to us. Because at the end of the day we're humans and that's at least what he has learned through his religion and through his time with God.SM: Amazing. Yeah, I think if there's ever a moment for allies and folks to step up and support trans, non-binary folks, it's right now. It's yesterday. Luke, Max, Dawn, Joe, Selina, thank you all so much for coming to speak with me and Uncloseted Media today. It means so much and I think it's so important to center trans voices, especially trans voices in Iowa, in this moment in time. So thank you.SU: It was a pleasure to be here.If objective, nonpartisan, rigorous, LGBTQ-focused journalism is important to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor, Resource Impact, by clicking this button:Donate to Uncloseted Media

Welcome to our blog series: “Misinformation & Extremism in America.” We’re living in an age where truth is harder to find than ever. One minute you’re watching a video your friend sent, and the next thing you know, you're neck-deep in a wild theory about lizard people controlling the government. Sound familiar? But this isn't just about quirky internet...

Paris Hilton brought the sparkle and star power to Coachella once again, surprising guests at the Absolut House of Cosmo on Friday, April 11, in an event that marked the start of the festivals first weekend. The heiress, entrepreneur, and DJ made an unannounced appearance as part of her ongoing partnership with Absolut, electrifying the crowd with her signature charm and a sneak peek of new musicSource

Lady Gagas headlining performance at Coachella 2025 was a masterclass in theatrical spectacle, musical prowess, and emotional depth. Taking the stage on the opening night of the festival, Gaga delivered a 110-minute set that seamlessly blended her extensive catalog with new material from her latest album, Mayhem. The performance was not just a concert but a narrative journeySource

by T. Christian Miller ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. On a late afternoon in November 2017, Witney Arch told her 1-1/2-year-old son to stop playing and come inside. Upset, he grabbed her right breast when she picked him up. She experienced a shock of pain but did not think it was anything serious. A week later, however, the ache had not subsided. After trips to several doctors, a biopsy revealed that Arch had early-stage breast cancer. Her surgeon told her that it was likely invasive and aggressive.By the end of January, she had made two critical decisions. She would get a double mastectomy. And she wanted her operation at the Center for Restorative Breast Surgery in New Orleans, a medical facility renowned for its highly specialized approach to breast cancer care and reconstruction. The two surgeons who founded it had pioneered techniques that used a womans own body tissue to form new breasts post mastectomy. The idea of a natural restoration appealed to Arch. I dont judge anybody for getting implants, especially if youve had cancer, she said. But I felt like I was taking something foreign out of my body, cancer, and I did not want to put something foreign back in.Arch was a 42-year-old preschool teacher for her church, with four young children, living in a suburb of New Orleans. The 1-1/2-year-old had been born with Sturge-Weber syndrome, a rare neurological disorder. Caring for him consumed her life. By nature upbeat and optimistic, Arch felt blessed that her sons act of defiance had led to an early diagnosis. Were going to pray about this and were going to figure it out, she told her husband.Arch asked her insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana, for approval to go to the center for her care, and the company granted it, a process known as prior authorization. Then, a week or so before her surgery, Arch was wrangling child care and meal plans when she got a call from the insurer. The representative on the line was trying to persuade her to have the surgery elsewhere. She urged Arch to seek a hospital that, unlike the center, was in network and charged less. Do you realize how much this is going to cost? Arch remembered the agent asking. Arch did not need more stress, but here it was from her own health plan. I feel very comfortable with my decision, she replied. My doctor teaches other doctors around the world how to do this. Over the next year, Arch underwent five operations to rid herself of cancer and reconstruct her breasts. Witney Arch received authorization from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana for her mastectomy and breast restoration, but the insurer did not pay the full bill from the Center for Restorative Breast Surgery. (Daniella Zalcman for ProPublica) Arch did not know it at the time, but her surgery would become evidence in a long-running legal fight between the breast centers founders, surgeons Frank DellaCroce and Scott Sullivan, and Blue Cross, Louisianas biggest health insurance company, with an estimated two-thirds share of the market. DellaCroce and Sullivan had repeatedly sued the insurer, alleging that it granted approvals for surgery but then denied payments or paid only a fraction of patients bills. They pointed to calls like the one Arch received as proof of the companys effort to drive away patients. The aggressive legal attack, they knew, was fraught. Litigation against the $3.4 billion company would take a long time and a lot of money. The chances of winning were slight. You fight dragons at great peril, DellaCroce would tell friends. But this September, after 18 years and several defeats in court, jurors found Blue Cross liable for fraud. They awarded the center $421 million one of the largest verdicts ever to a single medical practice outside of a class-action lawsuit. In a statement, Blue Cross said it disagrees with the jurys decision, which we believe was wrong on the facts and the law. We have filed an appeal and expect to be successful.Frustration with insurers is at an all-time high. The December fatal shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson allegedly by Luigi Mangione serves as an extreme and tragic example. Doctors and insurers are locked into a perpetual conflict over health care costs, with patients caught in the middle. Doctors accuse insurance plans of blocking payments for health care treatments that can save the patients lives. Insurance companies insist they shouldnt pay for procedures that they say are unnecessary or overpriced. It is easy to emerge from an examination of the American health care system with a cynicism that both sides are broken and corrupt.However, interviews with scores of doctors, patients and insurance executives, as well as reviews of internal documents, regulatory filings and academic studies, reveal a fundamental truth: The two sides are not evenly matched. Insurance companies are players in the fight over money, and they are also the referees. Insurers produce their own guidelines to determine whether to pay claims. When a doctor appeals a denial, insurers make all the initial decisions. In legal settings, insurers are often given favorable standing in their ability to set what conditions they are required to cover. Federal and state insurance regulators lack the resources to pursue individual complaints against multibillion-dollar companies. Six major insurers, which include some of the nations largest companies, cover half of all Americans. They are pitted against tens of thousands of doctors practices and large hospital chains. The Blue Cross trial provides a rare opportunity to expose in detail the ways that health insurance companies wield power over doctors and their patients. Blue Cross executives testified that the breast center charged too much money sometimes more than $180,000 for an operation. The center, they said, deserved special attention because it had a history of questionable charges. But the insurers defense went even further, to the very meaning of prior authorization, which it had granted women like Arch to pursue surgery. The authorization, they said in court, recognized that a procedure was medically necessary, but it also contained a clause that it was not a guarantee of payment. Blue Cross was not obliged to pay the center anything, top executives testified. Let me be clear: The authorization never says were going to pay you, said Steven Udvarhelyi, who was the CEO for the insurer from 2016 to 2024, in a deposition. Thats why theres a disclaimer.From 2015 through 2023, the Baton Rouge-based insurer paid, on average, less than 9% of the charges billed by the breast center for more than 7,800 individual medical procedures even though it had authorized all of them. Thousands of such claims were never paid at all, according to court records. Testimony revealed that the health plan never considered thousands of appeals filed by the center. Corporate documents showed Blue Cross executives had set up secret processes for approving operations and reimbursing the clinic and its doctors that resulted in reduced fees and payment delays. One lucrative strategy: A national-level policy allowed Blue Cross Louisiana to take a cut of any savings it achieved in paying the breast center on behalf of patients covered by out-of-state Blue Cross companies, meaning the less the insurer paid out, the more it earned. Let me be clear: The authorization never says were going to pay you. Thats why theres a disclaimer. Steven Udvarhelyi, former Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana CEO In Sullivans words, the insurer was hypocritical, morally bankrupt. Blue Cross had stranded many of the centers patients with high bills, amounts that it had absorbed over the years. On several occasions, though, Blue Cross executives had signed special one-time deals with the center, known as single case agreements, to pay for their wives cancer treatment. To Sullivan, it seemed the insurer was willing to pay the center when patients had connections but would fight when patients did not.Blue Cross declined to comment on any individual cases but said in a statement that single case agreements were common in the industry and were available to all members when needed to access out-of-network providers. Dr. Scott Sullivan, left, and Dr. Frank DellaCroce, the founding surgeons of the Center for Restorative Breast Surgery and St. Charles Surgical Hospital (Daniella Zalcman for ProPublica) Chapter 1 The Center Nobody would take the breast center and its adjoining hospital as an ordinary medical establishment. The two facilities take up a city block along St. Charles Avenue, the thoroughfare famous for its streetcars, Mardi Gras parades and Queen Anne mansions. Patients access the complex created by merging a former law office, funeral home, car dealership and Dunkin Donuts by driving around back where a porte cochere leads into a soaring atrium. Light pours in through windows set in the high ceiling. Arrangements of white orchids are scattered among comfortable couches and chairs. Here, women consult with doctors to plan their treatment. Surgeries are performed at the 39-bed hospital, which has an Icee machine in a family room. New-age music plays softly throughout the building. Rooms are designed to be as homey as possible, with medical gear hidden away and seascapes by a local artist hanging on the wall. One patients husband referred to it as a spa-spital.The idea of combining the luxury feel of an upscale plastic surgery practice with the mission-driven zeal of a medical clinic came to DellaCroce and Sullivan while they were young surgeons. The two grew up in Louisiana. Sullivan spent much of his childhood in Mandeville, a suburb of New Orleans on the north side of Lake Ponchartrain, his dad employed in the oil and gas industry. His mother wanted him to be a priest or a doctor. I definitely was not going to become a priest, he said. DellaCroces father worked at the paper mill in West Monroe in the states northern neck. His mother, a nurse, gave him an appreciation for medicine as a career that was meaningful and challenging.They became friends while working at the Louisiana State University medical center, where they earned the nickname the Sushi Brothers for their favorite lunch. They were drawn to microsurgery and breast reconstruction because it was an emerging field that was innovating and improving care. Both men became board-certified in plastic surgery. Sullivan, 60, is the hard-charging businessman, stocky, direct and blunt. DellaCroce, 58, with a ponytail, goatee and soft drawl, is more the diplomat, patient and cerebral. The pair have lectured around the world and written numerous medical journal articles. A patient room in the St. Charles Surgical Hospital in New Orleans (Daniella Zalcman for ProPublica) They opened their first office in 2003 in a single room rented from a fellow doctor at what was then known as Memorial Medical Center, the hulking private hospital in New Orleans. They performed operations at facilities throughout the region but found that most gave little consideration to their patients comfort. They wanted to build a different kind of hospital. Can we give them that little bit of extra without breaking the budget to make the experience less awful? Cant make it great, but can you make it less awful? DellaCroce explained. Can you attend to the human side of this patient and give them the added value of peace and confidence? Hurricane Katrina set back their construction plans, and the new edifice, named the St. Charles Surgical Hospital, did not open its doors until 2009. It boasts of being the only hospital in the country devoted solely to care for breast cancer patients who have received mastectomies. The center does not provide radiation or chemotherapy treatments. The majority of patients come from out of state.Women seeking to have their breasts restored after a mastectomy face two paths. Some choose a relatively straightforward surgical procedure using implants filled with silicon or another gel. The center specializes in the other option, whats known as autologous tissue reconstruction, where a womans own fat is taken from one part of the body, like the bottom or the stomach, and used to rebuild the breast. The procedure requires a longer recovery time, but the new breasts become part of the body.The transplant surgery is lengthy and complex. Operations can last up to 12 hours with big medical teams involved. One surgeon performs the mastectomy while another creates a new breast by knitting together layers of fat and tissue. Concentration is intense. The surgeons stare through glasses with microscopes to connect new blood vessels with a needle thats thinner than an eyelash, using thread less than half the width of a human hair. DellaCroce and Sullivan invented techniques, for example, allowing tissue to be taken from multiple sites when a woman did not have enough fat in one part of her body for a full restoration. Sullivan operates on a patient at St. Charles Surgical Hospital. (Daniella Zalcman for ProPublica) One afternoon last fall, DellaCroce strode into a cavernous operating room to check on a patient. On the table in front of him, a woman lay covered in curtains of blue surgical cloth, only her torso exposed. Earlier in the day, a surgical oncologist had removed her right breast as part of a mastectomy to treat her cancer. Later, another surgeon had taken flaps of fat from her stomach and interlaced them with blood vessels to create a new breast to replace the lost one. Now, in the fifth hour of surgery, a physicians assistant leaned over her midsection, closing an incision along her side with some final stitches. Nurses hurried around the space, preparing to wrap up the operation. Paul Simons You Can Call Me Al played in the background. The smell of burnt flesh hung in the air. A blue light signaled that the new arteries were successfully pumping blood. Wow, that woman looks really good, DellaCroce told the physicians assistant. Nice job.There is no denying that the centers high-end treatment means high costs. The median charge for an operation and hospital stay is about $165,000. DellaCroce and Sullivan hired consultants to review other well-regarded practices, who advised them their prices were competitive with their peers. We werent asking to be paid Lebron James, best of the best, even though we feel were in the top 1 or 2% of the country, Sullivan said. We just wanted something fair. Chapter 2 Blue Cross and Blue Shield It is one of the quirks of the American health care system that insurers almost never pay the prices for procedures demanded by doctors and hospitals.To understand why requires a tour of the grand bargain at the heart of the health insurance system. Insurance companies negotiate with hospitals and doctors to discount reimbursements on medical procedures, like office visits or MRI scans. Providers who sign these contracts are in network. Insurance companies like in-network doctors because they can budget for health expenses and set premiums accordingly. Doctors and hospitals agree to be in network because they get a steady stream of insured patients.DellaCroce and Sullivan held contracts with insurers that resulted in average payments to the centers doctors in the $20,000 to $30,000 range. But DellaCroce and Sullivan never came to an agreement with Blue Cross. That made them an exception in Louisiana the insurer is so dominant that 97% of local physicians and hospitals are in network. DellaCroce and Sullivan said the company was not offering them enough money in some cases not even enough to cover the cost of the surgeries, they argued in court documents. The doctors and their hospital remained out of network, meaning they charged Blue Cross the full price for their procedures.Such charges are controversial. Insurance companies and many health experts say they are too often inflated and untethered from actual costs. Physicians and hospitals say their fees are justified, reflecting the true price of medical care. In the end, insurers especially in states like Louisiana, with few competitors use their market power in negotiations to set reimbursements at what they want to pay, not what doctors charge.At Blue Cross, Dwight Brower was charged with reviewing the bills from the breast center. He had worked as a physician at a small family practice in Baton Rouge and then at a local hospital before joining Blue Cross as a medical director. He helped oversee prior authorizations. While many patients assume that an approval means an insurer will pay for an operation, it is simply a recognition that a procedure is medically necessary. Federal law mandates that private insurers cover breast restorations for women who undergo mastectomies because of cancer or genetic risk. And patients, in general, are allowed to choose their own doctors.However, since the center was out of network and had no contract with the insurer, Blue Cross determined how much it would pay for the treatment, and Brower believed that the breast centers bills were exorbitant. I did not think that they were reasonable, he would later testify. Surgeons doing lung transplants or brain surgery rarely billed Blue Cross more than $50,000 for their work. Why should DellaCroce and Sullivan get so much more? Dont get me wrong. The surgeons at the center are extremely skilled, he acknowledged. The operations were often lengthy. But so are open-heart surgeries, he said. Relative to some of the other extremely complicated surgeries done by other surgeons in other areas of the body, it just seemed like their fee schedule was extremely high.Blue Cross Louisiana executives testified that they did not even consider doctors invoices when making decisions on what to reimburse because such charges were unregulated and nonstandard. Instead, they paid an amount we establish unless the doctors bill was cheaper. In the end, the insurer said it settled on reimbursing the breast center about the same as in-network doctors performing similar operations, even though DellaCroce and Sullivan did not benefit from having patients referred to them. In practice, that meant the insurer paid out a fraction of the breast centers bills. Of the 7,837 medical procedures in dispute in the lawsuit, involving 1,680 patients, Blue Cross paid about $43 million on invoices totaling $500 million. Some 60% of the claims werent reimbursed at all. The difference between the bill and the payment could be striking. For example, in the case of Arch, Blue Cross paid $8,580 out of $102,722 for one operation. For another, it paid $3,190 out of $34,975. Fundamentally, I think their problem was that we were doctors who had control. That was regarded as a threat. Dr. Frank DellaCroce, Center for Restorative Breast Surgery co-founder Executives said the Blue Cross reimbursements were fair, designed to keep premiums low for the nearly 2 million Louisianans who depended on the insurer to cover their health care.Paying the breast centers full fees would add to its customers burden, they said. If we were to just agree to any rates or any prices set by physicians or any providers, it would cause cost to be exorbitantly high for both the plan and for members particularly, because we wouldnt be able to forecast or make sure those plans are actually sound, said Curtis Anders, the vice president of provider networks for Blue Cross. Premiums would increase.For many out-of-network doctors, payments lower than their invoices are an infuriating part of doing business. They absorb the costs, or pass them on to their patients, a practice known as balance billing that can result in medical debt. DellaCroce and Sullivan were the rare physicians with the tenacity to fight. The center collected money from both insurers and patients but it carried the unpaid portion of invoices on its books. That amount grew every year as it battled Blue Cross.DellaCroce and Sullivan were convinced that Blue Cross had singled them out for their obstreperousness, but they had no proof. Then, during a phone call one day, an employee for the center was talking to a Blue Cross representative to obtain a prior authorization. The representative let slip that the request required special handling. The breast centers doctors were flagged on an internal roster. It was called the targeted list. Chapter 3 Discoveries On Dec. 8, 2023, several dozen attorneys and paralegals from Chehardy Sherman Williams, one of New Orleans top law firms, were celebrating their annual holiday party. They had gathered in a private dining room with gilded mirrors and shimmering chandeliers at Arnauds restaurant, a bastion of Creole cuisine in the heart of the French Quarter. The waiters served shrimp remoulade, prime rib and turtle soup. Small talk filled the air.Suddenly, several attorneys cellphones buzzed as they all received the same email, a message from the lawyers for Blue Cross. It contained discovery for the case, more than 42,000 pages of internal documents, emails and policies. Matthew Sherman, one of the attorneys representing the center, turned to a colleague. Can you believe this? he asked. It was like something from a John Grisham novel, the kind of thing he and his friends had joked about at law school, a document dump at Christmas time. By long tradition, many of New Orleans biggest law firms hold their holiday parties on the same Friday afternoon in December. Afterward, rival attorneys from around town gather for drinks under a flag of truce at a local bar. Sherman realized there would be no afterparty this year. Nor much of a holiday vacation.The delivery of the documents was a Christmas gift nearly 20 years in the making. DellaCroce and Sullivans first lawsuits against Blue Cross, involving 88 breach-of-contract claims filed in a Louisiana civil court beginning in 2006, were dismissed because of a federal court ruling regarding jurisdiction. A second lawsuit, which lasted from 2010 through 2017, resulted in limited discovery and a two-day trial in federal court. Jurors found that Blue Cross had failed to tell the center how much it would pay for procedures, but they also ruled the center had not been financially harmed. A judge dismissed the remaining claims.DellaCroce and Sullivan launched their third lawsuit in February 2017 with a novel legal theory: They accused Blue Cross of fraud. They contended that for years the insurer had issued prior authorizations without the intention of paying the actual bills. Their lawyers had sought the targeted list during discovery to help prove the case. Blue Cross denied it existed.But now, as Sherman and fellow attorney Patrick Follette began poring over the thousands of documents, they came upon a spreadsheet that said Targeted Provider List. The first names on the list were DellaCroce and Sullivan. It was labeled confidential and dated June 2007 about a year after the pair had filed their first lawsuit against Blue Cross alleging nonpayment. More digging turned up other documents. There was a blocked list that also featured the two doctors.A corporate policy document provided what DellaCroce and Sullivan considered the most revealing explanation for Blue Cross financial motivation. Blue Cross insurers are independent companies that operate under a common set of rules, similar to franchisees in a fast-food chain. When a person covered by Blue Cross in their home state receives treatment in another state, the Blue Cross where the treatment occurs pays the provider and then recoups the cost from the home-state plan. What the attorneys discovered was that Blue Cross Louisiana would receive a share of any savings it could generate for the home-state plan. Say, for instance, Blue Cross Alabama was facing a bill of $5,000 for a procedure. If Blue Cross Louisiana instead paid $1,000, it saved the Alabama plan $4,000. The policy allowed Blue Cross Louisiana to earn 16% of the savings in this scenario, $640.For DellaCroce and Sullivan, the revelations cemented their belief that Blue Cross was a bad corporate actor more interested in power and control than health care. The percentage fee incentivized the insurer to pay the doctors as little as possible. The bigger the savings, the more Blue Cross made. Its win-win, DellaCroce said. Thats their pay day.As the trial approached, Blue Cross attempted to settle the case. DellaCroce and Sullivan refused the offer as too low. James Williams, left, and Matthew Sherman, the lawyers who represented DellaCroce and Sullivan in their suit against Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana (Daniella Zalcman for ProPublica) Chapter 4 The Trial On the afternoon of Sept. 5, 2024, the case St. Charles Surgical Hospital, L.L.C. and Center for Restorative Breast Surgery, L.L.C. v. Louisiana Health Service & Indemnity Company D/B/A Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Louisiana, Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Louisiana, Inc. and HMO Louisiana, Inc. opened in Division C of the Orleans Parish Civil District Court, a high-ceilinged room with dark brown benches and tables, fake marble columns and fluorescent lights. James Williams, the chief litigator for the hospital, had already impressed the 45 potential jurors by memorizing all their names and backgrounds during jury selection. Now, he stood up and placed a football on the plaintiffs table in front of the 12 chosen to try the case, which included a third grade teacher, a movie stunt double and a hotel manager. He warned them that they would hear a lot of insurance talk from Blue Cross. Im going to ask you, ladies and gentlemen on the jury, keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on what this case is about, Williams told them. If they start saying things like, Well, oh, we paid them what we thought was fair, 9%, keep your eye on the ball, right?Over 10 days interrupted by a two-day break to allow a hurricane to pass across Louisiana Williams made his case that Blue Cross had defrauded his clients by making promises to pay but failing to deliver.Much of Blue Cross defense had relied on the notice that a prior authorization was no guarantee of payment. The insurer had not committed fraud, it said, since it never explicitly promised the center to reimburse anything. Udvarhelyi, the former CEO, had insisted on that. But on the stand, Blue Cross witnesses provided a more nuanced explanation. They acknowledged that the disclaimer was not meant as a general excuse to free the company from paying bills. A prior authorization usually resulted in a payment, testified Brower, who reviewed the centers bills. He said that the notice was intended for specific situations. For instance, Blue Cross would not cover a woman who dropped out of her insurance before the operation. Nor would it pay anything if a patient had not met her deductible. But otherwise, Brower said, Blue Cross intended to compensate for a procedure that it had authorized. Its inappropriate for us as a company to approve a code and then turn around and deny it, Brower said. During the trial, Williams told jurors to keep your eye on the ball. (Daniella Zalcman for ProPublica) Over the years, the center had appealed thousands of reimbursements for being too low. It hired additional employees to manage the paperwork. At the trial, Blue Cross revealed that it had never considered any of the appeals nor had it ever told the center that they were pointless. An appeal is not available to review an underpayment, acknowledged Paula Shepherd, a Blue Cross executive vice president. The insurer simply issued an edict the payment was correct.This was the core of the case. The insurer set the rules. The insurer set the prices. Doctors could appeal to a state insurance regulator. But if that failed, and it often did, the only recourse was a long, costly lawsuit.Williams summed up for the jury the centers treatment at the hands of Blue Cross: Our payments are slow pay, low pay or no pay.In countering those arguments, Blue Cross witnesses explained that the insurer was committed to paying for Louisianans health care and keeping costs low. As a nonprofit, it directed any excess revenue from operations back into the business. (Udvarhelyi, the CEO, did acknowledge that his salary, over $1 million, included bonuses that depended on hitting revenue targets and increasing membership.)Brian West, a Blue Cross executive who monitored payments, said the center had engaged in egregious billing practices. They are bad actors in the billing world, he said. But company witnesses offered only a handful of examples. Sometimes the center mistakenly coded its bills in a way that appeared to charge for four separate breast reconstructions in a single operation. In other cases, the center asked for payment for two surgeons in the room at the same time. But Blue Cross, following Medicare guidelines, would pay two surgeons only 20% more than the reimbursement for a single surgeon. An appeal is not available to review an underpayment. Paula Shepherd, Blue Cross Louisiana executive vice president Blue Cross did not accuse the center of any intentional miscoding but the sloppy billing led to additional scrutiny, the companys witnesses said. The targeted list, a witness testified, had been created especially for the center, requiring all prior authorization requests to bypass normal routes for a special review by company doctors. The blocked list meant that each bill from the center received a manual scrub by payment specialists before reimbursement. Blue Cross acknowledged the careful checking often resulted in the need for more information from the center, which could result in slower processing of claims. But the lists, executives insisted, were not designed to reduce payments. Basically, no harm was done, said Becky Juncker, who was involved in approving surgical procedures.Company witnesses explained that the 16% received in saving money for out-of-state Blue Cross insurers was a fee to cover the costs of handling adjustments of the claim though they were not able to explain why Blue Cross did not charge a flat fee for its services.Blue Cross also defended itself against the accusation that it had paid nothing for 60% of the charges for individual procedures. Witnesses said the insurer had followed industry practice in bundling charges to make a single payment for an operation. An attorney for the center noted that it had never agreed to take bundled payments Blue Cross had imposed them.As to the calls to women like Arch? That was an effort to save members money. Our medical area would reach out to our members who were utilizing out-of-network providers to help them understand the, I would say, the financial implications, said Shepherd, the Blue Cross executive vice president, in a deposition. It could be financially catastrophic to a member to have an out-of-network claim that they are financially responsible for. Its a huge difference.In summing up the case, Kim Boyle, the lead attorney for the company, told jurors that Blue Cross had not committed fraud. It had acted to ensure the company and its members paid a fair price for the centers services, she said. Theres no scheme. Theres no plot. Theres no mafia. There are no Blue Cross employees of Louisiana that are sitting in some smoke-filled room in Baton Rouge, plotting against these plaintiffs on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, Boyle said. Its fiction; its fancy; its completely made up.On Sept. 20, at 1:57 p.m., Judge Sidney H. Cates IV sent the jurors to deliberate. The center attorneys retreated to a nearby hotel to await the verdict. About two hours later, they were summoned back to Division C. Williams put his head down and swore. He worried that such a quick return in the legally complex case meant victory for Blue Cross.The centers lawyers paid close attention to Cates as he reviewed the jurors decision. It was a two-page form. If the jurors found in favor of Blue Cross, the judge would have no reason to read on. Cates flipped to the second page: The jurors had found Blue Cross liable for fraud. Please express in dollars the total monetary compensation, if any, Blue Cross owes the hospital and the center for the damages, Cates said, reading from the verdict. Net damages, $421,488,633. The centers lawyers stood and shook hands as the insurers attorneys prepared to leave the courtroom.DellaCroce was in surgery at the hospital, having expected a longer deliberation. Sullivan was in the courtroom to hear the verdict. Afterward, jurors approached and thanked him for his work. He teared up. We would have given more if we had been asked for more. Thats how egregious the fraud was, Juliet Laughlin, a 58-year-old property manager who served as forewoman, later said. There had been wrong done. Blue Cross has appealed the verdict. A health insurance trade group has warned that the finding sets a dangerous precedent. If allowed to stand, insurance companies in Louisiana may find themselves forced to pay whatever price is demanded by out-of-network doctors which in turn could raise health insurance premiums across the state, the Louisiana Association of Health Plans said in a statement.For DellaCroce and Sullivan, the verdict was vindication. They had refused to sign contracts they thought unfair. They had rejected settlement offers they thought too low. The trial had revealed Blue Cross domineering behavior. Fundamentally, I think their problem was that we were doctors who had control, DellaCroce said. That was regarded as a threat.In the months since the judgment, Blue Cross has not changed its practices, the doctors said. It has not approached with an offer that would bring the hospital in network. It still issues prior authorizations for womens surgeries. And it still pays only a fraction of the billed fees. How We Reported the StoryThis account is based on a review of thousands of pages of trial transcripts, depositions, federal and state court records, and internal corporate documents from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana, the Center for Restorative Breast Surgery and the St. Charles Surgical Hospital; scores of interviews with doctors, patients and insurance executives; medical records; regulatory filings; and reports by academics, experts and the Louisiana state Senate. Some corporate documents discussed in court were placed under seal after the trials conclusion. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana was provided a detailed list of questions and responded with a written statement, cited in part in the story. The company declined to make any employees available for an interview. Former Blue Cross CEO Steven Udvarhelyi declined to comment, and former employee Dwight Brower did not respond to phone calls or emails. Freelance photographer Daniella Zalcman contributed reporting.

by Lisa Song ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. Federal scientists responsible for monitoring the health of West Coast fisheries are cleaning office bathrooms and reconsidering critical experiments after the Department of Commerce failed to renew their labs contracts for hazardous waste disposal, janitorial services, IT and building maintenance.Trash is piling up at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, staffers told ProPublica. Ecologists, chemists and biologists at Montlake Laboratory, the centers headquarters in Seattle, are taking turns hauling garbage to the dumpster and discussing whether they should create a sign-up sheet to scrub toilets.The scientists who conduct genetic sampling of endangered salmon to check the species stock status and survival routinely work with chemicals that can burn skin, erupt into flames and cause cancer. At least one said theyd have to delay mission-critical research if hazardous waste removal isnt restored.The deteriorating conditions at Montlake stem from a new policy at the Commerce Department that says Secretary Howard Lutnick must personally approve all contracts over $100,000. NPR reported that the bottleneck has disrupted operations at many NOAA facilities. ProPublica spoke to three Montlake employees who described what it was like to work there as, one by one, service contracts expire and arent renewed. People are running around looking for compost bags and wondering who will empty out the female sanitary waste containers in the bathrooms, they said. The floors are getting dirty and workers have no access to vacuums or mops. Some scientists have bought their own soap and cleaning supplies.Nor can people escape by working from home: the Trump administration has increasingly ordered federal workers to return to the office five days a week. At Montlake, that policy will apply to everyone by April 21.Its making our work unsafe, and its unsanitary for any workplace, but especially an active laboratory full of fire-reactive chemicals and bacteria, one Montlake researcher said.Press officers at NOAA, the Commerce Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.Montlake employees were informed last week that a contract for safety services which includes the staff who move laboratory waste off-campus to designated disposal sites would lapse after April 9, leaving just one person responsible for this task. Hazardous waste pickups from labs may be delayed, employees were warned in a recent email.The building maintenance teams contract expired Wednesday, which decimated the staff that had handled plumbing, HVAC and the elevators. Other contacts lapsed in late March, leaving the Seattle lab with zero janitorial staff and a skeleton crew of IT specialists.During a big staff meeting at Montlake on Wednesday, lab leaders said they had no updates on when the contracts might be renewed, one researcher said. They also acknowledged it was unfair that everyone would need to pitch in on janitorial duties on top of their actual jobs.Nick Tolimieri, a union representative for Montlake employees, said the problem is all part of the large-scale bullying program to push out federal workers. It seems like every Friday we get some kind of message that makes you unable to sleep for the entire weekend, he said. Now, with these lapsed contracts, its getting more and more petty.The problems, large and small, at Montlake provide a case study of the chaos thats engulfed federal workers across many agencies as the Trump administration has fired staff, dumped contracts and eliminated long-time operational support. Yesterday, hundreds of NOAA workers who had been fired in February, then briefly reinstated, were fired again. Local management had new service contracts ready to go ages ago, Tolimieri said. The delay from headquarters means employees will struggle to get repairs for their computers or basic building maintenance; the aging elevators at Montlake already break so often that Tolimieri joked it would be easier to send notices on the occasions when they did work.The fisheries center employs more than 350 people, most of whom work at Montlake. The rest are scattered across several research stations in Oregon and Washington.Staff at the center conduct research and provide scientific advice for policies on sustainable fishing and endangered species, including a population of orcas in Puget Sound. They test seafood after oil spills to ensure the fish are safe to eat. Their work helps restore native salmon populations and support regional farming.NOAA is so uncontroversial, said the Montlake researcher whos worried about hazardous waste disposal. Employees are just trying to do weather reports and give people good seafood.The researcher said lab workers are trained in basic lab safety, so the chemicals are properly stored, handled and placed into appropriate waste containers after use. But theres a limit to how much chemical waste can be kept on site. And the contractors who left were experts on handling emergencies like large chemical spills or serious toxic exposures.If those contractors dont return soon, the researcher said, the lab may need to delay or pause important research.That could include chemical-intensive lab work like testing sea lions, killer whales and walruses from Alaska for environmental contaminants, Tolimieri said.For a bunch of people who are screaming about efficiency, he said, referring to the administrations efforts to downsize the federal government, theyve done the most inefficient things possible.

by Peter Elkind ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. Donald Trump makes no secret of his loathing for regulations that limit water and energy use by home appliances. For years, he has regaled supporters at his campaign rallies with fanciful stories about their impact. He is so exercised by the issue that, even as global stock markets convulsed Wednesday in response to his tariff plans, Trump took time out to issue an executive order titled Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads.Contemporary shower fixtures are only one of the items that rankle the president, who complains that theres no water coming and you end up standing there five times longer, making it difficult to coif his perfect hair. He has frequently denounced dishwashers that he claims take so long and clean so poorly that the electric bill is ten times more than the water; toilets that require flushing ten or 15 times; and LED lightbulbs, which he faults for making him look orange.In his first term, Trump pursued an array of gimmicks to try to undermine the rules. His moves were opposed by industry and environmental groups alike. If its possible for regulations to be popular, these ones are. They have cut Americas water and energy consumption, reduced global-warming emissions and saved consumers money. Legal prohibitions stymied most of Trumps maneuvers back then, and the Biden administration quickly reversed the steps Trump managed to take.Trumps executive order on showerheads generated headlines, but its likely to have little effect (more on that later). Far more consequential steps have been taken outside the Oval Office. With the aid of Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency team, Trump appears to be attempting an end run that could succeed where his past attempts failed: by simply terminating the consulting contract that the Department of Energy relies on to develop and enforce the rules. In late March, DOGEs wall of receipts stated that it had deleted a Department of Energy contract for Guidehouse LLP (a PricewaterhouseCoopers spinoff) for Appliance Standards Analysis and Regulatory Support Service, producing a listed savings of $247,603,000. That item has now disappeared from the DOGE website, and its current status remains unclear.This has produced confusion for everyone from appliance manufacturers to government officials to the contractors paid to enforce the rules. If the contract is indeed canceled, experts told ProPublica, it would cripple the governments efficiency standards program, which relies on the consulting firms technical expertise and testing labs to update standards, ensure compliance and punish violators.It would have a huge impact, said George Washington University law professor Emily Hammond, who helped run the program as deputy general counsel at the Department of Energy and now serves on its appliance standards advisory committee. DOE does not have the internal capacity to do that work. Taking that away pulls the rug out from under the agencys ability to run that regulatory program.Appliance manufacturers seem almost as concerned. This is not a positive development, said Josh Greene, vice president for government affairs at A.O. Smith, the largest manufacturer of water heaters in the U.S. Terminating the Guidehouse contract, he said, would create a wild Wild West where upstart manufacturers are free to import poor-quality products because they know theres no one to enforce the rules. Thats not good for American manufacturing and its not good for consumers.The Department of Energy has made no public attempts to clarify the matter. An agency spokesperson did not respond to ProPublicas requests for comment. Emails to DOGE and the White House brought no reply. And Guidehouse officials, reportedly eager to lay low, also offered no response to multiple requests for comment.The governments efficiency requirements originated with the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, signed into law in 1975, when the concern was an energy shortage, not global warming. Today, the Department of Energy is required to set rules for energy and water use by more than 70 appliances and commercial products sold in the U.S. The agency must consider imposing stricter standards for each product every eight years, based on what is technologically feasible and economically justified. Manufacturers then have three to five years to make their products measure up.The Energy Department typically stiffens a requirement only after years of study, comment, negotiation and testing (and sometimes litigation) among industry, consumer and environmental groups. The law also includes an anti-backsliding provision that bars relaxation of standards that have been finalized. Guidehouse and its subcontractors have for years performed virtually all the necessary technical work; they also maintain a certification database that U.S. authorities use to keep illegal products from being imported.Republican lawmakers, anti-regulation advocates and right-wing media have long decried the efficiency rules as an impingement on personal freedom, limiting product choice. The early rollout of water-throttling products produced some of the issues Trump complains about, lampooned in a 1996 Seinfeld episode titled The Shower Head.But in the decades since, the standards have been widely embraced, dramatically cutting energy and water consumption, reducing emissions and providing plenty of attractive consumer choices. In 2023, Consumer Reports found that even the simplest and least expensive showerheads can provide a satisfying shower. Dishwashers and clothes washers clean better while using less than half as much water and energy as they once did. The transition to LED light bulbs, nearly complete, is estimated to have cut energy bills by $3 billion a year and eliminated the need for about 30 large power plants.In January, days before Trump returned to office, a Department of Energy report estimated that the efficiency standards are now saving the average American household about $576 a year on their utility bills, while cutting the nations energy consumption by 6.5% and water consumption by 12%. A 2022 survey by the Consumer Federation of America found that 76% of Americans support the government setting efficiency standards for appliances.None of that has slowed Trumps attacks. During his first term, the Department of Energy ignored legal deadlines for considering efficiency updates on 28 products, blocked the long-planned rollout of new lightbulb rules and sought to bypass finalized appliance standards through byzantine legal maneuvers. Among other things, the Energy Department announced special new product classes for dishwashers, clothes washers and dryers that completed their normal cycle in an hour or less. This would exempt any such short-cycle devices that were introduced from the existing limits on water and energy use.Manufacturers never brought those models to market. Most existing appliances already had a short cycle option that did their job well; those short on time simply had to push that button. And by mid-2022, Bidens Energy Department had reversed Trumps regulatory moves. The department went on to issue an array of tightened home appliance rules jointly recommended by industry and consumer groups; most were finalized early enough to be immune from congressional rollback.This didnt stop Trump from boasting on the 2024 campaign trail that he had changed everything during his first term. He vowed to fix it all again when he returned to the White House. Eliminate energy efficiency standards for appliances was on Project 2025s list of needed reforms.Sure enough, on his first day back in the White House, Trump issued two executive orders targeting the efficiency rules. On Feb. 11, he posted on Truth Social: I am hereby instructing Secretary Lee Zeldin to immediately go back to my Environmental Orders, which were terminated by Crooked Joe Biden, on Water Standard and Flow pertaining to SINKS, SHOWERS, TOLIETS, WASHING MACHINES, DISHWASHERS, etc., and to likewise go back to the common sense standards on LIGHTBULBS, that were put in place by the Trump Administration, but terminated by Crooked Joe. I look forward to signing these orders. (In fact, the rules Trump cited were issued and enforced by the Department of Energy, not the Environmental Protection Agency, where Administrator Zeldin presides.)None of the standards Trump listed were subject to an executive order, or any other kind of rapid rollback. In simple terms, Trump did not have the legal authority to change these rules.No matter. Energy Secretary Chris Wright who had listed affordability and consumer choice in home appliances among his top nine priorities took up the cause. Three days after Trumps Truth Social post, Wright announced that the Department of Energy was postponing seven of the Biden-Harris administrations restrictive mandates on home appliances, which have driven up costs, reduced choice and diminished the quality of Americans home appliances. Wrights list of seven affected home appliances actually included three types of commercial equipment and three other regulations long past the point where they could be undone.That left only one household-product regulation that could be challenged. It involved an item that seemed like an improbable symbol of freedom and consumer choice: the tankless, gas-fueled hot water heater.The vast majority of U.S. homes have traditional water heaters with 40- to 50-gallon tanks. By contrast, tankless gas products represent 10% of sales. They are about the size of a carry-on suitcase and heat a stream of water on demand. Theyre energy-efficient and roughly twice as expensive as standard heaters.But the rules governing tankless gas water heaters were vulnerable because they were issued in the final weeks of Bidens term. That meant lawmakers could reverse them under the Congressional Review Act, which allows lawmakers to block a recently enacted agency rule, if a resolution to do so passes both houses and is signed by the president.Appearing at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 20, Wright drew cheers as he offered a Trumpian litany My dishwasher has to run for two hours now, and at the end I got to clean the dishes before turning to hot water heaters. We have a factory in the southeastern part of the United States that employs hundreds of people to build a particularly popular product these days, Wright said. It is a tankless water heater powered by natural gas, which he described as selling like hotcakes. So, what did the Biden administration do, he asked. They passed a regulation that would make that product illegal, and that company would be dead. But under Trump, declared Wright, waving his arms, we are fixing that problem. That factory is staying open. America is back, baby!Wright returned to the hot-water thing in a FoxBusiness interview a month later. Assailing nanny-state, crazy, top-down mandates that makes it more expensive for American consumers and businesses to buy what they want, he said the new rule was going to shut down a factory just built in the southeast United States. Wright acknowledged that U.S. law bars elimination of other efficiency updates that he and Trump have targeted because theyve already been finalized. We cant officially get rid of them, he commented. So we just pushed back the enforcement date, hopefully, to never.Wrights portrayal omitted significant details. The administrations actions involve a single beneficiary: Rinnai, a Japanese appliance company with $3.3 billion in revenues last year. In 2022, Rinnai opened a $70 million factory south of Atlanta, where about 250 U.S. workers build non-condensing tankless gas water heaters, a major moneymaker for the company.Non-condensing tankless heaters are less efficient and less expensive than condensing tankless heaters, which reuse heat from their exhaust gases. As a result, Rinnai wouldnt be able to continue selling them when the new standards went into effect in December 2029.That, however, wasnt going to put the company out of business; it wasnt likely to shut down its U.S. factory, either, though Rinnai raised that specter in government filings where its U.S. president warned the new standards would make the Georgia plant largely obsolete eliminating all its jobs.Rinnai sells a broad array of products across the world. It also already sold condensing tankless heaters in the U.S. that met the new standard and were imported from Japan. And Rinnai had plans to make them in Georgia, according to the companys most recent annual report. (Rinnai agreed to make its U.S. chief, Frank Windsor, available for an interview with ProPublica, then canceled twice at the last minute. The company ultimately declined to respond to questions about its public representations.)Nonetheless, the company, now backed by the Trump administration, has pursued a multitrack campaign to roll back the new standards. Its efforts appear to be on the point of success. A resolution has passed the House and won Senate approval on Thursday. Rinnai has spent $375,000 on Washington lobbyists since 2023, according to disclosure reports. The company also joined with Republican attorneys general in a court challenge to the energy rule.Three major Rinnai competitors supported the Biden-era regulations. Wisconsin-based A.O. Smith has actively lobbied against Rinnais effort to win a congressional rollback. Greene said blocking the standard will disadvantage U.S. companies, which have already invested in more efficient condensing technology, by allowing continued sale of Rinnais less expensive competing products. In this time of America First, it just seems to us a shame that where were heading is rewarding foreign manufacturers, Greene said. There should be a level playing field.Meanwhile the administrations campaign has expanded to multiple fronts. On Wednesday, the Department of Energy announced a review of its procedures for energy standards, which one expert described as a reprise of the first Trump administrations attempts to create procedural hurdles to updating efficiency standards.Then there was the executive order on showerheads that same day. It, too, seeks to revive a move by the first Trump administration: to circumvent the limits on waterflow by redefining showerheads to include multiple nozzles, each of which could emit as much water as the entire showerhead was previously allowed. The Biden-era Energy Department killed that regulation, and Trump is attempting to bring it back while proclaiming that notice and comment is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal.That order will have virtually no effect because manufacturers have little interest in making showerheads that exceed the current limits, according to Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a nonprofit coalition of groups that support the efficiency rules. The president is asserting king-like authority, he added, about Trumps claim that he does not have to follow administrative procedures.In the end, DOGE could have more of an impact than a would-be monarch, if its able to kill the Guidehouse contract. Then, deLaski said, it would be next to impossible for DOE to enforce its efficiency standards. Doris Burke, Mark Olalde and Pratheek Rebala contributed research.

by Duaa Eldeib and Patricia Callahan, and photography by Sarahbeth Maney ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. In the past six months, two babies in Louisiana have died of pertussis, the disease commonly known as whooping cough.Washington state recently announced its first confirmed death from pertussis in more than a decade.Idaho and South Dakota each reported a death this year, and Oregon last year reported two as well as its highest number of cases since 1950.While much of the country is focused on the spiraling measles outbreak concentrated in the small, dusty towns of West Texas, cases of pertussis have skyrocketed by more than 1,500% nationwide since hitting a recent low in 2021 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Deaths tied to the disease are also up, hitting 10 last year, compared with about two to four in previous years. Cases are on track to exceed that total this year. Pertussis Cases Surged in 2024 Cases had been decreasing in the years before the COVID-19 outbreak and dropped further when schools were closed in response to the pandemic. Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica) Doctors, researchers and public health experts warn that the measles outbreak, which has grown to more than 600 cases, may just be the beginning. They say outbreaks of preventable diseases could get much worse with falling vaccination rates and the Trump administration slashing spending on the countrys public health infrastructure.National rates for four major vaccines, which had held relatively steady in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic, have fallen significantly since, according to a ProPublica analysis of the most recent federal kindergarten vaccination data. Not only have vaccination rates for measles, mumps and rubella fallen, but federal data shows that so have those for pertussis, diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis B and polio.In addition, public health experts say that growing pockets of unvaccinated populations across the country place babies and young children in danger should there be a resurgence of these diseases. Many medical authorities view measles, which is especially contagious, as the canary in the coal mine, but pertussis cases may also be a warning, albeit one that has attracted far less attention. This is not just measles, said Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious diseases doctor in New York City and author of the book Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Childrens Health. Its a bright-red warning light.At least 36 states have witnessed a drop in rates for at least one key vaccine from the 2013-14 to the 2023-24 school years. And half of states have seen an across-the-board decline in all four vaccination rates. Wisconsin, Utah and Alaska have experienced some of the most precipitous drops during that time, with declines of more than 10 percentage points in some cases.There is a direct correlation between vaccination rates and vaccine-preventable disease outbreak rates, said a spokesperson for the Utah Department of Health and Human Services. Decreases in vaccination rates will likely lead to more outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in Utah. Measles Vaccination Rates in Most States Were Below Herd Immunity in 2023 Data is for school year 2013-14 through 2023-24. The CDC recommends a vaccination rate of at least 95% to achieve herd immunity, to help prevent outbreaks and to protect communities. Montana is not categorized as "below herd immunity in 2023" because the state did not report data for school year 2023-24. Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Vaccination Coverage and Exemptions among Kindergartners. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica) Pertussis Vaccination Rates Decreased in Most States Between 2013 and 2023 Note: Decrease means that the rate in school year 2013-14 was higher than the rate in school year 2023-24. If no data was reported for 2013-14, data from the next earliest year was used. Montana is not categorized as a state where the vaccination rate decreased because the state did not report data for school year 2023-24. Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Vaccination Coverage and Exemptions among Kindergartners. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica) But statewide figures alone dont provide a full picture. Tucked inside each state are counties and communities with far lower vaccination rates that drive outbreaks.For example, the whooping cough vaccination rate for kindergartners in Washington state in 2023-24 was 90.2%, slightly below the U.S. rate of 92.3%, federal data shows. But the statewide rate for children 19 to 35 months last year was 65.4%, according to state data. In four counties, that rate was in the 30% range. In one county, it was below 12%.My concern is that there is going to be a large outbreak of not just measles, but other vaccine-preventable diseases as well, thats going to end up causing a lot of harm, and possibly deaths in children and young adults, said Dr. Anna Durbin, a professor in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has spent her career studying vaccines. And its completely preventable. The dramatic cuts to public health funding and staffing could heighten the risk. And the elevation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine critic, to the secretary of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, several experts said, has only compounded matters.The Trump administration has eliminated 20,000 jobs at agencies within HHS, which includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nations public health agency. And late last month, the administration also cut $11 billion from state and local public health agencies on the front lines of protecting Americans from outbreaks; the administration said the money was no longer necessary after the end of the pandemic.Several city and county public health officials had to move quickly to lay off nurses, epidemiologists and disease inspectors. Some ceased vaccination clinics, halted wastewater surveillance programs and even terminated a contract with the courier service that transports specimens to state labs to test for infectious diseases. One Minnesota public health agency, which had provided 1,400 shots for children at clinics last year, immediately stopped those clinics when the directive arrived, court records show.A federal judge temporarily barred HHS from enacting the cuts, but the ruling, which came more than a week after the grants were terminated, was too late for programs that had already been canceled and employees who had already been laid off. Lawyers for HHS have asked the judge to reconsider her decision in light of a recent Supreme Court ruling that allowed the Department of Education to terminate grants for teacher training while that case is being argued in lower courts. The judge in the HHS case has not yet ruled on the motion.But in tiny storefronts and cozy homes, at school fairs and gas stations, many residents in West Texas, near where the measles outbreak has taken hold, appear unfazed.I dont need a vaccine, one man sitting on his porch said recently. I dont get sick.Its measles. Its been around forever, said a woman making her way to her car. I dont think its a big deal.When asked why they werent planning on vaccinating their baby, a husband walking alongside his wife who was 27 weeks pregnant simply said, Its Gods will. Seminole last month. Many residents in West Texas appear unfazed by the measles outbreak. In word and deed, Kennedy has sown doubt about immunizations.In response to the measles outbreak, Kennedy initially said in a column he wrote for Fox News that the decision to vaccinate is a personal one. HHS sent doses of vitamin A alongside vaccines to Texas, and Kennedy praised the use of cod liver oil. Only the vaccine prevents measles.About a week later, in an interview on Fox News, while Kennedy encouraged vaccines, he said he was a freedom of choice person. At the same time, he emphasized the risks of the vaccine.Only after the second measles death in Texas did Kennedy post on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.But even that is not the unequivocal message that the head of HHS should be sending, said Ratner, the infectious diseases doctor in New York. It is, he said, a tepid recommendation at best.It gives the impression that these things are equivalent, that you can choose one or the other, and that is disingenuous, he said. We dont have a treatment for measles. We have vitamin A, which we can give to kids with measles, that decreases but doesnt eliminate the risk of severe outcomes. It doesnt do anything for prevention of measles.In the past, Kennedy has been a fierce critic of the vaccine. In a foreword to a 2021 book on measles released by the nonprofit that he founded, Kennedy wrote, Measles outbreaks have been fabricated to create fear that in turn forces government officials to do something. They then inflict unnecessary and risky vaccines on millions of children for the sole purpose of fattening industry profits.A spokesperson for HHS said, Secretary Kennedy is not anti-vaccine he is pro-safety, pro-transparency and pro-accountability. Kennedy, the spokesperson said, responded to the measles outbreak with clear guidance that vaccines are the most effective way to prevent measles and under his leadership, the CDC updated its pediatric patient management protocol for measles to include physician-administered vitamin A.Kennedy, the spokesperson added, is uniquely qualified to lead HHS at this pivotal moment.Late last month, leaders at the CDC ordered staff to bury a risk assessment that emphasized the need for vaccines in response to the measles outbreak in spite of the fact the CDC has long promoted vaccinations as a cornerstone of public health. While a CDC spokesperson acknowledged that vaccines offer the best protection from measles, she also repeated a line Kennedy had used: The decision to vaccinate is a personal one.Among the approximately 2,400 jobs eliminated at the CDC was a team in the Immunization Services Division that partnered with organizations to promote access to and confidence in vaccines in communities where coverage lagged.The National Institutes of Health, which is also under HHS, recently ended funding for studies that examine vaccine hesitancy. In early April, researchers, the American Public Health Association and one of the largest unions in the country sued the NIH and its director, Jay Bhattacharya, along with HHS and Kennedy, alleging they terminated grants without scientifically-valid explanation or cause. The government hasnt filed a response in the case.The NIH cancellation notices stated that the agencys policy was not to prioritize research that focuses on gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment.These grants are being canceled in the midst of an outbreak, a vaccine-preventable outbreak, said Rupali Limaye, an associate professor at George Mason University who has spent the past decade studying vaccine hesitancy. We need to better understand why people are not accepting vaccines now more than ever. This outbreak is still spreading.That vaccines prevent diseases is settled science. For decades, there was a societal understanding that getting vaccinated benefited not only the person who got the shot, but also the broader community, especially babies or people with weakened immune systems, like those in chemotherapy.An investment in public health and a sustained, large-scale approach to vaccines is what helped the country declare the elimination of the measles in 2000, said Lori Tremmel Freeman, the CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.But she has watched both deteriorate over the last few months. Nearly every morning since notices of the federal funding cuts began going out to local public health agencies, she has woken up to texts from panicked public health workers. She has led daily calls with local health departments and sat in on multiple emergency board meetings.Freeman has compiled a list of more than 100 direct consequences of the cuts, including one rural health department in the Midwest that can no longer carry out immunization services. Thats vital because there are no hospitals in the county and all public health duties fall to the health department.Its relentless, she said. It feels like a barrage and assault on public health. Vaccines were available at the health department in Lubbock, Texas, last month. More than 1,600 miles away from Washington, D.C., in Lubbock, Texas, the director of the citys health department, Katherine Wells, sighed last week when she saw the most recent measles numbers. She would have to alert her staff to work late again.Theres a lot of cases, she said, and we continue to see more and more cases.She didnt know it at the time, but that night would mark the states second measles death this year. An earlier death in February was the countrys first in a decade. Both children were not vaccinated.Kennedy said he traveled to Gaines County to comfort the family who lost their 8-year-old daughter and while there met with the family of the 6-year-old girl who died in February.He also visited with two local doctors he described as extraordinary healers, he said in his post on X. The men, he claimed, have treated and healed some 300 measles-stricken Mennonite children using aerosolized budesonide typically used to prevent symptoms of asthma and clarithromycin an antibiotic. Medical experts said neither is an effective measles treatment.State health officials have traced about two-thirds of the measles cases in Texas to Gaines County, which sits on the western edge of the state.Seminole, one of the countys only two incorporated towns, has emerged as the epicenter of the outbreak, with Tina Siemens acting as a community ambassador of sorts. Seminole has become the center of the measles outbreak. Siemens, a tall woman with glasses and a short blonde bob, runs a museum that combines the areas Native American history and Mennonite community with traditional skills like calligraphy and canning fruit.On a recent Tuesday, atop the museums dark coffee table, notes scrawled onto white paper listed the latest shipments of vitamin C and Alaskan cod liver oil.The supplies, Siemens said, were for one of the local doctors who met with Kennedy.As measles tears through the community, Siemens said families have to decide whether to get vaccinated.In America, we have a choice, she said, echoing Kennedys messaging. The cod liver oil that was flown in, the vitamin C that was flown in, was a great help. Tina Siemens Dr. Philip Huang, director and health authority for the Dallas County Health and Human Services Department, is working to keep the measles outbreak from reaching his community, just five hours east of Seminole. He wrote letters to the public school superintendents and leaders of private schools that had large numbers of unvaccinated or undervaccinated students offering to set up mobile vaccine clinics for them.Overall, the rates can look OK, he said, but when youve got these pockets of unvaccinated, thats where the vulnerability lies.Huang has had to lay off 11 full-time employees, 10 temporary workers and cancel more than 50 vaccine clinics following the HHS cuts. The systemic dismantling of the CDC and other federal health agencies, he said, will have a grave and lasting impact.This is setting us back decades, Huang said. Everyone should be extremely concerned about whats going on.Across the country, pediatricians are petrified, said Dr. Susan Kressly, who serves as president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the largest professional organization of pediatricians in the country.Many of us are losing sleep, Kressly said. If we lose that progress, children will pay the price.Shes carefully watching the spread of several vaccine-preventable diseases, including an increase in whooping cases that far outpace the typical peaks seen every few years. Although the whooping cough vaccine isnt as effective as the ones for measles and protection wanes over time, the CDC says it remains the best way to prevent the disease.Babies under the age of 1 are among the most at risk of severe complications from whooping cough, including slowed or stopped breathing and pneumonia, according to the CDC. About one-third of infants who get whooping cough end up in the hospital. Newborns are especially vulnerable because the CDC doesnt recommend the first shot until two months. Thats why experts recommend pregnant mothers and anyone who will be around the baby to get vaccinated.The number of whooping cough cases dropped significantly during the pandemic, but it exploded in recent years. In 2021, the CDC reported 2,116 cases; last year, there were 35,435.The numbers this year appear set to eclipse 2024. So far in 2025, 7,111 cases have been reported, which is more than double this time last year. Cases tend to spike in the summer and fall, which adds to experts concern about high numbers so early in the year.States on the Pacific Coast and in the Midwest have reported the most cases this year, with Washington leading the country with 742 cases so far, more than five times as many as at this time last year.The Washington child who died of whooping cough had no underlying medical conditions, according to a spokesperson for the Spokane Regional Health District. The death was announced in February but occurred in November.While Washingtons overall vaccination rate for whooping cough has remained relatively steady over the last decade at around 90%, pockets of low vaccination rates have allowed the disease to take root and put the wider community at risk, said Dr. Tao Sheng Kwan-Gett, a pediatrician and chief health officer of the Washington State Department of Health.This is the time to strengthen the public health system, he said, to build trust in those areas and make it easier for children to get their routine vaccines.But instead, were seeing the exact opposite happen, he said. Were weakening our public health system, and that will put us on a path towards more illness and shorter lives.Washington was one of 23 states and the District of Columbia that sued HHS and Kennedy following the $11 billion cuts, which rescinded approximately $118 million from the state. Doing so, the state said in court records, would impact 150 full-time employees and cause an immediate reduction in the agencys ability to respond to outbreaks.Washingtons Care-A-Van, a mobile health clinic that travels across the state to provide vaccinations, conduct blood pressure screenings and distribute opioid overdose kits, was a key element in the departments vaccination efforts.But that, too, has been diminished.An alert on the departments website cataloged the impact.Attention, it began.As a result of the unexpected decision to terminate grant funding, all Care-A-Van operations have been paused indefinitely, including the cancellation of more than 104 upcoming clinics across the state.The department had anticipated providing approximately 2,000 childhood vaccines as part of that effort.The frustration came through in Kwan-Getts voice. Many people think that federal cuts to public health mean shrinking the federal workforce, he said, but those clawbacks also get passed down to states and cities and counties. The less federal support that trickles down to the local level, the less protected communities will be.It really breaks my heart, he said, when I see children suffering from preventable diseases like whooping cough and measles when we have the tools to prevent them. Agnel Philip contributed data analysis.

by Jeff Ernsthausen, Mica Rosenberg and Avi Asher-Schapiro ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. Update, April 11, 2025: After this story was prepared for publication, Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted on a federal procurement website that it had awarded a new contract worth up to $3.8 billion to Deployed Resources to operate a migrant detention camp on Fort Bliss. It is the largest contract the company has received and the first time ICE is moving ahead with plans to detain thousands of people arrested in the U.S. on military bases in tents before they are deported. In June 2005, a former employee from the Federal Emergency Management Agency toured the grounds of the Bonnaroo music festival in rural Tennessee. He wasnt there to see the headliners, which included Dave Matthews Band and the lead singer of the popular jam band Phish. He was there to meet the guys setting up the toilets for the throng of psychedelics-infused campers in attendance: Richard Stapleton, a construction industry veteran, and his business partner Robert Napior, a onetime convicted pot grower, who specialized in setting up music festivals.The meeting, described in court documents, offered the pairs fledgling company, Deployed Resources, a key introduction to players doing government contract work for the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that oversees not only the nations disaster responses but also its immigration system. Over the next two decades, Stapleton and Napior hired more than a dozen former agency insiders as they turned their small-time logistics business, which had helped support outdoor festivals like Lollapalooza, into a contracting giant by building camps for a completely different use: detaining immigrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.Now, as the government races to carry out President Donald Trumps campaign promise of mass deportations, Deployed is shifting its business once more from holding people who are trying to enter the country to detaining those the government is seeking to ship out.In Trumps second term in office, the government is poised to spend tens of billions of dollars on immigration detention, including unprecedented plans to hold immigrants arrested in the U.S. in massive tent camps on military bases. One recently published request for contract proposals said the Department of Homeland Security could spend up to $45 billion over the next several years on immigrant detention. The plans have set off a gold rush among contractors. All this spending is unfolding at the same time the government has made sweeping cuts to federal agencies and shed other contracts.Among those seeking a windfall is Deployed Resources, which, along with its sister company, Deployed Services, has adapted to shifting government policies and priorities in immigration enforcement.Starting in 2016, to help respond to spikes in immigrant crossings that had periodically overwhelmed border stations, Deployed began setting up tent encampments to ease the overcrowding. These temporary structures served as short-term emergency waystations, which several former officials said provided flexibility that the U.S. needed. Many of those arriving including families and unaccompanied children were turning themselves in, hoping to be released into the U.S. to apply for asylum. In all, the company has been awarded more than $4 billion in government contracts building and operating border tents, according to an analysis of contracting data by ProPublica.Since taking office in January, Trump has cracked down on asylum, pushing border crossings to record lows. Last month, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it no longer needed the tent facilities run by Deployed.Instead, ProPublica found, the military will now be contracting with Deployed to use one of those border facilities to house people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.In March, one of the companys tent complexes in El Paso, Texas, was handed over to ICE, CBP and ICE spokespeople said. In an unusual move, the Trump administration tapped funds from the Department of Defense to pay Deployed for the facility, citing the presidents declaration of an emergency at the southern border, a DOD spokesperson said. The nearly $140 million contract wasnt posted publicly and was given to Deployed as the incumbent contractor, the spokesperson said, without further explaining why ICE would use military funds. ICE said it started transferring detainees to the site which currently has the capacity to house 1,000 adults on March 10. As immigration raids escalate, detention space in the countrys existing network of permanent ICE prisons is filling up. There are currently around 48,000 immigrants locked up across the country, levels not seen since 2019. Deportations are happening at a slower pace than ICE arrests, according to data shared with ProPublica, so the administration is turning to companies that can quickly set up facilities.As it looks to expand its capacity, the agency is exploring all options to meet its current and future detention requirements, said ICE spokesman Miguel Alvarez.Yet using tents to house thousands of people arrested by ICE is fundamentally different from using them to house recent border crossers, many of whom werent supposed to be held for more than a few days, seven current and former DHS officials who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations told ProPublica.They said it would be the first time these tent camps would be used for ICE detainees in the U.S. and that it was unclear how they could be constructed to meet the agencys basic health and safety requirements. These include separate areas for men and women and dedicated zones for families, as well as space to segregate those who are potentially violent, and private meeting areas for lawyers and their clients. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not directly involved in the contracts.People that youve ripped out of the community, people youve arrested, people who want to get back to their children, people who are scared, are going to behave differently than the border crossing population, said one former ICE official. You have a lot more fear in the population.It would take a remarkable degree of innovation from a contractor, said another former DHS official, adding, It would also be incredibly expensive.At a border security conference this week, ICE Acting Assistant Director for Operations Support Ralph Ferguson said that Deployed Resources was modifying the CBP tents in El Paso by adding more rigid structures inside, which he said would make them more secure. Deployed got an additional contract for up to $5 million to provide unarmed guards at the El Paso facility, according to a public notice posted in late March.The company did not respond to requests for comment. On its website, Deployed says it is dedicated to safely and efficiently providing transparent facility support and logistical services, anytime, anywhere and describes itself as the first-choice provider for government contracts.Deployed was also one of the companies interested in operating an immigrant detention camp on the nearby Fort Bliss military base, according to government documents obtained by ProPublica and interviews with people familiar with the contracting process. ICE was seeking proposals from vendors last month for a 1,000-bed camp that could grow to 5,000 beds, housing women and men, including those deemed high security risks, as well as families with small children. The contractor would be responsible for separating those groups and preventing escapes, documents reviewed by ProPublica show.The plans are a recipe for disaster, said Eunice Hyunhye Cho, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Unions National Prison Project.All of the problems that we see with ICE detention writ large, like the abuse of force, the sexual assault, medical neglect, the lack of food, lack of access to counsel, lack of due process rights, lack of access to telephones the list goes on all of those things are going to be vastly more complicated in a system where you are literally setting up people in tents that are surrounded by barbed wire and armed military personnel, Cho said.Connections and ContractsSince 2016, Deployed Resources has enjoyed a virtual monopoly on providing CBP with immigration tent structures to help with sudden influxes of immigrants. During the first Trump administration, the contractor set up temporary tent courts for people forced to wait in Mexico for their asylum hearings under a policy known as the Migrant Protection Protocols. The company also earned hundreds of millions of dollars during the Biden years operating emergency detention facilities for unaccompanied minors that were funded by the Department of Health and Human Services.Though the value of Deployed Resources isnt publicly known, county real estate records attest to the wealth its owners, Stapleton and Napior, have amassed in the detention business.In the spring of 2019, shortly after the company landed what was then its biggest immigration contract a $92 million no-bid award to run two tent facilities in Texas Stapleton purchased a $5.7 million condo in Naples, Florida. Nearly three years and more than $1 billion in contracts later, he upgraded to a $15 million home a block away from the shore. Napior snapped up a $9 million beachside property near Sarasota, Florida, in 2023. Stapleton did not respond to requests for comment. Reached by phone, Napior said he did not comment to the press and then hung up.After the meeting at Bonnaroo in 2005, Deployed later hired the former FEMA employee who had checked out its facilities there and to win emergency management contracting work at the agency before moving into immigration detention. In court filings, Deployed said that the meeting did not lead to its FEMA work.Deployed went on to hire additional former DHS officials over the years, expanding its connections to the federal agencies with which it does business. With a second Trump administration poised to crack down further on the flow of immigrants to the southern border a potential threat to Deployeds core business the company hired several former ICE leaders, according to online searches and current and former officials.A month after Trumps victory, former ICE field office director Sean Ervin announced he was joining Deployed as a senior adviser for strategic initiatives. He had previously overseen removal operations across Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. The head of field operations for ICE Miami, Michael Meade an 18-year agency veteran also joined Deployed that month, according to their profiles on LinkedIn. Meade and Ervin did not respond to requests for comment.Deployed has continued to win federal business even after the spending on the companys contracts was criticized by government watchdogs and a whistleblower.A review by Congress Government Accountability Office of one no-bid CBP contract that the first Trump administration awarded to Deployed found that the companys 2,500-person facility in Tornillo, Texas, averaged just 30 detainees a night in the fall of 2019 and never held more than 68 during the five-month period it was open. It also found that CBP paid Deployed millions for meals it didnt need to feed people it wasnt holding. Deployed agreed to reimburse $250,000 for meals not delivered, the GAO said.A separate whistleblower lawsuit in New Hampshire brought by a former DHS official who worked for Deployed accuses the company of cutting corners on training its staff to detect and report sexual abuse of children in facilities it set up to house unaccompanied minors during the Biden administration. In court filings, Deployed said it vigorously disputes the allegations and has moved to dismiss the suit. Construction crews work on an immigrant holding facility in Tornillo, Texas, in 2019. Deployed Resources was contracted to build and provide support services for the 2,500-person detention center, but it closed in 2020 after months of low occupancy. (Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters) Last year, Dan Bishop, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina, held up a Deployed Services contract in Greensboro, North Carolina, as an example of waste during a hearing on unaccompanied migrant children. The company was paid nearly $40 million to help operate a facility for immigrant children, Bishop said, but it stood empty for over two years.Deployed nonetheless had workers there full time, according to interviews with three former employees familiar with the facility, tasking them with playacting as if they were providing care. Case managers invented case details and Deployed workers would role-play as students in classrooms, even asking for permission to go to the bathroom, according to the former Deployed workers and social media posts of former workers describing the surreal situation.I have no idea why they were doing that with government money, said one former case manager, who recalled inventing elaborate backstories for fictional children, filling out make-believe statements and other paperwork for hours each day. The case manager spent about a year in Greensboro, living in housing paid for by Deployed from its government contract. Deployed did not respond to requests for comment about its Greensboro contract.Now, with even more money to be spent on immigration detention, Deployed is just one of the companies hoping to benefit. In addition to Fort Bliss more than 10 military sites around the country are being considered for ICE detention facilities, according to a DHS document shared with ProPublica. The New York Times previously reported on elements of the plan.The Fort Bliss contracting process has proceeded mostly out of public view, and its not clear if the project would go forward or fall under the larger $45 billion plan to expand immigration detention. In March, representatives from at least 10 companies, including Deployed Resources, toured Fort Bliss with DHS officials to survey the site, said two people familiar with the visit. Also there were private prison giants The GEO Group and CoreCivic, the sources said.The GEO Groups leadership and allied political action groups donated more than $1 million to Trumps reelection effort, according to a review by the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan Washington watchdog group. On its most recent earnings call, GEOs CEO said Trumps immigration agenda was an unprecedented opportunity for the firm. CoreCivic which donated $500,000 to Trumps inauguration committee has also spoken about the business opportunities. After Trumps election, stock prices for both companies jumped.CoreCivic said it is in regular contact with government agencies to understand their changing needs but said that it does not comment on contracts it is seeking. Its contribution to inauguration events was consistent with our past practice of civic participation supporting both parties. The GEO Group did not respond to a request for comment.Deployed Services has largely eschewed political donations, sticking to its strategy also used by GEO and CoreCivic of hiring former high-ranking government officials.A few weeks ago Deployed scored another high-profile ICE hire: Marlen Pineiro joined Deployed after 40 years in government, including more than a decade in ICEs Senior Executive Service, according to her LinkedIn profile. At a border security conference this week, where several former high-ranking DHS employees hired by Deployed were gathered among industry vets and Trump immigration officials, Pineiro declined an interview request from a ProPublica reporter.But on LinkedIn, the congratulations rolled in. The acting head of ICE under Trump, Todd Lyons, posted: Great news. Two other senior ICE officials who had also recently joined Deployed commented: Welcome aboard.Lets sail away, Pineiro replied. Woohooo see you soon.Note: ProPublica analyzed transaction-level contract data from usaspending.gov for this story. Contract amounts reported are federal obligations over the life of a contract or group of contracts. In the case of the recently announced Department of Defense award to Deployed Resources, the contract is new and worth up to $140 million. Perla Trevizo contributed reporting and Kirsten Berg contributed research.

by Doug Bock Clark ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. Prompted by ProPublicas reporting on efforts by right-wing activists to disallow ballots, North Carolina Democrats have introduced a bill designed to prevent votes from being tossed out based on postelection rule changes.The Voter Protection and Reliance Act, filed last week in the North Carolina House, says that ballots cast in state elections will be counted based on the laws and procedures in place on Election Day. It also forbids votes from being discarded because of technical or clerical errors in voter registrations.ProPublica reported that before the 2024 election, North Carolina activists and members of the Election Integrity Network a national group led by a lawyer integral to President Donald Trumps unsuccessful campaign to overturn the 2020 election discussed whether filing protests aimed at voters whose registration information was incomplete could help candidates overturn losses in close elections. The strategy debated on that call, which ProPublica obtained a recording of, subsequently was used by Republican Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin to challenge his 734-vote loss to Democrat Allison Riggs for a seat on the states Supreme Court.ProPublicas reporting showed people were hunting for pretexts to challenge the election ahead of time, said Phil Rubin, a Democratic House member who was the primary author of the bill. Rather than trying to proactively fix those problems before the election, Judge Griffin has retroactively tried to exploit them to overturn his loss. This law would prevent similar abuses in the future and force candidates to act for the good of the voters and not themselves.A spokesperson for Griffin, Paul Shumaker, said he couldnt respond to Rubins comments, his bill or questions from ProPublica because North Carolinas Code of Judicial Conduct prohibits judges and judicial candidates from stating a position on issues that could come before the court.It would be a violation to comment on legislation since legislation is subject to judicial review if enacted into law, Shumaker said.Last week, the Republican-majority North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled that election officials should discount around 60,000 ballots in the Supreme Court race cast by voters whose Social Security and drivers license information is missing in the state election database unless the voters provided that information within 15 working days. (That ruling has subsequently been stayed while the states Supreme Court considers the matter.)At the time of the election, state election rules allowed people to vote without that information and allowed members of the military to submit absentee ballots without providing photo ID. Often, the election database was missing Social Security and drivers license information not because of voters errors, but because of administrative mistakes, including a registration form that did not require these forms of identification.Nonetheless, the appeals court ruled that the state election board the body that issues election rules should have required the information.Griffins ballot challenges have been shown by data analyses to disproportionately affect Democrats and minorities, making it possible that their exclusion may upend the election results.Rubins bill also mandates that litigation involving election-related issues must be dealt with on an expedited basis by North Carolina courts so that candidates can resolve issues before elections rather than afterward.Though some North Carolina and national Republicans have criticized Griffins challenges, the Democratic-sponsored bill faces uncertain prospects in the GOP-controlled legislature.The bill is going nowhere, said Mitch Kokai, a senior political analyst for the conservative John Locke Foundation. Its more of a statement of the Democratic caucus approach to the Griffin-Riggs election and how they think it should have played out.North Carolinas governor and its legislative leadership did not respond to requests for comment.Rubin said that while the bill reflects issues playing out in North Carolina, it also could serve as a model for other states.There is no reason to think that these tactics will be limited to North Carolina, he said at a press conference on Thursday hosted by the Democratic National Committee and North Carolina Democratic Party about the Supreme Court case litigation, at which he presented the bill.The Election Integrity Network has chapters in swing states, plus many others, and partners with numerous national conservative organizations.The leader of the North Carolina chapter did not respond to a request for comment or emailed questions.

by Sharon Lerner ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to eliminate long-standing requirements for polluters to collect and report their emissions of the heat-trapping gases that cause climate change. The move, ordered by a Trump appointee, would affect thousands of industrial facilities across the country, including oil refineries, power plants and coal mines as well as those that make petrochemicals, cement, glass, iron and steel, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica.The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program documents the amount of carbon dioxide, methane and other climate-warming gases emitted by individual facilities. The data, which is publicly available, guides policy decisions and constitutes a significant portion of the information the government submits to the international body that tallies global greenhouse gas pollution. Losing the data will make it harder to know how much climate-warming gas an economic sector or factory is emitting and to track those emissions over time. This granularity allows for accountability, experts say; the government cant curb the countrys emissions without knowing where they are coming from.This would reduce the detail and accuracy of U.S. reporting of greenhouse gas emissions, when most countries are trying to improve their reporting, said Michael Gillenwater, executive director of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. This would also make it harder for climate policy to happen down the road. The program has been collecting emissions data since at least 2010. Roughly 8,000 facilities a year now report their emissions to the program. EPA officials have asked program staff to draft a rule that will drastically reduce data collection. Under the new rule, its reporting requirements would only apply to about 2,300 facilities in certain sectors of the oil and gas industry.Climate experts expressed shock and dismay about the apparent decision to stop collecting most information on our countrys greenhouse gas emissions. It would be a bit like unplugging the equipment that monitors the vital signs of a patient that is critically ill, said Edward Maibach, a professor at George Mason University. How in the world can we possibly manage this incredible threat to Americas well-being and humanitys well-being if were not actually monitoring what were doing to exacerbate the problem?The EPA did not address questions from ProPublica about the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. Instead, the agency provided an emailed statement affirming the Trump administrations commitment to clean air, land, and water for EVERY American.The agency announced last month that it was reconsidering the greenhouse gas reporting program. In a little-noticed press release issued on March 12, when the EPA sent out 24 bulletins as it celebrated the most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin described the reporting program as burdensome. Zeldin also claimed that the program costs American businesses and manufacturing millions of dollars, hurting small businesses and the ability to achieve the American Dream.Project 2025, the far-right blueprint for Trumps presidency, suggested severely scaling back the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program and also described it as imposing burdens on small businesses.In contrast, climate experts say the EPA reporting program, which tallies between 85% and 90% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., is in many ways a boon to businesses. A lot of companies rely on the data and use it in their annual sustainability reports, said Edwin LaMair, an attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund. Companies also use the data to demonstrate environmental progress to shareholders and to meet international reporting requirements. If the program stops, all that valuable data will stop being generated, LaMair said.The loss of that data could have a devastating effect on the worlds ability to rein in the disastrous effects of the warming climate, according to Andrew Light, who served as assistant secretary of energy for international affairs in the Biden administration. Light noted that addressing the dangerous and costly extreme weather events requires international collaboration and that our failure to collect data could give other countries an excuse to abandon their own reporting.We will not get to the kinds of temperature stabilization needed to protect Americans against the worst climate impacts unless we get the cooperation of developing countries, Light said. If the United States wont even measure and report our own emissions, how in the world can we expect China, India, Indonesia and other major growing developing countries to do the same?In its first months, the Trump administration has shown waning support for the reporting program. The EPA left the portal through which companies share data closed for several weeks and, in March, pushed back the emissions reporting deadline. Then last Friday, a meeting held with several program staff members raised further questions about the fate of future data collection, according to sources who were briefed on the meeting and asked not to be named for fear of retribution.At the meeting, political appointee Abigale Tardif, who is principal deputy assistant administrator of the EPAs office of air and radiation, instructed staff to draft a rule that would eliminate reporting requirements for 40 of the 41 sectors that are now required to submit data to the program. Tardif did not respond to inquiries from ProPublica about this story. Political appointee Aaron Szabo, who was present at the meeting and is awaiting confirmation as assistant administrator to the office, declined to answer questions, directing a reporter to EPA communications staff.Before joining the EPA, Tardif and Szabo worked as lobbyists. Szabo represented the American Chemistry Council and Duke Energy among other companies and trade groups and Tardif worked for Marathon Petroleum and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers Association.Some climate advocates noted that industry stands to benefit from the elimination of greenhouse gas reporting requirements. The bottom line is this is a giveaway to emitters, just letting them off the hook entirely, said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.Cleetus derided the choice to stop documenting emissions as ostrich-like. Not tracking the data doesnt make the climate crisis any less real, she said. This is just putting our heads in the sand.

by Richard A. Webster, Verite News This article was produced for ProPublicas Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. Calvin Alexander thought he had done everything the Louisiana parole board asked of him to earn an early release from prison.He had taken anger management classes, learned a trade and enrolled in drug treatment. And as his September hearing before the board approached, his disciplinary record was clean.Alexander, more than midway through a 20-year prison sentence on drug charges, was making preparations for what he hoped would be his new life. His daughter, with whom he had only recently become acquainted, had even made up a room for him in her New Orleans home.Then, two months before the hearing date, prison officials sent Alexander a letter informing him he was no longer eligible for parole. A computerized scoring system adopted by the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections had deemed the nearly blind 70-year-old, who uses a wheelchair, a moderate risk of reoffending, should he be released. And under a new law, that meant he and thousands of other prisoners with moderate or high risk ratings cannot plead their cases before the board. According to the department of corrections, about 13,000 people nearly half the states prison population have such risk ratings, although not all of them are eligible for parole.Alexander said he felt betrayed upon learning his hearing had been canceled. People in jail have lost hope in being able to do anything to reduce their time, he said. Calvin Alexanders daughter, Sabrina Brown, left, and his sister, Jerry Hart. Alexander was planning for his new life with Brown when he found out he was no longer eligible for parole. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica) The law that changed Alexanders prospects is part of a series of legislation passed by Louisiana Republicans last year reflecting Gov. Jeff Landrys tough-on-crime agenda to make it more difficult for prisoners to be released. While campaigning for governor, Landry, a former police officer and sheriffs deputy who served as Louisiana attorney general until 2024, championed a crackdown on rewarding well-behaved prisoners with parole. Landry said early release, which until now has been typically assumed when judges hand down sentences, is a slap in the face to crime victims. The revolving door is insulting, Landry told state lawmakers last year as he kicked off a special legislative session on crime during which he blamed the states high violent crime rate on lenient sentences and misguided post-conviction programs that fail to rehabilitate prisoners. (In fact, Louisianas recidivism rate has declined over the past decade, according to a 2024 department of corrections report.) The Legislature eliminated parole for nearly everyone imprisoned for crimes committed after Aug. 1, making Louisiana the 17th state in a half-century to abolish parole altogether and the first in 24 years to do so. For the vast majority of prisoners who were already behind bars, like Alexander, another law put an algorithm in charge of determining whether they have a shot at early release; only prisoners rated low risk qualify for parole. That decision makes Louisiana the only state to use risk scores to automatically rule out large portions of a prison population from being considered for parole, according to seven national criminal justice experts. Alexander cant read or write, so he dictated answers to mailed questions from Verite News and ProPublica to a fellow prisoner. (Obtained by Verite News and ProPublica) That was not how the tool, known as TIGER, an acronym for Targeted Interventions to Greater Enhance Re-entry, was intended to be used. Developed as a rehabilitative measure about a decade ago, it was supposed to help prison officials determine what types of classes or counseling someone might need to prevent them from landing back behind bars not be used as a punitive tool to keep them there, said one of its creators.Criminal justice advocates and civil rights attorneys say the new law could disproportionately harm Black people like Alexander in part because the algorithm measures factors such as criminal history where racial disparities already exist. The laws opponents also contend that the unique step Louisiana has taken to curtail parole is deeply problematic and potentially unconstitutional because it does not take into account the efforts of prisoners to better themselves while incarcerated. They deserve that opportunity to show theyve changed, said Pearl Wise, who was appointed to the parole board by Landrys Democratic predecessor and served from 2016 until 2023. You demonstrate over time the changes that you made and that you are not the person that was sentenced on that day. An Immutable Risk ScoreAlexander is like thousands of prisoners who have previously appeared before the board repeat offenders accused of nonviolent crimes, often mired in addiction with limited education or learning disabilities. Alexander cant read or write, having dropped out of school as a fourth grader in the early 1960s. He needed to help support his family in deeply segregated Mississippi and turned to selling crack cocaine as a child. That period was also the start of his own lifelong struggle with narcotics that resulted in multiple arrests and extended stints in prison. The department of corrections would not allow an in-person or phone interview with Alexander. Instead, Verite News and ProPublica mailed Alexander written questions, which a fellow inmate read to him and then wrote down his responses. Alexander admitted he was reckless in his youth and that he had violated his parole related to a 1994 drug possession conviction by drinking and staying out after curfew. That mistake would prove devastating three decades later because a prisoners history of parole violations plays a significant role in their TIGER risk score.Louisianas TIGER scoring system was born out of a 2014 federal initiative to help states reduce their prison populations. The risk assessment tool, developed by the state department of corrections and Louisiana State University researchers using a $1.75 million federal grant, was meant to treat criminal thinking, said Keith Nordyke, one of the creators of TIGER. For populations with the highest risk of reoffending, he said, the prison would flood them with services addiction counseling, therapy, job training to help keep them out of trouble once they were freed. The whole purpose of this was to slow down the revolving door, Nordyke said. Louisiana corrections officials started using the TIGER scores as part of the parole determination process in 2018, but it was only in 2024 that they became the sole measure of parole eligibility. Similar algorithms are used throughout the country in the parole decision-making process, but legal scholars say the way such risk tools calculate a persons odds of reoffending is among the reasons why no other state exclusively uses them to bar individuals from parole. While algorithms like TIGER can predict on a group level that 40 out of 100 people will reoffend upon their release, they cant pinpoint exactly who those 40 people will be, according to experts. The Louisiana department of corrections declined multiple interview requests and did not respond to questions about the states use of the risk tool.The reliance on a TIGER score to potentially block a prisoners bid for freedom is especially concerning, experts on risk assessment tools say, because most of the factors considered by the algorithm the crimes they committed, work history, age at first arrest, whether they had any marijuana-related convictions, prior parole revocations are from a prisoners past, which cannot be changed; they do not include anything related to what people have done in prison to rehabilitate themselves. Criminal justice scholars say that when scores based on immutable facts are weighted so heavily in parole decisions, prisoners from impoverished, racially segregated communities are more likely to be hurt. A fellow inmate wrote down Alexanders answers to Verite and ProPublicas questions on what he misses and what he would have done had he been granted parole. (Obtained by ProPublica and Verite News) Take the algorithms use of prior employment data: People raised in low-income communities do not have the same work opportunities as those brought up in more affluent neighborhoods, said Megan Stevenson, an economist and criminal justice professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Using such an algorithm to determine someones chances of parole, she said, suggests that poor people should be less eligible for parole than wealthier people. Factoring in prior drug convictions, too, is more likely to impact Black prisoners, Stevenson said. Black people use illegal drugs at roughly the same rate as white people, but are arrested and convicted for it in greater numbers because their neighborhoods are more heavily policed, she said.In using these data points to produce a risk score, youre going to create a biased algorithm to make biased decisions, Stevenson said. Already, Black people account for nearly two-thirds of Louisianas prison population, more than double their share of the state population. The Landry administration did not respond to requests for comment regarding potential racial biases in the way the TIGER scores are used for parole. Louisianas legislation might also violate the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits laws that retroactively increase the severity of a persons criminal sentence, according to several legal scholars. Tying parole eligibility to a computerized risk score that cant be lowered by an inmate through good behavior or other actions appears to do just that since the opportunity for parole has traditionally been considered part of a sentence, said Sonja Starr, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.Some former Louisiana parole board members also bristled at the idea of an algorithm superseding human judgment. It doesnt make much sense to me that a score generated by a process that the inmate has no control over takes away the authority and the power of the parole board, said Keith Jones, who was appointed by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards and served on the board from 2018 to 2020. Why have a parole board?Jones and two other former parole board members said the introduction of the TIGER tool as part of parole determination wasnt in itself a bad thing, as long as it remained just one factor to be considered among many. Although some board members did refuse to parole anyone with a moderate or high risk score before the law took effect, the states parole board had much more discretion in determining when a prisoner was released, former board members said.Tony Marabella, a former East Baton Rouge criminal court judge who served on the parole board until last year, said he had placed greater emphasis on a prisoners disciplinary record and completion of self-improvement programs. He also took into account whether the warden or victims supported their release when deciding whether to grant parole. If someone was a moderate risk, I wasnt going to throw them out, said Marabella, who served on the board for four years under Edwards. I was more concerned about what they had accomplished.Thats exactly what Alonzo Allen was able to show. Alonzo Allen, outside of his home in Mansfield, Louisiana, was paroled nearly four years ago. He had a moderate risk assessment score, which, after the passage of a 2024 law, would now prohibit him from appearing before the board. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica) In 2021, three years before the new law went into effect, Allen succeeded in convincing the parole board that he was worthy of release despite having the same TIGER score and a similar criminal history as Alexander.Allen had been sentenced to 40 years behind bars in 2012 on multiple drug charges and carrying a gun. While in prison, he was written up for possessing contraband, including a pencil sharpener and $2 worth of sugar, and he previously had his parole revoked twice, according to Allen and the parole board.As a result, he was marked a moderate risk.During Allens parole hearing, Jerry Goodwin, then warden at the David Wade Correctional Center in Homer, where Allen was being held, lauded Allen for his tireless work overcoming his drug addictions and improving his communication skills. Goodwin noted that Allen took classes even when he knew he had reached his limit for good time credits, time shaved off a sentence for good behavior.Hes worked hard for this opportunity, Goodwin told the parole board, and I think hes really got his best foot forward. Allen works full time as a truck driver. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica) Alvin Roche Jr., then a member of the parole board, questioned the accuracy of Allens TIGER score. Is it possible that this instrument might be wrong? Roche asked during Allens hearing. You think you are rehabilitated to the point where you can prove that assessment wrong? Yes, sir, very much, sir, Allen responded. I do think that is wrong. The board unanimously voted to parole Allen. Speaking by telephone from his home in Mansfield, just south of Shreveport, Allen, 61, said he was grateful for the second chance. Hes stayed sober, works full time as a truck driver and has not violated the terms of his parole in the nearly four years since his release. God has been good, he said. Allen at home. Since his parole almost four years ago, hes stayed sober and has held a steady job. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica) Steeply Declining Parole HearingsLawmakers who supported Louisianas push to place strict limits on parole have maintained that relying on the algorithm over human judgment was the most efficient way to clear a backlog of parole applications. State Sen. Patrick McMath, R-Covington, the bills author, claimed during a Senate committee hearing in February 2024 that so many unrealistic parole petitions were coming before the board that prisoners most deserving of early release were not being prioritized.What Im really trying to do here is make the system run more efficiently and effectively, McMath said.But data from the parole board doesnt support his assertion. According to the parole boards annual reports, the number of cases heard by the board actually dropped by 40% between 2016 and 2023. Prison reform advocates and civil rights attorneys say McMaths bill was never anything more than a Trojan horse designed to kill parole, given the laws other requirements that make parole substantially harder to achieve, including a unanimous board vote before parole is granted and an increase in the number of years prisoners must maintain clean disciplinary records. McMath declined to be interviewed and did not answer questions concerning the impact of his legislation.Landry, who signed the legislation into law in March 2024, appointed five new people to the seven-member board. None of the seven were permitted to comment about the use of TIGER to deny prisoners parole, according to Francis M. Abbott, executive director of the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole, citing board policy. Instead, he provided a statement from board chair Sheryl Ranatza: We believe Governor Landrys reforms passed in the special crime session will enhance public safety.The average number of people paroled in Louisiana has already dropped from 32 per month in 2023 to six per month since the law went into effect in August, according to Department of Corrections data. And at least 70 parole hearings, including Alexanders, were canceled between Aug. 1 and Dec. 13 because of the prisoners risk score, according to the parole board.Opponents of the bill predict the new restrictions on parole will swell the states prison population, costing taxpayers billions of dollars to build new corrections facilities and leading to more violence behind bars as inmates have fewer incentives to behave. For Alexander, that means he will not have the same opportunity Allen did to show the parole board that he had heeded their advice to improve himself. Brown, right, shows a photo on her phone taken when she visited Alexander, center, at Rayburn Correctional Center last year. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica) With his health rapidly deteriorating, his family fears he will not live to see the end of his sentence in five years. Hes got one eye. Hes diabetic. Hes got poor circulation, said Alexanders daughter, Sabrina Brown. I dont want to have to go to a funeral for him. Instead of moving into Browns New Orleans home as planned, Alexander will be able to see his daughter only when she makes the 85-mile trek north to the Rayburn Correctional Center. It wasnt supposed to be this way, he said.They told me once I received my risk score there is nothing I can do to change it, Alexander said. Its like walking into a brick wall.

by Taylor Kate Brown ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This piece was originally published in Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country. Sign up to receive our stories in your inbox every week. When Edgar Barrientos-Quintana left prison last November, he told reporters: Happy to be out here. Its the best week. And more to come. It was an understated moment from a man who had been in prison for close to 16 years for a murder that officials said he didnt commit. And it provided a stark contrast to the reality television show that depicted the investigation that led to his arrest. Barrientos-Quintana was freed after the Minnesota attorney generals Conviction Review Unit found he had been wrongfully convicted and recommended vacating his conviction. The units 180-page report cited failures by police, prosecutors and Barrientos-Quintanas own defense lawyers. But it also mentioned something reporter Jessica Lussenhop had never seen before in a wrongful conviction case: the involvement of popular true crime show The First 48. The show begins each episode with the premise that the chance of solving a murder is cut in half if police dont have a significant lead within 48 hours of a killing which also creates a sense of deadline pressure.In two stories ProPublica recently published, Lussenhop follows the shows involvement in the murder investigation that landed Barrientos-Quintana in prison, and how the shows two-decade history of filming in cities across the U.S. has left a complicated trail of problems and municipal regret.I talked to Lussenhop about what she learned about how The First 48 operates and why so many cities have stopped working with the show. What did you find surprising while reporting this story? Finding out that these episodes often air before a defendants trial. The show has disclaimers to the effect of everyone is innocent until proven guilty, but those words go by in a flash, and as a viewer, I certainly havent paid much attention to them. This person is still innocent until proven guilty, but the show does a good job of depicting them as guilty.What else was surprising was just the sheer number of times there were problems. There are shows like Live PD that have had extremely high-profile controversies and have been canceled. But The First 48 has been on the air for 20 years, and multiple cities ended their relationships with the show. Its not just the defense bar thats upset with it. Its prosecutors, judges, mayors, city council people, all saying, Why did our police department decide to do this? Why do police departments get involved with this show? As far as we understand it, police departments dont make any money off this show, and if you take into account the lawsuits, sometimes the show winds up costing cities money. Then the question becomes, well, why would any police department agree to do this? I think the answer is that police departments are often the subject of negative news coverage. They want a light shone on the work of their homicide detectives and everyone who supports their investigations.But one of the other important things is these are often the kinds of homicides that are not going to get a lot of press attention. The First 48 does often interview the victims family; theyll show the victims picture on television and say a little bit about their lives. That might be way more media attention than these victims would otherwise get. Theyre often poor, theyre often people of color, and the kinds of homicides that may get very little attention in their local media. So I think that it does, in a sense, provide a service. Watch: Reality Cop Show The First 48 and the Wrongly Convicted Man How is this similar to and different from other wrongful conviction cases? A lot of whats in Barrientos-Quintanas Conviction Review Unit report are the hallmarks of wrongful convictions: very young witnesses being interrogated for a very long time, sometimes without parents or lawyers involved; police not following photo lineup procedures; the defense claiming that the prosecution is withholding evidence from them. But to our knowledge, this is the first exoneration ever to be tied to The First 48.Multiple people, including the Hennepin County prosecutor, told me that the very premise of the show is extremely problematic because it makes it sound like you have to rush. The show has a literal clock thats ticking down in the corner of the screen. Obviously, you want good leads early on, but you have to keep an open mind to evidence thats going to come into play later on. One of the big pieces of evidence in Barrientos-Quintanas exoneration is the existence of surveillance tape of him at a grocery store with a girl roughly 33 minutes before the shooting happened. That was not a piece of evidence that they had within the first 48 hours, or even within the first two weeks. Theres also just the notion that if you have a camera crew following you around, youre going to behave differently. Especially if its a camera crew for a show called The First 48, which implies you better make something happen in 48 hours. That could have an effect on your actions as an investigator. What did you hear from the family of Jesse Mickelson, the victim Barrientos-Quintana was convicted of killing? Multiple members of the family have accepted that Barrientos-Quintana is not guilty. Those were some of the most fascinating conversations that I had. If you spent 15 years not only believing that hes guilty but in a certain sense hating him for destroying your family, and to be presented with new evidence and then be like, Wait a minute, I think we got this wrong that just takes a lot of courage and heart. I spoke to Mickelsons half-sister, Tina Rosebear. She thought of the show as sort of a document of this awful experience that her family had gone through, but it was something that acknowledged her brothers life. She found it almost a source of comfort to watch the episode. But now she has very, very different feelings, and she draws a bright line connecting the television show to the fact that their family may never know who shot and killed Mickelson. Maybe these investigators didnt do as good a job as they could have because they were rushing to meet this 48-hour thing. For a variety of reasons, the opportunity to catch whoever did this has passed, and she cant help wondering if thats in some way the shows fault.The companies that produce the show did not respond to numerous requests for comment or to a detailed list of questions. The detectives involved in the case also declined to comment. One prosecutor in the original case against Barrientos-Quintana is now a judge and thus precluded from speaking to the press by the Minnesota Code of Judicial Conduct; another took issue with many of the characterizations in the Conviction Review Unit report but agreed that The First 48 had been a problem.

by J. David McSwane and Hannah Allam ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. On Feb. 10, more than a dozen Department of Homeland Security officials joined a video conference to discuss an obscure, sparsely funded program overseen by its Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. The office, charged with investigating when the national security agency is accused of violating the rights of both immigrants and U.S. citizens, had found itself in the crosshairs of Elon Musks secretive Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.It began as a typical briefing, with Homeland Security officials explaining to DOGE a program many describe as a win-win. It had provided some $20 million in recent years to local organizations that provide case workers to keep people in immigration proceedings showing up to court, staff explained, without expensive detentions and ankle monitors.DOGE leader Kyle Schutt, a technology executive who developed a GOP online fundraising platform, interrupted. He wanted Joseph Mazzara, DHSs acting general counsel, to weigh in. Mazzara was recently appointed to the post after working for Ken Paxton as both an assistant solicitor general and member of the Texas attorney generals defense team that beat back public corruption charges.Schutt had a different interpretation of the program, according to people who attended or were briefed on the meeting.This whole program sounds like money laundering, he said.Mazzara went further. His facial expressions, his use of profanity and the way he combed his fingers through his hair made clear he was annoyed.We should look into civil RICO charges, Mazzara said.DHS staff was stunned. The program had been mandated by Congress, yet Homeland Securitys top lawyer was saying it could be investigated under a law reserved for organized crime syndicates.I took it as a threat, one attendee said. It was traumatizing. For many in the office, known internally as CRCL, that moment was a dark forecast of the future. Several said they scrambled to try to fend off the mass firings they were seeing across the rest of President Donald Trumps administration. They policed language that Trumps appointees might not like. They hesitated to open complaints on hot-button cases. They reframed their work as less about protecting civil rights and more about keeping the department out of legal trouble.None of it worked. On March 21, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem shut down the office and fired most of the 150-person staff. As a result, about 600 civil rights abuse investigations were frozen.All the oversight in DHS was eliminated today, one worker texted after the announcement that theyd been fired.Eight former CRCL officials spoke with ProPublica about the dismantling of the office on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution. Their accounts come at a time when the new administrations move to weaken oversight of federal agencies has faced legal challenges in the federal courts. In defending its move to shut CRCL, the administration said it was streamlining operations, as it has done elsewhere. DHS remains committed to civil rights protections but must streamline oversight to remove roadblocks to enforcement, said DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.CRCL staff often functioned as internal adversaries to slow down operations, McLaughlin added. She did not address questions from ProPublica about the February meeting. Mazzara and Schutt did not reply to requests for comment.The offices closure strips Homeland Security of a key internal check and balance, analysts and former staff say, as the Trump administration morphs the agency into a mass-deportation machine. The civil rights team served as a deterrent to border patrol and immigration agents who didnt want the hassle and paperwork of an investigation, staff said, and its closure signals that rights violations, including those against U.S. citizens, could go unchecked.The office processed more than 3,000 complaints in fiscal year 2023 on everything from disabled detainees being unable to access medical care to abuses of power at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and reports of rape at its detention centers. For instance, following reports that ICE had performed facial recognition searches on millions of Maryland drivers, a CRCL investigation led the agency to agree to new oversight; case details have been removed from the DHS website but are available in the internet archive. The office also reported to Congress that it had investigated and confirmed allegations that a child, a U.S. citizen traveling without her parents between Mexico and California, had been sexually abused by Customs and Border Protection agents during a strip search.Those cases would have gone nowhere without CRCL, its former staffers said.Nobody knows where to go without CRCL, and thats the point, a senior official said. Speaking of the administration, the official went on, They dont want oversight. They dont care about civil rights and civil liberties.The CRCL staff, most of them lawyers, emphasized that their work is not politically motivated, nor is it limited to immigration issues. For instance, sources said the office was investigating allegations that disaster aid workers with the Federal Emergency Management Agency had skipped over houses that displayed signs supporting Trump during the 2024 election.The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties touches on everyone, one fired employee said. Theres this perception that were only focused on immigrants, and thats just not true.Uncertainty and PanicThe final days of the civil rights office unfolded in a cloud of uncertainty and panic, as with other federal offices getting RIFd, the Beltway verb for the governments reduction in force.Staff members described the weeks before the shutdown as a whittling away of their work. Dozens of investigative memos posted online in a transparency initiative? Deleted from the site. The eight-person team on racial equity issues? Immediately placed on leave. Travel funds to check conditions at detention centers? Reduced to $1.As fear intensified that the civil rights office would be dismantled, staff tried to lie low. Leaders told staff to stop launching investigations that came from media reports, previously a common avenue for inquiries. Now, only official complaints from the public would be considered.Staff was particularly frustrated that under this new mandate it couldnt open an official investigation into the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and legal resident who was arrested for participating in protests against Israels war in Gaza. CRCL staff was unable to open an investigation into Mahmoud Khalils arrest after they were told to stop launching investigations that came from media reports. (Bing Guan/The New York Times/Redux) With dozens of employees spread across branches or working remotely, many civil rights staffers had never met their colleagues until the Trump administrations return-to-office order forced them to come in five days a week. By early March, when reality had sunk in that their jobs were likely to be eliminated, they began quietly organizing, setting up encrypted Signal chat groups and sharing updates on lawsuits filed by government workers in other agencies.Its inspiring how federal employees are pushing back and connecting, one worker said.Beyond Trumps mandate to remove all references to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, leaders told staff to omit from memos words such as however, which might sound combative, or stakeholders, which came across as too warm and fuzzy.Daily life was one miserable assignment after the next, a staffer said. The orders coming down from Trump appointees were intended to basically tell us how to undo your office.In what would be the last days of the office, the atmosphere was chilling and intimidating. Some personnel froze, too afraid to make recommendations, while others risked filing new investigations in final acts of defiance.When the news came on a Friday that they were all being fired, civil rights staff were told they couldnt issue any out-of-office reply, one former senior official said.They are still technically employees, on paid leave until May 23. Many have banded together and are exploring legal remedies to get their jobs back. In the interim, if complaints are coming in, none of the professionals trained to receive them are around.Whats Been LostDays after the meeting in which allegations of money laundering and organized crime were loosely thrown at CRCL employees, the program in question was shut down. That effort had essentially earmarked money to local charities to provide nonviolent immigrants with case workers who connect them to services such as human trafficking screening and information on U.S. law. Created by Congress in 2021, the goal was to keep immigrants showing up to court.Now, Trumps DHS is suggesting the case worker program is somehow involved in human smuggling. Erol Kekic, a spokesperson for the charity the federal government hired to administer funds in that program, said Church World Services received a weirdly worded letter that baffled the organizations attorneys.They said there could be potential human trafficking, he said, referring to DHS. But they didnt accuse us directly of it.The nonprofit is working on its response, he said.Elsewhere, the absence of Homeland Securitys civil rights oversight is already reverberating.With their office closed, CRCL staff now fear the hypotheticals: At ports of entry, Americans Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizure are relaxed; if CBP abuses its power to root through phones and laptops, who will investigate? And if DHS began arresting U.S. citizens for First Amendment protected speech? Their office would have been the first line of defense.As an example of cases falling through the cracks, CRCL staff told ProPublica they had recommended an investigation into the deportation of a Lebanese professor at Brown University who was in the country on a valid work visa. Federal prosecutors said in court she was detained at an airport in Boston in connection with sympathetic photos and videos on her phone of leaders of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Reuters reported she told border authorities she did not support Hezbollah but admired the groups deceased leader Hassan Nasrallah for religious reasons.Staff also wanted to look into the case of a 10-year-old girl recovering from brain cancer who, despite being a U.S. citizen, was deported to Mexico along with her parents when they hit an immigration checkpoint as they rushed to an emergency medical visit.In Colorado, immigration attorney Laura Lunn routinely filed complaints with CRCL, saying pleas with ICE officials at its Aurora detention center were often ignored. Those complaints to CRCL have stopped her clients from being illegally deported, she said, or gotten emergency gynecological care for a woman who had been raped just before being detained.But now, she asks, Who do I even go to when there are illegal things happening?Lunns group, the Rocky Mountain Immigration Advocacy Network, has also joined in large group complaints about inadequate medical care, COVID-19 isolation policies and access to medical care for a pod of transgender inmates.Shes among those trying to find clients who were housed in the Aurora facility but have mysteriously disappeared. Her clients had pending proceedings, she said, yet were summarily removed, something shed never seen in 15 years of immigration law.Ordinarily, I would file a CRCL complaint. At this moment, we dont have anyone to file a complaint to, Lunn said.That sort of mass deportation is something CRCL would have inspected. In fact, staff members said they had just launched a review into Trumps increased use of Guantanamo Bay to detain migrants, an inquiry which now appears to have vanished. A new camp site where the Trump administration plans to house thousands of undocumented migrants at Guantnamo Bay, seen in February 2025. A recent CRCL review of the administrations use of Guantanamo Bay has vanished. (Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux) In New Mexico, immigration lawyer Sophia Genovese said shes filed more than 100 CRCL complaints, helping her secure medical care and other services for sick and disabled people.She said she has several pending complaints, including one about a detainee who has stomach cancer but cant get medication stronger than ibuprofen and another involving an HIV-positive patient who hasnt been able to see a doctor.CRCL was one of the very few tools we had to check ICE, to hold ICE accountable, Genovese said. Now you see them speeding to complete authoritarianism.

by Jesse Eisinger ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. In his Rose Garden speech launching a global trade war by announcing the most sweeping tariffs in modern history, President Donald Trump bestowed a history lesson on his audience that diverged from the factual record: Then in 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government. Then in 1929, it all came to a very abrupt end with the Great Depression, and it would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy; it would have been a much different story.So why did we institute an income tax? Were there any humans who knew what the reasoning was? And did the actions of 1913 lead to the Great Depression in 1929?There is a clear consensus among historians on these points. No, the income tax was not a mistake. But it was something stranger: both a 40-year struggle and an accident.In 1913, the states ratified the 16th Amendment, which gave the federal government the power to collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived.This was not the first income tax effort, however.For a few short years during and after the Civil War, the United States imposed its first tax on income to help fund the massive costs of the war. Placed on relatively high incomes but only collecting a modest percentage, it was cast as both a way to generate needed revenue and a way to maintain fairness.Yes, thats right, one of the chief selling points of taxing income was that it was a way of achieving equity in the burdens of the war. Responding to allegations that only poor men were fighting and dying, President Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Party made sure the law required that the taxes people paid would be publicly disclosed. Unsurprisingly, the wealthy men of the dawning Gilded Age did not like seeing their tax information in the pages of The New York Times. Wealthy interests forced a repeal of the income tax in 1871, and the federal government returned to funding itself with proceeds from user fees and tariffs. Efforts to rein in the rich persisted, however. Congress moved in 1894 to reintroduce an income tax. The populist Nebraskan politician William Jennings Bryan gave a famous speech on the floor of Congress. Responding to the argument that the wealthy would leave America if they had to pay such a tax, then proposed as 2% on the top incomes, he said:Of all the mean men I have ever known, I have never known one so mean that I would be willing to say of him that his patriotism was less than 2 per cent deep. If some of our best people prefer to leave the country rather than pay a tax of 2 per cent, God pity the worst.Congress passed the law. One year later, however, the Supreme Court controversially rejected it, 5-4, in the case of Pollock v. Farmers Loan and Trust Company. The party of Lincoln, now dominated by wealthy Northeastern interests, celebrated. Its 1894 platform had declared that an income tax will bring odium on any party blind enough to support it and predicted that partys funeral. Populists like Bryan didnt give up. A young Democratic congressman from Tennessee named Cordell Hull said in his maiden speech on the floor in 1908, in which he proposed passing another income tax, that he was willing to risk the odium and the funeral.Hulls effort didnt gather much momentum that time, but he didnt give up. He obsessively talked with anyone and everyone about an income tax, so much so that when leaders of his own party saw him approaching, they would turn and walk in another direction, he later recalled. Soon he would succeed, but only thanks to the help of the party that was against the income tax the Republicans.In 1909, the country was facing a severe drop in federal revenue and a widening deficit after the financial panic of 1907, which had ended only thanks to a bailout led by J.P. Morgan, the most powerful banker of the age. At the same time, with new responsibilities like trying to keep food and medicines safe and maintaining a growing empire abroad, the federal governments needs were exploding. A few years earlier, Congress had allocated $1 billion in spending for the first time ever (about $30 billion in todays dollars).To address these issues, the Republican party turned to tariffs. Tariffs not only remained the cornerstone of Republican economic policy, they were also the key to the partys political power. Each time a new tariff bill came up for consideration was like throwing bananas in a cage of monkeys, economist Henry George said. Lobbyists from every corner of American industry descended on the capital to push for lower imposts on their companies and, if possible, to have them raised on someone else. Tariffs and levies on things like tobacco and alcohol were deeply unpopular with the public. They were regressive, costing working people a far greater percentage of their income than the rich. In one of his speeches, Hull attacked the new dominant class of oligarchs: The world has never seen such colossal fortunes as we behold in the present age ... the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, and the Rockefellers, with their aggregated billions of hoarded wealth.Hull said, It would seem that this class of people consider themselves almost immune from any kind of taxation. He closed a speech with a warning to his congressional colleagues: Public sentiment is becoming aroused.In Washington, lawmakers had a bounty of novel ideas for raising funds. Some members of Congress suggested an inheritance tax, others a corporate profits tax, and still others wanted some version of a stamp tax on commercial documents. As president, Theodore Roosevelt supported an income tax, though he didnt do much to push it legislatively. Most Republican senators, many of whom were millionaires themselves, had mild aversions to some of the proposals and a particular loathing for the income tax.Nelson Aldrich, the Senate majority leader from Rhode Island, a millionaire and the father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr., was arguably the most powerful politician in the country at the time. Teddy Roosevelt nicknamed him the King Pin. In 1909, Aldrich was trying to pass a new tariff bill. Hulls Democrats posed a problem for him, but not the only one. He also faced a rebellious faction within his own party, the progressive Republicans. These were largely Midwestern and Western leaders who argued for what they described as working peoples interests, as well as reforms to improve public safety and the strengthening of labor unions. They also supported an income tax.Aldrich tried a series of legislative maneuvers to delay votes on anything about the income tax. The proponents were undeterred, and, as a next step, he and then-President William Taft put their weight behind a corporate income tax, contending that it would be a lesser evil than a personal income tax. The wealthy did not like it, but it passed surprisingly easily, leaving Republicans hopeful the income tax was dead. In a private letter to a friend, the president explained, A good many people who are attacking [the corporate income tax] now will be glad to use it as a means of preventing the income tax later on.Taft proved to be overly optimistic. Supporters of the income tax kept pushing, seeking to raise money directly from the wealthy. A debate ensued about whether Congress could simply pass an income tax law or, since the Supreme Court had struck one down recently, whether a constitutional amendment was needed. Hull pointed out that the makeup of the court had changed and argued that a law could now pass muster with the justices. Then, one progressive Republican proposed an income tax amendment.Aldrich pounced on what he perceived as his opponents misstep. He threw his support to the measure as a means of placating the advocates for a national income tax. In exchange, enough lawmakers agreed to back Aldrichs tariff bill.Aldrich, of course, did not support the income tax amendment, but he believed it was too radical to be ratified by three-fourths of the states, the minimum required by the Constitution. Leading politicians assumed that the defeat of the amendment would likely kill the income tax for years, if not a generation.Hull agreed with that analysis and was despondent. It has long been understood that the Republicans never support a worthy cause until forced by public sentiment. Too stupid to devise and enact wholesome laws and to formulate and execute sound administrative policies, this piratical organization is wont to wait until Democrats point the way, he said in a speech on the floor.And so Nelson Aldrich, the senator who had done more than almost any other American politician in history to protect the wealthy, introduced what would turn out to be an historic measure to amend the Constitution and explicitly allow income taxes on the rich. A few days later, with little fanfare, the amendment passed the Senate by a unanimous vote of 77-0.Soon after, Congress passed the Payne-Aldrich Tariff bill, giving Aldrich his victory.But Aldrich had miscalculated and Hull had been too gloomy. After a slow start for the ratification movement, political winds shifted and enough states came around. The amendment was ratified four years later. Then it fell to Hull to almost singlehandedly write what became the 1913 income tax law. Hulls plan proved prescient. He had foreseen that if the United States ever became entangled in a war that involved attacks on shipping, imports would dry up and tariff revenue would plummet. When the United States joined the war against Germany in 1917, Congress had to raise income tax rates to generate the money needed to pay for the expense of sending soldiers to Europe.So no, President Trump, the origins of the income tax are not lost to history.But did the tax cause the Great Depression 16 years after its enactment, as Trump has argued? No serious economist thinks so. Heres one data point: In the 1920s, Republicans regained the presidency. Andrew Mellon, one of the richest men in the country, became Treasury secretary. One of the main causes he worked for was lowering income taxes, and the lead-up to the worst economic calamity of the 20th century was actually marked by a decline in those tax rates.The evidence is similarly clear on Trumps argument that continued reliance on tariffs to fund the government would have averted the Great Depression. In June of 1930, President Herbert Hoover signed into law the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, significantly raising taxes on imported goods in hopes of boosting American industries and increasing domestic employment. Hoover brushed aside the arguments of his own economists who warned that other nations would respond with their own tariffs, touching off a trade war in which every country would lose.Economists now agree that Hoovers tariffs deepened the economic downturn that had begun with the 1929 stockmarket crash. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gradually reduced the tariffs during his presidency, and his Democratic and Republican successors continued that pattern well into the 21st century.Todays situation has similarities to the pre-income-tax years. The American economy is again marked by wealth inequality, with the largest gap between rich and poor weve seen since the Gilded Age. We are having debates about how to reduce the federal deficit, about how to fairly and adequately tax the rich and about what the appropriate size of government would be. Last week, Trump reached back in history to restore U.S. tariffs to the Smoot-Hawley levels, triggering a global selloff in stock markets around the world. Correction April 8, 2025: This story originally incorrectly identified William Jennings Bryan as a Kansan politician. He represented Nebraska.

by Doug Bock Clark ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. Members of a bipartisan committee of North Carolina senators are asking the state auditor to investigate how money intended to stop human trafficking had been spent and managed, in response to ProPublicas reporting.ProPublica had reported how the Republican-dominated legislature had directed $15 million for sexual abuse survivors away from Democratic-led agencies that had long overseen such money, sending it to a tiny commission in the Republican-helmed state court system. The Human Trafficking Commission struggled to disburse the funds in a timely manner, according to its former grants administrator. Staffers at 18 crisis centers told ProPublica payments were delayed for months and led to cuts, some of which continue to limit urgent, potentially lifesaving services.It sounds like something that we can definitely put the auditor on, said Sen. Steve Jarvis, a Republican co-chair of the Committee on Regulatory Reform, after a Democratic senator highlighted ProPublicas reporting in a meeting last week. The committee subsequently advanced a bill to empower the state auditor to create a team to investigate waste, fraud and inefficiency in state spending and report to lawmakers what can be cut. The DAVE Act named for Republican State Auditor Dave Boliek would create under him the Division of Accountability, Value and Efficiency. This division has been widely described as North Carolinas version of the federal Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.Boliek told the senators that he was moving quickly to respond to ProPublicas reporting. Boliek said that he had read the article and put it on his teams whiteboard, and that he had established a rapid response team as a way for us to be proactively reactive even before the division is officially established. Boliek did not respond to questions about the nature and timing of the investigation sent to his office.Sen. Woodson Bradley, a Democratic member of the committee, said in the meeting that as a survivor of domestic violence, this story broke my heart. It broke my trust. Bradley said she had heard from numerous survivors across the state about the story.So Im asking publicly, before the DAVE Act goes to the Senate floor, to explain to all of North Carolina what went wrong here? How can we fix this? Bradley said, leading to the promises from the Republican senator and state auditor to look into the Human Trafficking Commission.Bradley said that after the meeting, The auditor gave me personal assurances that he or his team would look into this. Though the existence of such investigations is rarely made public, I followed up to ask for a formal investigation, and Im waiting for written confirmation.In the meeting, Bradley also raised concerns that the DAVE Act could be politicized, with investigations targeting agencies led by Democrats or serving them, as Democrats have accused DOGE of doing. She argued that the redirection of the $15 million to the Human Trafficking Commission had happened through a partisan maneuver in a past state budget and worried that the DAVE Act could be similarly skewed. It needs to be an honest and bipartisan review, Bradley said.Boliek promised to do his job in a nonpartisan way thats data-centric and based on what were actually getting as a return on investment on taxpayer dollars.In addition to the $15 million redirected to the Human Trafficking Commission, lawmakers gave the commission additional money specifically for faith-based groups. The group that received the most money from the commission $640,000 had been created by the former head of the state GOP about two months before it was named in the 2021 budget. In October 2024, the group wrote in its quarterly report to the court system that it had assisted only four victims, and its executive director said that at least three of those women had been given only food and gas and no long-term services. The executive director told ProPublica that as of March 2025 the group had helped about two dozen victims.A spokesperson for the court system declined to comment for this article, pointing ProPublica to its past statements.Our experience is that support for fighting human trafficking is nonpartisan in the legislature, the spokesperson had previously told ProPublica, as it is in the Judicial Branch.After the meeting, Jarvis told ProPublica that the DAVE Act was meant to address situations exactly like those with the Human Trafficking Commission.The goal of the DAVE division, Jarvis said, would be to get down into the details of how efficiently agencies are working to make sure they are operating the right way.

by Mark Olalde ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. President Donald Trumps executive orders shrinking the federal workforce make a notable exception for public safety staff, including those who fight wildland fires. But ongoing cuts, funding freezes and hiring pauses have weakened the nations already strained firefighting force by hitting support staff who play crucial roles in preventing and battling blazes.Most notably, about 700 Forest Service employees terminated in mid-Februarys Valentines Day massacre are red-card-carrying staffers, an agency spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica. These workers hold other full-time jobs in the agency, but theyve been trained to aid firefighting crews, such as by providing logistical support during blazes. They also assist with prescribed burns, which reduce flammable vegetation and prevent bigger fires, but the burns can only move forward if theres a certain number of staff available to contain them. (Non-firefighting employees without a red card cannot perform such tasks.)Red-card-carrying employees are the backbone of the firefighting force, and their loss will have a significant impact, said Frank Beum, a board member of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees who spent more than four decades with the agency and ran the Rocky Mountain Region. There are not enough primary firefighters to do the full job that needs to be done when we have a high fire season. ProPublica spoke to employees across the Forest Service which manages an area of land nearly twice the size of California including staff working in firefighting, facilities, timber sales and other roles, to learn how sweeping personnel changes are affecting the agencys ability to function. The employees said cuts, which have hit the agencys recreation, wildlife, IT and other divisions, show the Trump administration is shifting the agencys focus away from environmental stewardship and toward industry and firefighting.But notwithstanding Trumps stated guardrails, the cuts have affected the Forest Services more than 10,000-person-strong firefighting force. Hiring has slowed as there are fewer employees to get new workers up to speed and people are confused about which job titles can be hired. Other cuts have led to the cancellation of some training programs and prescribed burns.Its all really muddled in chaos, which is sort of the point, one Forest Service employee told ProPublica.This agency is no longer serving its mission, another added.The employees asked not to be named for fear of retribution. Get in TouchProPublica is reporting on the federal public lands grazing program. Do you work on grazing in the Forest Service? Reach out directly via Signal to Mark_Olalde.13 or email mark.olalde@propublica.org. Or find details on more ways to send us tips securely. The Forest Service did not respond to questions about the impact of cuts other than to clarify the number of terminated employees. The Forest Service spokesperson said about 2,000 probationary employees typically new staff and those who were recently promoted, groups that have fewer workplace protections were fired in February. Others with knowledge of the terminations, including a representative of a federal union and a Senate staffer, said the original number of terminated employees was 3,400 but that decreased, likely as workers were brought back in divisions such as timber sales.The White House and a representative from the Department of Government Efficiency did not respond to requests for comment.In early March, an independent federal board that reviews employees complaints compelled the Department of Agriculture, the Forest Services parent department, to reinstate more than 5,700 terminated probationary employees for 45 days. During their first weeks back on the payroll, many, including Forest Service personnel, were put on paid administrative leave and given no work.The administration and DOGE continue working toward layoffs amid court challenges to their moves. Word circulated throughout the Forest Service in March that departmental leadership had compiled lists containing the names of thousands of additional Forest Service employees who could be soon laid off, according to some workers.Additionally, understaffing in the agencys information technology unit is threatening firefighting operations, according to an agency employee. In December, the branch chief overseeing IT for the agencys fire and aviation division left the job. The Department of Agriculture posted the job opening, describing the division as providing support to the interagency wildland fire communitys technical needs. This includes overseeing software that firefighting crews use to request equipment everything from fire-resistant clothing to hoses from the agencys warehouses so first responders have uninterrupted access to lifesaving equipment.The day after Trumps inauguration, the Department of Agriculture removed the IT job posting. The position remains unfilled, according to an employee with knowledge of the situation.The hiring of new firefighters has also bogged down amid the deluge of sometimes-conflicting orders from the administration and DOGE, Forest Service staffers said.We are really, really behind onboarding our employees right now, a Forest Service firefighter told ProPublica.The staffing issues exacerbate challenges that predate the second Trump administration. To address a massive budget shortfall, the Forest Service under President Joe Biden last year paused the hiring of seasonal workers, except those working on wildfires. (Firefighters did see a permanent pay increase codified by Congress in its recently approved spending bill.)Still, many permanent employees, including many firefighters, work on a seasonal basis and are placed on an unpaid status for several months each year when there is less work. Uncertainty within the federal government has led many of these employees to give up on government work and look elsewhere.Some of our people have taken other jobs, one Forest Service employee told ProPublica. People arent going to wait around.Cuts to the agencys legal department will also curb its ability to care for the nations forests and fight wildfires, an employee told ProPublica. Large prescribed burns and other vegetation-removal projects require environmental review, a process that is often targeted with lawsuits, including by green groups concerned that the efforts go too far in removing trees.A smaller legal staff could lead to fewer prescribed burns, increasing the risk of catastrophic fires, according to a lawyer for the Department of Agriculture who worked on Forest Service projects. The lawyer was fired in the mid-February purge of probationary employees.Every time we lose a case out West, it means the Forest Service cant do a project, at least temporarily, the lawyer said.Theyre going to get sued more, and theyre going to lose more, said the lawyer, who was reinstated in March following the board ruling that the Department of Agricultures mass firings were illegal.The employee received back pay but was immediately put on administrative leave. Because of the cuts to support staff, it was several weeks before many of the returning employees were reissued government laptops and badges and allowed to do any work.Government efficiency at its finest, the lawyer said.

by Dave Altimari and Ginny Monk, The Connecticut Mirror This article was produced for ProPublicas Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Connecticut Mirror. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. This year, the head of Connecticuts Department of Motor Vehicles made a startling public admission, telling lawmakers that the agency, which regulates the towing industry, has never enforced a century-old law meant to protect drivers whose cars are towed.Under that law, if vehicle owners dont reclaim their towed cars or cant afford the fees, towing companies can sell them, but they are required to hold onto the proceeds for a year so the vehicle owner can claim the money. Tow companies are entitled to subtract their fees. But, even if the owner still doesnt come forward, the companies arent supposed to pocket the profits and must turn over any remaining money to the state.DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera told lawmakers the agency had never set up a process to accept deposits and wasnt tracking whether any money had come in.In fact, the DMV commissioner said he wasnt aware of that part of the statute until The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica brought it to his attention last fall as part of an investigation into how Connecticuts laws favor towing companies at the expense of drivers. After the storys publication, the state treasurers office audited its deposits and determined that no tow truck company or the DMV had ever turned over money from sales in the history of the law.In a statement, Guerrera said, This law has been in effect since the 1930s, yet unfortunately, there has never been a system in place to effectively monitor its implementation. Tony Guerrera, the commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles, told lawmakers the state doesnt have a system to ensure that towing companies turn over the unclaimed profits from car sales. (Shahrzad Rasekh/The Connecticut Mirror) This failure has hurt both vehicle owners and the state itself: Owners dont have the opportunity to get money back that the law says should be theirs, and the state is missing out on both the potential payments and any interest or investment income that would accrue from the deposits.The unenforced law is another example of how the DMV has failed to oversee the towing industry, which sells thousands of cars following tows each year. In an extreme case, reported by the news organizations last month, a DMV employee was found to be part of a scheme to undervalue cars and sell them for thousands in profit, according to an internal DMV investigation. The employee denied he did anything wrong and still works at the DMV. In another, criminal court records show, a Norwalk towing company owner was caught driving a Mercedes-Benz he had towed, racking up nearly 6,000 miles in 22 months. The tower was charged with larceny and participated in a diversion program, after which his record was expunged. CT Mirror and ProPublica have spoken to dozens of people who had their cars towed and never saw them again. Many said they werent notified that their cars would be sold.Legislators are now aiming to create a system to make sure car owners or eventually the state get that money. A wide-ranging bill to overhaul the entire towing statute would require towing companies to submit documentation to the DMV of the sale price, any towing and storage fees they incurred and information on the vehicle and its owner within 15 days of a sale.The bill would also reform the process of escheating, or remitting money to the state. After reviewing the sale document, the DMV would require the tower to send a certified letter notifying the owner or lienholder of the sales proceeds. Instead of the general fund, leftover money would be sent to the states unclaimed property fund and appear on a publicly posted list.Guerrera said the DMV recently added more staff charged with overseeing the sales system and added a section to its website this year to ensure tow companies are aware of the requirement to turn money over to the state.During an interview late last year, Guerrera said that implementing the process wasnt the DMVs responsibility and that doing so was up to the state treasurers office. But the treasurer pushed back on that in a statement, saying it fell under DMV rules. After the initial CT Mirror and ProPublica story was published, Guerrera took more ownership.I am glad this has been brought to my attention and I am more than prepared to address this issue, ensuring that it is now being handled properly and in accordance with its intended purposes, he said in a statement.The Transportation Committee approved the bill on March 19, sending it to the House. Some lawmakers opposed it, arguing the bill was intended to target a few bad apples but adds unnecessary regulations on all towing companies.House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, said he expects lots of debate as the bill winds its way through the legislature, but he said the escheating process needs to be addressed.Theres got to be some accountability and transparency on that for sure, Ritter said. This is peoples property.Timothy Vibert, president of Towing and Recovery Professionals of Connecticut, said a past association president asked DMV officials about how to return funds to the state but received no answers.He said tow companies rarely make back their towing and storage fees when they sell cars and questioned why any tower would ever give the state money.There might have been a little bit of a windfall with one car or another, but theres been a whole lot of losers, so why does the state get a chance to take it? asked Vibert, who owns Farmington Motor Sports. He added that many towers would rather return the cars.What the towers are doing is keeping those cars and then just getting rid of them for $500 or $600, Vibert added. So were keeping the cars for, Im going to guess 45 days, maybe sometimes 50, depending on the paperwork, and then were just disposing of them because theyre not worth anything.House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, said he thinks there usually isnt money left over after fees. I think, frankly, what usually happens is the tow companies wait for the towing and storage fees to exceed the value, so it never ends up going to the state or back to the individual, he said.Kristianne Hall experienced the fees piling up firsthand while she was bartending in downtown New Haven. The job posed a delicate balance. She had to work her shift and offer sufficient service to get good tips. But she also had to keep the parking meter fed. There were a few times Hall couldnt get to the meter, and parking tickets stacked up. Kristianne Hall said she should have received thousands of dollars after her car was towed and sold, but she never got anything. (Octavio Jones for ProPublica) In 2015, her car got booted and then towed when she couldnt afford to pay the $500 to get the device taken off. By the time she had that money saved, she said, the towing company quoted her $2,000 to get the vehicle back from its lot.Hall couldnt afford that and never saw the car again. She estimated the 2008 Chevrolet Aveo was worth about $5,000, which is supported by a Kelley Blue Book report, thousands more than what the towing company told her shed need to pay to get it back.Why was I not entitled to the rest of that money if I own that car outright? she asked.After the tow, Hall struggled to get to and from work. She had to take an Uber home because the city bus stopped running before her shifts ended. She quickly ran low on money and had to turn to her roommates to help her pay bills before she eventually moved in with her grandparents in Florida.I felt like a failure because I couldnt hack it, Hall said. It was a really, really hard and almost traumatic situation. Has Your Car Been Towed in Connecticut? Share Your Story and Help Us Investigate. Asia Fields contributed reporting.

by Megan OMatz ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. When Susan Crawford, Wisconsins newly elected Supreme Court justice, took the stage in Madison on Tuesday night to claim victory, four women flanked her, beaming, hands on one anothers shoulders. One had her fist raised in triumph.The supporters were four justices now serving on the states Supreme Court, representing the courts liberal faction. Pictures and video of the moment captured the overt display of partisanship in a contest for the states highest court.Missing from the scene: the courts three conservative leaning justices. About 60 miles east, one of them, Rebecca Bradley, joined the election event of the opposing candidate, former Republican Attorney Gen. Brad Schimel, where she expressed disappointment that he lost and blamed liberals for politicizing the court. I also think the way Judge Crawford ran her race was disgusting, Bradley said, according to the news site The Bulwark. Bradley accused the Democratic Party of buying another justice.Bradley added: It needs to stop. Otherwise, there is no point in having a court. This is what the Legislature is supposed to do, to make political decisions based on policy. Thats not what a courts supposed to do, and unfortunately, were going to see this happening for at least the next several years.Officially the Supreme Court race was nonpartisan. Crawford and Schimel did not run with an R or D beside their name. Wisconsin judges take an oath to be faithful to the state constitution, to administer justice without favoritism and to act impartially.But the spectacularly high-profile Wisconsin contest was undeniably political. The nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice estimated the spending topped $100 million making it the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history. Large sums came from political action committees and shadowy third-party groups that funneled money into TV ads, mailers, canvassing and other assistance.President Donald Trump, taking a keen interest in the race, endorsed Schimel and held a tele-rally for him. His close adviser, billionaire Elon Musk, funneled roughly $25 million into the race, via his super PAC, an associated dark-money entity and direct party donations. The outlays included offers to pay Schimel volunteers $50 for every photo of a voter outside a polling station, as well as million-dollar checks as prizes to three supporters. At one point in the race, Schimel posed for photos in front of a giant inflatable likeness of Trump.On the other side, the Democratic Party endorsed Crawford and steered over $11 million to her campaign from contributions made to the party by donors that included billionaires such as George Soros and Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. On social media in the waning days of the campaign, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton urged support for Crawford. Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler attended Crawfords victory party in Madison.Wisconsins raw partisan display reflects a growing focus on the importance of these courts in shaping policy especially on hot-button issues like abortion, redistricting and voting rights. At the same time, it feeds a growing concern nationally about the independence of state high courts. Some government watchdogs worry that the blatant partisanship around who serves on these courts is increasing distrust by the public in judicial decisions, jeopardizing the system of checks and balances needed in a functioning democracy.The targeting of state supreme courts by special interests and ultrawealthy individuals, some court observers say, can leave the public with the impression that justices are no different than any senator or representative or governor: devoted to serving their political allies. At that point, will court orders no longer carry the moral weight and respect needed to carry them out?At the national level, a federal judge is considering whether the Trump administration defied a court order to halt planes deporting immigrants to a prison in El Salvador, prompting Trump to call for the judges impeachment. In Wisconsin, meanwhile, Musk exhorted voters to sign a petition against activist judges.Especially at this moment, when courts are being tested and are serving as a crucial bulwark in our democracy, it is very important that the public be able to trust them and keep demanding that other elected officials follow court decisions, said Douglas Keith, senior counsel for the Brennan Center, a policy institute that studies judicial elections and advocates for a fair and independent judiciary.Similar to how U.S. Supreme Court nominations have been subject to political maneuvering, state courts in recent years have seen battles over ideological control. Billionaire Elon Musk, right, spent roughly $25 million in an attempt to get former Republican Attorney Gen. Brad Schimel elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, including handing out million-dollar checks to supporters. (Scott Olson/Getty Images) In North Carolina, where justices run under partisan labels, the Republican-led Supreme Court blocked the certification of a Democrat elected to the bench in November, while the GOP candidate challenges the validity of more than 60,000 ballots cast in the race. On Friday, the states lower court of appeals, in a 2-1 decision led by Republicans, ordered those voters to provide their drivers license or Social Security number within 15 days to demonstrate their eligibility to vote. Democrats vowed to challenge the ruling in front of the state Supreme Court.And in Iowa, after the Supreme Court in 2018 ruled that the state constitution protected the right to an abortion, the Legislature changed who can serve on the states judicial nominating commission. New justices, appointed by the states Republican governor, in 2022 reconsidered the abortion issue and reversed course, also citing the constitution.The debate over money in Wisconsins state Supreme Court races goes back more than 15 years, when the state enacted public financing for such contests to limit spending. But that did not last long. Republicans threw out spending reforms in 2015, and the money devoted to these races has grown exponentially.In Wisconsin eight years ago, a group of 54 retired judges were so worried about the influence of money on the work of the judiciary that they petitioned the Wisconsin Supreme Court. They sought to amend the Code of Judicial Conduct to require parties in lawsuits to disclose campaign contributions over $250 and impose recusal standards in cases involving sizable donations.As money in elections becomes more predominant, citizens rightfully ask whether justice is for sale, the petition stated.The state Supreme Court voted 5-2 to deny the petition, with conservatives, including current Justices Annette Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley, lined up against it on constitutional grounds.Michael Kang, a professor at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, has studied the effect of campaign donations on state supreme court decisions and found that judges elected in competitive races were more likely to rule in favor of business litigants as the amount of campaign donations they received from corporate interests increased. His research, over many years, also found that contributions from political parties correlated with subsequent judicial voting in election disputes over issues such as ballot counting or candidate eligibility.But Kangs work went further by examining judges barred from running again because of mandatory retirement ages. He found that the effect of money drops off for lame duck judges who are spared from having to raise money to run again.You can go a long way toward addressing the role of money, even with judicial elections, by giving judges one long term, but they're not eligible for reelection at the end, he said at a recent panel discussion. And that, to an important degree, ought to reduce the influence of money.In Wisconsin, Crawfords victory cements liberal control of the court for the next three years.Beside her on stage in Madison were liberal justices: Jill Karofsky, Rebecca Dallet, Ann Walsh Bradley, who is retiring, and Janet Protasiewicz, who was elected in 2023 with the help of $10 million from the Democratic Party. That contest broke spending records, at roughly $56 million, and shifted the balance of the court to the left after 15 years of conservative dominance.The courts current session ends in June, and Crawfords swearing in will be in August. In the future, the seven-member court is likely to confront issues with huge implications for both parties or their supporters.Crawfords victory signals that Wisconsin likely will continue to permit access to abortion, which now is legal up to 20 weeks in the pregnancy. Anti-abortion advocates backed Schimel, and had he won, it was assumed that Wisconsin could revert to an 1849 law that outlawed most abortions. Over a decade ago, as a county district attorney, he signed on to a legal white paper advocating support for the 1849 provision, which does not allow for exceptions in the case of rape or incest or protecting the mothers health. Crawford, as a private attorney, fought for abortion rights.Democrats at some point are widely expected to bring another lawsuit challenging the states gerrymandered congressional maps. Wisconsin voters are evenly divided politically, but representation in the U.S. House is skewed to favor the GOP. Six seats are held by Republicans and two by Democrats. Last year, the liberal-controlled court didnt fall in lockstep with some expectations about its political leanings, handing Republicans a small victory in declining to consider a Democratic lawsuit challenging those maps.In other states, justices who once could largely toil above the political fray have paid a political price for their decisions.In Ohio in 2022, Republican lawmakers briefly toyed with impeaching Chief Justice Maureen OConnor, a fellow Republican, after she sided with three Democrats in repeatedly overturning the states legislative maps, which had been drawn by Republicans. She later retired.In Oklahoma last November, voters tossed out Yvonne Kauger, who had served over 30 years on the bench. A campaign to remove her and two colleagues, fueled by $2 million in dark money, painted them as too liberal, noting they were appointed by Democratic governors.Is it any surprise all three are activist liberal judges, killing common sense lawsuit reform, adding millions to the cost of doing business, padding the pockets of trial lawyers? one video ad blared.Justices traditionally dont campaign in Oklahoma retention elections, which Kauger told a news outlet left the judges helpless to defend themselves. I am saddened and alarmed that the system is being used to attack the independent judiciary based on dissatisfaction with a few specially selected opinions, she said.In Wisconsin, ads from both sides painted unflattering portraits of the candidates. Crawford was labeled a radical liberal judge who gave a light sentence to a child molester. Schimel was accused of giving plea deals to despicable criminals. Both were attacked for their views on abortion.Musk and Trump, meanwhile, depicted Schimels installment on the court as a vital step in carrying out Trumps agenda and keeping GOP control of Congress.In Green Bay, two days before the election, Musk told supporters the state Supreme Court race is a vote for which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives. Republicans now control the chamber by only 7 votes. Redrawing congressional lines in Wisconsin could make some seats more competitive for Democrats.That is why it is so significant. And whichever party controls the House, you know, it, to a significant degree, controls the country, which then steers the course of Western civilization, Musk told the crowd.In the end, Crawford won with 55% of the vote.Today, Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy, our fair elections, and our Supreme Court, and Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price, Crawford told her supporters. Our courts are not for sale.Retired Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul Pfeifer said he does not like big money in politics at any level, from county commissioner to state Supreme Court. But after decades of wrestling with the issue hes concluded that spending controls are unworkable, as loopholes invariably open.I view it much like a water bed, he said. You push down here and it pops up over there.

by Renee Dudley ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. A few weeks ago, my colleague Doris Burke sent me a story from The New York Times that gave us both deja vu.The piece reported that Starlink, the satellite internet provider operated by Elon Musks SpaceX, had, in the words of Trump administration officials, donated internet service to improve wireless connectivity and cell reception at the White House. The donation puzzled some former officials quoted in the story. But it immediately struck us as the potential Trump-era iteration of a tried-and-true business maneuver wed spent months reporting on last year. In that investigation, we focused on deals between Microsoft and the Biden administration. At the heart of the arrangements was something that most consumers intuitively understand: Free offers usually have a catch.Microsoft began offering the federal government free cybersecurity upgrades and consulting services in 2021, after President Joe Biden pressed tech companies to help bolster the nations cyber defenses. Our investigation revealed that the ostensibly altruistic White House Offer, as it was known inside Microsoft, belied a more complex, profit-driven agenda. The company knew the proverbial catch was that, once the free trial period ended, federal customers who had accepted the offer and installed the upgrades would effectively be locked into keeping them because switching to a competitor at that point would be costly and cumbersome.Former Microsoft employees told me the companys offer was akin to a drug dealer hooking users with free samples. If we give you the crack, and you take the crack, youll enjoy the crack, one said. And then when it comes time for us to take the crack away, your end users will say, Dont take it away from me. And youll be forced to pay me.What Microsoft predicted internally did indeed come to pass. When the free trials ended, vast swaths of the federal government kept the upgrades and began paying the higher subscription fees, unlocking billions in future sales for the company. Microsoft has said all agreements with the government were pursued ethically and in full compliance with federal laws and regulations and that its only goal during this period was to enhance the security posture of federal agencies who were continuously being targeted by sophisticated nation-state threat actors. But experts on government contracting told me the companys maneuvers were legally tenuous. They circumvented the competitive bidding process that is a bedrock of government procurement, shutting rivals out of competition for lucrative federal business and, by extension, stifling innovation in the industry.After reading the Times story about Starlinks donation to the White House, I checked back in with those experts.It doesnt matter if it was Microsoft last year or Starlink today or another company tomorrow, said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School. Anytime youre doing this, its a back door around the competition processes that ensure we have the best goods and services from the best vendors.Typically, in a competitive bidding process, the government solicits proposals from vendors for the goods and services it wants to buy. Those vendors then submit their proposals to the government, which theoretically chooses the best option in terms of quality and cost. Giveaways circumvent that entire process. Yet, to hear Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick tell it, the Trump administration wants to not only normalize such donations but encourage them across Washington.Last month, during an appearance on the Silicon Valley podcast All-In, he floated his concept of a gratis vendor who gives product to the government. In the episode, released just a few days after The New York Times published its Starlink story, Lutnick said such a donor would not have to go through the whole process of becoming a proper vendor because youre giving it to us. Later, he added: You dont have to sign the conflict form and all this stuff because youre not working for the government. Youre just giving stuff to the government. You are literally giving of yourself. Youre not looking for anything. Youre not taking any money.Since President Donald Trump took office in January, Musk, who is classified as an unpaid special government employee, has made a show of providing his services to the president and products from his companies to the government at no cost to the taxpayer. The White House donation was just the latest move. In February, he directed his company SpaceX to ship 4,000 terminals, at no cost, to the Federal Aviation Administration for installation of its Starlink satellite internet service.During our Microsoft investigation, salespeople told me that within the company the explicit end game was converting government users to paid upgraded subscriptions after the free trial and ultimately gaining market share for Azure, its cloud platform. Its unclear what the end game is for Musk and Starlink. Neither responded to emailed questions.Federal law has long attempted to restrict donations to the government, in large part to maintain oversight on spending.At least as far back as the 19th century, executive branch personnel were entering into contracts without seeking the necessary funding from Congress, which was supposed to have the power of the purse. Lawmakers didnt want taxpayers to be on the hook for spending that Congress hadnt appropriated, so they passed the Antideficiency Act, a version of which remains in effect today. One portion restricted voluntary services to guard against a supposed volunteer later demanding government payment.But in 1947, the General Accounting Office (now called the Government Accountability Office), which offers opinions on fiscal laws, made an exemption: Providing what became known as gratuitous services would be allowed as long as the parties agree in writing and in advance that the donor waives payment.Microsoft used that exemption to transfer the consulting services it valued at $150 million to its government customers, entering into so-called gratuitous services agreements. To give away the actual cybersecurity products, the company provided existing federal customers with a 100% discount for up to a year. It is unclear whether gratuitous services agreements were in place for Musks giveaways. The White House and the FAA did not respond to written questions. Neither did SpaceX. An official told The New York Times last month that a lawyer overseeing ethics issues in the White House Counsels Office had vetted the Starlink donation to the White House.For the experts I consulted, the written agreements might help companies comply with the letter of the law, but certainly not with the spirit of it. Just because something is technically legal does not make it right, said Eve Lyon, an attorney who worked for four decades as a procurement specialist in the federal government.The consequences of accepting a giveaway, no matter how its transferred, can be far reaching, Lyon said, and government officials might not grasp the perniciousness at the outset.Tillipman agreed, saying the risk for ballooning obligations is particularly pronounced when it comes to technology and IT. Users become reliant on one provider, leading to vendor lock-in, she said. Its too soon to tell what will come of Starlinks donations, but Microsofts White House Offer provides a preview of whats possible. In line with its goal at the outset, the worlds biggest software company continues to expand its footprint across the federal government while sidestepping competition. A source from last years Microsoft investigation recently called to catch up. He told me that, with the government locked into Microsoft, rivals continue to be shut out of federal contracting opportunities. When I asked for an example, he shared a 2024 document from the Defense Information Systems Agency, or DISA, which handles IT for the Department of Defense. The document described an exception to fair opportunity in the procurement of a variety of new IT services, saying the $5.2 million order will be issued directly to Microsoft Corporation. The justification? Switching from Microsoft to another provider would result in additional time, effort, costs, and performance impacts. DISA did not respond to emailed questions. Doris Burke contributed research.

by Kayla Guo, The Texas Tribune ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues. Attorney General Ken Paxton has spent much of his career, which has taken him to the heights of Republican politics, trailed by a raft of criminal and civil accusations.But in the final days of the Biden administration, The Associated Press reported Thursday, the Justice Department defused the most serious legal threat he faced a federal criminal probe into allegations of corruption by declining to prosecute and effectively ending the investigation.With the investigation over, Paxton has nearly cleared his crowded slate of career-threatening legal battles, just as he gears up for a likely 2026 primary run against U.S. Sen. John Cornyn.The end of this investigation is both politically and personally a huge boon for Ken Paxton, said Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University. Paxton can point to that and say, You see, even under a Democratic administration, they didnt feel that there was anything there that merited moving forward.Two sources familiar with the issue, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, told the AP of the Justice Departments decision, including that it was made while President Joe Biden was still in office. The DOJ did not immediately respond to questions about confirming the AP report. The development extends a multiyear string of legal victories vindicating the once-embattled Republican. It underscores Paxtons durability through all manner of political, personal and legal troubles and helps burnish his reputation among the right wing of his party as a fighter who, like President Donald Trump, has defied numerous efforts by his detractors to take him down.It really sets up those parallels to Trump that will play very well among the Republican primary electorate, Wilson said. Paxton is a political survivor. People have written his obituary a couple of times, and he has really forged this loyal base among the grassroots activists in the Republican Party.Paxtons attorney Dan Cogdell said he learned of the outcome from the AP because the Justice Department never notified him of its decision not to prosecute.The fact that they declined prosecution is not a surprise, Cogdell said. I dont really think they ever had a case to begin with.There was little concern that the case would continue under the Trump administrations Justice Department, given Paxtons close alliance with the president.In January, the Texas Supreme Court tossed the State Bar of Texas lawsuit against Paxton over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election won by Biden.Prosecutors last year dropped felony securities fraud charges against Paxton just three weeks before he was set to face trial, after he agreed to perform 100 hours of community service, take 15 hours of legal ethics courses and pay $271,000 in restitution to those he was accused of defrauding more than a decade ago. The deal ended a nearly nine-year-old felony case that had dogged Paxton since his early days in office. And when the state Legislature sought to impeach him for the same allegations of corruption that spurred the federal investigation, the Texas Senate acquitted him of 16 charges of bribery, abuse of office and obstruction charges that more than 70% of his own party had supported in the House. Paxtons last outstanding legal battle is a whistleblower lawsuit filed against him by four of the former senior aides who reported him to the FBI, who allege that he fired them improperly after they spoke out. The Texas Supreme Court said in November that Paxton would not have to sit for a deposition in the lawsuit another win for the attorney general, who has managed to avoid testifying about the corruption allegations through the civil lawsuit, his impeachment trial and the federal investigation. Paxton last year said he would no longer contest the facts of the case in order to end what he called wasteful litigation and a distraction for his office.The whistleblowers are now waiting on a Travis County district judge to rule on a settlement.DOJ clearly let political cowardice impact its decision. The whistleblowers all strong conservatives did the right thing and continue to stand by their allegations of Paxtons criminal conduct, TJ Turner and Tom Nesbitt, attorneys for some of the whistleblowers, told the AP in a statement. On Thursday, Paxton referenced the end of the federal investigation to take a swing at Cornyn, who has been critical of Paxtons legal controversies and steadfast in his bid for reelection.This former TX Supreme Court Justice and TX Attorney General ignored the rule of law, the Constitution, and innocent until proven guilty while standing with the corrupt Biden DOJ cheering on the bogus witch hunts against both me and President Trump, Paxton posted on social media in reference to Cornyn, adding, Care to comment now, John?In response to an attempt by Paxton to tag Cornyn as insufficiently conservative and supportive of Trump, Cornyn had said, Hard to run from prison, Ken. The likely matchup could prove to be Cornyns toughest primary battle yet as Texas Republican primary voters lurch toward the right and his popularity among GOP voters drops from 2020 highs.Among Republican-identifying voters, according to polling by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, Cornyn has a 49% approval rating, compared to Paxtons 62% approval rating. Texas other senator, Ted Cruz, meanwhile, has an approval rating of 78% among Republicans.Still, Cornyn, who has trounced past challengers, is a prodigious fundraiser and wields widespread influence as a senior senator. He has also worked to smooth over his relationship with the hard-right in Texas and tout his work in the Senate in support of Trump.On Thursday, Cornyn declined to comment on Paxton or the Justice Department decision not to prosecute, saying he was not going to have any comments about that until hes an announced candidate. Then Ill have a lot to say.In response to a request for comment, Cornyns campaign, meanwhile, sent an endorsement from the National Border Patrol Council that was announced Thursday.Cruz declined to comment. Fundamentally, hes a fighter, and hes also a risk-taker, said Matt Mackowiak, a Republican strategist and the former Travis County GOP chair, describing Paxtons position heading into a potential campaign with the federal investigation behind him. What I think this whole episode taught him is, trust your instincts and never quit. The psychology of that has to be very powerful for him in approaching this race. Katharine Wilson of The Texas Tribune and Vianna Davila with ProPublica contributed reporting.

by Stacy St. Clair, Chicago Tribune, and Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. Amid a standout season last year, University of Illinois mens basketball stars found themselves in high demand as they reached the Elite Eight in the 2024 NCAA Tournament.Three players appeared in a commercial for a local BMW dealership. One did an Instagram post for TurboTax.Another promoted an apartment complex near the Urbana-Champaign campus. But not one of those endorsements which are allowed now that student-athletes can profit from their personal brands was reported to the university, as state law requires. In fact, the entire Illini team reported just $9,100 in name, image and likeness deals during the 2023-24 season, according to records obtained by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica. By comparison, the average earnings reported for a male basketball player in the Big Ten and the three other biggest college conferences were more than $145,000 during that school year, according to data that institutions voluntarily provided to the NCAA.The Illini basketball teams missing disclosures reflect an indifference to documenting NIL deals across the athletic department, the news organizations found. Athletes from 20 sports combined have reported earning only about $1.2 million in three-plus years, compared with the $20 million Ohio State Universitys football team reportedly received in a single year, or a University of Missouri quarterback who alone is estimated to have made more than $1 million in NIL deals.By shrugging its shoulders at Illinois reporting requirements, the university is failing to compile a complete picture of how its students some of them still teenagers are navigating a relatively new terrain rife with legal, moral and financial pitfalls. I find that maddening and irresponsible, said Bill Carter, founder of Student-Athlete Insights, which provides NIL consulting services. It seems unethical to me to allow 18-to-23-year-olds to participate in something life-altering like this but provide no structure, no support, no direction. A University of Illinois cheerleader rallies fans at the start of a womens basketball game in February. The lead sponsor of the states law on college athletes name, image and likeness deals said one goal of the mandatory reporting provision was to examine potential gender gaps in compensation. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune) Officials from the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics say they inform the schools athletes of their responsibilities but acknowledge they do not enforce compliance, despite the Illinois law requiring athletes to disclose all deals to their schools. The officials downplayed those failures by asserting that reporting is spotty nationwide.Athletes should just disclose the deals, but both here and across the country, they just kind of dont really do that, Kamron Cox, a U of I assistant athletic director and the schools NIL specialist, said in an interview.In a three-page response to questions, the athletic department acknowledged students are underreporting their earnings and did not dispute any of the figures in this story. The statement noted it is students responsibility to report NIL agreements and said the university has fulfilled its obligations under the law by paying for an app that allows athletes to do so. It called the states disclosure rules which the university had advocated for ineffective, noting the law carries no penalties and arguing that punishing players internally would harm the institutions reputation. Our program, like most across the country, is doing its best to navigate in uncharted waters, the statement said. It contended that 70% of NIL deals nationwide go unreported, citing one industry insider whose estimates have varied. Blind adherence to an untenable process does not appear to be the expectation of the state, the NCAA, or our industry.Administrators also said they do not know how much money Illini basketball players or any of the student-athletes are receiving through NIL, even though todays collegiate marketplace requires understanding the amounts needed to recruit and retain star athletes. That lack of knowledge is not possible and its not believable, Carter said.More than 20 states, including Illinois, passed laws requiring athletes to disclose their deals after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled four years ago that collegiate competitors have the right to make money. ProPublica and the Tribune obtained records of the deals reported by U of I athletes from July 2021 through October 2024 via the Freedom of Information Act, offering the public a rare look at the lack of accountability in the big-money world of college sports. Michael LeRoy, a University of Illinois professor who has studied name, image and likeness deals in collegiate athletics, said he wonders why the Illinois athletic department hasnt done more to ensure compliance with NIL reporting requirements. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune) The records the U of I provided to the Tribune and ProPublica included 1,037 deals across all sports with the names of the athletes redacted by agreement. Sponsored social media posts were, by far, the most frequent way athletes reported earning money, followed by autograph signings and personal appearances. In this far-from-complete data, deals ranged from a male basketball players $326,000 arrangement with a Porsche dealership in Kentucky to $10 for a track athlete to endorse a mens soap called Freshticles.The Illinois law on NIL requires athletes to provide their schools with copies of contracts when the deals are valued at $500 or more. Illini athletes reported more than 175 deals that meet that standard. But when the news organizations filed a public records request seeking contracts for 12 of the largest reported deals, a university administrator responded that the campus did not have any of them.There is nothing in the Illinois law that would be difficult for any Big Ten athletic program to follow, said Michael LeRoy, a labor and employment relations professor at U of I and former chair of the schools athletic board. But theyre clearly choosing not to do it. You have to wonder why.The NCAA declined to speak with reporters for this story, but it has issued multiple statements stressing the need for transparency in NIL agreements. It established a policy last year to encourage athletes nationwide to report deals to their institutions, so schools could then provide the information to the NCAA to make available on a public dashboard intended to help students navigate the NIL marketplace.But up to now, there have been no consequences for athletes or institutions that fall short.That could soon change. Next week, a $2.8 billion settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by student-athletes against the NCAA is expected to gain final approval, shifting the landscape again. Under the deal, known as the House settlement after one of the plaintiffs, a school would be able to pay its athletes directly from a revenue-sharing budget capped at $20.5 million for the next school year. Schools also could be directly involved in negotiating NIL deals for their athletes, and deals worth at least $600 and those made with collectives would need to be reported to an outside entity. That entity would evaluate whether the payments align with a fair market value and ensure the money is not a pay-to-play deal. Those reports are not expected to be made public.The four largest conferences the Atlantic Coast Conference, Big Ten, Southeastern Conference and Big 12 have said they plan to create an organization that would both implement and enforce the rules as the NCAAs oversight role shrinks. It also could issue penalties. The ante has been upped, said Joshua Lens, a University of Iowa sports management professor who has studied NIL extensively. It will require disclosure like we have all along, but now the schools and athletes could be penalized. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, shown at State Farm Center on the University of Illinois campus, signed legislation in 2021 that allows college athletes in the state to make money off their brand while requiring them to report such deals to their school. (Anthony Zilis/The News-Gazette) Face Wash and Physical TherapyThe NIL era in Illinois began on June 29, 2021, at the State Farm Center on the University of Illinois campus. Gov. JB Pritzker signed the groundbreaking legislation, known as the Student-Athlete Endorsement Rights Act, while surrounded by several Illini athletes, including gymnast Dylan Kolak. Illinois was among the first states to pass an NIL law, and Kolak was ready to seize the moment. He had begun making TikTok videos during the pandemic to promote mens gymnastics and fitness, amassing more than 500,000 followers in a little over a year. When companies approached him about the possibility of endorsement deals, Kolak said he either ignored their messages or explained that NCAA rules prohibited him from earning money that way. For Kolak, a partial-scholarship athlete who excelled at the floor exercise and vault, it stung each time he passed up an offer. Former Illini gymnast Dylan Kolak reported his NIL deal with Athletico, a physical therapy provider, to the university, in keeping with state law. (TikTok video obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune) Watch video Hes the type of athlete state Rep. Kam Buckner, a former Illini defensive lineman, had in mind when the Chicago Democrat sponsored legislation codifying moneymaking opportunities for student-athletes. He was joined by two former Northwestern University athletes, state Sen. Napoleon Harris and Illinois House Speaker Emanuel Chris Welch.Buckner said he remembered what it was like to be a college athlete and need extra cash for necessities. In a way, it had the underlying air of indentured servitude where you dont even own your own space, Buckner said. And so for me, this was about fairness.The state laws rules for NIL are straightforward: Athletes cant take money from the gambling, tobacco or alcohol industries. They cant use a university logo without permission. They cant wear their uniforms in advertisements unless they have prior approval from their institutions. And they have to report their NIL deals to their schools. From Buckners standpoint, that clause offered universities and their athletes a baseline for understanding what kind of deals and what kind of dollars were available in this new and unfamiliar world. The data also could help identify any gender or racial gaps that emerged, Buckner said.By all accounts, the school took the reporting requirement seriously in the beginning. We were told to report our deals constantly, Kolak said. We were told we could lose our eligibility if we didnt. Nobody wanted to risk that.Kolak said he reported everything that came his way, including $900 for an Instagram post about a face wash, $1,300 for promoting mens shoes on TikTok and $2,375 for documenting his physical therapy at Athletico. Illinois state Rep. Kam Buckner, a former Illini football player, was a chief sponsor of the states NIL legislation. He said he remembers what it was like to be a college athlete and need extra money for necessities. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune) The reporting requirement became so ingrained in Kolak and his teammates in those early NIL days that the mens gymnastics squad logged 128 deals in 2021 and 2022. It was the most of any Illini mens team, with only womens softball recording more deals. The number dropped significantly, however, by 2023 and 2024, after the university stopped stressing the importance of reporting. The mens gymnastics team reported just 44 deals in those years still the most reported by any mens team. Cox, the U of I assistant athletic director, said he regularly reminded students about the disclosure rules during the first year of NIL. But after the NCAA in October 2022 barred schools from arranging or negotiating NIL deals for athletes, the department stopped stressing the importance of reporting, according to Cox.The fall 2022 guidance didnt say to stop, however. In fact, it stated, when permitted by applicable state laws schools can and should require student-athletes to report NIL activities to the athletics department.Roger Denny, the U of I athletic departments chief operating officer, said in an interview that the department still conducts several presentations each year for athletes to go over contracts, taxes and disclosure rules. The departments statement said it sends weekly emails to athletes and conducts sessions with an NIL consultant. Asked for an example of the emails, the department shared the most recent newsletter, in which the last item reminded athletes to disclose their NIL deals. Buckner, the Illinois lawmaker, said that he was unaware of the reporting practices and the rules should be followed so athletes understand the playing field. I dont believe in just throwing arbitrary mechanisms into policy that arent followed, he said. If theyre not doing what theyre intended to do, weve got to figure out how to change that.The universitys lack of attention to students reporting is apparent in the schools data, which shows the reported value of NIL deals dropped by 85% on the Urbana-Champaign campus in the 2023-24 academic year. According to the records, student-athletes reported making a total of just $103,000 that year, down from $702,500 in 2022-23. First image: University of Illinois gymnast Sam Phillips pets his cat, Richard Parker, at his apartment in Champaign. Phillips, who recently injured his Achilles tendon, said his former school, the University of Nebraska, exercised more oversight over his NIL agreements than the U of I does. Second image: Phillips displays an Instagram promotion he did for Degree deodorant. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune) Illini gymnast Sam Phillips, a two-time All-American who transferred from the University of Nebraska last year, said NIL rules were mentioned at a meeting for new U of I athletes. But there hasnt been additional discussion about NIL, he said. By contrast, at Nebraska, Phillips said he regularly received advice from an athletic department compliance officer who reminded him to disclose his deals to the university.He did so through an app that many universities use called Opendorse, which helps athletes find NIL deals and report them to university officials. U of I is spending $260,000 on a contract with Opendorse through mid-2026, which the athletic department said fulfills its obligation under the states NIL law to facilitate reporting.Nebraskas compliance officer reviewed each of Phillips agreements at that school, according to the app, but as of December there was no indication U of I had examined the deals Phillips had reached since his transfer, including with Abbott, Degree deodorant and Savage X Fenty underwear. The university said its athletic department reviews deals submitted through Opendorse but that it does not document it on the app and it is not required to. I havent spoken to anyone in [the U of I] administration at all, said Phillips, a nonscholarship athlete who uses the money to pay for living expenses. It has been on my own. Quattrone, who owns five auto dealerships in the Champaign area, has autographed sports memorabilia on display in his office at Serra Buick GMC in Savoy. Quattrone said he has sold cars to student-athletes at hefty discounts, among other compensation, in exchange for their appearances and participation in ads. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune) A Ridiculously Good DealAt Illinois, the reporting failures are best exemplified through the universitys marquee mens sports: football and basketball. Relying on social media, news releases and media interviews, ProPublica and the Tribune identified dozens of endorsements that were not included in the database provided by U of I. The missing endorsements include several promoted during March Madness in 2024, including the TurboTax ad from basketball player Marcus Domask and a popular commercial for a Serra Champaign car dealership that featured three of his teammates.In that ad, Terrence Shannon Jr., Coleman Hawkins and Ty Rodgers wore Groucho Marx glasses as they sought an autograph from Illini teen superfan Tommy Rouse. The players, who have all driven luxury vehicles from Serra, had their cars cleaned while they shot the video in the showroom, according to dealership owner Ben Quattrone. Quattrone, a longtime supporter of the athletic department, said he has sold cars to athletes at hefty discounts in exchange for their appearances and participation in ads, as well as provided car washes in exchange for signed basketballs, all permitted under the NIL rules. He estimates he has spent about $150,000 in the past few years to purchase TV ads and other media promotions featuring Illini athletes.Illini athletes have posted videos on social media showing them driving BMWs, including a BMW XM, an SUV with a sticker price of $160,000. I make them a ridiculously good deal, said Quattrone. Records on NIL deals reported to the University of Illinois did not include this 2024 commercial for a Champaign car dealership in which Illini players Coleman Hawkins, Terrence Shannon Jr. and Ty Rodgers appeared in Groucho Marx glasses. (Obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune) Watch video No Illinois athlete, however, has disclosed a deal with Serra to the university, records show. Quattrone said he reminds athletes to set aside money to pay taxes on their NIL deals but said he was unsure of their reporting obligations to the university. Around the same time as the Serra ad came out, the Pacifica on Green a new apartment complex that caters to students also tried to capitalize on the success of the universitys basketball team and its football program. The Tribune and ProPublica identified at least six football and mens basketball players featured on the apartment complexs Instagram, including then-Illini forward Dain Dainja, who appeared in multiple posts throughout the 2023-24 season.In one post, which celebrated the team advancing to the Elite Eight, Pacifica gave a signed Dainja jersey to a tenant who renewed his lease during March Madness. An earlier photo showed Dainja signing the jersey for the renewal promotion while wearing an olive green Pacifica T-shirt.No mens basketball or football players disclosed receiving any kind of payment from the complex. Only one Illini athlete a female basketball player told the university about receiving compensation from Pacifica: more than $16,000 for Instagram reels, according to the data. Former Illini basketball player Marcus Domask promoted TurboTax in a paid partnership Instagram post last year. The deal was not included in the NIL records provided by the university. (Screen recording by ProPublica. Cropped by ProPublica.) Watch video None of the athletes in the Serra, Pacifica or TurboTax promotions or their representatives agreed to comment for this story. A Pacifica representative also did not respond to interview requests.The failure by many male athletes to disclose their deals also makes it difficult to assess differences in NIL compensation between male and female students at U of I a stated goal of the Illinois laws lead sponsor.That a gender gap exists is clear, despite the flawed nature of the data. In the three-year period examined by the Tribune and ProPublica, male athletes accounted for more than $1 million in reported earnings, compared with $160,000 total for female athletes.But in the 2023-24 school year, after administrators stopped stressing the importance of reporting, men disclosed only $44,500 in NIL deals, compared with $58,500 for the women.The falloff in reporting also obscures the role played by a boosterlike nonprofit organization called the Icon Collective in raising NIL money for Illinois student-athletes. Such collectives have become common at many universities, raising millions of dollars paid to players in exchange for community service such as volunteering at a food bank.Icon is supposed to be independent from the U of Is athletic department, though records show they work together on everything from athlete appearances to the beer sold at Memorial Stadium. Reporters identified at least six U of I athletes who promoted the Pacifica on Green apartment complex on Instagram, but only one deal with Pacifica, involving an unnamed woman, was included in the NIL data from the university. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune) In announcing Icons launch in early 2023, a university press release said the collective had raised more than $1.5 million intended for student-athletes.But Illini athletes reported receiving only about $99,000 from Icon between February 2023 and October 2024, with the bulk of it $75,000 going to Illini football players. No mens basketball players reported receiving any money via the collective, though the group regularly uses images of mens players in its marketing material.Icons president, Kathleen Knight, a former athletic department employee, declined to answer questions about the inconsistencies between the athletes reports and her organizations purported fundraising.In a brief statement, Knight said Icon does not publicly share its financial information. Cox, the assistant athletic director and NIL specialist, said he does not know how much money Icon has distributed to its athletes, in part because of the lack of disclosures.The university made a similar statement on Thursday. Leadership of the athletic department remains unaware of the terms of Icons agreements with most of our student-athletes, it said.Several experts told ProPublica and the Tribune that the idea an athletic department wouldnt know the amount of money a collective gave to its athletes defies credulity, given the well-known financial demands of the college marketplace and the typically close relationships between collectives and athletic departments. Its not even putting their head in the sand, said Carter, the NIL expert. Its patently false. A video board at the University of Illinois State Farm Center displays an advertisement for a new Icon Collective membership drive. The collective raises NIL money to benefit Illini student-athletes. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune) The Future of TransparencyAt a congressional hearing last month, Illini athletic director Josh Whitman talked about the future of NIL and the importance of creating national standards for revenue-sharing and NIL deals instead of a patchwork of state-by-state legislation.We certainly dont have an interest in micromanaging those opportunities for our student athletes, he told federal lawmakers. But it is important that we do try and create some system to monitor that, to create some level of transparency. Our student-athletes want that transparency.U of I administrators, however, have argued against public transparency when it comes to NIL deals. Cox, also an adjunct professor at the universitys law school, wrote in a law publication last year that the best move for all institutions to support student-athletes is to refuse disclosure of student-athlete NIL information as a matter of policy.Administrators then succeeded in getting a law passed that they contend exempts NIL records from the Freedom of Information Act, severely hindering any further public analysis or accountability. Indeed, the U of I said in early January that it would no longer release the type of records obtained by the Tribune and ProPublica for this investigation.Our position is that thats not the publics business, Whitman told a reporter last year.The Illinois athletic department also referenced the FOIA exemption in its three-page response to ProPublica and the Tribune, saying that although there is public desire for NIL information, the privacy of students is the more pressing concern.But even as Illinois administrators pushed to change the law last year, the requirement that athletes report the deals to their institutions remained. And athletes will be required to disclose their deals under the House settlement a mandate the university celebrated in its written statement. In the face of strong and swift accountability, officials said, their athletes would comply. Joe Mahr of the Chicago Tribune contributed data analysis. Mariam Elba of ProPublica contributed research reporting.

by Heather Vogell ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. Workers at one of the nations largest baby formula plants say the Abbott Laboratories facility is engaging in unsanitary practices similar to those that led it to temporarily shut down just three years ago, sparking a nationwide formula shortage.Current and former employees told ProPublica that they have seen the plant in Sturgis, Michigan, take shortcuts when cleaning manufacturing equipment and testing for microbes. The employees said leaks in the factory are sometimes not fixed, a dangerous problem that can promote bacterial growth. They also said workers at the facility do not always take required swabs to check for pathogens while performing maintenance during production. Supervisors have urged workers to increase production and have retaliated against workers who complained about problems, the employees said.One worker complained to the Food and Drug Administration in February, saying the plant has experienced persistent leaks and unaddressed contamination issues, according to correspondence between the worker and the agency viewed by ProPublica. Water and chemicals have pooled on the floor, the worker said. In one spot, white sweetener oozed from a pipe and formed a pile like a stalagmite on top of a tank used for blending, the employee said.The complaints come as the Trump administration is dismantling wide swaths of the federal government including conducting mass layoffs at the FDA and filling some key regulatory positions with industry-friendly voices. The new head of the FDA division that oversees baby formula is a corporate lawyer who previously defended Abbott against a lawsuit. The workers ProPublica spoke to said they did not want to be named because they feared repercussions from Abbott management, but they felt compelled to speak up out of concern that a baby who drank formula made at the plant would fall ill.I cant have this on my conscience, one of the workers said. Abbott called workers assertions untrue or misleading, denied their claims about retaliation and said the company stands behind the quality and safety of all our products including those made at Sturgis. In a statement, a spokesperson said that since 2022, the company had increased plant staff by 300 people, spent $60 million on upgrades and stationed multiple food-safety consultants there on weekdays. The company said the plant often takes more than 10,000 environmental swabs across the facility in a month to check for microbes.We believe Sturgis is the most inspected, tested, and swabbed infant formula manufacturing facility in the U.S., and likely in the world, the statement said.That said, Abbott conceded that the plant acted outside of our quality process in one incident from last May.Workers told ProPublica that, instead of retrieving a portable pump, an employee used a piece of cardboard from a trash bin to funnel coconut oil, a formula ingredient, into a tank during production of the companys Pure Bliss by Similac Organic brand. Abbott said the cardboard was reactively used to prevent spilling onto the floor. The company denied that there was a trash receptacle in the area and said plant practice was for cardboard to be stacked on a pallet before being recycled.Food-safety laws require companies to use clean tools to transfer ingredients, not a makeshift implement like cardboard, said Patrick Stone, a former FDA inspector who works as a consultant. No one would think thats a proper use, he said. Its not something thats been cleaned and verified its clear of contamination.Abbott, however, downplayed the significance of the incident, saying it occurred early in the manufacturing process, before pasteurization, and the product underwent enhanced testing that came back negative for microbes.We acknowledge that this is outside of our quality process, and this has been addressed, Abbotts statement said. The company said the plant had a discussion with the employee reiterating the proper procedure.Employees complained about the incident at the time and some hoped the plant had destroyed the formula. But a few weeks later, they received an email, which ProPublica viewed, that said the plant had released all batches not just on time, but early. It congratulated workers for an amazing milestone and achievement for Sturgis. Abbott said there have been no medical complaints related to the lot. The brand is advertised as suitable for newborns. In another incident in February, an employee said that the company had signed off on the use of an amino acid that was 10 months past its manufacturers best by date. A photo of the label viewed by ProPublica showed a best by date of April 2024. The law requires that ingredients in formula not expire before the formula as a whole, Stone said.Abbott said that the powders expiration date had been extended, which it said regulations permit in some cases, after the company used third-party testing to confirm its nutrient levels.But the worker said the amino acid powder was chunky and employees refused to add it to a formula mixture. It had been manufactured in October 2023. Abbott told ProPublica that two containers of amino acid mix were, in fact, placed on hold due to crustiness and later destroyed. When we find products that dont meet all specifications, we dispose of them, the company said.Some of the workers said theyve felt pressure not to disrupt the manufacturing process. At one meeting in February, a worker said a senior manager told employees the plant needed to improve its profit margins by either increasing production or reducing the amount of formula it was discarding as unusable.Abbott disputed the idea that it is cutting corners to make more formula.Any assertion that quality is being sacrificed at the expense of volume and profit is patently untrue, it said. The company said that in 2024, Abbott made 41% less formula at Sturgis than it had in 2021, the year before the shutdown.For its part, the FDA did not respond to questions about whether an inspection or investigation is taking place at the Sturgis plant in response to the complaint it received. The agency said it generally does not comment on potential or ongoing inspections or investigations.In a statement, the FDA said that it takes reports related to infant formula seriously and follows up as appropriate. The case could prove to be a major test for President Donald Trumps second administration, which just last month announced an effort to ensure the ongoing quality, safety, nutritional adequacy, and resilience of the domestic infant formula supply. Dubbed Operation Stork Speed, it promised to increase ingredient testing and communicate regularly with consumers and the industry as significant developments occur to ensure transparency, including information regarding nutrients and health outcomes.Egregiously Unsanitary ConditionsThe Abbott employees concerns come three years after the company voluntarily recalled several formula brands, including Similac, Alimentum and EleCare, and temporarily halted production at Sturgis amid reports of unsanitary conditions and infant deaths. A former plant employee in 2021 had told the FDA that the plant was using lax cleaning practices, falsifying records and releasing untested infant formula to the public. FDA inspectors found leaking equipment valves, standing water and a type of bacteria at the plant called Cronobacter sakazakii, which is common but can be deadly for young babies. Company documents showed the manufacturer had even discovered the bacteria in its finished formula in 2019 and 2020, the report said. Food-safety laws require companies to test samples of their formula to check the nutrient content and look for harmful microorganisms.Those inspection findings were shocking, a former FDA chief said later. He called the plant egregiously unsanitary.Initial reports said several infants were hospitalized and two died from an illness caused by the Cronobacter bacteria after drinking formula made at the Sturgis plant, according to an inspector generals report. Between December 2021 and June 2022, it said the FDA received a total of 16 consumer complaints involving infant deaths and Sturgis facility products. The report said the FDA did not directly link drinking formula from the plant to any of the infants illnesses or deaths. Abbott said no unopened Abbott formula has ever tested positive for Cronobacter.Still, in May of 2022, Abbott signed a consent decree with the Department of Justice and the FDA and committed to following improved procedures at the facility. The decree is still in effect. It says the company can be fined up to $30,000 a day for violations, with a maximum of $5 million in a year.The plants nearly four-month-long shutdown in 2022 sparked a nationwide formula shortage, which was worsened by COVID-19-related supply-chain issues. Store shelves emptied of formula, leaving parents desperate. Some babies developed symptoms such as spitting up and diarrhea after being forced to switch brands, researchers found. Nearly half of parents in one survey of primarily low-income families said theyd resorted to at least one unsafe feeding practice, such as watering down formula.Abbott said it disagreed vehemently with the FDA chiefs comments on the Sturgis plant being unsanitary, and it said the former employee who filed the 2021 complaint with the agency was dismissed for serious violations of its food-safety policies. Abbott said the employees specific claims were not supported by the FDA. Its time to stop giving credence and fame to individuals with questionable agendas that have led to unnecessary formula shortages, Abbott said. New Complaints Arise as FDA Is CutIts unclear how the Trump administration, with its reduced federal workforce, will respond to the newest complaints. The administration recently eliminated 3,500 FDA jobs as part of extensive cuts in federal health workers ranks. While officials said the reductions will not impact inspectors, the agency did not answer a question about whether any of the employees being let go are involved in inspection or enforcement for the Sturgis facility. The White House also recently installed a corporate lawyer in a top FDA post, putting him in charge of the agencys regulation of formula. Kyle Diamantas, acting deputy commissioner for human foods, previously defended Abbott against a lawsuit in which families alleged the company failed to warn them about a deadly bowel condition that premature babies who are fed formula have a greater risk of developing. Abbott has appealed a verdict in which it was ordered to pay $495 million.Meanwhile, at the Department of Agriculture, officials disbanded an advisory committee that had been studying the threat of Cronobacter contamination in powdered formula. The USDA said at the time that it did so to comply with an executive order seeking to reduce bureaucracy but it remained committed to food safety. The Heritage Foundations Project 2025 blueprint for a Trump presidency had listed as one of its goals reevaluating excessive regulation of infant formula.Families using formula arent being protected if the FDA is acting like a partner to companies like Abbott instead of overseeing them, said Jennifer Pomeranz, a professor and expert in public health and food policy at New York University who has served as a witness for plaintiffs suing Abbott over the bowel condition. She called Diamantas appointment the perfect example of regulatory capture.In its statement to ProPublica, the FDA said it is committed to enhancing regulatory oversight of all infant formula manufacturers to help ensure that the industry is producing infant formula under the safest conditions possible. The Sturgis plant is a major supplier of formula in the United States and had been producing about 20% of the nations formula when it shut down in 2022. Abbott provides formula to more than half of babies in the government-backed nutrition-assistance program, called WIC, that subsidizes families formula purchases. The company has contracts to be the sole source of formula for WIC recipients in 36 states and Washington, D.C., as of August of last year.If You Have Leaks, Forget About ItSince the 2022 consent decree, FDA records show it has completed 10 inspections, including a multiweek review that was underway when employees said the cardboard incident took place. (The company says that according to its records, it has been inspected by FDA 12 times in that period.) No action was required in response to most of those visits, according to a database that tracks FDA inspections. But for one inspection that ended in December 2022, the FDA issued a citation that noted concerns related to contamination prevention, worker hygiene and the handling of consumer complaints, documents say.A report from that inspection completed just seven months after Abbott signed the consent decree said the agency found problems similar to those that had shut down the plant. The report noted, among other things, six instances of employees failing to collect required swabs to test for bacterial contamination after cleaning up a leak. It also said inspectors found apparent insects and dust like debris near formula-making equipment. You did not establish a system of process controls covering all stages of processing that was designed to ensure that infant formula does not become adulterated due to the presence of microorganisms in the formula or in the processing environment, the report said.Stone, the former FDA inspector who is now a consultant, said the citation is significant. FDA should have really hammered on them harder, he said, but theyre weak and theyre scared.Without taking those swabs and testing them, the company cannot know if the formula is contaminated, Stone said. Unless youre monitoring your environment, you dont know whats in your environment, he said. If you have leaks, forget about it. You dont know whats in there.Abbott said it has addressed all FDA observations from 2022. FDA inspectors have raised no major issues since then, the company said.In 2023, Abbott confirmed the Department of Justice had opened a criminal investigation into conduct at the plant. A spokesperson for the departments Western District of Michigan did not respond to a request for information about the investigations status. Abbott did not respond to a question about the probe but said at the time that it was cooperating fully. The Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Trade Commission were also scrutinizing the company after the problems surfaced in Sturgis. Spokespeople for the SEC and FTC, which released a report on the formula supply disruptions, declined to comment. Abbott did not respond to questions about the investigations.More recently, some employees who spoke to ProPublica said plant leaders have urged them to speed up production even though the consent decree aimed to add more safety protocols. Imagine a 10-page rule book youre told you have to operate by no matter what, one said. No deviations. Youre doing that, and then your boss says, Youre not doing your job fast enough.The workers said some employees have pushed supervisors to follow sanitary procedures more closely and at times refused to run equipment until their concerns about sanitation were met, even as they feared losing their jobs. Abbott is one of the largest and highest-paying employers in the largely rural area near the Indiana border. The plants tall white tower, emblazoned with a large green a, looms over nearby homes.An employee said that since the consent decree, he had witnessed leaks of formula, oil, chemicals and water that were not cleaned up, fixed or documented properly. Sometimes, the worker said, supervisors resisted shutting down machinery always a money-losing proposition to address a leak. The worker reported seeing a leak that hadnt been handled correctly more than once a month. Its all over, the employee said.Photos taken in the plant show equipment whose outer surface was streaked with drips from formula ingredients that had leaked. In one instance, an absorbent mat had been placed on the floor to catch drips. Procedures require the plant to contain leaks, fix equipment and test the area for pathogens, workers say. Leaks can become breeding grounds for bacteria.Abbott said in a facility the size of Sturgis, with literally miles of pipes, leaks, drips, and condensation are inevitable. The plant has a team it deploys quickly to contain leaks, then swab, test and sanitize the area, the company said. The plant aims to limit standing water and sanitize regularly to prevent bacterial growth, Abbott said, and it runs six times the number of Cronobacter tests on finished product samples as required by federal regulations.Abbott has a quality policy that we make our products as if they were for our own families, the companys statement said. If quality were not our first priority Abbott would not still be here at 137 years. A contractor Abbott hired to improve its processes has raised concerns about the facility not following protocols or procedures in past audits but cited no such problems in the audit completed earlier this year, said Mansour Samadpour, co-founder of IEH Laboratories and Consulting Group. IEH, which began its work after the consent decree, reports back to Abbott and the FDA on what the plant needs to correct. Neither Abbott nor IEH provided a copy of the most recent audit.Samadpour declined to detail the earlier concerns. He said it was possible an employee could miss a swab, but said theres no systemic problem. He said he does not have concerns about sanitary practices in the plant.If I have any concerns, they will hear from me and FDA will hear from us, said Samadpour, who spoke with ProPublica at Abbotts request. That is our job. Debbie Cenziper contributed reporting.

by Jessica Schreifels, The Salt Lake Tribune This article was produced for ProPublicas Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. The last time Sam met with his therapist, Scott Owen, the session was nothing more than an hour of Owen sexually abusing him, he told a Provo, Utah, courtroom this week. Sam remembers sitting in his car afterward, screaming as loud as he could.I could feel him all over my skin, he said. I could not believe this was happening.It was October 2017, and Sam had been seeing Owen for therapy for more than a year. A faithful member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he was struggling with what he called unwanted same-sex attraction. Owen was a high-ranking leader in the LDS Church at that time, and Sam said Owen assured him that he had helped more than 200 men who felt similarly.Instead, he said, Owen meticulously leveraged his two roles as a therapist and a church leader to assure him that the sexual touching during their sessions was key to helping him heal, learn how to accept intimacy and grow closer to God.He exploited my trust, he weaponized my faith and dismantled my confidence, Sam told the courtroom. What he did was not just unethical. It was calculated, predatory and destructive.Police began investigating Owen in 2023 only after The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica reported on a range of sex abuse allegations against Owen, who had built a reputation over his 20-year therapy career as a specialist who could help gay men who were members of the LDS Church. Some of the men who spoke to The Tribune said their bishop in the faith referred them to Owen and used church funds to pay for sessions where Owen allegedly also touched them inappropriately. Austin Millet at his home in Oregon. Millet is one of several men who told The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica that Owen abused them during sessions paid for with funds from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (Amanda Lucier for ProPublica) In February, Owen pleaded guilty to three charges, admitting he sexually abused Sam and a second patient who also said he sought Owens help because he was struggling with his sexuality and Latter-day Saints faith. Owen also pleaded no contest in another case, saying prosecutors likely had enough evidence to convict him at a trial on an allegation that he had groped a young girl during a therapy session.But the number of people who say that Owen harmed them is much larger and they filled a Provo courtroom on Monday as Owen was sentenced to spend at least 15 years in prison. One by one, they stood at a podium in court and told Owen how he had hurt them. Most were his patients, like Sam, a pseudonym to protect his identity from his community.One man told the court Owen had abused him when Owen was a leader of a young mens group organized by the LDS Church.He had sleepovers at his house, Mike Bahr said. I was there once, and I have lived in a nightmare since.Also speaking were family members of a man who had died by suicide, including his brother who said his sibling disclosed to him that Owen had abused him just days before he took his life.And there was one of Owens own family members, his cousin, who alleges that Owen molested him on a family trip when he was a kid. After becoming more public with his own abuse allegations several years ago, James Cooper has worked to gather others who say his cousin victimized them. James Cooper speaks during Owens sentencing hearing. Cooper is Owens cousin and alleges the man abused him when he was a child. (Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune) He spoke about the dynamics that allowed Owen to hurt others for so long without repercussions.Certainly, we know how charismatic he is, and what its like to be a victim of sexual assault. The shame you carry. The guilt you carry, he said. The fear of Scott. The fear of not being accepted by your family, your society, your church. All those things are enormous factors.One woman spoke about Owen touching her inappropriately during therapy when she was 13 years old, in 2007. During the hearing, the only woman to have publicly accused him said Owen had made her feel like something was wrong with her. Now, she added, He no longer holds power over me.When Owen, 66, was given a chance to speak, he said there was no excuse or rationale for what he had done.I am so sorry, he said. All I have to offer is whats left of my life. And I hope that in offering those years, justice will have been met in some small fashion, and those who I have hurt can disconnect from me and move forward with their healing.Defense attorney Earl Xaiz said Owen did not want leniency from the judge but mentioned in court that his client had been sexually abused himself as a child and had struggled with his sexuality.Fourth District Judge Kraig Powell sentenced Owen on Monday to 15 years to life in prison. Given Owens age and the nature of his crimes, both prosecutors and the defense agreed it is likely he will spend the rest of his life in prison.Powell became emotional as he handed down the sentence, telling Owen that he harmed not only those who spoke publicly on Monday, but all of those therapists and church leaders who are ethical and working to help people.Thousands and thousands of these people, I fear, will be affected by this terrible, abhorrent case, the judge said. Owen was sentenced to prison after he admitted he sexually abused patients during sessions. (Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune) While Owen gave up his therapy license in 2018 after several patients complained to state licensors that he had touched them inappropriately, the allegations were never investigated by the police and were not widely known.Under a negotiated settlement with Utahs licensing division, Owen was able to surrender his license without admitting to any inappropriate conduct, and the sexual nature of his patients allegations is not referenced in the documents he signed when he gave up his license. He continued to have an active role in his therapy business, Canyon Counseling, until The Tribune and ProPublica published their investigation.Police interviewed more than a dozen former patients of Owens, all of whom reported that he touched them in ways they felt were inappropriate during therapy sessions. But Owen faced charges in connection with only three patients, because the type of touching that the other men alleged fell under parts of the criminal code that had a shorter window of time for prosecutors to file a case, called the statute of limitations. The crimes that Owen was charged with are all felonies that have no statute of limitations.Both state licensors and local leaders in the LDS Church knew of inappropriate touching allegations against Owen as early as 2016, reporting by The Tribune and ProPublica showed, but neither would say whether they ever reported Owen to the police.The church said in response to that reporting that it takes all matters of sexual misconduct seriously, and that in 2019 it confidentially annotated internal records to alert bishops that Owens conduct had threatened the well-being of other people or the church.The church also said it has no process in place to vet the therapists its church leaders recommend and pay for using member donations. It is up to individual members, a church spokesperson has said, to make their own decisions about whether to see a specific therapist that their bishop recommends. Michael, a former patient of Owens who agreed to be photographed but asked to be identified by only his first name, looks at his wife while speaking in court about the inappropriate touching he said happened in therapy sessions. (Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune) For some who accused Owen of abuse, Mondays sentencing was the only chance they had to address Owen because charges could not be brought in their cases. That includes Michael, who asked to be identified by only his first name. He said he saw Owen for therapy on and off for about a decade, starting when he was 14. He read a letter to his younger self in court on Monday.I just learned on Thursday that we are beyond our legal opportunity to fix this problem, he said. And it broke my heart to learn that I cant pursue a court case for you. Youll have to be strong. Its going to be so hard, but youre going to make it through. Editors note: Sam is identified only by a pseudonym because he requested anonymity. We have granted this request because of the risk to his standing in his community. The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica typically use sources full names in stories. But sometimes that isnt possible, and we consider other approaches. That often takes the form of initials or middle names. In this case, we felt that we couldnt fully protect our source by those means. We know his full name and have corroborated his accounts in documents and through interviews with others.

by Hannah Allam ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. With a line of cars waiting behind them at the train station, the two women hugged tightly as they said goodbye at the end of a spring break that hadnt turned out to be the relaxing vacation theyd imagined.Their girls trip had transformed into endless conversations about security precautions as one of the friends, 30-year-old Turkish national Rmeysa ztrk, grew increasingly worried she would become a target of the Trump administrations deportation campaign.ztrk, a former Fulbright scholar in a doctoral program at Tufts University, was stunned to find out in early March that she had been targeted by a pro-Israel group that highlighted an op-ed she co-wrote last year criticizing the schools response to the war in Gaza.Her concern deepened days later with the detention of former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident the government is trying to deport over his role in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus. By the time of ztrks spring break trip on March 15, she was consumed with anxiety, said her friend E., an Arab American academic on the East Coast who asked to withhold her name and other identifying details for security reasons.During their reunion in E.s hometown, the first time theyd been together since the summer, the friends looked up know-your-rights tutorials and discussed whether ztrk should cut short her doctoral program. They spent their last day together filling out intake forms for legal aid groups just in case.Right up until their last minutes together at the train station, they wrestled with how cautious ztrk should be when she returned to Massachusetts. ztrk wondered if she should avoid communal dinners, a feature of Muslim social life during the holy month of Ramadan.I told her to keep going out, to be with her community. I wanted her to live her life, E. recalled, her voice breaking.And then she got abducted in broad daylight.By now, much of the country has seen the footage of Oztrks capture.Surveillance video from March 25 shows her walking to dinner in Somerville, Massachusetts, near the Tufts campus, chatting on the phone with her mother when she is swarmed by six masked plainclothes officers. ztrk screams.Within three minutes, shes bundled into an unmarked car and whisked away, a jarring scene that showed the nation what President Donald Trumps deportation campaign looks like on the street level: federal agents ambushing a Muslim woman who co-wrote an op-ed in a college newspaper.The footage drew worldwide outrage and turned ztrk into a powerful symbol of the Department of Homeland Security dragnet. Surveillance Video of Rmeysa ztrks Capture (Obtained by ProPublica) Watch video To piece together whats happened since then, ProPublica examined court filings and interviewed attorneys and ztrks close friend, who regularly speaks to her in detention. What emerges is a more intimate picture of ztrk and how a child development researcher charged with no crime ended up in a crowded cell in Louisiana. The interviews and court records also provide a glimpse into a sprawling, opaque apparatus designed to deport the maximum number of people with minimum accountability.Her lawyers describe it as the story of a Trump-era rendition, a callback to the post-9/11 practice of federal agents grabbing Muslim suspects off the street and taking them to locations known for harsh conditions and shoddy oversight.ztrk is among nearly 1,000 students whose visas have been revoked, according to a tally by the Association of International Educators. And she is among several students and professors who have been detained.Her detention was exceptional, immigration attorneys said, because it was caught on camera. Whats scariest, they say, is how fast the removals happen and how little is known about them.Homeland Security spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment.The video of ztrks arrest surfaced because Boston-area activists had set up a hotline for locals to report interactions with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The call that came in about ztrk reported a kidnapping, said Fatema Ahmad of the Muslim Justice League, part of the advocacy network that obtained the footage.What broke me was her screaming. And knowing that the same thing had just happened to almost 400 people in the Boston area the week before, she said, referring to a recent six-day ICE operation.After her arrest, ztrk was held by ICE incommunicado for nearly 24 hours, her attorneys said, during which time she suffered the first of four asthma attacks. Only later, through court filings and conversations with ztrk, her attorneys learned that in the course of a single night she was taken from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and then Vermont, where the next morning, she was loaded onto a plane and flown to an ICE outpost in Alexandria, Louisiana.Her last stop was a detention center in Basile about an hour away, where she remains, one of two dozen women in a damp, mouse-infested cell built to hold 14, according to court filings.ICE officials say in court documents they couldnt find a bed for ztrk in New England, adding that out-of-state transfers are routinely conducted after arrest, due to operational necessity.Immigration attorneys say the late-night hopscotch was an ICE tactic to complicate jurisdiction and thwart legal attempts to stop ztrks removal. Louisiana and Texas, they say, are favored destinations because the courts there are viewed as friendlier to the Trump administrations MAGA agenda, issuing decisions limiting migrant rights.It was like a relay race, and she was the baton, ztrks attorney Mahsa Khanbabai said.Whole Other Level of TerrorOn March 4, two weeks before their spring break reunion, ztrk texted her friend E. to say shed been doxxed by Canary Mission, part of an array of shadowy, right-wing Jewish groups that are criticized for using cherry-picked statements and distorted context to portray even mild criticism of Israel as antisemitism or support for terrorism.For more than a decade, hard-line pro-Israel groups have publicized the names of pro-Palestinian activists, academics and students, often with scant or dubious evidence to back allegations of anti-Jewish bigotry. The goal, civil liberties advocates say, is to silence protesters through campaigns that have cost targets jobs and led to death threats. On its website, Canary Mission said it is motivated by a desire to combat antisemitism on college campuses. It says it investigates individuals and groups across the North American political spectrum, including the far-right, far-left and anti-Israel activists.The effort was stepped up during the wave of student protests that erupted in opposition to the war in Gaza.ztrks entry on the Canary Mission site, posted in February, claims she engaged in anti-Israel activism in 2024, citing the op-ed she co-wrote more than a year ago that accused Tufts of ignoring students calls to divest from companies with ties to Israel over human rights concerns.I can not believe how much time people have, ztrk texted her friend when she saw the post.E. responded with an open-mouthed shocked emoji. The Canary Mission entry, she said, had unlocked a whole other level of terror for ztrk.It was that feeling of having your privacy be so violated for people to spend all this time and energy on one op-ed, E. said.The op-ed published in The Tufts Daily was signed by four authors, including ztrk, and endorsed by more than 30 other unnamed students. The language echoed the statements of United Nations officials and international war crimes investigators about the death toll in Gaza, which according to health officials there has passed 50,000, with about a third of the casualties under 18.ztrk, an advocate for children in communities plagued by violence, was personally heartsick over images of burned and mangled Palestinian children. But she was not a prominent activist or a fixture at campus protests, her friends and attorneys say.ztrks attorneys, who are scheduled to appear Monday before a federal judge in Vermont, say the sole basis for revoking her visa appears to be the op-ed highlighted by Canary Mission.Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer representing ztrk, said pro-Israel groups are providing the administration with lists of targets for its deportation campaign against noncitizen student protesters. The sequence of events, he said, is op-ed, doxxing, detention.Pro-Israel groups, including Canary Mission, have boasted about their influence on the Trump administrations targeting of student protesters. Immigration officials insist that they make their own removal decisions based on a number of factors, including a hard line on criticism of Israel.Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he has revoked more than 300 student visas, including for Khalil and ztrk, under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which permits the deportation of noncitizens who are deemed adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist who tears up our university campuses, Rubio told a news conference last month in response to a question about ztrks detention. Every day I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.A spokesperson said the State Department does not comment on ongoing litigation.In a call with reporters on Thursday, attorney Marc Van Der Hout of Khalils legal team said the authority Rubio cites was intended for rare occasions involving high-level diplomatic matters, not to be used to go after people for First Amendment-protected activity.Overnight OdysseySurrounded by masked officers on March 25, ztrk had no idea who was seizing her or where she was being taken, according to a statement filed on Thursday in federal court. The operatives were dressed in civilian clothes, she wrote, so at first she worried they were vigilantes spurred by Canary Mission.I had never seen police approach and take someone away like this, she wrote. I thought they were people who had doxxed me and I was afraid for my safety.ztrks statement details her harrowing night being shuttled across New England with little food after a day of fasting for Ramadan. She describes being shackled by her feet and stomach and then driven to different sites for meetings with unidentified men, some in uniform and some not. One group so unsettled her, ztrk wrote, that she was sure they were going to kill me.At another stop, described in the statement as an isolated parking lot, ztrk repeatedly asked an officer if she was in physical danger.He seemed to feel guilty and said we are not monsters, ztrk wrote.At the last stop in Vermont, ztrk wrote, she arrived famished and with a lot of motion sickness from all the driving. Officers took her biometric data and a DNA sample.She would stay there for the night, in a cell with just a hard bench and a toilet. Officers gained access to her cellphone, she wrote, including personal photos of her without her religious headscarf.During the night they came to my cell multiple times and asked me questions about wanting to apply for asylum and if I was a member of a terrorist organization, ztrk wrote. I tried to be helpful and answer their questions but I was so tired and didnt understand what was happening to me.Around 4 the next morning, she wrote, she was shackled again in preparation for a trip to the airport. She was told the destination was Louisiana. Her statement to the court recounts the parting words of one of her jailers: I hope we treated you with respect.At nearly every stage of her detention, ztrk, who takes daily preventative medication for asthma, experienced asthma attacks, which she says are triggered by fumes, mold or stress, court files say.During one in Louisiana, ztrk wrote, a nurse took her temperature and said, You need to take that thing off your head, before removing her hijab without asking. When ztrk protested, the nurse told her, This is for your health.By her fourth wheezing episode, ztrk wrote, she didnt bother to seek attention from her jailers in Louisiana: I didnt feel safe at the medical center.After the portrait ztrk paints of ICE detention, her statement turns back to her old life, a reminder of how abruptly her world has shifted. From her cell in Louisiana, she described the plans she had in the coming months. Completing her dissertation. A conference in Minnesota. Students to mentor. A summer class to teach.I want to return to Tufts to resume all of my cherished work, she concluded.Reunion Interruptedztrk and E. bonded in 2018 after meeting at a Muslim study group in New York, where they were both attending Columbia University.They were in their 20s then, two bookish cat lovers who were serious about their studies and their faith. They went on nature walks and liked afternoon naps.Old ladies, E. said with a laugh.They remained close and took turns visiting after ztrk left for Tufts and E. moved away from the city. Over the years, the pressures of grad school and distance had made their visits less frequent, E. said, so theyd been looking forward to their three-day spring break catch-up.During the visit, E. said, the women broke their fast together and visited a mosque for late-night Ramadan prayers. They stopped by a childrens library ztrk wanted to visit. They stayed up late talking, gaming out how to keep ztrk safe from the Trump administrations crackdown.She said, I think this is going to be the last time I get to visit you, E. recalled. I told her, No, no, youre going to be able to come again, dont worry, and Im going to come visit you. That all turned out to be wrong.The friends had kept in touch daily after parting at the train station. They exchanged mundane texts and voice notes about doing taxes and eating cookies. E. sent ztrk a photo of the park where they had walked during their visit. Rmeysa! The trees are starting to bloom again, she wrote.They last texted on March 25, a couple hours before ztrk was detained on the way to dinner in Somerville.E. didnt find out what happened until the next morning, when she stumbled out of bed before dawn for the early meal Muslims eat before the daily Ramadan fast. Sipping her tea, E. scrolled through her phone and spotted a message that said, Have you seen this? alongside an alert about ztrks arrest.It was like: Is this real? Am I still asleep? she recalled.E. said the idea of her gentle friend being swept into ICE custody still didnt seem real until later that morning, when the video was released and she saw a familiar figure, in the same white jacket shed worn on her visit.It was utterly nauseating to watch, E. said. So horrifying and so heartbreaking to see her have to be so violently taken that way. E. and ztrk (Courtesy of E.) Trying to Be a Good DetaineeTwo days after ztrks transfer to Louisiana, E. received a call from a strange number that came up on her phone as Prison/Jail. It was ztrk, in the first of what would become regular check-ins at random times of the day.In interviews, E. showed ProPublica corroborating photos, text messages and voice notes of her interactions with her friend.She always starts with, Is this a good time to talk? And Im, like, Ive been waiting for this, E. said.Some days, ztrk sounds upbeat. Turkish diplomats, she told E., had delivered her a new hijab. ztrk found a cookbook and noted a citrus salad recipe she might try someday. She cracked jokes about being too old to climb into a bunk bed every night.In one call, ztrk expressed relief that shed filed her taxes before getting detained a perfect example, E. said, of her overachieving friends wry sense of humor.She read the detainee handbook two times, E. said. She said, Im trying to be a good detainee.Other calls are not as easy, E. said, adding that she didnt want to divulge specifics out of respect for her friends privacy. In those harder talks, E. said, she wishes she could be there to tell her itll be OK, give her a hug.Their conversations are sprinkled with reminders that ztrks nightmare might not end soon. She asked for help canceling appointments and returning library books. Shes also in the process of requesting a single paperback, per detention regulations.If approved, she wants E. to find her a guide for writing childrens literature, preferably with exercises she could do from her cell. E. said her heart ached when ztrk asked her to make the book a long one.The calls and tasks ease feelings of helplessness, E. said, an antidote for the guilt that sneaks up on her when she walks outside on a sunny day.How is it that were moving forward, she said, while my closest friend is rotting in this place?

Charli XCX delivered a standout performance at the 2025 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, captivating the audience with her high-energy set and surprise guest appearances. Held on April 11 at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, her show was a highlight of the festivals opening weekend. The British singer-songwriter, known for her innovative pop sound, brought her Brat tourSource

In a dazzling display of musical artistry and queer celebration, drag icon Trixie Mattel and genre-defying pop artist VINCINT joined forces at Coachella 2025, delivering a performance that left an indelible mark on the festivals history. Their collaboration not only showcased their individual talents but also highlighted the vibrant energy of queer culture on one of the worlds most prestigiousSource

Facebook was once the digital town square—a place to connect with friends, share life updates, and post dog photos. But over the years, that vision has unraveled. What’s left is a platform increasingly dominated by outrage, conspiracies, and hate speech. How did we get here? More importantly, why has Meta, the tech giant behind Facebook, allowed this to happen? Engagement Over...

by Topher Sanders ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. When news broke in January that the Trump Justice Department was freezing significant work on civil rights litigation, including police reform cases, attention immediately focused on two cities: Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky.Both places were on the cusp of entering court-enforced agreements to overhaul their police forces after high-profile police killings there sparked a nationwide reckoning over race and policing.But its now clear that the administrations move will be felt well beyond those two cities. In fact, it throws into question police reform efforts in at least eight other communities across the country, according to a ProPublica review. The need for change in these places was documented in a flurry of investigations published by the Justice Department in the final year of Joe Bidens presidency. All of the probes found a pattern or practice of unlawful behavior that was routine enough that the federal government recommended reforms.From Phoenix to Trenton, New Jersey, federal officials investigating the eight agencies found unjustified killings, excessive force, debtors prisons, retaliation against police critics, racial discrimination, unlawful strip searches and officers having sexual contact with sex workers during undercover operations. Such findings are typically the first step toward a department agreeing to federal oversight and court-ordered reform. Over the years, the DOJ has credited such agreements, known as consent decrees, for having helped departments reduce unnecessary use of force, cut crime rates and improve responses to people with behavioral health needs. President Donald Trumps Justice Department, however, has ordered its civil rights attorneys to pause such work until further notice, effectively reinstating the limited approach it took during the presidents first term. Department officials did not respond to questions about the pause or how long it would remain in effect.For now, that means any reform efforts will be up to local leadership a dynamic that experts say could bode poorly for communities with long histories of police abuse.Cliff Johnson, an attorney and director of the Mississippi office of the MacArthur Justice Center, a nonprofit legal organization, was not optimistic.While those DOJ reports sometimes can lead municipalities, police departments and other offenders to come to Jesus, Johnson said, what weve been seeing, from our perspective, is folks saying, I dont need Jesus. I got Trump.Louisiana leaders, for example, have slammed the Justice Departments report, which found a pattern of problems in the way the state police used force against civilians. Gov. Jeff Landry said the report was an attempt by the Biden administration to diminish the service and exceptionality of the state police. And state Attorney General Liz Murrill said the Justice Department was being used to advance a political agenda.The report was partly spurred by the 2019 death of Ronald Greene, who was killed while in the custody of Louisiana State Police. Officers repeatedly shocked him with a Taser, dragged him by his ankle shackles and then left him face down in the road. Some officers deactivated or muted their body cameras during the incident. Louisiana troopers had claimed Greene died when his car crashed after a high-speed chase. The department was forced to change its story when The Associated Press obtained and published body-camera footage of the incident.Federal investigators found the episode was not an outlier. According to their report, officers in the department used Tasers without warning and against people who were restrained or who did not pose a threat, didnt give people the chance to comply before using force, used force against people who werent a threat, and used excessive force against people running from officers.A spokesperson for the Louisiana State Police did not answer questions about the reports findings but said the agency is working to improve its relationship with citizens and other stakeholders. Landrys office did not respond to ProPublicas questions about the report and the states response, and Murrills office declined to comment.Across the state line in Lexington, Mississippi, the Justice Departments shift away from police accountability could also be consequential. Department officials said residents there were so afraid of local police that they were hesitant to meet with investigators in public, fearful of retaliation.They had good reason to be concerned. In 2023, officers arrested an attorney who was representing citizens in police abuse cases against the department. She had been filming a traffic stop at the time.The police force made up of about 10 officers, some of whom are part time is the smallest the Justice Department has investigated in decades. Federal investigators ultimately found that its officers use excessive force, discriminate against Black people, conduct stops and searches without probable cause, and arrest people purely for not having the money to pay fines.Its unclear what steps, if any, the Lexington Police Department is taking in response to the report. Police Chief Charles Henderson declined to comment and directed questions to the city attorney, who did not return a call.Reform advocates have put their hopes in upcoming elections in Lexington that could bring in new leadership that is more interested in making changes at the police department.In Mount Vernon, New York, advocates say theyve seen little movement since the Justice Department found police there use excessive force, conduct unlawful strip and body cavity searches of arrestees, and fail to properly train officers and supervisors. It also found police discriminated against Black people. One group is considering legal action to bring the city to the table.It seems like Mount Vernon has put lip service on addressing the findings, said Daniel Lambright, an attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union. It remains unclear actually what theyre doing to address the findings.In their report, federal investigators expressed concern that the police departments overly aggressive tactics unnecessarily escalate encounters. In one instance, they wrote, five Mount Vernon officers used force on a man they thought was selling drugs without announcing their presence or attempting to arrest him peacefully. Instead, one of the officers approached the man from behind and attempted to put him in an upper body hold, which started an altercation, according to the report. Police then threw the man to the ground. One officer drove his Taser into the suspect five times while another repeatedly punched him in the head. The man suffered a broken nose.The reform efforts have to continue, said the Rev. Stephen Pogue, a member of the United Black Clergy of Westchester, an organization that works on social justice matters in Mount Vernon and surrounding areas. Were not in one of those places where Trump is our god. In Mount Vernon, we still need Jesus.Pogue said he hopes the city will host a public meeting about the report before the summer.Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard and a police spokesperson did not reply to interview requests. But in December, the mayor said in a statement that the city would work with the Justice Department to address its findings. We wholeheartedly support our good officers and at the same time will not tolerate and will punish unconstitutional policing, she said.In Phoenix, city and police officials have sent conflicting signals about the federal investigation, which found the Police Department used excessive and deadly force, violated the rights of homeless people, and discriminated against Black, Latino, Native American people, as well as those who have behavioral disabilities. Why the hell would anybody ever accept a consent decree? said one City Council member months before the report was released. Afterward, the head of the police union said the investigation was a farce and part of an unprofessional smear campaign.But Mayor Kate Gallego has said the city is taking the report seriously. In September, the City Council passed several police reform measures, including requiring all officers who deal with the public to use body-worn cameras, even the special units that have been at the center of controversial shootings.Regardless of the new federal administration, these reforms are moving forward, and the mayors commitment to improving the police department is unwavering, a mayoral spokesperson told ProPublica.Some of the other cities the Justice Department had targeted are taking small steps toward fixing problems the federal investigators identified, though its unclear whether the efforts will result in lasting change.In Oklahoma City, where Justice found in January that police officers discriminate against people with behavioral health disabilities, the city recently began funding mobile mental health units that can respond to incidents instead of police, said Jessica Hawkins, chair of the citys Crisis Intervention Advisory Group. She said the city is also working on a written response to the DOJ report but didnt know when it would be completed.Police Chief Ron Bacy declined ProPublicas request for an interview and through a spokesperson said the department was still reviewing the report.In Memphis, Tennessee, where federal investigators found that police use excessive force, conduct unlawful stops and discriminate against Black people, the mayor put together a reform task force, led by a retired federal judge. The DOJ report, in our case, kick-started a conversation that had sort of gone cold, said Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City, an organization that works on litigation and justice matters in Memphis.And in Trenton, New Jersey, where the Justice Department found that local police have a pattern or practice of using excessive force and conducting unlawful pedestrian and vehicle stops, City Council member Jasi Edwards has been hosting community meetings to introduce the idea of a civilian complaint review board and build support for the measure. Edwards said she plans to formally put forth her proposal sometime in the fall.It will likely run into resistance, though. Representatives of the Police Department and mayor told ProPublica that they didnt believe a civilian review board was necessary because it would be costly and there are existing ways for citizens to complain about police conduct. The DOJ report, they said, highlighted some areas in need of improvement but mischaracterized a number of cases and gave an inaccurate depiction of the departments culture.In Worcester, Massachusetts, reforms are already moving forward in response to the Justice Departments investigation.Last month, the police chief released a 15-page report on proposed measures intended to remedy the problems identified by federal investigators. The changes, which are still awaiting legal review, include prohibiting police from releasing K-9 dogs into mass gatherings or riot scenes and requiring a supervisor to go to a scene if someone reports being injured by police.The police chief, Paul Socier, has also proposed several changes to how officers approach prostitution. Investigators found the department engaged in outrageous government conduct with sex workers by having sexual contact during undercover operations.We are hopefully headed in the right direction, said Audra Doody, co-executive director of Safe Exit Initiative, an organization in Worcester that provides services, housing and counseling to sex workers who want to leave the sex trade. With a time of such uncertainty, I want to believe our people in the community are telling the truth and actually are going to do what they say theyre going to do, which they seem like they are, right now. ProPublica is reporting on how the Trump administrations efforts to reshape the federal government will impact the Department of Justice and its work on civil rights. If youre a former or current Justice Department employee and you want to send us a tip, please contact us. Were especially interested in the departments Civil Rights Division. Topher Sanders can be reached by phone or on Signal at 904-254-0393 or by email at topher.sanders@propublica.org.

by Nicole Foy ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. Just a week into President Donald Trumps second term, Rep. Adriano Espaillat began to see reports of Puerto Ricans and others being questioned and arrested by immigration agents. So Espaillat, a New York Democrat, did what members of Congress often do: He wrote to the administration and demanded answers. That was more than 10 weeks ago. Espaillat has not received a response. His experience appears to be common. At least a dozen members of Congress, all Democrats, have written to the Trump administration with pointed questions about constituents and other citizens whom immigration agents have questioned, detained and even held at gunpoint. In one letter, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee demanded a list of every citizen detained during the new administration. None has received an answer.What we are clearly seeing is that with this administration, they are not responding to congressional inquiries, said Rep. Teresa Leger Fernndez, a New Mexico Democrat. Leger Fernndez and others wrote to Trump and the Department of Homeland Security on Jan. 28 after receiving complaints from constituents and tribal nations that federal agents were pressing tribal citizens in New Mexico for their immigration status, raising concerns about racial profiling.The congresswoman and others say the lack of response is part of a broader pattern in which the administration has been moving to sideline Congress and its constitutional power to investigate the executive branch.That is a big concern on a level beyond what ICE is doing, Leger Fernndez said, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a branch of DHS. This administration does not seem to recognize the power and authority and responsibility of Congress.Norman Ornstein, a longtime congressional observer at the American Enterprise Institute, said prior administrations lack of responsiveness has frustrated lawmakers too. But hes never seen one so thoroughly brush off Congress. Whats clear now is that the message from Donald Trump and his minions is: You dont have to respond to these people, whether they are ours or not, Ornstein said, referring to Republicans and Democrats. Thats not usual. Nothing about this is usual.A White House spokesperson denied that the administration has been circumventing Congress or its oversight. Passage of the continuing resolution that kept our government open and commonsense legislation like the Laken Riley Act are indicative of how closely the Trump administration is working with Congress, said Kush Desai in a statement. The White House did not answer questions about the letters. DHS also did not respond to ProPublicas questions.Last month, ProPublica detailed how Americans have been caught in the administrations dragnet. Such mistakes have been made by many administrations over decades. The government often has not taken steps to reduce errors, such as updating its files when agents confirm somebodys citizenship. But experts and advocates have warned that Trumps aggressive immigration goals including arrest quotas for enforcement agents make it more likely that citizens will get caught up.ICE and its sister agency, Customs and Border Protection, said in earlier statements to ProPublica that agents are allowed to ask for citizens identification. The agencies did not provide explanations for their actions in most of the cases ProPublica asked about. Answers were also hard to come by during Trumps first term, even when Democrats controlled the House and had more power over hearings. At a House hearing in 2019 about family separation, lawmakers pressed then-Border Patrol Chief Brian Hastings about another issue: the three-week detention of a Dallas-born high school student and citizen, who was only released after The Dallas Morning News reported what happened. Hastings said the student never claimed to be a citizen during his detention though the newspaper reported that the agencys own paperwork noted the opposite. Hastings also declined to give any broader accounting of how often the agency had held Americans. I dont have information about specific cases, he said. (Hastings did not respond to requests for comment.)Espaillat, the New York representative, has been in office for eight years. He said he frequently raised immigration questions and concerns during the Biden administration too, and got responses.Republicans complained about the opposite experience during the Biden administration. They said the administration was unresponsive to Congress questions on immigration, forcing lawmakers to subpoena officials for answers. (The administration dismissed the moves as political posturing.) Espaillat said hes not surprised the Trump administration has been silent. They probably dont have a good answer.

Today, we’re diving into the real-world impact of misinformation on social media, particularly Facebook. How did a made-up story lead someone to bring a gun into a pizza shop? What really fueled the Capitol riot? We explore the thin line between lies online and violence offline. It’s tempting to scroll past a conspiracy theory or laugh off a wild comment section. But...

Its hard to believe its already been 5 years since the start of the Covid-19 Pandemic. In 2020, on top of all the fear and uncertainty of a world on lockdown, the students of Deer Valley High School, just like many students all over the world, were on a mission to achieve their dreams of [...]The post GLAAD Exclusive: Hear Javontes Inspiring Story on PBSs The Class first appeared on GLAAD.

Shawn Mendes has added some more ink to his body, but this time, fan reactions have been... mixed.The tattoo, made up of a bald eagle on Mendes sternum, was introduced to the world on April 13 by LA-based tattoo artist Kane Navasard on Instagram. It is captioned, Soaring to new heights, for my bro @shawnmendes. (@) The comments under the post were mixed, with some saying its an incredible and detailed work and others saying, Everyone is lying here, the tattoo was horrible.Historically, Mendes ink has had significant meaning for him, including the Good Luck tattoo he had penned in 2019 as a sign of good spirits for the people who walk behind him and the Dos Reis tattoo on the back of his neck to signify his bloodline. Others include the lightbulb on his arm, which symbolizes his Illuminate album, and Good Boy on his arm, which is a tribute to his dog.Still, besides some of the negative feedback, fans are also oggling Mendes toned chest and abs in the photo. If we didnt know it was to debut a new tattoo, we just would have been distracted anyway.At the time of this writing, Mendes has yet to publicly speak about his tattoo or its meaning. Although it does resemble the tattoo under Rihannas breast line, it still aesthetically fits in and matches his other tattoos, so not all of the hate toward him is warranted.As it is, traditionally, bald eagles symbolize strength, courage, freedom, and immortality. Theyve become a staple in American history since theyre only indigenous to North America.Keep scrolling for some reactionsgood and badto Mendes new ink, and look for when he addresses what it means. (@) "Monday morning news: Katy Perry and Gayle Kind went to space and Shawn Mendes got an eagle underboob tattoo" (@) "Its funny how every new Shawn Mendes tattoo is somehow the most Shawn Mendes tattoo ever lmao" (@) "if you happen to look very closely, you will notice that shawn mendes has a new tattoo" (@) "I will eagle-ly suck it until his soul went to cloud 9" (@) "every time he gets a tattoo shawn twt gets divided over it for like 3 days" (@) "gonna look like an upside down moustache in 3 years but still would" (@) "Holy sh*t!!! I love this" (@) "His body is perfect without the ink. Its like spray painting the statue of David." (@) "What tattoo? all I see is hairy chest." (@) "bumper sticker on a bentley." (@) "The hate towards this man is so forced."

Gayle King and Katy Perry both kissed the ground when they landed back on Earth after going to space, but Amazon founder Jeff Bezos lips ended up touching the ground for an embarrassing reason that was seen by everyone watching the moment on a live stream.Blue Origin, Bezoss space technology company, just sent an all-female crew to space, but when he met the capsule when it landed in the Texas desert on Monday morning things didnt go exactly as planned.The second richest man in the world ran up to the capsule carrying his fiance, Lauren Sanchez, but fell face-first into the dirt before he go the chance to greet her. (@) After face planting, the 61-year-old billionaire popped back up and seemed to pretend nothing had happed before continuing on to open the hatch for the crew that included a combination of celebrities as scientist. The history-making crew included Sanchez, Perry, and Gayle King, who were joined by film producer Kerianne Flynn, NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, and bioastronautics research scientist Amanda Nguyen.The embarrassing moment was captured on film, prompting the internet to start dunking on Bezos. Jeff bezos planting face in front baddies, lol, one person joked on X (formerly Twitter), while another wrote, Jeff Bezos trips and face plants. First time its felt like hes a normal person. (@) (@) The star-studded nearly 11-minute-long journey to space was the first all-female spaceflight since 1963 when Soviet-era cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space when she went on a nearly three-day solo flight orbiting Earth, NPR reports. All of the women on the flight looked elated as they left the shuttle, except for King, who just looked done. (@) "Gayle King is all of us on a Monday," one person wrote. (@) "It's oddly quiet when you get up there," King said. "It's really quiet and peaceful, and you look down on the planet and think: That's where we came from? To me it's such a reminder about how we need to do better, be better.

The new season of Hacks is finally here! Although well have to wait to see what Ava (Hannah Einbinder), Deborah (Jean Smart), and all the others get up to over this particular run of episodes, Einbinder is already opening up about who shed like to see Ava get frisky with next.In a fun interview with Entertainment Tonight, co-creator and fellow star Paul W. Downs sat down to ask Einbinder and Smart some questions about season 4 and beyond."Last season, you had some steamy moments with Christina Hendricks," he said, addressing Einbinder. "Who would you like us to cast for your next romantic adventure? Well take notes."At first, the actress played coy, insisting she "couldnt possibly say," to which Smart amusingly interjected, "Yes, you could." It turns out her co-star was correct."Whoever you think will be great," Einbinder mused, before rapidly adding, "La Seydoux. Please." (@) The two stars also had the opportunity to sell fans on the current season of the show in just 15 seconds as if anyone who watches Hacks would ever consider stopping now.Still, they did a bang up job. Smarts list of reasons to watch included strippers, coyotes, race cars, sex scenes, laughs, and "fabulous guest stars." Einbinder didnt have quite as much to add, but capped the whole thing off flawlessly."We have gay people," she said as the timer went off. "Feels like we summed it up."See on Instagram

Looking to turn up the heat this spring? The Tryst Puerto Vallarta is turning the party all the way up with an irresistible lineup of drag brunches, rooftop pool parties, cocktail soires, and community celebrations during Semana Santa and Pride Week. As the worlds first luxury gay hotel brand, The Tryst isnt just rolling out the red carpettheyre strutting it in heels. Mizz Peaches at theSource

On April 21st, the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, Inc., a case that could strip away a critical piece of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which mandates insurance companies cover preventive healthcare services at no out-of-pocket cost. Braidwood Management, Inc. initiated the case stating that, as a [...]The post How Targeting PrEP Could Negatively Impact Preventive Healthcare for Millions of Americans first appeared on GLAAD.

Drag Race star Jasmine Kennedie claims she had a harrowing experience last night where she was harassed and followed by a man on her way home from work.Kennedie, who came out as trans while filming season 14 of Drag Race, posted an Instagram reel with video footage of the man she alleges harassed and followed her and was caught on tape saying, Trump is still your daddy.After a short clip of the man at the heart of Kennedies allegations, the 25-year-old drag performer assured her followers that she was safe before detailing what happened to her while she was on the Oculus PATH train.I was verbally harassed and followed on the New Jersey Transit back home, and I will be sharing my story as well as video evidence and giving you all the rundown as to what happened to me last night, she said in the reel. Kennedie pointed out how scary it is to be a trans woman during the current political climate. Y'all, it is very, very dangerous right now to be a trans woman in Trump's America. I have lived in this city since 2017 and I have never been treated the way that I was treated last night, she explained.Kennedie was on her way after doing a show at Playhouse in the West Village when she was accosted by a strange man. The one time I decide to take public transit home is the one time I get verbally accosted, get called slurs, get followed, and really I had to stand up for myself, she said. And I was actually very proud of myself, because in this world and this climate, they want us to be afraid. They want us to be scared. They don't want us to be able to stand up for ourselves. And this person was very shocked to see that I, as a trans woman, was willing to stand up for myself and my rights.See on InstagramShe was waiting for a train while on the phone with her boyfriend and still had a full face on of drag when the random man decided to sit very, very, very close to me.Kennedie immediately stood up and the man called her the F slur and said this is Trumps America and Trumps your daddy.Despite being called anti-trans slurs, Kennedie said she refused to back down and take his verbal abuse. I said, Yes, I am a tr*nny do you have a problem with that? Yes, I am a trans woman. Do you have a problem with that? And then he had the nerve to say, you know, like you have a dick. And I said, Yes, and it's probably bigger than yours, she said.Kennedie went on to explain that trans women arent trying to claim that they were born male at birth, but Republicans seem incapable of understanding that our gender is different than our sex at birth and that gender and sex are two different things.Now, because the right-wing party has decided to make it their number one villain in attack and make them feel make them feel like an outsider, make them feel like they shouldn't belong, Kennedie said. But we do belong. And I stood the fuck up to this person. I do not care. I was not gonna let some man make me feel insignificant because I'm confident in who I am, and let's be honest, why'd you sit so close next to the doll?Kennedie said that the man then told her that she should be deported. I'm a US citizen. Are we just deporting anybody who doesn't go with the ideology of Trump? Now, is this what we're becoming? This is what the Trump's America wants is to deport people that aren't in their ideology.She may have felt vulnerable," but she didnt allow the man who was harassing her to make her cower.I don't give a fuck. I am who I am, and I'm never going to back down on this, she revealed. "This is a message to all trans women out there and trans brothers and trans men, do not let them stoke fear in you. Do not because at the end of the day, when you stand up, they don't expect you to stand up, but when you do, they back down, and they get scared, they get cowardice.Kennedie explained that once she pulled out her phone and started to record him, the man backed down and started to grovel. She also said that people were standing near her and on the train who defended her and made her feel safe.It was very comforting to know that the people in this world see me for who I am, and are willing to defend me while assholes and bigots like that can run around rampant and they think that there's no repercussions, Kennedie said. So, at the end of the day, you can never make me feel insignificant, because I know my power, and I did not let them take it from me.Kennedie finishes the reel with more recordings of the man, where he claims that she started the problem, tries to grab her phone, and even follows her onto the train.After posting the reel to Instagram detailing the harassment, Kennedie experienced an outpouring of support from followers and fellow Drag Race alum like Daya Betty, Amanda Tory Meating, Alyssa Hunter, Aurora Matrix, and Deja Skye.Other people reposted her reel asking for help identifying the man in question, which Kennedie added to her Instagram Stories. She also added a video clip where she said that shes received a tip that the man supposedly works at Gym U, but the information has yet to be confirmed.PRIDE has reached out to Kennedie for comment but has not heard back as of publication.

First came the homophobic remarks. Then came the cuddles. And now? Celebrity Big Brother UK (CBBUK) viewers arent quite sure what show theyre watching anymore.After Mickey Rourke was removed from the CBBUK house for inappropriate behaviorincluding multiple homophobic comments aimed at JoJo Siwaattention has now shifted to something no one saw coming: a surprisingly intimate bond between Siwa and fellow housemate Chris Hughes.The pair have been inseparable since day one, with Hughes notably comforting Siwa after Rourke told her, If I stay longer than four days, you wont be gay anymore, and later joked about tying her up and voting the lesbian out. While Hughes defense of Siwa was widely praised, whats happened since has complicated things. (@) In the most recent episode, Siwa and Hughes were seen cuddling in bed under the night vision cameras as Chris gently stroked her back and the two exchanged sleepy smiles. JoJo eventually returned to her own bed, but not before Chris told her he missed her while he was asleep. The next morning JoJo climbed back into bed for a morning hug; (@) Naturally, the internet explodedbecause lets be real, JoJo is very publicly in a relationship with nonbinary partner Kath Ebbs, while Hughes is straight and single. That makes this whole thing feel like the queerest will-they-wont-they in reality TV history.And yet, their chemistry is undeniable. During a pirate-themed challenge, JoJo (appointed Captain, of course) playfully took charge while Hughes praised her for being hot and kind of sexy. Later, he complimented her scent with a you smell nice tonight, before asking for a goodnight hug. (@) Even former contestant Michael Fabricant weighed in on Late & Live, claiming the two have real chemistry, despite host Will Best brushing it off as one-sided on Chriss part. Meanwhile, Chriss real-life brother Ben Hughes took to morning TV to insist its just a strong friendship, noting theyre among the youngest in the house and simply bonded over shared experiencesespecially after Rourkes attacks. (@) But viewers remain torn. Some see a sweet, platonic dynamic forged in a pressure cooker. Others feel lines are getting blurry, especially given JoJos relationship status and the potential optics of cuddling with a straight guy on national TV. Then theres the question of whether ITV is leaning into a showmance angle, editing footage to spark buzz and Twitter spirals. (@) Whatevers happening, one things clear: Rourke may have been booted, but the lesbian chaos he stirred up is still lingering.Celebrity Big Brother UK airs Monday through Friday on ITV1.Keep scrolling for other reactions. (@) "wtf is jojo siwa and chris hughes from love island having a budding romance on BIG BROTHER #CBBUK" (@) "Jo Jo Siwa having a bisexual awakening over Chris Hughes is the most insane television of the 21st century. Something AI would not even generate." (@) "imagine telling someone in 2017 that jojo siwa and chris hughes from love island would be in bed together on national tv" (@) "jojo washing chris hughes feet on the livestream oh saint siwa they could never make me hate you #cbbuk" (@) "Jojo siwa and Chris Hughes are my heartstopper" (@) "sorry but why did I just see a video of jojo siwa and chris hughes in bed together on my tiktok fyp ?????? i need to research"

Just in time for STI Awareness Week (April 1319), MISTRthe largest LGBTQ+ sexual health platform in the United Statesis marking a game-changing milestone: one year of providing free DoxyPEP to patients nationwide. And the results? A dramatic 50% drop in STI positivity rates among its users. Since launching access to free DoxyPEP (doxycycline post-exposure prophylaxis) in 2024Source

Fresh off his win on Peacocks hit competition series The Traitors, Dylan Efron, 33, is turning his breakout moment into a stylish splash, starring in a new skincare collaboration with Sephora. The campaign, which launched this week, features the first-time reality star clad in nothing but a white towel as he introduces his newfound commitment to taking better care of his skin. Ill be honestSource

It all comes down to this!Season 17 of RuPaul's Drag Race has served up plenty of iconic moments and now Lexi Love, Onya Nurve, Sam Star, and Jewels Sparkles are the final four contestants vying for the crown."Fans should expect the unexpected! You should expect Suzie [Toot] not to be competing," Love laughs. "You should expect the most! I am here to give you the most tonight. I am pulling out all the stunts, all the stops, and all the shenanigans. It's time to let these girls have it!" See on Instagram One of the most beautiful moments from the season happened during the iconic makeover challenge. Love was able to transform her biological mother during the episode, which served a major turning point in their relationship."It meant so much more than any material object that she has ever or thought that she was giving me. I received one of the kindest gifts in the entire world standing on that stage."Everyone knows the real race for RuGirls begins once the season is wrapped and Love is already working on some exciting projects following her time on the show."The next thing for Lexi Love is to be in a city near you! Then, I gotta hit Fashion Week. Victoria's Secret, call me. New York Fashion Week, call me. Milan Fashion Week, call me. Actually, I'm going to call you! I'm just going to show up. I'll just be there. I'm a size 13!"RuPaul's Drag Race airs Friday nights on MTV. To see the full interview with Lexi Love, check out the video at the top of the page.

Pop star Shawn Mendes has added another piece of body art to his growing collection, and its turning heads for more than one reason. On April 13, Los Angeles-based tattoo artist Kane Navasard revealed Mendes latest inka detailed bald eagle stretched across the center of the singers chest. The sternum-spanning piece made its debut on Instagram, where Navasard captioned the post: SoaringSource