The leading scientist urging policymakers not to criminalize kratom, a substance that has left a trail of death and addiction around the world, has routinely failed to disclose longstanding financial ties to the industry’s most powerful lobbying group, ProPublica has found.

University of Florida professor Christopher McCurdy has accepted travel reimbursements, donations to his university’s foundation and funding for an annual symposium on research into the leaf’s medicinal potential from the American Kratom Association — none of which has been disclosed in his conflict of interest statements or on the papers he publishes.

The fight to keep kratom legal across the country has taken on increased urgency as more potent kratom derivatives have appeared on store shelves and evidence has mounted of the leaf’s risks to users’ health. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 5,200 people in the United States died from drug overdoses involving kratom between 2020 and 2024. And calls to poison control centers involving kratom have spiked 1,200% in the last decade. 

The lobbying group, which says it advocates for kratom consumers, has waged a pitched battle in statehouses and in Washington, D.C., to keep kratom products widely available in America’s gas stations, smoke shops and convenience stores. Documents show it has relied repeatedly on McCurdy to help convince lawmakers kratom is safe enough to remain legal — deploying him to key states that are either considering full bans on the leaf or are on the verge of overturning an existing ban. His success fighting federal regulators earned him a place in the AKA’s Legacy Advocate Hall of Fame.

Kratom comes from a tree native to Southeast Asia and is sold as a powder or in capsules, tablets or shots like energy drinks. In small amounts, it acts as a stimulant. In larger amounts, it acts like an opioid. Although the Food and Drug Administration prohibits marketing it as a supplement or using it as a food ingredient, it’s advertised as a mood and energy enhancer, a painkiller and an alternative to opioids.

ProPublica’s review of McCurdy’s appearances in recent years shows he has emphasized kratom’s therapeutic potential while downplaying its risks — despite his own published research finding kratom use can lead to severe withdrawal symptoms in newborns exposed in utero, and to dependency and even death in those who take it. McCurdy has brushed off questions about the hazards by noting that even water can kill if consumed in excessive quantities. McCurdy does, however, argue for better manufacturing standards and labeling, and for putting age restrictions on kratom’s use.

Other scientists who consult with and do research for the kratom association disclose that relationship. But McCurdy, who does not disclose it, has built a reputation as a neutral arbiter in the emotional debate pitting those with life-altering kratom addiction against those who say they use it without ill effects to combat opioid use or relieve pain.

Indeed, McCurdy’s research focuses on developing kratom’s dominant chemical compound into a pharmaceutical to treat addiction. That work has been funded by the federal government, which has poured an estimated $100 million in grants into the research. Such funding could be disrupted if kratom is declared illegal.

McCurdy told ProPublica that he has accepted invitations to speak to policymakers because “decisions about kratom should be informed by the best available science.” Reimbursed travel expenses don’t influence the “substance” of his presentations or his “scientific conclusions,” he said.

“My views on kratom are based on more than two decades of scientific research,” he said. “They are my own and are not dictated by the American Kratom Association or any other outside organization.”

Those advocating for restrictions on kratom contend that as McCurdy testifies, publishes research or provides public information, he should be more forthright about his relationship with the kratom industry.

Jennifer Brandt, a Virginia pharmacist who advocates for a total ban on kratom sales, was the first to file records requests with the University of Florida for McCurdy’s correspondence. She has subsequently asked a medical journal to append corrections listing his ties to the lobbying group. “I’m really confused on where science ends and lobbying begins,” she said of McCurdy.

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McCurdy’s work opposing the criminalization of kratom started as early as 2018. That year, he joined with other scientists — including the AKA’s lead science consultant — to convince the Drug Enforcement Administration not to classify kratom as a Schedule I narcotic. The designation, reserved for drugs with no medical purpose and high abuse potential, would make kratom illegal. The scientists said in a letter to federal regulators that it would also “severely hinder” their research into possible therapeutic uses. In a paper, McCurdy argued that scheduling kratom would erect new regulatory hurdles to studying the leaf and dissuade funders from supporting it. The effort to schedule kratom was halted during the first Trump administration.

However, the association’s fight continued as it worked to convince state lawmakers to explicitly legalize kratom by regulating its sale. McCurdy also became a key player in this effort, according to emails obtained by ProPublica through public records requests to the University of Florida. 

While the group’s membership is made up of kratom users, its lobbying efforts are funded by manufacturers and vendors. It spends about $2.5 million a year on lobbying.

In 2023, at the AKA’s request, McCurdy briefed the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs, which regularly considers kratom regulation. He conducted the briefing remotely and did not travel to the annual meeting in Vienna that year. In 2025, however, he made the trip to brief delegates in person. Emails indicate his hotel room was paid for by the lobbying group.  

In 2024, McCurdy traveled several times for the association. He planned an August trip to Indonesia, which was considering a full ban on the leaf, with the association paying $8,700 for a first-class plane ticket. McCurdy canceled the trip at the last minute, the association said. Email correspondence indicates, however, that he kept the flight credit for future AKA-related travel. 

But he was soon back on the road. In September, he went to Washington, D.C., to dine with and brief members of Congress and their staffs. There, he told lawmakers that he couldn’t say kratom is “entirely safe” but that it should remain available to the public as research continues.

“I want it to be accessible to everybody,” he said. “Always have.”

The following month, the AKA arranged for McCurdy’s travel to Little Rock, Arkansas, where lawmakers were debating whether to lift a kratom ban enacted in 2016. He told them kratom dependence was similar to caffeine dependence, describing withdrawal symptoms as akin to those caused by missing a morning cup of coffee. Kratom users have described dependence, so severe they suffer debilitating withdrawal symptoms and can’t quit the leaf. McCurdy has also said in a deposition that some users have been unable to stop taking it.

The lobbying was unsuccessful in Arkansas. But a few months later, with McCurdy’s help, the organization had its first success overturning a state ban. 

Rhode Island’s Gov. Dan McKee had vetoed a bill to legalize kratom after weighing the concerns of his top public health officials. The association booked travel for McCurdy and other scientists to Providence to brief those health officials. When the legislature reconvened in 2025, the AKA’s bill passed and McKee signed it. This time, the state health officials stayed silent.

That frustrated Rep. Michelle McGaw, a Democrat who is also a pharmacist. She opposed legalizing kratom, citing the threat to public health, but struggled to get her legislative colleagues to take seriously data showing kratom’s risks. “It has been a struggle, particularly in light of having kratom lobbyists finding ways with their own research or data to counter that narrative or try to confuse the narrative.”

Mac Haddow, the AKA’s lead lobbyist, said his organization relies on McCurdy and other scientists to provide accurate information but has “no control” over what they tell policymakers. “We think that science should dictate what the public policies are,” he said. 

Regarding McCurdy’s lack of disclosure that the association funds his travel, Haddow contends that beneficiaries aren’t typically required to reveal travel-related payments and said the association has never commissioned a study from McCurdy that would require disclosure.

Instead, the group has donated to the University of Florida’s foundation and has helped to underwrite McCurdy’s annual kratom symposium, attended by about 100 scientists, to promote research into kratom’s therapeutic potential. The AKA, through its nonprofit arm, the Center for Plant Science and Health, has donated more than $100,000 to the school.

McCurdy estimated while speaking to lawmakers in Georgia this summer that his research has been supported by $1 million from industry donations to the foundation.

McCurdy had not disclosed any ties to the industry on papers he’s published until Brandt, the Virginia pharmacist, spoke up in 2025. She provided one publisher with email correspondence she had obtained under public records laws revealing McCurdy’s ties to the association. The publication required McCurdy to append a correction to the paper that discloses his work as an expert witness in court cases, which he has done for both kratom companies and families bringing wrongful death claims. The correction doesn’t mention his work with kratom industry lobbyists. 

Rules for disclosure vary depending on the scientific journal. But the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, which recommends publishing standards, requires reimbursed travel to be disclosed for research submissions. 

Such information is important to understanding the validity of research, said Ivan Oransky, executive director of the Center for Scientific Integrity. 

“It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t trust anything that’s funded by industry,” Oransky said. “It’s part of knowing the whole picture.”

Oransky said giving to a university foundation instead of directly funding research is similar to a business using a shell company to conceal its true ownership. Such a donation might not trigger disclosure the way sponsoring a specific study would.

“These things are technically legitimate but not intellectually honest,” Oransky said of McCurdy’s funding sources. “It’s obscuring what’s really happening.”

McCurdy did not list any travel in his conflict of interest statements required by the University of Florida. The university requires disclosure if travel exceeds $5,000 in a calendar year. The total value of the travel reimbursed by the AKA is unclear, and neither McCurdy nor the association responded to questions about how much was spent. 

A university spokesperson said a review of McCurdy’s university disclosures “found no indication of non-compliance.” The spokesperson did not reply to a question about whether McCurdy’s travel totaled less than $5,000.

In an email to a university colleague, McCurdy said he sees talking to policymakers for the AKA as “part of my work related expertise and education of the public and policy makers,” which does not need to be disclosed.

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The AKA does not support the sale of all products derived from kratom. More recently, McCurdy has sounded the alarm on new kratom derivatives, such as MGM-15 (dihydro-7- hydroxymitragynine), MGM-16 (9-fluorodihydro-7-hydroxymitragynine), and MP (mitragynine pseudoindoxyl), which the AKA is trying to have banned. This has involved drawing a bright line between whole-leaf kratom — generally the products sold by the vendors that fund the association — and its new derivatives, which have been described as more potent than morphine.

This summer, McCurdy told a committee of Georgia lawmakers that such derivative products have a high potential for abuse and are causing deaths in his state. “These are the things that are really scary to me,” he said. “These synthetics are far from kratom, they are derived from kratom, but they are not kratom at all.”

The DEA cited McCurdy’s research in its recent notices seeking temporary classification of some derivatives as Schedule I drugs. In a news release, the DEA specified the classification does not apply to “botanical kratom products,” such as the ones McCurdy has sought to protect from scheduling.

But whole-leaf kratom — the natural product and its extracts — has also led to dependence and death, according to McCurdy’s own research.

In 2022, he co-authored a review of medical literature that found cardiovascular, neurological and psychiatric adverse events from kratom use and emphasized an “urgent” concern about babies born experiencing withdrawal after exposure to kratom in utero.

In 2025, he co-wrote a paper analyzing kratom-related deaths in Florida from 2020 to 2021, well before the more dangerous derivatives came on the market, that concluded dozens of people “died of kratom (mitragynine) exposures alone.”

When talking to policymakers, McCurdy stays largely silent on these findings.

McCurdy told ProPublica he doesn’t contend kratom “is without risk” and that his findings on its dangers should “be taken seriously.”

“At the same time, the existence of risk does not by itself answer the policy question of whether a substance should be prohibited,” he said. “My scientific assessment has led me to support appropriate regulation, including manufacturing and labeling standards, age restrictions, and safeguards addressing products that present materially different risks.”

When pressed by lawmakers on the danger, he answers that any substance can be dangerous at the right dose, including caffeine and water.

“There is such a thing as water intoxication that can cause death, and does cause deaths every year,” he told a lawmaker in Arkansas in 2024. “But we don’t ever think about banning water or making it illegal. It’s an essential part of life.”

The post The Scientist Trying to Keep Kratom Legal Has Not Disclosed Longstanding Ties to Kratom Lobbyists appeared first on ProPublica.

For more than a year now, I’ve been investigating how youth sports organizations have failed to protect kids from sexual abuse, and the gaps in the system that have allowed coaches banned for misconduct to keep working with young athletes. 

So far, I’ve shown that one major nonprofit sports organization, the Amateur Athletic Union, has become a haven for coaches accused of abuse. I identified eight coaches who are still working with kids under the AAU despite having been banned by SafeSport, a center created by Congress to protect kids from abuse in sports that has a public list anyone can check. The AAU has said it does not comment on individual cases but in a statement said that it is “committed to protecting its athletes through comprehensive protection policies overseen by our Compliance Department.”

I also told the story of a Texas volleyball coach named Ryan Richardson, who continued coaching despite having been banned by SafeSport and is now under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security. Richardson did not respond to multiple requests for comment on ProPublica and The Washington Post’s reporting, or an email seeking comment about the Homeland Security investigation. When he was first suspended in 2024, Richardson told the local news website MyRGV that complaints about him were an effort to “retaliate and defame someone’s character,” and he said he “would never do anything to risk the physical or mental wellbeing of these strong young ladies.” 

I’m still reporting, and I want to hear from you. 

I know these are sensitive topics that can be difficult to discuss. I also know how important these stories are. If you know about a coach on the SafeSport list who is still working with kids, or you have other experiences with how youth sports organizations have handled abuse allegations, please fill out our brief questionnaire. 

I’m particularly interested in:

• Finding instances of coaches who are continuing to work with kids after being banned by SafeSport. 
• Better understanding how abusive coaches manipulate and deceive parents.
• Learning about coaching abuse, safety and misconduct in basketball, in which SafeSport has far less influence compared with many other popular youth sports.

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

The post Help Us Investigate Abusive Coaches in Youth Sports appeared first on ProPublica.

A Texas volleyball coach who was the subject of an investigation last month by ProPublica and The Washington Post is now facing a federal child exploitation probe, according to an agent for Homeland Security Investigations, the main investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security.

The ProPublica and Post story detailed how Ryan Richardson continued to coach teenage girls for years at his gym in Pharr, Texas, amid allegations of misconduct, even after he was suspended in early 2025 and subsequently ruled “permanently ineligible” this February by the U.S. Center for SafeSport, an oversight group. On its public disciplinary list, SafeSport said it found that Richardson had an intimate relationship with a minor, committed sexual misconduct involving a minor, and engaged in physical misconduct and bullying. 

Juan J. Flores Jr., a supervisor in a Homeland Security Investigations unit that focuses on child exploitation in the Rio Grande Valley, told ProPublica and The Post that he had launched the probe into Richardson in response to the story, which included allegations from a parent and former players that he had a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old player beginning in 2022 and that he groomed and emotionally and physically abused others. 

“My plan is to turn over every rock, have every conversation. I know he’s still coaching,” Flores said. 

Richardson did not respond to multiple requests for comment on ProPublica and The Post’s reporting or to an email seeking a comment for this story. When he was first suspended in 2024 by Lone Star Region Volleyball, the organization overseeing volleyball in Texas, Richardson told the local news website MyRGV that complaints about him were an effort to “retaliate and defame someone’s character,” and said he “would never do anything to risk the physical or mental wellbeing of these strong young ladies.” 

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said HSI was “a global leader in the fight against child exploitation” but said it was “unable to confirm or deny any ongoing investigations.”

ProPublica and The Post published excerpts of Snapchat messages between Richardson and a former player, including from August 2022, when the girl was 16. In those messages, Richardson and the girl said “I love you” to each other and planned when they would next meet up. In a message in May 2023, when the girl was 17, Richardson wrote, “I don’t like that we are only sex right now so I really would love to get past this high school Shit when you are on your own pretty much.” The Snapchat messages were part of an investigation conducted by SafeSport.

The mother of the former player, Maggie Gutierrez, said that in the summer of 2022, she discovered Richardson alone with her 16-year-old daughter in the darkened back room of his gym, which at the time contained a twin mattress. Richardson turned his back to her and appeared to be tying up the string of his pants, Gutierrez said. At the time, Richardson and Gutierrez’s daughter denied anything inappropriate had happened. (ProPublica and The Post, which do not name alleged victims of sexual abuse without their consent, are referring to Gutierrez by her maiden name to avoid identifying her daughter, who declined to be interviewed.) 

Gutierrez went to the police in both Pharr and McAllen in early 2024, she told ProPublica and The Post, after her daughter’s college volleyball coach told her that he believed Richardson and her daughter, then 18, were dating. 

She said police declined to pursue the case because her daughter was a legal adult and did not want to speak to police officers.

Police in both jurisdictions denied records requests from ProPublica and The Post by citing an exemption under state privacy statutes, but the news organizations obtained excerpts from the police report in McAllen. In the text, an officer described meeting with Gutierrez at the McAllen police station.

The officer wrote that due to Gutierrez’s daughter “being 18 years of age, which as per Texas law is considered an adult and an age which gives her the right to consent, case would not be further investigated and closed.” 

Gutierrez then reported her concerns to Lone Star, the regional arm of USA Volleyball, which governs the sport. Officials referred the matter to SafeSport, which opened an investigation. 

Gutierrez spoke to the Homeland Security investigator last week, she told ProPublica and The Post. 

Flores said his inquiry would also involve looking into the actions of both police departments that declined to pursue a case against Richardson.

Police in Pharr and McAllen did not respond to requests for comment.

The post Homeland Security Opens Child Exploitation Probe Into Banned Texas Volleyball Coach appeared first on ProPublica.

California lawmakers unanimously passed legislation last week to ensure that school administrators are informed about past accusations of misconduct against teachers as part of their hiring process.  

The legislation follows a KQED-ProPublica investigation revealing how delays and inaction, combined with a lack of transparency, allowed educators to get new jobs after school districts reported them to the state teacher licensing agency for sexual harassment or other misconduct. Our reporting found that at least 14 educators were hired by new schools after their former employers determined they had sexually harassed students or committed other sexual misconduct. 

The bill, authored by Democratic Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, is an attempt to make sure that doesn’t happen again, adding teeth to background check mandates in place since 2025. Under that law, applicants for jobs at public schools are supposed to list every teaching position they have ever held. The requirement expanded to private school teaching applicants this year. Top school administrators are required to check with applicants’ previous employers to see if they had ever been reported to the state for credible or substantiated complaints of egregious misconduct.

But the existing law relies on schools and teachers to follow the mandates without clear penalties for those who fail to do so. Muratsuchi’s bill specifies that the state’s teacher licensing agency may discipline teachers and administrators; that can include issuing public reprimands, or suspending or revoking their credentials if they don’t comply. 

“If there aren’t any penalties, there are no consequences,” Muratsuchi said in an interview with KQED and ProPublica after the legislation passed. “The bill makes sure that school districts prioritize this by putting in consequences for failing to do so.” 

Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto the legislation. A spokesperson for Newsom said the governor does not typically comment on bills awaiting his signature.  

The measure is dramatically different from the bill Muratsuchi originally proposed in June, which would have gone further, creating a searchable database that would allow schools to see if applicants for public school teaching positions had been reported to the state after they were fired or had resigned over claims of misconduct. California is set to launch such a database by next summer for school support staff, such as bus drivers and janitors, with substantiated claims of egregious misconduct. But public school teachers are not included.

The Trump administration had singled out teachers unions as obstructions to legislative reforms to protect children when it announced a national crackdown this summer on how school districts handle accusations of sexual misconduct by teachers.

California’s powerful teachers unions, the California Federation of Teachers and California Teachers Association, had criticized Muratsuchi’s database proposal for public school educators, arguing it would violate teachers’ privacy and subject them to employment consequences if allegations are later determined to be unfounded. 

The Commission on Teacher Credentialing, California’s educator licensing agency, also warned that complying with the proposed legislation to add teachers to the database would “require Commission staff to commit crimes” and expose the agency to liability because state law restricts what information it is allowed to share. 

After the pushback, Muratsuchi amended the proposed bill and scrapped the database idea. The revamped legislation ultimately received support from the California Federation of Teachers. 

School administrators, though, say the legislation does not address the burden on school districts to reach out to every previous employer for any reports they made to the state about a teacher applicant.  

“Many of us in this state have been faced with budget cuts and reduced staffing. We need a better system,” said Chris Calabrese, superintendent of Benicia Unified, a 4,500-student district in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

He said a database for employers to check whether a teacher had ever been reported would be a more efficient way to vet applicants, allowing schools easy access to critical information that would keep students safe.

Currently, a red flag shows up next to a teacher’s name in the state’s public database of credentialed educators if the licensing agency has ever disciplined the person. But the state disciplinary process typically takes one year, according to the agency, giving educators who have been reported a window to apply for new teaching jobs without any warning to potential employers. 

In 2023, Benicia Unified reported former elementary teacher Matthew Shelton to the state after students accused him of touching them inappropriately. Shelton resigned and weeks later was hired as an assistant principal at a nearby middle school in West Contra Unified. A red flag did not appear next to his name until the following year, after his teaching license was suspended because he was charged with five felony counts of lewd acts on a Benicia student. The number of victims and charges has since grown, and Shelton, whose license has been revoked, is scheduled to go to trial in September.

Shelton, who has pleaded not guilty to all charges, did not respond to requests for comment, and his attorney declined to comment. 

Calabrese, who started as superintendent last year, declined to comment on specific questions about Shelton.

The post California Lawmakers Pass Bill to Punish Administrators Who Fail to Vet Teachers for Misconduct appeared first on ProPublica.

In mid-July testimony before Congress, Russell Vought boasted that, as the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he’d refashioned the agency’s approach to pursuing banks and other financial companies accused of exploiting Americans — the role Congress had created for the agency after the 2008 economic crash.

Vought had spent the first 18 months of the new Trump administration trying to dismantle the bureau, much as he and other appointees had done with the U.S. Agency for International Development. At CFPB, he’d ordered mass layoffs, tried to choke off the bureau’s funding and ended the lease on its headquarters, attempting to make good on his vow to put civil servants “in trauma.” But federal courts blocked Vought’s efforts to close the CFPB, with a judge at one point saying the administration had acted with “complete disregard” for Congress. 

So Vought, who is one of President Donald Trump’s top advisers, switched tactics: If there had to be a watchdog, theirs would be more of a golden retriever, friendlier to industry and less aggressive. Vought had accused the bureau of “thuggery” in the past, and said the “new” CFPB would focus on deregulation, embrace “humility” and adopt a “collaborative approach” to its dealings with companies that harm consumers.

As evidence of the success of this new approach, Vought singled out one company by name in his testimony, a buzzy startup called Bilt. The company, which offers credit cards used to make rent and mortgage payments, had fumbled a critical transition, leading to confusion and financial stress for its customers. In the past, the CFPB might’ve deployed examiners to ensure that every consumer harmed got relief, investigated Bilt’s technology platforms for potential flaws, questioned its third-party contractors or issued subpoenas — with the goal of finding the root causes of whatever went wrong and preventing it from happening again. 

The Trump-era CFPB took a different tack. “We reached out to the company,” Vought told Congress, “and before it got to the adversarial part of the process, they were able to fix their issues.” The CFPB even posted a feel-good statement on its website, touting its new approach and telling consumers that information provided by Bilt “appears to show” the firm was “back on track.”

Yet two weeks after Vought’s testimony, Bilt failed customers again. This time, Bilt cardholders received mistaken debt collection notices and saw their credit scores go down as a result, sparking more embarrassing news stories and angry complaints. It was Bilt’s second fiasco in six months, and as its customers scrambled to understand what had gone wrong, the CFPB was nowhere to be found.

The Bilt controversy offered an early test of CFPB’s new approach, and the results suggest that an ask-nicely strategy to consumer protection isn’t likely to protect consumers. What’s more, current and former CFPB officials say the bureau could’ve caught the issues that caused the second of Bilt’s two screw-ups had the previous playbook still been in use.

ProPublica sent the CFPB a detailed set of questions about its handling of the Bilt complaints and what actions it took to protect consumers and prevent future problems. The bureau did not respond to any questions or requests for comment.

The whole episode drives at a bigger question, according to consumer advocates and current and former CFPB employees: If the Trump administration can’t eliminate the CFPB, what will become of it in the hands of Trump officials, such as Vought, who have long believed the agency is unnecessary? (Vought termed out as acting director in early August but remains a senior adviser. The administration’s nominee for full-time director, Brian Johnson, is an executive at Capital One bank and a former CFPB appointee. At his confirmation hearing, Johnson said he could not think of a single decision that he disagreed with made by Vought at the CFPB.) 

“What we saw Vought do with Bilt is innovative — and I don’t mean that as a compliment,” said Mike Pierce, a former CFPB official who runs the consumer advocacy group Protect Borrowers, which has criticized Vought’s tenure at the bureau. 

A Rocky Transition

Bilt’s business rests on a simple premise: Consumers should build credit and earn rewards for what’s typically their single biggest expense — their rent or mortgage payment. “Prior to Bilt, that payment didn’t build anyone’s credit history, which is crazy,” Bilt co-founder Ankur Jain said in March. Jain added that it was “silly that you can earn rewards buying a round of drinks at a bar, but not paying your rent every month.”

Founded in 2021, Bilt is one of the hottest startups in the personal finance industry. Bilt says it has 7 million customers and has raised nearly $1 billion in venture capital investments, at a $10.75 billion valuation. Investors include private equity giant Blackstone, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and a venture capital fund chaired by former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault. 

Forbes estimates Jain’s wealth at $3.4 billion. People magazine published exclusive photos of Jain’s 2024 wedding to Erika Hammond, a former WWE wrestler and cast member on the upcoming season of “The Real Housewives of New York City.” The event took place near the Great Pyramid of Giza; one photo shows the couple kissing at sunset with the Sphinx and pyramids in the background.

Earlier this year, Bilt suffered a serious crisis. The startup had signed a seven-year partnership with Wells Fargo to offer Bilt-branded credit cards that could be used to pay rent. Under its deal with Bilt, Wells Fargo agreed to absorb processing fees associated with rent transactions and make payments to Bilt because it saw the partnership as a way to attract new customers who might one day seek a mortgage from Wells Fargo, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

But revenue fell short of Wells Fargo’s projections, and the bank was losing so much money — as much as $10 million a month, the Journal reported — that it ended its partnership with Bilt four years early. (A Bilt spokesperson said at the time that the Journal’s reporting was “an inaccurate representation” of the Wells Fargo partnership.)

In February, Bilt relaunched its credit cards with new financial partners. But the rollout of “Bilt 2.0,” as the company called it, was a debacle.

Customers said their rent payments were paid late, double-charged or not paid at all. Credit limits had been lowered from one card to the next. Their cards were inexplicably frozen.

Bilt’s customer support department struggled to keep up as tens of thousands of messages poured in. Customers fumed that they were unable to bypass chatbots and reach a human being for help. They also bombarded the CFPB’s website with complaints, which included accounts of how Bilt’s AI support system gave information that was “completely wrong” and “demonstrably … false.” (In a statement at the time, Bilt said its new card had “attracted unexpectedly high demand, and some of our members experienced gaps in service that are simply unacceptable to us.” The company told ProPublica it resolved all problems related to the new cards “months ago.”) 

In March, the consumer group Protect Borrowers sent a letter to the CFPB, demanding that the bureau’s supervision or enforcement divisions take “immediate action.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wrote to Bilt, pointing out a 1,300% increase in complaints about the company submitted to the CFPB in February and seeking answers about the Bilt 2.0 transition. Warren also said that Bilt’s practice of immediately debiting rent payments may have run afoul of the 2009 Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act’s disclosure requirements for credit cards. A Bilt spokesperson said Warren’s assertions were “incorrect.”

It’s common for lawmakers and advocacy groups to fire off outraged letters about a company’s alleged wrongdoing.

The strange part is what the CFPB, then led by Vought, chose to do about it.

“Air Cover for the Company”

The law that established the CFPB, the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, envisioned two tracks for the bureau’s work. 

On the supervision track, CFPB employees would periodically visit banks and other financial institutions to monitor their business practices and ensure compliance with the law. Supervision would be confidential, giving companies the ability to adjust their operations without public scrutiny. Contrary to Vought’s accusations, current and former CFPB staffers say the traditional supervision process has long been collaborative and nonpublic. Congress designed it that way when it wrote the law.

Supervision could examine the past or look in real time. In one notable instance, when two federal student loan servicers exited the industry in 2021, the bureau’s supervision division chose to proactively monitor the transition of more than 9 million borrowers’ accounts to new servicers. Bureau staffers caught problems mid-transfer, from inaccurate due dates to botched repayment schedules, and directed the companies to fix them. It later published a recap of what the CFPB did as well as a set of tips so that the rest of the industry could avoid the same mistakes.

On the enforcement track, CFPB lawyers would file lawsuits against or pursue consent decrees — binding settlements that courts can enforce — with companies that allegedly broke the law. By their nature, lawsuits and settlements are public, but the enforcement division didn’t speak publicly about its actions apart from its filings.

The Trump-era CFPB took neither of these tracks in response to Bilt’s first incident. A senior political appointee and Vought aide, Victoria Dorfman, took the lead in contacting Bilt and asking for information about the consumer complaints, according to a person familiar with the interactions who requested anonymity to share confidential communications. Dorfman was joined by Elie Greenbaum, another Vought adviser, and Deborah Morris, the deputy enforcement director. Having political appointees lead this process, instead of nonpartisan career executives and subject-matter experts, was “abnormal” for the CFPB “but is becoming normal” under the Trump administration, a current CFPB staffer told ProPublica.

Dorfman, Greenbaum and Morris met with Bilt’s executives, who explained how they were fixing the problems and supplied data to the bureau about the company’s customer communications and efforts to resolve problems. When Bilt assured the bureau it had fixed the issues, CFPB officials appear to have taken those assurances at face value, issuing a celebratory press release on the bureau’s website. 

But it was what the press release said, or didn’t, that alarmed some current and former CFPB officials. Nowhere does it mention whether the bureau dispatched examiners to help locate the root of Bilt’s problems, as it would have done in the past, or whether it conducted its own audit of Bilt data to ensure every harmed consumer got relief. 

Indeed, the CFPB’s statement stressed that the bureau did not open an investigation. Nor did it craft a consent decree or enforceable pledge to ensure compliance. Documentation provided by Bilt, the bureau said, “appears to show” that the company had fixed its problems and that its systems were “back on track.”

Austin Hinkle, a former supervision lawyer and section chief at the CFPB, said it’s easy for a company to identify a population of customers who were harmed, issue an apology and get them relief, as Bilt did. 

Understanding what caused the issue is more complicated — and arguably just as important. In a situation like Bilt’s, Hinkle said, CFPB examiners would normally conduct a root-cause analysis, asking, for instance, which system led to the late or double-charged rent payments and why had it failed. Financial technology companies often rely on third-party processors and banks, Hinkle said, so the bureau’s investigators would also scrutinize what outside firms Bilt uses and what the communications have been with those firms.

There’s none of that depth in the CFPB’s statement, Hinkle said. “The press release just looks like they’re providing air cover for the company without directing real fixes or systematic changes.”

The lighter touch appears, so far, to be a hallmark of the Vought-era bureau. It has brought just one enforcement action since Trump took office, which ended with a consent decree and a civil penalty of $1, while dismissing or resolving dozens of cases brought during previous administrations. A CFPB supervisor warned her subordinates that they would face “most unpleasant” consequences if they were too aggressive in their work, Reuters reported. Recently, the bureau announced it would no longer include narratives in consumer complaints that appear in the CFPB’s public database.

Meanwhile, a current CFPB staffer told ProPublica that the number of policy attorneys, who help direct supervision work and identify violations of law, had shrunk from typically between 40 and 50 lawyers down to five. The staffer said that examiners were no longer allowed to access the primary source level data and could only “check the checker now,” meaning they must rely on a company’s own findings. They also faced pressure to finish examinations as fast as possible, given only three weeks to complete their work when they used to have eight weeks.

The staffer added that, as far as they knew, the first time that front-line staffers on the supervision and enforcement tracks heard of CFPB’s handling of the Bilt case was either the public statement or when Vought mentioned Bilt in his Capitol Hill testimony.

Pierce, the Protect Borrowers director, said he viewed CFPB’s treatment of Bilt as an indication that the bureau had embraced a mindset similar to what Ronald Reagan’s presidency was known for: a wholesale deregulatory approach meant to strip away regulations and oversight of companies large and small. 

“It’s taking the government’s supervision and enforcement tools and figuring out how you can use them the way the Reaganites used them,” Pierce said.

“Sent Me Into a Panic” 

Roughly two weeks after Vought’s testimony, Bilt customer Jordan Carey, a 30-year-old who works in the hospitality industry, received an alert from Credit Karma, the credit-monitoring service. His credit score had dropped 50 points in a single day. The news “sent me into a panic,” Carey said. He had stellar credit and paid off his Bilt credit card the day charges were posted. “I was thinking there is no way this is real,” he said.

Carey dug deeper and saw that the hit to his score had happened after a debt collector, Tate and Kirlin, reported a supposed long-overdue payment. And when he looked at the collections notice, he saw it listed Bilt as the cause of the error.

When he alerted Bilt’s customer service to the problem, he said, “they were not aware of the issue [and] I’m pretty sure I was one of the very first people to report it.” A Bilt customer service agent initially laid the blame with Wells Fargo and told Carey to contact the bank for help. But when he posted on Reddit about his experience, he got a different response from Bilt about the source of the problem, blaming a different banking partner. He also heard from almost a dozen other people who said they had the same issue. 

Nearly 1,900 of Bilt’s customers received mistaken notices from a debt collector that said they owed hundreds or even thousands of dollars in unpaid credit card balances. On Reddit, people wrote about receiving one or multiple false collections notices, including, in one case, as the cardholder was closing on a new house.

Hinkle, the former CFPB section chief, said the more recent Bilt problem was the kind of situation the CFPB’s previous oversight model could’ve prevented or identified more quickly, instead of customers discovering the problem and self-reporting it. “The fact that there’s a seemingly related problem popping up now suggests to me that the normal supervisory process didn’t work here,” he said.

The CFPB has not made a public statement since Bilt’s second breakdown. 

Bilt, for its part, said the issue had to do with an earlier iteration of its credit cards that had stopped accepting customers. The company said it alerted the collection agency in question as well as the credit bureaus to the mistake. It also awarded customers an extra 2,500 points for their trouble, worth between $25 and $50. “We held the agency accountable, made things right for every customer involved, ensured each was notified directly and provided direct customer support along with courtesy Bilt Points,” a spokesman said.

Carey said his credit score had been restored within a few days but was unimpressed by the free points; 10,000, or about $100 to $200, would have felt more appropriate. “This is a multibillion-dollar company,” he said. “They can afford it.”

The post The Trump Administration’s Plan for Protecting Consumers? Politely Ask Companies to Behave. appeared first on ProPublica.

Jimmie “Chris” Duncan wiped the sweat off his forehead as he assessed his temporary home from the parking lot of a rundown motel in central Louisiana. Sure, there’s drug dealing and prostitution, he said on a recent summer afternoon. And he suspected his neighbors were cooking meth on a floor below the room he paid $350 a week to rent.

But, he said, “I feel safe here. I mean, I’ve been on death row. I feel safe anywhere.”

Duncan had spent the last three decades trying to prove his innocence after a jury convicted him of killing his former girlfriend’s toddler. An investigation by Verite News and ProPublica last year showed that prosecutors had relied on key evidence that appeared to be fabricated by a pair of forensics experts whose use of bite mark analysis has since been widely discredited as junk science.

Nevertheless, Louisiana prosecutors continued to argue that Duncan should be put to death. The threat became ever more real as Gov. Jeff Landry began expediting executions, despite the state’s track record of convicting and sentencing to death people later found to be innocent. It wasn’t until June that the Louisiana Supreme Court threw out Duncan’s murder conviction, ruling that the bite marks found on the child’s body, the only physical proof tying Duncan to the alleged crime, could not have been made by a human.

Chief Justice John Weimer was so outraged by the prosecution of Duncan that he compared it to 17th-century witch trials. “We now look back at those practices as asinine and absurd” with “no basis whatsoever in logic,” he wrote. Some of the evidence against Duncan, he said, was “similarly specious.”

The trauma that the state imposed on Duncan as a result of his wrongful conviction continues today. Although Louisiana’s top jurist tore apart the state’s case against Duncan, the 57-year-old West Monroe native still isn’t truly free. Steve Tew, district attorney for Ouachita Parish, where the crime allegedly took place, had warned the justices during an April hearing that he would retry Duncan if the court vacated his conviction. Tew, who did not respond to requests for comment, has said in court that he still believes that Duncan is not only guilty but deserves to be executed. Tew has until next June to decide on a retrial, though his term ends in January and he is not running for reelection.

Until then, Duncan said, he is trapped in limbo, both mentally and financially. He came out of Angola with nothing in the bank and now makes $17 an hour working the night shift at Walmart unloading and stocking freight. While he enjoys the job — he was named employee of the month in June — Duncan said he is barely scraping by.

There is a state restitution program designed to compensate exonerees up to $480,000 over a decade for wrongful convictions, but he is not eligible until either the district attorney decides not to retry him or he is acquitted in another trial, which can take years. And even then, there is no guarantee he will ever be awarded any money. Attorney General Liz Murrill has opposed nearly all applications for compensation, telling lawmakers last year that defending the state against such claims consumes an enormous amount of time and resources and that the fund should be abolished altogether.

“The foreseeable future for me is the year between now and when they can’t prosecute me no more. That’s the only future I get to play with,” Duncan said. “I’m 100% factually innocent, but not 100% free from prosecution.”

Surviving His First Decade in Angola

Over the course of more than six hours of interviews with Verite News and ProPublica, Duncan described in harrowing detail the nightmare he lived since police arrested him on Dec. 18, 1993. By far the worst of it all, he said, was thinking that his neighbors, friends and even relatives could believe he had committed such an unspeakable crime against a child.

It felt as if everything he was as a person was “being torn out of you, violently, in an emotionally painful way,” Duncan said. “Just having your identity eviscerated.”

Duncan was babysitting Haley Oliveaux in the home he shared with the girl’s mother, Allison Layton Statham, in West Monroe when the 23-month-old died. Duncan told law enforcement he had put the child in the bath, then went to wash dishes. When he heard a noise coming from the bathroom, he rushed to check on her and found Haley floating face down in the water. She was pronounced dead a few hours later.

Police initially arrested Duncan for negligent homicide, but prosecutors upped the charge to first-degree murder after pathologist Steven Hayne and dentist Michael West conducted Haley’s medical exam and claimed they discovered evidence, including the purported bite marks, that she had been sexually assaulted and intentionally drowned. Following two weeks of testimony during the trial in 1998, the jury found Duncan guilty; months later, the 30-year-old was sentenced to death.

His first decade at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola was the hardest, Duncan said. Not only did he lose his initial appeal in 2002, and with it the dream he could convince the courts of his innocence, but he was forced to watch helplessly as his family gradually fell to pieces.

His mother, Barbara Oren, used to visit him every Thursday, and then in 2004, she stopped coming without explanation. Duncan would stare out the window across the hall from his cell, “almost obsessing, like my mom’s gonna show up any time now,” he said.

Three years later, Oren died of complications from excessive drinking, her sister, Elaine Whiteside, said. But in truth, Whiteside said, grief killed her.

“She fought for Chris for so long, and she turned to alcohol,” Whiteside said. “It’s been very traumatizing for everybody. For the last 32 years, how do you tell someone your nephew’s on death row for the rape and murder of a baby?”

Fourteen years after his mother passed, Duncan’s brother, David, died of an overdose. During the first several years of his incarceration, Duncan said he spoke with his brother often, but those calls grew less frequent as David’s addictions took hold.

“My brother ended up going from being the region’s No. 1 car salesman to being addicted to drugs to eventually dying of overdose,” he said. “He just couldn’t take it. He couldn’t escape being my brother.”

Duncan wasn’t allowed to attend either of their funerals.

Daily life on death row nearly robbed him of his sanity, Duncan said. Like all inmates awaiting execution, Duncan remained in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. This lasted almost 20 years. And there was never a set schedule for that one hour he would be let out and allowed to use the phone. Some days, it would be 2 a.m. Who could he call at that hour? (Death row inmates were eventually allowed to spend at least four hours outside their cells following a 2017 class-action lawsuit.)

The concept of time gradually disappeared. Duncan tried to keep a strict routine: wake up, drink coffee, watch the news, exercise and read books, mainly about other cultures and religions. He learned Hebrew so he could better understand the Bible. He became a tutor and helped other inmates earn their GEDs.

But the years of confinement began to take their toll physically. After about four years, Duncan started experiencing severe heart pain caused by a bacterial infection. “By the time I was 34 years old, my health had went all the way downhill,” he said. “A lot of nights, I went to sleep, said my prayers and really didn’t think I was going to wake up the next day.”

During the summer months, when the heat inside could rise to 115 degrees, Duncan said he experienced seizures. “I’m pretty sure I got brain damage as a result of it,” he said. “There were times when I got out of bed and I didn’t even know if I was left-handed or right-handed. There were a few times when I got up, I didn’t even know my name.”

In 2013, three death row inmates sued the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections for “appalling and extreme conditions” as a result of the high temperatures. Their experiences described in the lawsuit closely matched Duncan’s. For 85 straight days in 2012, the heat index in one section of death row exceeded 126 degrees, according to the suit. A judge ordered the state to provide air conditioning throughout death row, but a federal appeals court overturned the order. The corrections department did not respond to questions about conditions within the prison.

Instead of breaking him, Duncan said the brutal conditions hardened his resolve to keep fighting. But it didn’t seem as if anyone was listening.

“Sometimes the louder you scream, the more people look at you and laugh, like, ‘There’s another one claiming he’s innocent,’” Duncan said. “I was suicidal at one point because I was hopeless.”

Signs of Hope

Duncan had been on death row for about a decade when he learned from his lawyers and the news that there were others like him — people convicted based on inaccurate evidence, including discredited bite mark science, presented by Hayne or West. Four of them had been exonerated by 2008, and five more would follow.

In 2009 journalist Radley Balko wrote about Duncan’s case in Reason, a libertarian magazine, and how it was part of a larger pattern of “forensics fraud” perpetrated by Hayne and West. At the time, Duncan’s attorneys with a New Orleans nonprofit had filed a post-conviction appeal but did not have the resources to conduct a fuller investigation and uncover new evidence required to win. That left his case largely dormant.

Then in 2016, Duncan’s attorneys contacted the American Bar Association, which put him in touch with an Atlanta firm that took Duncan on as a client pro bono. (The Innocence Project in New York signed on six years later.) They filed a series of discovery requests that unearthed a trove of evidence pointing to Duncan’s innocence. This included expert witnesses who said the child’s death was an accidental drowning brought on by a seizure and a jailhouse informant who recanted his trial testimony that Duncan had confessed to the crime.

Most important was a recording of West’s 1993 examination of Haley. In that grainy black-and-white video, West can be seen taking a mold of Duncan’s teeth and grinding it into and across the girl’s body, seemingly creating bite marks where none previously existed — the marks later used to secure a death sentence against Duncan. The trial judge had not allowed the jury to see the video on the grounds that it was not an indication of Duncan’s innocence.

West, who has not responded to multiple earlier requests for comment, had previously said he was simply using what he called a “direct comparison” technique — in which he presses a mold of a person’s teeth directly onto the location of suspected bite marks. He admitted in a 2011 deposition in another case that he no longer believed in bite mark analysis. Hayne died in 2020.

Atlanta attorney Christian Bromley, who had joined the case, recalled the first time he was shown the recording in 2016 and being “horrified and surprised that the video had been available at that point for over 20 years and just essentially ignored and deemed not relevant.” The video would provide the foundation for Duncan’s latest bid for freedom.

Filmmaker Catherine Legge, who spent more than three years creating a documentary about his case, also played a pivotal role. Duncan said he’s indebted to her for tracking down Statham, Haley’s mother, and convincing her of his innocence. He knows it wasn’t easy.

“Allison spent 30 years being accused of being a partner to her baby’s killer,” Duncan said.

In April of last year, then-Ouachita Parish Judge Alvin Sharp overturned Duncan’s conviction, criticizing the “questionable” work of Hayne and West. Tew appealed, claiming that bite mark evidence was an accepted science at the time of Duncan’s trial and that some experts still consider it to be a useful forensic methodology.

At Duncan’s bail hearing last July, Statham told the court that the district attorney’s office had lied about her daughter’s death to make it look like murder and continues to perpetuate the lie. She said Duncan deserved to be free. He wept as he listened to his former girlfriend come to his defense.

“Just seeing her on the stand and hearing her voice engaged in the same struggle that I’ve been fighting for 30 years, knowing that what mattered to her was the truth,” he said, “That was the only thing that mattered to me.”

Four months later, Sharp granted Duncan bail. He was released into the embrace of his family the day before Thanksgiving. Then, this June, the state Supreme Court rejected the district attorney’s appeal and threw out Duncan’s conviction. Of the four people sentenced to death based in part on the work of Hayne or West, Duncan was the last to be freed.

Rebuilding a Life From Scratch

Since his release from prison, Duncan has been trying to piece together some semblance of a normal existence. There were the everyday logistics of finding permanent housing and a job. And then the deeper work of addressing the decades of pain that he — and his family — experienced.

At first, he slept on his aunt’s living room couch in Pineville in central Louisiana. But she broke her leg in June, which required twice-weekly visits from nurses and physical therapists, leaving little room for Duncan. That’s how Duncan ended up at the motel across the Red River in Alexandria, with half of his belongings packed into the back of a truck. In August, he moved into his own apartment, the first place he has ever lived by himself.

“I never really had a place to just be comfortable and relax,” he said.

Duncan’s main focus now is doing the best job he can at work. On most nights, he said he puts his earbuds in, listens to music, unloads the trucks and lets the world drift away. “Ain’t got to think about nothing else,” he said. But Duncan has his eye on the future and enrolled in a Walmart management training program that will bring additional responsibilities.

One day soon, though, he knows that he will need to shift his attention back to the flawed criminal justice system in Monroe and the conditions in Angola prison. He wants to make sure the horrors he experienced don’t happen to anyone else, including the guys on death row, men who were convicted of terrible crimes but with whom he still formed true friendships.

“I was under the same roof with those people twice as long as I was under the same roof with my own family,” he said.

He’s also rekindled a relationship from long ago. Recently, he was going through Facebook friend requests and saw a familiar face, but one he couldn’t quite place. He accepted, and the woman texted him a photo of herself when she was just a kid. It was his childhood sweetheart.

The last time he saw her was at a skating rink just after Christmas in the early 1980s. He had given her a pair of earrings. A short time later, her family moved out of town.

“She just disappeared,” Duncan said. “She’s one of the only people I remember from my past. I still missed her just the same as I always did.”

That part of his life seems at times to be more of a dream than reality, Duncan said. He lived a simple, country life. He hunted and fished. He drank beer, rode motorcycles and worked on hot rods. And he planned to become a firefighter like his dad.

But then Haley died.

“I can’t be a simple person anymore,” Duncan said. “I try to find ways to be happy, but nothing is simple anymore.”

The post He Spent 27 Years on Death Row as a Wrongfully Convicted Man. What Comes Next? appeared first on ProPublica.

When ProPublica recently investigated a rape crisis that surged through Syracuse University in the 1980s, we found evidence that the school had taken steps to suppress news coverage of the assaults. The university responded by portraying itself as a changed institution today, “committed to supporting the students who come forward and being there for them at every step of the process,” as a school spokesperson put it.

But the university’s recent actions in a lawsuit filed by a former student who was attacked on campus during that period appear at odds with that commitment. After the Syracuse Police Department agreed to provide old records to the victim, lawyers for Syracuse University intervened, seeking to block the victim’s access to many of the records. The school argued in legal papers that the subpoena sent to the police department was “overbroad” and suffered “from fatal geographic overreach” that rendered “it unreasonably burdensome and irrelevant.”

New York state court Judge Joseph Lamendola ruled in the university’s favor in February, dramatically limiting the records the victim could obtain to make her case that the school should have beefed up security in response to escalating crime in the area.

In June, her attorneys appealed that decision, sending the matter to a state appellate court.

“It smacks of the 1980s when SU quashed media coverage of sexual assault. It’s that all over again,” said Andrew Stengel, a former Manhattan prosecutor representing the victim. He accused the university of “retraumatizing” his client “by pretending sexual assault wasn’t a problem on campus and in the surrounding area.”

Stengel and his client, referred to as Jane Doe in legal filings, are suing the university under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that opened a one-year exemption from the statute of limitations for survivors of long-ago sexual assaults to pursue legal claims against alleged abusers and negligent institutions.

Sarah Scalese, Syracuse University’s vice president of communications, said in an emailed statement that “we do not comment on active litigation.” In response to ProPublica’s earlier story, Scalese said the university “has a robust structure in place to support those affected by sexual and relationship violence,” including “confidential counseling, advocacy and investigation and resolution services to students.”

Doe was attacked by a man with a knife inside a bathroom on the third floor of the university’s music building at about 6:30 p.m. on Feb. 27, 1987. Her assailant had entered the building through an unlocked door, according to her lawsuit, which contends that the university administration offered her “zero support” after the assault. The music program director, the complaint alleges, told her, “Men get raped, too,” and advised her to get “back on the horse.” (The director is deceased.)

Hers was one episode in a brutal saga of sexual violence that unfolded in and around the Syracuse campus throughout the decade. The scourge of assaults became so pervasive that it eventually inspired student protests, drew national press attention and contributed to the passage of federal legislation that now requires universities to publicly report crime statistics.

ProPublica’s earlier examination — rooted in the wrongful conviction of Anthony Broadwater for the rape of Alice Sebold, an author who wrote a bestselling memoir about being attacked on the last night of her freshman year at Syracuse University in 1981 — found that more than a dozen women, many of them students, reported being raped or attacked by strangers in a half-square-mile area near the campus over four years. Sebold’s was the third such attack in Thornden Park, which runs alongside the campus, in about seven months.

Some of the police reports from this time period were marked “NO PRESS,” which, according to the testimony of a former Syracuse detective, meant that the university had used its influence in the police department to “put their foot down and said no press for any kind of rape, robbery, burglary that’s anywhere in the area of Syracuse University.”

Last year, Stengel asked the police department for all police calls and reports tied to a variety of crimes from 1982 to 1987 within the ZIP code that contains the university, Thornden Park, various businesses, and a mix of student and nonstudent housing.

Emails filed as an exhibit in Doe’s case show that a lawyer representing the Syracuse Police Department suggested that Stengel focus his search on that ZIP code. The two of them agreed on the terms in August 2025, and the police department began gathering the records shortly thereafter.

A month later, the university filed a motion to “partially quash” the subpoena. Relying on case law that applies only to central and western New York state, university lawyers argued that it had standing to limit the request, even though it was not the recipient of Stengel’s subpoena. The university asserted that the subpoena would create unnecessary work for the police department, unearth irrelevant documents and waste the time of everyone involved.

The police department then reversed its earlier position and joined in the motion, estimating in a February brief that it would take 845 hours and $50,000 in staff time to provide the documents Stengel had asked for and the police department lawyer had initially approved. (A spokesperson said that “the City of Syracuse does not comment on ongoing litigation.”)

At a hearing, John Powers, an attorney hired by the university, seemed to play to Lamendola’s previous role as a lawyer for the city of Syracuse, reminding the judge that the city is “inundated with [Freedom of Information Law] responses and subpoenas, and it’s incredibly burdensome on the city, I think, as you know in your experience as well.”

The records were too old to be digitized, Powers told the judge, adding that, just as the judge once did, Powers represents the city in other matters. City employees, he said, would have to find them “the old way, Judge, the way we used to do it, crawling around in the dusty storeroom … trying to determine what ZIP code’s involved, looking at the crime. A lot of boxes, a lot of files. Very burdensome, very expensive for the city.” (Powers declined to comment, citing the litigation.)

Lamendola was persuaded. Under his ruling, none of the rapes that took place in Thornden Park or in the student apartments near it will have to be disclosed. The police will have to disclose only reports of crimes that took place on the campus itself, and not reports concerning burglary, larceny and other offenses, which the judge deemed irrelevant. He also directed Syracuse University, the defendant in the case, to assist the Police Department in identifying cases that occurred on its campus.

Doe’s team filed a 37-page appellate brief in late June that argues that the court’s decision to limit the disclosure to university buildings is “hard to justify” given that the campus is interwoven with the city. The brief, authored by appellate attorney Michael Steinberg, also takes issue with the decision to allow university personnel to act as “gatekeepers,” authorizing them to review the police files and decide for themselves which meet the judge’s criteria and which don’t. That, the appeal contends, presents a conflict of interest that would “give the defendant the power to control the evidence it will have to contest at trial.”

The university has until Sept. 23 to respond to the appeal.

Legal filings also show that university lawyers have sought to reduce its liability by raising the name of a onetime suspect in the case, Michael McKinney.

At the time of Doe’s rape, McKinney was on parole after attacking a woman in a downtown parking lot. According to police reports, two witnesses saw a man matching his description running out of the Syracuse music building the night of the attack. Doe later picked him out of a photo array.

Days later, police went to his home. Officers learned from his wife that he owned a Miller beer hat identical to the one the suspect was said to have been wearing at the time of the crime. She also said he had left abruptly, for another state. Police put the case in the “inactive file,” a common occurrence for rape cases in Syracuse at the time.

Months later, McKinney turned up in New York City. By then he had come under scrutiny for the violent robbery of another Syracuse woman. According to a newspaper article from December 1987, he was eventually found guilty of that robbery and given an unusually lengthy sentence of 20 years to life, with the judge noting his repeated crimes against women. McKinney was never prosecuted in the Jane Doe case.

McKinney served 30 years in prison on the 1987 robbery charge, records show. Then, in March 2025, he was arrested for the rape of a 46-year-old woman earlier that year. A grand jury indicted him in June 2026. He has pleaded not guilty.

While McKinney was in jail, Syracuse University lawyers filed a civil complaint against him, arguing that if the university is held liable in Doe’s case, McKinney should “contribute to any award in an amount equal to his equitable share” because of “his own culpable conduct.” Because McKinney did not respond to the suit, the university lawyers have asked the judge to find him in default. This could eventually affect a jury’s decision on the financial responsibility owed to Doe by the university.

Reached by phone, Donald Kelly, McKinney’s court-appointed lawyer in the new rape case, said, “It’s concerning that the university would serve a third-party complaint upon a prisoner to try to avoid liability,” noting that McKinney has “empty pockets.”

Reiterating that McKinney was never charged in the 1987 rape of Doe, Kelly added, “Either the university was negligent or it wasn’t.” (Kelly declined to make his client available for an interview.)

Jonathan Cardi, a Wake Forest University law professor who specializes in civil litigation and has researched negligence claims for rape, said it was not especially unusual for a defendant to try to quash subpoenas of third parties or to shift liability to others.

“These are litigation tactics,” he said. “But, at the end of the day, the university is the client, and very frequently a client’s business interests or morals dictate what they say their attorneys can and can’t do. If a university is trying to turn over a new leaf, they can tell their attorney that even though this might be the best litigation practice, this is not who we want to be.”

The post Syracuse University Seeks to Prevent Campus Rape Victim From Obtaining Police Records appeared first on ProPublica.

The first emergency call about a detainee trying to harm himself came about a month after Camp East Montana — an immigration detention center in El Paso, Texas — started to house immigrants. It was 2:50 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 12. 

“We have a patient currently in holding who is saying he’s got suicidal ideations, swallowed some foreign object, has refused our basic medical care here,” a nurse told the operator. In the audio, you can hear that someone is moaning and yelling in the background. 

“At this point he is unable to speak and rolling on the floor in agonizing pain, holding his stomach,” the nurse continued. “A preliminary X-ray was done and a foreign object was found. We just need to take him to the hospital that’s closest so that they can verify if the object is currently in his system and possibly to excavate the object.”

I’ve been reporting on Camp East Montana for months. It sits on barren military land and was supposed to be a model for how the Trump administration would carry out mass deportations. Instead, it became an example of what could go wrong. It remains in operation despite claims of inhumane conditions and abuse, which Department of Homeland Security officials have said are “categorically false.” ICE plans to keep the facility running at least through Sept. 30, 2027, The Associated Press reported.

In the span of six weeks between December 2025 and January 2026, three men died at Camp East Montana, making it one of the country’s deadliest detention centers at the time.

In July, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune published my investigation into the Jan. 3 death of one of those men, Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban national with a history of mental illness. He died after an altercation with guards over his medication, and a medical examiner ruled Lunas Campos’ death a homicide. (The Trump administration initially claimed that he had experienced medical distress, but Department of Homeland Security officials later said guards had used force to keep him from killing himself.)

We found that Lunas Campos had repeatedly raised concerns about his mental health while detained at Camp East Montana. Records show staff didn’t transfer him to a facility that could better care for him, despite repeatedly saying they were working to do so.

I wanted to understand more about how the facility was responding to such incidents. I obtained, via public records requests, recordings of more than 160 emergency calls, and I spoke with staff, government officials familiar with the facility, detainees, lawyers and advocates who had spent time inside the detention center. 

I asked DHS about my reporting and some of the 911 calls. A spokesperson did not comment on the specific issues identified in the calls, but said the facility provides “comprehensive medical services, including mental health services.” If the detainee requires a higher level of medical care, they are referred to local emergency services as needed, the spokesperson said. The official also said that for many immigrant detainees, the healthcare they get while in custody is the best they’ve gotten in their lives.

Now I want to share some of those 911 calls with you. While they may be difficult to listen to or read about, they offer a glimpse into what’s happening in a place reporters don’t have access to. The calls and my investigation show failures in responding to mental health and medical emergencies that extend beyond those experienced by one man. (Note: In some cases, recordings were edited to remove long stretches where no one was talking.) 

Oct. 12, 2025: “They will not give them medical treatment.”

Two months after Camp East Montana began holding detainees, some were growing so desperate that they were having friends and relatives call 911 to seek medical help on their behalf. A man from North Texas called three times on Oct. 12, trying to get a detainee, whom he identified as his partner, emergency care for his kidney stones. 

“Why isn’t the facility calling?” the operator asked.

“Because they don’t care. They don’t care about any of the detainees. They will not give them medical treatment; they don’t care. … He does not like to go to the hospital. So when he is saying he is in emergent pain at a level of 10 out of 10 and he needs to go to the emergency room, it is no joke; it has got to be very, very serious.” 

In a declaration to lawyers, a 32-year-old Venezuelan man identified by a pseudonym, Xavier, who fits the profile of the man with kidney stones, said he had gone on a hunger strike because he was not getting any information about his case or about a court date. “Being here feels like torture,” he said. “I feel like this experience is finishing me emotionally and physically. I don’t feel like I can survive for another month at this place. They treat us like animals.” 

Nov. 2, 2025: “We don’t have any oxygen for her.”

In some of the emergency calls, the medical providers themselves lamented how little they could do for their patients.

A nurse at the facility dialed 911. She said she had a 46-year-old woman with COVID-19 who was short of breath and whose oxygen saturation was dropping. “But the issue is we don’t have any oxygen for her, especially if she does start desaturating even more,” she tells the operator. “She just doesn’t look good.” 

“OK. Let me request assistance, OK? Just bear with me,” the operator tells her.

“Apparently she’s been sick for the last couple of days and she’s asked to be brought into the clinic and they hadn’t brought her in,” the nurse explains later in the call. “She was just brought in today, bless her heart, so I’m just worried about her.” 

Feb. 28, 2026: “Was this accidental or intentional?”

By late February, three people had died at Camp East Montana. The first one was Francisco Gaspar-Andres, a 48-year-old Guatemalan man who died on Dec. 3, 2025, of liver and kidney failure. Then came Lunas Campos’ death on Jan. 3. Less than two weeks later, ICE reported that Victor Manuel Díaz, a 36-year-old Nicaraguan who had been detained during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, was found unresponsive and with a piece of fabric around his neck. His autopsy has not been made public. 

Still, the 911 calls kept coming.

“OK, we have a guy who’s overdosed. He’s a detainee,” a nurse told an emergency operator on Feb. 28. 

They didn’t know much about the 60-year-old man who had just arrived at Camp East Montana or about what he had taken about an hour ago, she said. Someone had seen him “popping pills” and stumbling around.

“Was this accidental or intentional?” the operator asked.

“Intentional,” she said.

The post Listen to 911 Calls From Inside an Immigration Detention Center: “We Just Need to Take Him to the Hospital” appeared first on ProPublica.

Every third morning Soumia Bensalah was roused before the break of dawn. Pulled from her cell, shackled hand and foot, she was herded onto a bus and driven over Tampa Bay from the Pinellas County Jail to a cramped hold room at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office. 

Each time, she sat there all day, still shackled. Once evening came, she was driven back to the jail, forced to wait for hours in a hallway, photographed, strip-searched, questioned and led back to her cell. This happened five times last December, and Bensalah said it left her exhausted and humiliated.

It was no coincidence that Bensalah, a French Moroccan with a pending green card application, was released from the Pinellas jail and then sent back at regular, 72-hour intervals, according to legal experts. That’s the maximum amount of time that county jails like Pinellas’ can hold immigrants on behalf of ICE. The limit exists to prevent immigrants detained on civil charges from spending too long in jails meant for people detained on criminal charges. 

Repeat releases and readmissions, known as rebookings, typically happen in secret and circumvent federal rules and regulations, according to eight legal experts interviewed by ProPublica. 

The jail had refused to release the logs that documented Bensalah’s journey, citing federal immigration regulations that shield jail records, which are typically public. We were able to trace the journey after obtaining an unredacted copy of the Pinellas jail’s booking logs from a source who provided them on the condition of anonymity, for fear of workplace reprisal. We checked them against anonymized federal immigration data collected by the Deportation Data Project.

The repeat rebookings stem from the fact that the federal government often doesn’t have enough detention space to jail all the immigrants whom ICE and its cooperating local authorities are rounding up. The shortage of detention space is pronounced in Florida, where the majority of law enforcement agencies have signed agreements to collaborate with ICE on immigration enforcement. 

ProPublica’s analysis of data obtained by the Deportation Data Project shows that over the past year, jails in both Pinellas County and in Orange County, Florida, had unusually high numbers of repeat rebookings of immigrants held for ICE compared with other jails nationwide. (Read more about our methodology here.) The Orange County Jail, in Orlando, rebooked 559 of them two or more times from July 2025 until early February 2026, when the data shows the practice ceased. Less than two hours away, in the Tampa Bay area, Pinellas rebooked 174 immigrants at least twice from July 2025 until the practice appeared to cease in July 2026, when zero rebookings were recorded in the data. 

The scale in the two Florida counties is unmatched, ProPublica found. Other jails across the country rebooked no more than 10 immigrants two or more times.

All of the rebooked immigrants ProPublica counted were jailed for ICE, meaning they were not being detained on local charges. Our analysis counted a person as having been rebooked only if they cumulatively spent at least 72 hours in jail.  

Emily Ryo, a Duke University law professor who studies ICE detention, said jails often can’t provide comprehensive medical screenings, space for confidential legal consultations or even outdoor access. All of those things should be guaranteed to immigrants in ICE custody, according to ICE’s own detention standards. 

Two former Department of Homeland Security officials who spoke with ProPublica described the repeated rebookings as an attempt to evade the detention standards.

“What it shows is that they were very aware that they were breaking a rule,” said Michelle Brané, a former DHS immigration detention ombudsperson. 

Bensalah landed in jail after her U.S. citizen husband allegedly assaulted her, according to a police report. She called the police, who observed cuts on both and booked them into the Polk County Jail on battery charges. (The charges against both were later dropped.) She posted bond but was not released because of an ICE detainer, a written request from the federal government asking a jail to hold someone for up to 48 hours after they’d otherwise be released. A detainer is meant to give ICE time to pick up an immigrant and begin deportation proceedings. 

State law requires every jail in Florida to sign collaboration agreements with ICE. Most jails in the state can detain immigrants for ICE for only up to 48 hours. Through June, Pinellas and Orange had special contracts that ICE says allowed them to hold immigrants for up to three days. ICE designates them as “under 72” facilities in its database.

“At 72 you should have walked him out the door,” said a former senior DHS official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisal. 

Instead of sending Bensalah to a longer-term immigration detention facility in the days after she posted bond, ICE moved her two counties over to Pinellas. Three days later, her rebookings began. 

“There’s no argument that this is a lawful detention,” Jennifer Chacón, a professor of law at Stanford University, said of the repeat rebookings.

In response to ProPublica’s questions about the repeat rebookings, a DHS spokesperson wrote: “ICE is NOT breaking any laws by making custody determinations based on bed space and ensuring detainees’ presence for immigration proceedings or removal from the United States.”

ProPublica shared with DHS details about Bensalah’s case. The department responded that “she received due process.”

“Under President Trump and Secretary [Markwayne] Mullin, if you break the law, you will face the consequences,” DHS wrote. “Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S.”

All the people rebooked at least twice in Pinellas and Orange counties ended up behind bars for more than 72 hours. One woman from Mexico was rebooked into Pinellas 10 times, spending a cumulative 26 days in the jail. (DHS declined to comment on her case because ProPublica did not provide her name; she had declined multiple requests for an interview.) She was then transferred to an ICE facility and eventually released after posting a $2,000 bond, according to Deportation Data Project figures. Only 65 people rebooked into those counties’ jails two or more times through June 2026 were eventually released on bond.

Of the 423 immigrants rebooked at least twice in Pinellas and Orange counties through December 2025, 115 — or 27% — had no criminal charges or convictions except for traffic-related offenses. That is consistent with recent data released showing that an increasing percentage of all ICE detentions involve people with no criminal record or charges.

For some rebooked immigrants in Orange County, the turnaround time was extreme: 30 of them were rebooked in 15 minutes or less, right as their current stay approached 72 hours. Those rebookings were between September 2025 and February 2026. Orange County rebooked five immigrants back into the jail in as little as one minute. 

Additionally, the Pinellas County Jail has held at least 157 immigrants for ICE for longer than three business days in a single booking since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term in January 2025, according to a ProPublica analysis. In the two years prior, it held only five immigrants for longer than three days. After one woman — a Brazilian immigrant who had not been charged with a crime — challenged her nine-day detention in federal court this July, ICE released her, calling her jail stay a “procedural error.” 

“All her claims will be heard by an immigration judge, and she will receive due process,” DHS wrote in response to questions about the Brazilian woman’s case. “This administration will not ignore the rule of law.”

Legal experts say that the only real recourse for immigrants repeatedly rebooked or held for prolonged periods in a local jail is to file an emergency petition in federal court seeking relief from illegal detainment. ProPublica was able to determine that at least 29 of the immigrants held for ICE in Orange or Pinellas counties filed such petitions, called habeas corpus claims.  

In response to the Brazilian woman’s habeas petition, the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office claimed that she was in federal custody and that it didn’t have the power to release her. Federal appeals courts have found the opposite: Jails have the power to release ICE detainees after a hold expires and can be found liable if they don’t. Last November, a federal jury ordered Suffolk County, New York, to pay $112 million to more than 600 immigrants it found had been wrongly held. Suffolk County has appealed the decision. 

Corporal Jamie Miller, a spokesperson for the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, told ProPublica that the facility holds people for ICE for only up to 72 hours before releasing them. The sheriff’s office declined further comment after ProPublica shared the findings from its analysis and sent a list of questions. The office declined requests for an interview with the sheriff.

In a written statement to ProPublica, a spokesperson for the Orange County Jail said it had eliminated “multiple bookings.” The statement referred further questions to ICE. 

Our analysis shows that in Orange County, the rebooking practice stopped in early February. That change happened after widespread public opposition. In Pinellas, where opposition has been quieter, the rebookings slowed in January, but single stays exceeding 72 hours started to climb. 

---

Orange and Pinellas counties both stand out nationally for their volume of rebookings. But their differing politics contributed to different outcomes at their jails. 

In majority-Democratic Orange County, religious groups, attorneys and a coalition of activists prompted officials and the courts to take action. In county commission meetings, community members told the stories of immigrants held in the jail and pointed out that the county was losing money every time it held someone for ICE.

County officials — caught between a state legislative mandate to cooperate with ICE, a national mass deportation push that was filling their jail with detainees and a vocal electorate that demanded change — wrestled with how to respond.

In August 2025, the Orlando Sentinel reported on half a dozen rebookings in the Orange County Jail. Months later, in late January, a defense attorney showed up at a county commission hearing to describe how the rebooking practice was still going on. She claimed she had multiple clients who’d been illegally held at the jail on behalf of ICE and that the rebookings violated due process.

A week later, County Mayor Jerry Demings sent a letter to ICE, informing it that “ICE inmates will be limited to one continuous housing period of up to 72 hours per immigration matter.” After the letter, the rebookings ceased, ProPublica’s analysis shows.

The day Demings sent the letter, Orlando federal judge Paul Byron criticized the rebooking practice at a hearing for an immigrant who’d claimed he was illegally detained.

“If the government is pulling a detainee out of jail to artificially reset the clock, that is wildly inappropriate,” Byron told Assistant U.S. Attorney Phillip Ragler. “What allows that?”

Ragler didn’t have an answer. Byron ordered the immigrant be freed.

Ragler recently told ProPublica that the experience led to a crisis of conscience.

“Being forced to defend ICE’s actions in a professional capacity caused significant moral and ethical conflicts for me personally,” Ragler wrote in a statement to ProPublica, adding that ICE gave the U.S. attorneys no reasoning or justification for detaining people, many of whom had no criminal record. He told ProPublica he resigned from the position shortly after the hearing, following almost a decade in the office.

Ultimately, Orange County renegotiated its contract with ICE so that immigrants could be held for only two days. Soon after, the number of immigrants in ICE custody booked into the jail plummeted, ProPublica’s analysis shows. Just two were booked into the jail in July, down from a high of 692 in January.

At around the same time that Orange County stopped repeat rebookings of immigrants, the number of rebookings in Pinellas started decreasing. But unlike Orange County, Pinellas then began holding more immigrants for longer than three business days in a single stay — and saw no dip in the number of immigrants it was booking overall. 

Six months later, in July, Pinellas appears to have stopped repeat rebookings of immigrants, ProPublica’s analysis found. That same month, at least 12 immigrants booked in the jail were held for more than three business days. One Honduran man stayed for at least eight days.

Pinellas County, unlike Orange County, trended Republican in the last presidential election. Pinellas Sheriff Bob Gualtieri has long advocated for his and other local jails to collaborate with the federal government on immigration enforcement. Over the past decade, he helped pioneer a type of contract with ICE that shields local jails from legal liability when they hold someone for the agency. He also helped create a federal-local agreement that lets jail staff serve ICE detainers on people held at the facility.

“For years, sheriffs have had to choose between releasing criminal illegal aliens from their jails back into the community, or exposing themselves to potential civil liability,” Gualtieri is quoted as saying in a 2017 ICE press release.

In the August 2025 Orlando Sentinel article, Gualtieri is quoted as saying that there’d been rebookings at his facility due to “a capacity issue” at the federal detention facility where they were supposed to be transferred. 

In the summer of 2025, Gualtieri was part of a group of Florida sheriffs that proposed allowing ICE to take advantage of unused jail beds across Florida — and have Florida police transport the detainees. Since Trump took office in January 2025, Gualtieri’s own jail began to house a historically high number of them. 

More than 7,000 immigrants have been detained for ICE in the Pinellas County Jail during the first 564 days of Trump’s second term, according to ProPublica’s analysis. That’s more than four times as many as during the last two years of the Biden administration.

The jail’s proportion of ICE detainees among its total bookings steadily increased over the course of 2025, from under 7% at the start of the year to 18% in December, according to ProPublica’s analysis of Pinellas jail booking data. In 2026, the proportion hovered around 20% from January through July.  

Most of the immigrants ProPublica tracked in Pinellas and across the country, including Bensalah, ultimately were deported. After her fifth rebooking, she was transferred to the first of four ICE detention centers, then deported to France. 

Paul Chavez, litigation director for Americans for Immigrant Justice, a legal nonprofit that litigates for immigrants’ rights, said repeat rebookings like Bensalah’s are clear examples of unconstitutional detention. 

“If it was that easy to thwart, all we would have to do to thwart the Fourth Amendment was throw somebody in the backseat of a car, drive them to McDonald’s and then drive back,” he said. “I don’t know that the drafters of the Fourth Amendment would have found solace in that.” 

How We Identified People Rebooked Into County Jails

ProPublica found immigrants ICE repeatedly rebooked into county jails by analyzing multiple federal and local detention databases. 

To count immigrants rebooked two or more times at jails nationwide, we used federal immigration detention data obtained by the Deportation Data Project. The data assigns a unique ID to each person in detention and records the date and time each person is booked into and out of each facility. We calculated the length of each stay, as well as the period between leaving and returning to a single facility.

A detainee may leave ICE detention, such as when they are released on immigration bond or into U.S. Marshals’ custody and then return to ICE custody weeks or even months later. To avoid counting these cases, ProPublica counted a person as being rebooked only if their return to the same facility occurred within 24 hours. Detainees are sometimes rebooked into the same facility after longer periods, but our analysis found that 95% of detainees were rebooked within 12 hours.

The detention data covers a period from Oct. 1, 2022, through Aug. 6, 2026. We limited our analysis to local jails, where federal rules require jails hold ICE detainees for less than 72 hours unless jails sign a special contract with ICE and meet ICE’s detention standards, which include submitting to regular federal inspections. Because a single rebooking could be due to a failed transfer or a missed or delayed deportation flight, we counted only immigrants who had been rebooked two or more times. An expert familiar with ICE detention practices told ProPublica that was a better indicator of intentional rebookings made to extend detentions in a single jail. 

Under federal regulations, weekends and holidays do not count toward a jail’s stay limit. ProPublica excluded these days when counting the number of hours each person spent in a county jail. We counted someone as having been rebooked only if their total cumulative stay reached at least 72 hours. When tallying the total stay of individual detainees, ProPublica counted all hours spent in jail, including weekends and holidays.

To count the number of rebooked detainees without criminal charges or convictions, ProPublica used ICE detention data released by the federal government under the Freedom of Information Act. Versions of this dataset were originally released to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse and The New York Times. This data ends in mid-December 2025. To determine that 27% of detainees rebooked two or more times had no criminal charges or convictions except for traffic-related offenses, we filtered by detainees charged with only traffic-related offenses or who were described as “other immigration violator,” a category used by the Department of Homeland Security when a detained individual has no other record of criminal charges or convictions. 

ProPublica queried an unredacted copy of the Pinellas County Jail’s inmate search database it obtained to calculate the share of bookings at the jail that were ICE detainees. ProPublica verified the veracity of the unredacted database by comparing its booking records to those in Pinellas’ online search tool and by validating the booking dates and timestamps against the federal immigration datasets.

The post These Local Jails Were Supposed to Detain Immigrants for Only 72 Hours. One Woman Was Held for a Total of 26 Days. appeared first on ProPublica.

The rules governing your retirement plan may be changing.

As we reported in July, President Donald Trump wants to encourage 401(k) plans to invest more in private equity, real estate and cryptocurrency, which can be complex and risky. To pave the way, the Department of Labor has proposed rules that would make it harder for employees to hold companies liable for how they oversee retirement plans.

Employers are required to serve the best interests of their employees when choosing investment options. Under the proposed changes, a company that follows a certain process would get the benefit of the doubt in court, making it harder for workers to sue over the management of their 401(k).

A spokesperson for the Department of Labor did not respond to requests for comment. In an announcement from March, the department said the proposed rule change will “democratize access to alternative investments in 401(k) plans” and “lower litigation risks” for employers who are acting with good judgment.

The new rules, expected to be finalized this year, also raise broader questions: What investment options are already offered in people’s retirement accounts, and what are people paying in fees?

We’ve asked the public to send us their annual 401(k) disclosures so we can understand the range of funds and fees people have in their accounts. (Want to send us yours? Here’s how.) So far, we’ve heard from more than 200 people, many of whom also asked us questions about their plans. To find the answers, we spoke with eight economists, lawyers and retirement benefit experts.

If you have questions about your specific retirement plan, experts recommend talking to a fee-only financial planner who will serve as a fiduciary (which means they must provide advice in your best financial interest, not theirs). You can check a financial adviser’s qualifications by searching here.

Table of Contents

How could the proposed changes affect my 401(k)?
How do I know if my 401(k) is in good shape?
How can I tell if I’m paying high fees?
How can I compare my 401(k) to plans offered by similar companies?
What if I don’t like my retirement plan?

How could the proposed changes affect my 401(k)?

Under the Labor Department’s proposed rule change, employers who show that they’ve considered a set of six factors when choosing investments and document their reasoning when building a plan should have greater protection from a potential lawsuit.

That liability tends to sit with your employer because they have final say over your plan’s investment options, even though companies usually hire firms like Fidelity or Vanguard to run the plan, and those firms often suggest which funds to include.

A company could document its reasoning for choosing to offer certain investment options and still act imprudently, said Tim Hauser, who was the deputy assistant secretary at the Labor Department’s Employee Benefits Security Administration until last December. In his three-plus decades there, he encountered cases in which companies “generated a lot of paper” to explain their reasoning but, ultimately, didn’t make wise financial decisions based on the information available to them.

Monique Morrissey, a senior economist for the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a June letter that the proposal would “gut protections for retirement savers” and prioritize maximizing investment returns over balancing risk. She cited a 2025 AARP survey finding most Americans don’t think it’s important to be able to access private market investments or cryptocurrency in their retirement accounts.

But Bonnie Treichel, the founder of Endeavor Retirement, a consulting firm for retirement advisers, said the proposed rules are a framework not a mandate. Employers could offer these investments, but that doesn’t mean they’ll rush to add riskier investment options.

To find out if the rule change may affect your 401(k), ask your plan administrator, often someone in your human resources department, whether the company plans to offer new investment options. (The plan administrator is often listed on the same document that lists your fees; find out how to access that information in the form on this post.)

How do I know if my 401(k) is in good shape?

For many people, a 401(k) only needs close attention when starting a job, when leaving a job and when closing in on retirement. The rest of the time, it mostly runs itself. Still, experts we interviewed said it’s worth checking in on the plan once a year as fees and fund options can change.

A healthy account comes down to three basics: how much you save, how much risk you take and how much you pay in fees, experts say. Only the first is entirely up to you. The other two you manage from a menu of options your employer builds.

The more you save — and the earlier you start — the more time your money has to grow. Companies often offer to match part of your contribution, so if you can swing it, experts advise putting in at least enough to collect the full match. Otherwise you’re leaving money on the table.

You also control what your savings are invested in, based on the menu of investment options your plan offers.

Each fund you invest in carries a different level of risk. Stocks are more volatile than bonds, for example, and a balanced investment portfolio weighs the level of risk depending on how far you are from retirement. Younger investors decades away from tapping into their retirement fund may invest more in stocks, while older workers may prefer to have more in bonds.

The “easy button” is to choose a target-date fund that’ll automatically reallocate your investments to reduce your risk by shifting from stocks to bonds, or other less volatile investments, as you approach retirement.

“For most people, this is all the money they have,” said Jean-Pierre Aubry, an associate director at the Boston College Center for Retirement Research. “It’s not money you want to play around with.”

How can I tell if I’m paying high fees?

Compounded over time, even small differences in fees have a huge impact on your retirement savings. By the Labor Department’s own math, 1% in additional fees can shrink a nest egg at retirement by 28%.

Federal law requires employers to make sure employees are paying reasonable fees. Since 2012, the Labor Department also requires companies to send a disclosure form to employees listing all funds and fees. (That’s the annual disclosure we’re asking people to send to us. If you want to send us yours, find instructions on the form in this post.) Still, the Government Accountability Office found nearly 4 in 10 people don’t fully understand the fees they’re paying on their retirement plan.

The number you should watch for is each fund’s expense ratio: the fees firms charge employees for owning or investing in a fund, taken as a percentage of the money you have in it. An expense ratio of 0.5% means you pay a $5 fee per year for every $1,000 you’ve invested. To find the fees you’re paying, look for your annual disclosure on your plan’s website or ask your HR department. (See instructions for your specific plan here.)

If most funds on your 401(k) menu have an expense ratio over 1%, that should be a “red flag” that it’s a high-cost plan, said Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning at Morningstar.

Even 0.75% or 0.5% is “actually pretty high by 401(k) standards,” said Quinn Curtis, a law professor at University of Virginia who has studied the litigation around 401(k) fees.

The cheapest options are typically index funds, which mirror a slice of the market like the S&P 500 instead of paying a manager to pick stocks. Workers are gravitating to these passive, low-cost investments and the firms are competing to win over investors, which is driving down fees even more. Most index fund fees are under or around 0.1%, Benz said. If your index fund is charging several times that, experts say it’s worth asking why or finding another option.

When you check your 401(k) plan once a year, make sure you’re still in the funds with the lowest available fees, Aubry said.

And be wary of offers for personalized portfolios at the click of a button, Treichel said. These services often charge additional fees.

“Nothing in life is free,” she said. “So, if it looks free, look further.”

How can I compare my 401(k) to plans offered by similar companies?

There’s no easy way. No free database exists where you can, say, type in your employer name and see how its 401(k) investment options compare to what other companies offer. But there are a few general trends to be aware of.

The size of your company matters. Smaller companies tend to get offered retirement plans with higher fees, according to research. Larger companies have more employee money and therefore leverage, and tend to negotiate lower fees. So, if you work for a smaller company, experts said you may want to be especially vigilant about your plan’s investment options.

Other signs of a good plan: your employer pays some or all of the administrative costs and your employer offers a matching contribution, experts said.

And more choices don’t necessarily mean better ones. Most people don’t have the time or the expertise to understand the investment funds available to them, Curtis said. A well-designed retirement plan gives workers a curated set of low-cost investment options that’ll “meet the needs of most investors.”

What if I don’t like my retirement plan?

Start with your plan administrator, often someone in your company’s HR department, experts say. Tell them that you aren’t happy with the investment offerings and the associated fees, and lobby for additional options.

If you believe the people overseeing your 401(k) plan have been careless, disloyal or negligent, resulting in a smaller nest egg for your retirement, you can contact the Department of Labor, Hauser said. An employee benefit adviser should follow up with you to learn more and may refer your case to the enforcement division for further investigation.

Under federal law, you can also file a lawsuit against your employer.

But Hauser said it may be difficult for the average person to police the options in their 401(k) plan. Much of the responsibility falls on employees, whether or not they are well-versed in investing, he said. That can mean people invest in their retirement fund for decades before they notice the high fees that cut into their potential retirement savings.

“People consistently underestimate the impact of even small differences in fees,” Hauser said.

The post How to Check In on Your 401(k) Fees appeared first on ProPublica.

The U.S. Army paid General Dynamics $533 million for an artillery factory that failed to produce a single usable shell.

Instead of efficient, state-of-the-art production lines, half a billion dollars in taxpayer funding paid for machines that kept failing in bizarre ways, former workers told ProPublica’s Jesse Coburn. Giant robot arms would catch fire. The Texas factory’s signature device often cracked the steel meant for the shells. And workers regularly had to take a sledgehammer to certain machines to try to make them function properly. But the machines still botched nearly every shell.

The boondoggle, which included a real-life dumpster fire, was described as an “absolute disaster,” by one former official who worked in an Army office overseeing the project. The official, like others interviewed for the story, spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In a detailed statement, the Army told ProPublica it exercises “rigorous oversight” and that, “where vendors fail to meet contract specifications” — as at the General Dynamics artillery factory — ”we are evaluating contract performance, seeking recoupment of funds, and pivoting resources.”

General Dynamics declined an interview request, but the company has said it “met or exceeded requirements,” according to a Department of Defense inspector general report. In a statement, a company spokesperson told ProPublica its reporting “fundamentally mischaracterizes the circumstances,” but did not respond to a request to specify our reporting’s alleged errors.

To chronicle what went wrong, Coburn interviewed 36 people who’ve worked for the Army, the Pentagon, General Dynamics and the White House, and he reviewed internal company documents as well as photos and video from inside the factory. Here are the lapses in planning and execution Coburn’s reporting uncovered — and some of the consequences of those mistakes.

The Red Flags

The Army awarded the project to General Dynamics in a rushed process despite significant unknowns.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Biden administration rushed to boost production of artillery shells to support Ukraine’s war effort. General Dynamics was the only company producing the 155 mm metal shell bodies in the U.S. at that time, mainly in a century-old facility in Pennsylvania.

The company could have simply replicated the facility’s traditional manufacturing method, which dated back to the time of the Korean War, to ramp up production. But General Dynamics proposed using a state-of-the-art production line from Repkon, a Turkish company virtually unknown in American defense. 

Repkon said other countries were already using its machinery to build an older, simpler model of the artillery shells. But it wasn’t clear the Turkish equipment could work with the particular steel used to make the Army’s newer model of 155 mm shells. And Repkon said the Army and General Dynamics could not inspect full artillery production lines in action, citing customer privacy.

Repkon did not respond to requests for comment. 

The Department of Defense did not competitively bid the project.

The Army could’ve insisted that General Dynamics more fully demonstrate that Repkon’s machines could perform the desired work. But that would’ve taken time, and — as a former Army official told Coburn — “there was incredible pressure to go fast.”

In November 2022, the Army gave General Dynamics the first in a series of contract awards for the artillery factory. Then, Congress granted the Department of Defense the power to award money for Ukraine-related causes without some of the usual contracting safeguards meant to ensure taxpayer money doesn’t go to waste. That meant the Army could give General Dynamics no-bid awards and the company could start work on the project before finalizing the contract terms with the government.

The U.S. ended up ordering three Repkon production lines — instead of just one — without knowing for certain whether they could make shells that met the Army’s specifications. (The Army said it selected General Dynamics because of the company’s unique artillery production experience).

The Army did not thoroughly vet the proposal before approving it.

Both the Army and General Dynamics sent staffers to Turkey to inspect the Repkon machines. But they never inspected a full production line in action, and they didn’t send enough experts who could identify potential defects in Repkon’s equipment, four former General Dynamics and Army officials told ProPublica.

The Army also didn’t require General Dynamics to demonstrate it could use Repkon’s equipment to complete the entire production process and make shells that met the service’s specifications. (The Army said that “formal testing could not occur prior to full machinery installation.”)

In 2024, leaders from the Army and General Dynamics gathered in Texas to celebrate the factory’s opening. But the machines were barely functioning. 

Here’s how the rushed planning from the Army and General Dynamics played out in the factory.

The Consequences

In Texas, robotic arms caught fire and smashed into equipment.

Twelve former factory workers told Coburn that problems quickly piled up inside the factory. Machines meant to begin giving the shells perfectly smooth noses would, instead, mangle them into swirls that looked like soft-serve ice cream.

The robotic arms had a tendency to swing out of control, smashing into things around the factory. Workers talked about the arms going “rogue.” Sometimes, a machine in the factory would be seen moving on its own, controlled remotely by someone in Turkey, spooking workers in the Texas factory. 

Workers said smoke hung in the air inside the factory, and it’d reach desert-like temperatures when the furnaces or forging presses were on. Making matters worse, walls cracked, water flooded in when it rained and employees said the foundation of the buildings appeared to be shifting or sinking beneath them.

As progress at the artillery plant continued to stall, paranoia grew and rumors swirled among the American workers that the Turkish employees from Repkon might be purposefully sabotaging the machinery.

“It was astonishing how little progress we would make, month after month, year after year,” one former worker told ProPublica. “People started speculating, ‘I wonder if they’re spying on us.’” (The Army said it has no evidence of sabotage or spying.)

General Dynamics failed to meet a number of milestones at the facility, including failing to perform scheduled first article tests, which would’ve demonstrated the factory could produce shells that met the Army’s requirements. 

The Army hasn’t required General Dynamics to pay the money back.

General Dynamics, one of the world’s largest defense contractors, and Repkon haven’t been held publicly accountable for the taxpayer-funded failure. The Army also hasn’t made General Dynamics pay back the money. (The service said it will recover funding from the project by getting unspecified discounts from General Dynamics on production orders.)

In August 2025, the Army halted work on two of the three production lines at the factory. But the Army didn’t unilaterally terminate the contract awards. In December 2025, the government paid the company $26.3 million in “progress payments” for two production lines — although the lines had never made a usable shell.

The Army says it won’t spend any more money on the artillery plant. But since the Army partially halted work at the factory last summer, the same unit of General Dynamics responsible for the struggling facility has won contract awards worth $2.5 billion, according to the Army. (The service said this was for “distinct production lines and critical national defense requirements” unrelated to the Texas factory.)

Having experienced the failure of a little-proven technology in its factory, General Dynamics has announced it will team up with yet another unheard-of partner promising technological innovation. The new solution? Artificial intelligence.

Read our full investigation here.

The post The Costly Blunders in the Army’s $533 Million Fiasco appeared first on ProPublica.

In Idaho, parents who say their faith prohibits lifesaving medical care for their children can’t be charged with child neglect or manslaughter. Supporters of this protection over the years have included lawmakers who voiced support for “traditional” Idaho values.

But from at least the 1880s through the early 1970s, it was illegal for parents in Idaho to choose prayer over medical care when a child’s life was at stake, newspaper archives and historical documents show.

“Every parent of any child who willfully omits, without lawful excuse, to furnish necessary food, clothing, shelter, or medical attendance for such child, is guilty of a misdemeanor,” reads the 1887 edition of Idaho territory statutes, published before statehood.

The statutes included no mention of spiritual belief as a “lawful excuse.” Three years later, the state constitution explicitly put limits on Idaho’s freedom of religion. It would not excuse “acts of licentiousness,” polygamy or other practices “inconsistent with morality or the peace or safety of the state.”

It wasn’t long before the law came down on members of the Followers of Christ, a faith-healing sect that arrived in Idaho in 1899 and remains active in the state. From 2015 to 2025, the sect’s congregations in Idaho experienced 15 preventable deaths of children, according to ProPublica’s reporting.

Pearl Annis was a 13-year-old girl whose parents had moved from Oklahoma to Idaho’s Magic Valley in the spring of 1915 with at least one other Followers family. The Annises and their 13 children shared “a two-room shack,” a local newspaper reported. An officer and a doctor visited the home after neighbors voiced concern. They found Pearl in bed, fully dressed and on the cusp of death.

Her father, Lurid P. “Lewis” Annis, was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of refusing to provide medical attention. Pearl was taken to the hospital, according to the news story, and died there with what today would be described as septic shock from a bowel blockage. The newspaper, which didn’t appear to follow up on Annis’ criminal charge, called the Followers church “a religious cult” and Pearl’s death a consequence of “religious mania.”

News archives and historic records don’t say how many times Idaho acted on similar cases in the decades after.

But one legal battle over lifesaving care drew attention in the 1960s, as sickness made its way through a Followers family in a Boise suburb. The mother died in December 1965. Her 4-year-old daughter died the following June.

Days after the girl’s death, a judge ordered the state to take custody of her 10-year-old brother under Idaho’s child protection law. The boy was admitted to a local hospital with pneumonia, a complication of the measles. He spent days in critical condition but survived. The judge told the father that to regain custody, he would have to be willing to give the boy medical care as the law required.

A doctor testified that without the hospitalization, the child “almost certainly would have died,” a newspaper report said.

The father’s lawyer told the judge that his sect was rooted in “faith that God will heal the sick.” The law in the 1960s was clear, though: a parent had a duty to protect their child’s health, no exceptions. The judge told Samuel’s father: “The law governs conduct. Religion governs opinion.”

But the legal landscape was about to shift. It came with little public attention.

During a full-on rewrite of Idaho’s criminal code in 1971, the Legislature added a section that said the state could not bring endangerment charges against someone “who chooses for his child treatment by prayer or spiritual means alone.” Legislative records don’t make clear how the wording originated. The passage of another law one year later, affirming the “spiritual means” language and applying it to other crimes, has been credited to the Christian Science church, another Christian denomination with Idaho members.

(The Christian Science website says the church’s practice of “healing in the way Christ Jesus taught” is not “faith healing” and that members are free to choose any form of healthcare. The church also supported Oregon’s full removal of its faith-healing exemption in 2011.)

Faith-healing exemptions soon became widespread nationally. The trigger was the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974, which set out to standardize the nation’s child welfare system by giving states grants to more effectively investigate reports of child abuse.

The Department of Health, Education and Welfare interpreted the law as requiring states to have a faith-healing exemption to qualify for the grants — an interpretation that records from the time don’t explain.

Most states went along, and Idaho further broadened its exemption in 1976 to not only keep faith healers from going to jail if their children died, but also to keep their children from being placed in foster care solely for lack of medical care.

At the national level, the mandate lasted less than a decade. The Reagan administration adopted new regulations in 1983 that took a neutral stance on the subject, and several states in subsequent years rolled back their exemptions.

Colorado, for example, reverted to prosecuting faith healers as it would any other parent in 2001 following deaths in the Followers-adjacent sect Church of the First Born, including the death of a 13-year-old girl from untreated diabetes.

But Idaho clung to its special treatment for faith healers.

It has remained that way ever since.

The post Idaho Law Protects Faith Healers. It Wasn’t Always That Way. appeared first on ProPublica.

Shortly after taking office last year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth polled the nation’s top commanders about cutting a program designed to protect civilians during U.S. military operations.

Hegseth had bet senior officers would endorse his view that focusing on civilian security was “woke” and out of step with “maximum lethality,” current and former defense officials told ProPublica.

Instead, every commander rebuffed the idea.

The poll from early 2025, which has not been previously reported, cemented top-level military support for Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a relatively new program adopted after years of heavy civilian tolls in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. As part of its mission, CHMR (pronounced “chimmer”) stationed personnel within major regional commands. Officials tried to develop a picture of life on the ground in combat zones to aid decision-making on military strikes and avoid or minimize civilian harm.

In the poll, Hegseth gave commanders three options: cut 65% of staff but keep the effort operational, continue with only a small centralized office in Washington, or eliminate the program.

Nine commanders chose the first option to preserve the enterprise as much as possible, according to a memo reviewed by ProPublica. Leaders of two commands, one overseeing the nuclear arsenal and the other focused on cyber threats, declined all three options, asking to maintain the full program.

Leaders at U.S. Central Command, the Tampa, Florida-based center that oversees military action in the Middle East, pressed to keep its full CHMR staff of 16. Eliminating or scaling back the effort would “result in decreased efficiency of U.S. lethal operations due to an increased risk of target misidentification and reduced battlespace awareness,” a memo reviewed by ProPublica said.

Retired Army Gen. Erik Kurilla, who was then in charge of Central Command, and several other senior officers directly involved in combat operations had appealed to Hegseth to keep the program. They explained that it was a valuable tool, another retired general said — but “that intent was overridden.”

Hegseth gutted the effort, leaving only a handful of people to carry out the mission. It was stripped of almost all of its funding, even as the U.S. launched new campaigns in Somalia, Yemen and Iran. One official summed up the Hegseth approach as: “Bombs away!”

Hegseth’s early exchanges with the generals made clear that the civilian harm program had no future in his reimagined “Department of War.”

“No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement,” Hegseth would later tell a gathering of hundreds of generals and admirals.

But now, after U.S. missile strikes have killed hundreds of civilians in Iran and Yemen, episodes that drew global criticism and questions from Congress, the program could soon be partially revived.

The about-face would mark a rare reversal in a department that hasn’t tolerated dissent under Hegseth and President Donald Trump. Last year’s military memos detail a delicate pushback that may preserve at least the framework of the civilian security campaign.

Current and former defense officials described the evolution of the civilian security program on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration.

The Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment about the poll or the program’s revival.

Casualties, Outrage

The first major military operation of Hegseth’s tenure — an air campaign in Yemen in the spring of 2025 — killed 153 civilians and wounded 243 others. The majority of the deaths came from just two strikes, ranking them among the deadliest for civilians the Pentagon has acknowledged in modern warfare, said Airwars, a British watchdog that tracks civilian harm from military operations. The toll was confirmed in the Pentagon’s 2025 annual report for civilian casualties, The Washington Post first reported.

Hegseth described the Yemen operation at the time as a “clear, limited mission executed with ruthlessness, full stop.”

By the time the U.S. began attacking Iran the next year, the Pentagon’s civilian protection program was down from a little under 200 people to around two dozen, some working only part time, the current and former defense officials said. Central Command, which said it needed a minimum of nine of its 16 staffers to function, was left with one person.

On the first day of the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran, a U.S. airstrike hit a school in Minab, a city near the Strait of Hormuz, killing more than 100 children and igniting international outrage.

Hegseth and the commander in charge of the Iran operation, Adm. Brad Cooper, were questioned about the strike before Congress. Hegseth said the U.S. does not target civilians and would investigate. Early reports on that investigation, yet to be publicly released, have said outdated U.S. intelligence led to the attack on the school.

Democratic senators and humanitarian groups questioned whether the cuts to the civilian protection personnel also contributed to the school tragedy.

In a letter to Hegseth in April, 11 senators said the school strike, as well as other deadly attacks on civilians in Iran, reflected “the administration’s broader disregard for the strategic, legal, and moral imperative to minimize civilian harm,” noting the dismantling of civilian harm reduction efforts. “This is a concerning pattern and raises questions about whether the administration is upholding international law and the laws of war,” it said.

Previously, a Pentagon spokesperson declined to answer questions from ProPublica about the letter, saying it would “respond directly” to Congress.

Concerns were voiced by military leaders before Hegseth largely eliminated the operation. One exception is the Department of the Army, headed by a civilian appointee, which agreed with getting rid of CHMR entirely.

Leaders at Central Command told Hegseth’s top staff in a memo that CHMR “enhanced our precision and accuracy, making us more lethal.” The memo added, “The operational and strategic value of this work is widely recognized.”

At the same time, the Joint Staff echoed the commanders’ sentiment. According to correspondence reviewed by ProPublica, the Joint Staff disagreed with the Army acting secretary, who said in a February 2025 memo that the program was redundant and recommended Congress repeal the law that set it in motion.

As pressure has built from both Congress and within the military to restore the program, the Defense Department appears to have backpedaled.

In April, Elbridge Colby, the Defense Department’s under secretary of policy, sent a follow-up memo about the civilian protection enterprise to Hegseth. This time, there was only one proposal on the table: reboot the program, albeit at reduced staff levels with 70 full-time people.

In that memo, Colby wrote that maintaining 35% of CHMR would address investigations into civilian harm, reports to Congress and payments to those harmed.

The same commanders Hegseth polled earlier endorsed the move, several defense officials told ProPublica.

The proposal would allow all regional commands to reconstitute their civilian harm reduction staff, and the Virginia-based Civilian Protection Center of Excellence for training, data and research would move from under the Army to the Joint Staff. The move, officials say, gives the mission more heft and eases collaboration with the Navy and Air Force, which are at the forefront of the administration’s campaigns.

“If not for the combatant commanders,” one defense official said, the program would be “dead.”

The harm mitigation effort makes up a tiny fraction of the Defense Department’s billions in spending. The center near the Pentagon had an annual budget of $7 million, officials said, with the cross-command total for all civilian security work estimated at around $80 million before the cuts. Officials expect a refashioned program to operate on a smaller budget.

Military leaders steeped in lessons learned from the post-9/11 “forever wars” repeatedly have affirmed harm mitigation as an asset on the battlefield. Civilian casualties undermine U.S. objectives and help boost insurgent recruiting, analysts say.

The Pentagon had formalized CHMR in 2022, detailing steps to protect noncombatants and investigate reports of casualties. Commanders had publicly championed the program in congressional testimony and defense journals. The current head of European Command, Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, co-wrote a paper calling it a “watershed” development.

In some cases the staff acted as a “red team” pushing back on strikes and the possible collateral damage. The center of excellence focused on institutionalizing best practices, training service members and collecting data on civilian harm.

Those efforts and “operational effectiveness are the same thing,” one retired general told ProPublica. “They’re two sides of the same coin.”

The post Top Commanders Told Hegseth Not to Cut Civilian Protection Program, Poll Showed. He Did It Anyway. appeared first on ProPublica.