Over the “strongest possible” objections from the federal prosecutor handling the case, leaders at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., quashed plans to bring civil rights charges against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent accused of shooting a Venezuelan immigrant and then lying about it. 

The agent, 52-year-old Christian Castro, allegedly shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg in Minneapolis this January during Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s immigration blitz that sent thousands of federal agents into the state. The incident was one of three shootings by immigration agents in the city, the other two of which were fatal. 

Federal prosecutors in Minnesota had been preparing to charge Castro with deprivation of rights under color of law for the shooting of Sosa-Celis, according to several people familiar with the case. Those charges are similar to the ones leveled against Minneapolis police officers accused in George Floyd’s killing and can carry hefty prison sentences. 

Late on Tuesday, Matthew Evans, the assistant U.S. attorney in Minnesota in charge of the case, told lawyers for Sosa-Celis and other victims to prepare for Castro to be charged “only with False Statements,” according to an email that was reviewed by ProPublica. 

That charge would likely carry a far less severe punishment if he were convicted.

“This is being directed by the Main Justice and the US Attorney,” Evans wrote in a remarkably candid account of internal deliberations. “I objected in the strongest possible terms and fought it as hard as I could. It wasn’t enough.” 

He wrote that the false statement charges could come soon and would likely be filed under seal.

“It has been an honor and a privilege to try to get justice for your clients,” Evans concluded the email.

A DOJ official said civil rights charges require consultation with the civil rights division in Washington, and “any charging decisions that come out of such investigations are collaborative and deliberative and adhere to the facts and law of that specific case and controversy.”

The agency “has not yet reached a conclusion on this matter and will never rush an investigative process and the thorough review of all evidence,” the official said. 

Evans and a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota declined to comment. An attorney for Sosa-Celis did not return phone calls from a reporter. Castro, who has an outstanding warrant in Minnesota for this case, could not be reached for comment.

Under the Trump administration, the Justice Department’s civil rights division has been thinned and has dropped some Biden-era oversight of law enforcement agencies. This move by the DOJ is likely to fuel further concerns that the department is operating more in support of President Donald Trump’s political agenda than to preserve the rule of law. Earlier this year, a ProPublica analysis found that in almost every instance of immigration agents shooting people, Trump’s administration blamed the injured and dead within hours of the incident. In many of those cases, federal or local police declined to investigate the agents.

Castro, who was put on leave by the Department of Homeland Security, is also facing multiple state felony charges in Minnesota, including assault with a dangerous weapon. After he left Minneapolis and returned to Texas, Minnesota officials had requested state officials there extradite Castro to face the charges, but Texas Gov. Greg Abbott refused to cooperate. Castro had been held for 90 days in jail while the two states fought over the extradition. He was released last week. 

Sosa-Celis was shot on Jan. 14, as Castro and another ICE agent chased Alfredo Aljorna, an immigrant from Venezuela, after a traffic stop. Aljorna ran to his home, which he shared with Sosa-Celis. The two men made it inside after a brief scramble, and Castro fired through the closed door, “knowing [the home] was occupied by several people,” according to state charging documents. One witness said there were two children in the house when Castro shot into it. Sosa-Celis was hit in the leg. 

ICE agents then deployed tear gas into the home and took the men and their partners into custody, according to the documents and other court records.

DHS originally said Castro and the other agent were ambushed by the men and beaten with a shovel or broomstick, making Castro fear for his life and fire in self-defense. DHS called Sosa-Celis and Aljorna “violent criminal illegal aliens,” and federal prosecutors charged them with assault. 

The next month, however, they dropped the charges against both men, and the DHS backed off its narrative in a rare admission of possible wrongdoing of its officers. “Video evidence has revealed the sworn testimony of the two agents appeared to be false,” then-acting ICE director Todd Lyons said in a statement.  

After Castro’s release from jail, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, who is leading the state’s prosecution against him, said she worried that Castro will flee to Mexico.

Reached for comment Wednesday, Moriarty compared the Justice Department’s decision to overrule Evans to its actions after ICE agents killed Renee Good. A week before shooting Sosa-Celis, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Good in her car. Agents alleged she drove toward them, but video of the incident showed Good’s wheels turned away from them when they shot her. Federal authorities first agreed to a joint investigation, but Justice Department officials later refused to cooperate with state police, deeming any review of the fatal shooting unnecessary.

The post Trump’s DOJ Blocked Serious ICE Shooting Charge Over Federal Prosecutor’s “Strongest Possible” Objections appeared first on ProPublica.

Top U.S. Postal Service officials tasked with issuing new regulations on mail voting expressed concerns in internal meetings about how the rules they were drafting could delay or block ballots from reaching large swaths of eligible voters for the upcoming midterms, but the rules moved forward anyway, ProPublica has learned.

The revelations about the discussions, from someone familiar with the rulemaking process, come as a separate anonymous federal employee filed a whistleblower disclosure with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, warning that the new system is untested and error-prone, and could lead to mass disenfranchisement in the upcoming election. The whistleblower described the entire process as “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed.” 

In a March executive order, President Donald Trump directed the Postal Service to create the new rules, including requiring states to give USPS a list of all voters eligible to receive a ballot in the mail and requiring USPS to use those lists to determine which ballots get sent to voters. USPS officials were tasked with crafting the details of how the new system would work, including the creation of a new portal for states to upload their voters’ information and the back-end software that would allow mail delivery sites and local post offices to track, and potentially block, ballots entering into the mail on their way to voters. 

Voting rights organizations, state officials and Democratic political groups filed lawsuits challenging the new rules, and a federal court has temporarily blocked the requirements for states. The merits of the new rule are expected to reach the Supreme Court before the November election. Even if the Supreme Court allows the plan, though, election officials and experts say that the new system could not be ready in time for this election, given that ballots for people who are in the military or overseas must be sent out this month.

During meetings in which top USPS officials discussed how to comply with the executive order, there was much discussion about the controversial nature of what they needed to do, according to the person familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. The focus was on limiting the impact to voters while also complying. One repeated concern regarded how to avoid invalidating an entire batch of ballots if one voter among thousands couldn’t be confirmed as eligible. Some in the meetings recommended trying to limit harm to voters by not rejecting the entire batch, according to the person familiar with the discussions. Despite that, according to the whistleblower who contacted Blumenthal, the directive to reject entire batches if they included just one unverified ballot moved forward.

“As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state — effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters,” the whistleblower wrote.

Election clerks raised similar concerns directly to USPS officials just days before the final rule was issued, at a mid-August National Association of Election Officials conference in Kansas City, Missouri, ProPublica has learned. 

There, an example was given of Maricopa County, Arizona, which often sends out more than 2 million ballots at a time in its initial mailing. USPS officials confirmed it was possible that one ballot with a bad barcode or wrong voter information within the more than 2 million ballots could delay the entire mailing, according to two people who attended the related committee meeting.

The Postal Service has defended its final rule in court, stating that it does not intend to seize control of administration of elections and that the rule “need not and should not prevent a single voter from voting by mail.”

In a statement to ProPublica, a Postal Service spokesperson said the agency is carefully reviewing the Blumenthal whistleblower’s concerns and that USPS has spent months developing its system, in a manner consistent with court orders, and will soon provide instructions for how election officials can use it.

“Regardless of political party or perspective, we share a common goal: ensuring that Americans can have confidence that their election mail will be handled securely and delivered reliably,” the spokesperson said.

Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement to ProPublica that the process of building software to carry out the new mail ballot checks “is neither complex nor unique for USPS since the Postal Service regularly uses bulk mailing and intelligent mail barcodes for a wide variety of large customers.”

“Under President Trump, the federal government is working to ensure safe, transparent, and honest elections,” Bis wrote.

Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who received the whistleblower disclosure, asked the postmaster general for detailed info about the plan in a letter this week. He told reporters on a call Monday that the new USPS rule puts all mail voters at risk, and he accused the administration of being “hellbent on changing the framework of casting ballots in this country, clearly for political reasons.”

Election officials and printing experts have told ProPublica that errors in the system are likely, given how difficult it is to design envelopes with a clear barcode for scanning and to keep voter information up to date. Seemingly small details have yet to be worked out that could throw the entire system into chaos, they said, such as what file format to use when uploading voter lists and whether to provide mailing or residential addresses to USPS.

“These are trivial things that create massive problems,” said Jeff Ellington, CEO of Runbeck Election Services, which prints ballots and ballot envelopes for counties. Beyond that, he said, most of the counties in the country don’t have the type of barcodes needed to make the system function. And the Postal Service hasn’t told local election officials how to design new ballot envelopes and get them approved by USPS in this short of a timeframe.

The Blumenthal whistleblower said the idea that entire batches will be delayed by one mistake is especially concerning because of significant operational problems that exist with the portal that will contain information about eligible voters and the lack of testing of the system. The whistleblower is concerned about how, while systems typically have a known error rate, there has been no internal acknowledgment that errors will occur in the new mail ballot system, and instead the USPS has adopted a “zero-percent failure policy.”

The whistleblower also alleges that the administration moved forward with steps to create the new system during two initial injunctions from the court, which would have violated the court’s order. USPS had stated when issuing its final rule that it was adhering to the injunctions and would not take actions to implement the rule for the 2026 election unless the injunctions were lifted.

Both the whistleblower and the person familiar with discussions about the executive order’s implementation said that the timeline for creating a sophisticated tracking system would typically be at least nine months. The whistleblower’s disclosure says that workers began to work on the system in mid-June and had only weeks before being given a Sept. 1 deadline. The person familiar with the discussions said it was common for priority projects within USPS to have crunched timelines. The internal goal, the person said, was to try to implement the new system by that deadline or to show why it couldn’t happen — which was typical of other directives the agency had faced in the past.

The whistleblower disclosure described confusion as the staff attempted to develop the systems without enough direction, within weeks, and without proper communication, and said several employees referred to the situation as a “shit show.” 

The post New Mail Voting Rules Moved Forward Despite USPS Officials’ Concerns About Mass Disenfranchisement appeared first on ProPublica.

The rejections piled up one after another as leaders of Alpha School, a growing network of private school campuses, tried to convince states that their artificial-intelligence-led teaching model belonged in publicly funded charter schools.

The Alpha system is centered on the idea that students can “crush academics,” like reading and math lessons, in just two hours a day. AI software teaches the lessons. The human teachers, referred to as guides, focus on motivation and emotional support. “School is broken, and we’re here to fix it,” Alpha’s “2 Hour Learning” tagline claims.

But over the last two years, officials in numerous states have questioned the model,  characterizing it as “untested” and ”experimental.” In North Carolina, one charter school board member feared two hours was “not nearly enough” to teach required subjects. A month earlier, in August 2024, an official in Utah worried that the school’s instructors may act more like “a life coach” than a teacher.

Even the largely conservative Texas State Board of Education, which had approved most charter applications over the last decade, rejected Alpha’s pitch last summer. 

“I’m just a little skeptical of those types of gains,” said Keven Ellis, a Republican board member in Texas, in response to Alpha’s claims of massive improvements in student academic outcomes over short periods of time.  

By this spring, Alpha had applied to form charter schools in at least 10 states, according to an Instagram post from co-founder MacKenzie Price in March. Only Arizona had said yes.

“I’ve met with White House representatives. Policy makers at the federal and state level. Decision makers who hold the fate of our society in their hands,” said Price in the Instagram post, months after Texas rejected the company’s charter pitch. “Unfortunately, change is hard.” 

What Price didn’t mention in her post was that Texas leaders were rolling out a new education program that would allow private schools to earn state funding, and Alpha School was set to benefit. The inaugural voucher initiative would award tax dollars for select students’ homeschooling or private school tuition. Price and her husband, Andy, had personally pushed for vouchers by donating over $2 million, before and after the program was approved, to Texas legislators and political action committees that helped pass the controversial program and oversee it. 

Now, just one year after the state rejected its charter school application, Alpha has roughly quadrupled its Texas private schools, with more than 30 virtual and in-person campuses, most of which were accepted into the voucher program, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found. This rapid expansion has made Alpha among the largest private school chains participating in the voucher initiative.

“They took a backdoor approach,” said Democrat Tiffany Clark, one of several Texas State Board of Education members who voted against Alpha’s charter school application last summer and were concerned with its entrance into the voucher program. “They said, ‘You know what, we can’t get in as a charter, but we can continue to be a private school and take these funds.’”

Texas and Arizona appear to be the first states where Alpha’s campuses have been approved to participate in school choice programs, though they could qualify in others. After starting with one campus in Austin, the chain now has private schools in 17 states and Puerto Rico. Most of those states run voucher programs. 

As ProPublica reported in July, private schools across the country have multiplied in recent years, often with little oversight, alongside the growth of state voucher programs. The result is that taxpayer dollars sometimes go to school leaders who have misused public funds or have documented histories of abusing children. Elected leaders in Texas, which has one of the newest and largest voucher programs in the country, promised that they had implemented strong guardrails, including some that other states had not. 

But Alpha School’s acceptance into the voucher program, after state education leaders rejected the same model just last year, underscores the limitations of those standards, according to education experts. Alpha leaders didn’t apply again to the state education board but to the Texas comptroller’s office, essentially the state’s chief financial officer, which legislators designated to run the voucher program. The comptroller checked for only four criteria: that a school operates in Texas, that it’s accredited by an approved organization, that it’s been in operation at least two years and that it administers annual standardized tests.

None of Alpha’s private schools had to meet state curriculum standards or show how the company’s model would lead to student success. None of the concerns raised by the Texas board just last year about Alpha’s rejected charter applications, test scores or use of AI to teach mattered.  

“That wasn’t relevant,” said Travis Pillow, a spokesperson for the voucher program. “Our role is to make sure that a school meets the requirements in the law.” 

None of the Alpha leaders named in this story, nor the company’s press office, agreed to interviews, nor did they answer most of the newsrooms’ questions, including about their test scores. An Alpha spokesperson provided an emailed response only to questions about previous reporting by other news outlets. Alpha officials have defended their model in interviews and podcasts, saying it has drastically improved student outcomes and test scores that it says place their kids in the top 1% to 2% in the country.  

Price has said she co-founded the school in 2014 to allow students to learn at their own pace after her oldest daughter grew bored and felt held back in public schools, according to multiple interviews. That mission was supercharged four years ago, when tech mogul Joe Liemandt poured $1 billion into the school and its AI-guided platform with the goal of reaching 1 billion students worldwide. Since then, Alpha has transformed into a sprawling education company with a fast-growing national profile. The schools have caught the attention of Trump endorser and billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and Elon Musk, whose Starlink internet will be used to launch more Alpha schools across the world.

Education experts have raised skepticism about Alpha’s bold claims, noting that private schools can self-select affluent students, who are likely to perform well academically. ProPublica and the Tribune interviewed five such experts, who noted that private schools aren’t required to share their internal data and so can easily cherry-pick positive examples. 

The newsrooms also examined some of Alpha’s outcomes among lower-income students and charter schools, including a partnership the company had with an existing charter in Texas that has not yet been reported. The experts ProPublica and the Tribune spoke with said in those examples, Alpha either didn’t release enough data to verify its alleged successes or the test scores released by state education agencies fell far short of the academic growth that company leaders predicted.

“I don’t believe their claims that typical students will see rapid improvements,” said Justin Reich, director of the Teaching Systems Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “There are tons of reasons to be skeptical of that claim.”

Rejection After Rejection

To achieve their ambitions of teaching a billion students, Alpha leaders had to break into the same public education system they aimed to revolutionize. 

By 2024, the company was in the midst of a nationwide sprint, hoping to open virtual or in-person charters in over half the country. 

The concept intrigued some state leaders, who liked the self-paced learning or the opportunity to pioneer AI instruction in classrooms. “My mind is kind of blown by all this,” one North Carolina education official said in September 2024. 

But charter leaders across the country raised similar concerns that led them to reject Alpha’s pitches, according to ProPublica and the Tribune’s review of applications, interviews and written feedback from the six states where the newsrooms were able to verify the company had applied: Texas, Arizona, Arkansas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Utah.

Officials in every state the newsrooms reviewed worried about what would happen to the role of teachers if Alpha’s AI-led platform, rather than certified educators, provided lessons to students. Many state charter leaders also doubted students could master necessary lessons in just two hours a day or questioned whether Alpha’s courses covered each individual state’s required curriculum. In at least one instance, in Utah, Alpha leaders admitted they had not checked the curriculum standards before applying. 

In several states, charter leaders criticized Alpha’s habit of projecting multiplying enrollment year after year, or the little community support and outreach they’d secured to back up the claims. Alpha leaders told education officials at times that they surveyed Price’s social media followers to measure parent interest in a state. 

At least two state education boards also took issue with Alpha’s plan to keep Price and her husband on the charter’s oversight board while the school simultaneously paid their companies, which provide services like the two-hour learning platform. The Prices acknowledged the conflict of interest and repeatedly promised to correct it. In Arizona, the only state to approve the Alpha-affiliated charter, Andy Price said in 2024 that they were “fully committed to having a majority board of 100% independent Arizona folks by the end of this year.” MacKenzie and Andy Price were still serving on the board as recently as this June, according to board meeting minutes.   

Among state officials’ most consistent concerns was the fact that Alpha’s model had been tested only among affluent students whose families could afford expensive private schools or among students who’d received scholarships. They questioned whether the learning platform would work in charter schools, where there could be more students behind academically, who had special education needs or were learning English as a second language. (In at least four of its charter applications, Alpha said it incorporates programs like the language app Duolingo to help students with their English.)

Alpha leaders often countered concerns by referencing successful student test scores in two more diverse campuses in Texas where they’ve operated. But the achievements they highlighted were not so clear-cut as they made them seem, experts said. 

In one instance, Alpha partnered with an Austin charter called Texas Preparatory School that was already facing a potential state-imposed closure because of low student test scores and failed financial audits. An Alpha leader told Texas education officials in May 2025 that after they implemented their two-hour learning platform at the charter, outcomes changed from most students failing state exams to 50% to 60% of students passing them. 

Test results published by the Texas Education Agency don’t back up that claim. The scores indicate that students may have performed worse on state tests than before Alpha’s involvement, according to several education experts who reviewed them. The portion of students who achieved “approaches grade level,” the lowest category that counts as passing the test, slightly rose, from 19% to 21%. The share of students that the test showed were at their grade level dropped from 10% to zero after the Alpha partnership. 

Texas Preparatory School received its third consecutive F rating, largely based on the test scores it received during the partnership with Alpha. 

“I don’t see the extreme growth,” said Toni Templeton, a research scientist at the University of Houston Education Research Center who reviewed the records at the newsrooms’ request. “If you’re such a high-performing school, you should have no problem demonstrating it.” 

The state decided to shut down the charter permanently last year in the middle of the Alpha partnership, but it allowed the campus to finish out the school year. 

Alpha leaders also pointed to its private school campus in Brownsville, a majority-Latino city in South Texas, as another example of their success. Alpha boasted to state charter boards that its Brownsville students, located in one of the poorest school districts in the nation, still excelled using the company’s AI program. 

“We don’t care if a student is white, Black or brown, rich or poor. An AI tutor is infinitely patient,” Price said during an interview with education officials in Utah about opening a charter campus there. “I believe this is the most kind of equitable answer to the problem of education.” 

However, reports from Wired and CNN have detailed families leaving the school after students fell behind academically or developed anxiety trying to keep up with learning expectations. Alpha has vehemently denied the findings, which a spokesperson wrote in an email to ProPublica and the Tribune “contain inaccurate reporting, misleading context and potentially defamatory representations.” “Prior to publication, WIRED was provided with documentation that directly contradicted its central claims, yet the piece did not accurately reflect that information,” the spokesperson wrote. She did not share that documentation with ProPublica and the Tribune, saying some of the “strongest evidence involves sensitive mental health records, personal records and individual data related to minor children.”

ProPublica and the Tribune specifically looked at the Brownsville student outcome data that Alpha self-published, which does not include detailed test scores to prove academic growth for all students, according to several education experts who reviewed it. There was also inconsistency in how Alpha presented the data. An Alpha leader told Texas education officials that  students across grade levels in the Brownsville campus had scores that jumped from 30% to 80% mastery. But Jennifer Steele, an education professor at American University, said that Alpha’s published report shows those improvements for only its second graders, who may not be representative of the entire school.

“The bottom line is that if you desperately want your child to drill on screens two hours a day and you are prepared to pay a lot of money for that, you might have the kind of child who will test well after doing so. These kids do exist, and the Alpha schools are built to attract their parents,” Steele said. “But as a scalable model for public schools — even public charter schools — there is no evidence that it works.” 

Even in Arizona, the sole state to green-light Alpha’s charter pitch, the academic outcomes appear to again fall short, based on the preliminary state test scores recently presented to the charter school’s oversight board ahead of their official release this fall. (The Arizona Education Department would not provide ProPublica and the Tribune with the underlying scores.)

In their application to form a charter school in Arizona, Alpha leaders had predicted 65% of their students would test proficient in English at the end of the first year, but just 28% did, the state test scores showed. They projected 60% could reach that level in math. Only 10% achieved it. 

The Expansion Continues

Even as many states have rejected Alpha’s charter applications, the company’s push to expand its footprint hasn’t slowed. It’s only intensified. By this summer, Alpha had announced the launch of private campuses in 50 cities across the country, each catering to a different type of learner: Athletes can attend one of Alpha’s 13 sports academies. There are options for kids who play video games like Fortnite or who like to spend time in nature. One high school campus in New York challenges students to launch business ventures and net $1 million by the time they graduate, or else Alpha will pay back their $150,000 annual tuition. In another program, students spend their year abroad in Kenya and Ecuador. Their mission: help start new Alpha schools. 

As the number and types of schools multiplied, so did Alpha leaders’ efforts to win support from public officials, particularly those who have pushed voucher programs. 

In 2023, the Texas Observer reported that an LLC called Future of Education, whose incorporation address is the same as the Prices’ Austin home, donated $1 million to the campaign committee affiliated with then-Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, an outspoken voucher advocate. In Texas, Andy Price gave over $250,000 to a political action committee that helped elect pro-voucher candidates, and MacKenzie Price gave $10,000 to Rep. Brad Buckley, the Republican lawmaker who successfully carried the Texas voucher bill last year. She also donated to the leaders whose office oversees the state’s voucher program: $200,000 to Kelly Hancock and $100,000 to Don Huffines, who have both served as Texas comptroller. 

MacKenzie Price personally donated the most money in Texas to the main fundraising committee of Gov. Greg Abbott, who led the charge to bring a voucher program to the state. She contributed over $1.5 million to the governor’s campaign in the last three years. 

Alpha even got a mention in a press release the governor’s office issued in September 2025, after Abbott met with U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon. McMahon had toured an Alpha campus in Austin earlier that day. “The Secretary noted the innovation of Texas schools using artificial intelligence as a beneficial tool to assist students in learning how to ask the right questions to better understand educational materials,” the press release said.   

Joining McMahon on that tour was Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath, though about two months earlier the state board of education — which oversees his initial charter decisions and often agrees with Morath — had rejected Alpha’s charter proposal despite his recommendation. Morath has been a supporter of Alpha’s model before and after the vote, which he doesn’t have the power to override.

State board member Julie Pickren was thrilled to learn from ProPublica and the Tribune that Alpha private schools were accepted into the voucher program. Pickren, who voted in favor of Alpha’s Texas charter last summer, thought the model brought a promising individualized learning solution that could improve student outcomes, especially in academically struggling districts. 

“I would say thank you to them,” said Pickren, referring to Alpha. “Thank you for not giving up and looking for a way to serve children.” 

Fellow Republican and education board member Evelyn Brooks disagreed. She was shocked  to learn about Alpha’s acceptance into the voucher program and rapid expansion in Texas.

“You’re just making money. You’re reproducing a model, regardless of the region, regardless of the state,” said Brooks, who voted against Alpha’s charter proposal last year. 

And Alpha continues to open campuses where its leaders say there is enough demand. 

Last month, the company sent out a news release announcing a new school in a suburb of Houston. 

“At this point,” Brooks said, “it’s a franchise.” 

The post Several States Rejected This Private School Chain as a Charter. Now It’s Eligible for Texas’ Taxpayer-Funded Vouchers. appeared first on ProPublica.

Dave Masters could no longer ignore the storm as trees cracked and the swollen river roared. It was dark outside, but through the window he could see his father’s house, usually 100 feet away from the Pigeon River, was surrounded by water. Masters, tall and slender, forded the frigid waist-deep water to wake up his father and convince the 63-year-old to evacuate.

From the son’s trailer on the hillside, the two watched the water rise as Hurricane Frances wreaked havoc on Western North Carolina in early September 2004. Within an hour, his father’s home floated up like a bobber on a fishing line and then sailed down the middle of the road before veering into a telephone pole and cracking in half. The two pieces finally stopped when they got caught under a bridge downstream.

Just 10 days later, Hurricane Ivan dumped more rain in an unprecedented double whammy for the mountainous region far from the coast. Haywood County realized it needed to prevent further harm. It condemned several neighboring mobile homes along with a wood-frame house across the river. 

Recognizing the threat of flooding, the county eventually bought out that house, making the land near the town of Clyde permanent open space under a federally funded program to reduce the risk of future loss of life and property damage. The state also paid to relocate Masters’ father and another family from the trailer park on Hyder Mountain Road out of the floodplain “to mitigate the possibility of future damage to life and property should subsequent events occur.”

But although federal floodplain maps showed that the land where the trailer park sat was at risk, the county didn’t buy out the mobile home park or stop the park’s owners from again renting out the lots where trailers were destroyed, including the one where Masters’ father had lived.

It was a decision that would have great consequence. In 2021, the Hyder Mountain Road park flooded again during Tropical Storm Fred, damaging five of the six trailers that fronted the river, including one on the plot where Masters’ father had lived. Despite the damage, all the trailers in that first row remained. Then, in 2024, flooding from Hurricane Helene swept one of those mobile homes into the river, driving it into the same bridge and killing a resident and three of her dogs.

The repeated losses at the Hyder Mountain Road mobile home park are in part the result of a gap in disaster policy that allows mobile home residents to be put in harm’s way again and again. 

The federal government’s programs to buy out disaster-prone buildings are “the cornerstone of the Nation’s system for emergency management,” according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But the program was developed with traditional homeowners in mind, and mobile homes, the country’s largest source of affordable housing, are often left out. Trailers, even when they become immovable and lifelong homes, aren’t typically considered real estate but instead personal property, like motorcycles and boats.

That still leaves people living on flood-prone land. For the state to actually buy that land, mobile home park owners have to take the buyout, and FEMA’s program offers little incentive for them to do so: They can’t collect from the government for lost rent or for the value of the mobile homes on top of the land. 

Some park owners say the payouts are not high enough to allow them to relocate; others aren’t even aware of the buyout program. So park owners regularly allow new trailers to move into the vacant spots. Art and Lynne Heinmiller, who own the Hyder Mountain Road mobile home park, did not respond to questions — which were emailed, texted and mailed via certified letter — about allowing trailers and campers to move back to where they’d washed away.

What to do about such properties is now a big question for counties and Renew NC, Gov. Josh Stein’s billion-dollar Hurricane Helene recovery program. Renew NC’s manual states that it can help relocate mobile-home owners whose damaged trailers face future flood risks. But the program doesn’t keep new families from moving onto lots with a record of flooding.

At the Hyder Mountain Road park, families now live in recreational campers on plots where mobile homes have twice washed away. The county knows it’s a problem. The mobile home park is one of the spots Wentfard Henson, chief of the Clyde Volunteer Fire Department, watches during storms. Twice ahead of Helene in 2024, his team visited the community, knocking on doors and telling people to evacuate. 

“Where they’re at, it’s not if, it’s just when,” Henson said. “It’s going to flood again, there’s no doubt, because it flooded every time we’ve had a storm. It’s flooded four times.” 

Asked why residents are again allowed to live by the river, Cody Grasty, Haywood County’s recovery officer, told The Assembly and ProPublica that until a neighboring county bought out a park decimated by Helene, he “did not know it was even possible” to buy out a mobile home park. Small counties like Haywood, which has 60,000 residents, often look to the state for direction.

North Carolina Emergency Management, which reviews buyout applications and often completes these transactions for local governments, said there is no specific guidance for mobile home park buyouts and that the process is no different than it is for commercial or residential properties. In a statement, Justin Graney, the agency’s spokesperson, said, “It is entirely the property owners and the local jurisdiction’s decision on whether or not they wish to participate in the program.” 

Neither Haywood County nor the state of North Carolina maintain a list of high-risk properties where they believe mitigation is necessary for public health and safety, a standard practice in many states. 

That disturbs Masters, an auto mechanic who moved out of the mobile home park before the 2021 floods.

“Without a doubt in my mind, it’s going to happen again,” Masters said. “They need to remove it.”

A Second Disaster

Joe Rogers was 38 and living less than a mile away on the other side of the Pigeon River when hurricanes Frances and Ivan struck in 2004. He walked down and saw the destroyed mobile homes at the Hyder Mountain Road park.

He didn’t expect that two years later, he’d move to the lot next to where Masters’ father once lived. 

But Rogers’ own father, whose health was declining, gave him a single-wide trailer in 2006, intending to help him stay in the increasingly expensive Appalachian region where his family had lived for generations. The trailer’s roughly 900 square feet was enough space for Rogers to raise his son. And at $200 a month, renting the lot on the river was affordable on his wages as a Waffle House cook. 

In the front yard, he and his high school crush, Sandra Justus, planted two peach trees for shade and a pink rose of Sharon for the birds, and they put up a fence so the dogs Justus was prone to rescuing could play outside.

Caring for others was at Justus’ core. In addition to raising her daughter, she often took in other children and animals in need. She was a wildlife rehabilitator and hair stylist who loved Renaissance fairs, rock ’n’ roll and Halloween.

Rogers’ lot was only 100 feet from the Pigeon River, but he’d heard that large floods should happen only once every 40 years and figured he’d have a few decades before he’d have to worry about that.

During heavy rainstorms, the Pigeon River would sometimes creep over Hyder Mountain Road 40 feet away. But the river spared their home for 15 years, until Tropical Storm Fred in August 2021. Water flooded all but one of the six trailers closest to the river. Inside the couple’s home, muddy water rose 3 inches, damaging the particleboard floors and the foundation — a burden made lighter when FEMA’s assistance paid for repairs. 

The couple got married in 2022, and Sandra changed her last name to Rogers. Two years later, they were planning to move when, in September 2024, Helene hit Florida as a Category 4 hurricane and was spinning fiercely toward Western North Carolina. The county sheriff warned residents that “a catastrophic, life-threatening event” that could surpass the 2004 and 2021 storms was “about to befall Haywood County.”

But none of the park’s residents had been there during the 2004 storms, so they only had memories of the minor damage from Fred. So most residents of the Hyder Mountain Road park stayed, as did the couple, who wanted to look after their army of dogs and pet birds. “We thought that maybe it would be just like the last flood,” Joe said.

On the night of Sept. 26, 2024, the couple went to bed. Within hours, the river, usually about 5 feet deep, crested at a record 30 feet. It took less than an hour for the water in their home to go from ankle-deep to chest-high. They packed the birds into travel boxes and cages, and Joe moved two of their cars to higher ground, giving up on the third when its wheels spun in the waterlogged soil. 

Sandra told Joe she thought they should leave but changed her mind when she found out she’d need to swim through water now above her head. Sandra sat on a wooden chair on top of their saturated foam mattress in the bedroom. In the living room, Joe dodged floating furniture, trying to figure out what to do, as the cold, murky water rose. 

Suddenly, the water pulled the back door off the trailer. Joe watched several of the dogs make their way toward the opening, where they could swim toward higher ground. 

The water had reached his neck when, for a moment, it seemed to recede. He thought the worst was over, only to realize it was because the home had been pushed off its foundation. The trailer lurched, thrusting Joe toward the ceiling. His fingers gripped the top of the bedroom door frame as he called into the darkness to his wife. 

Thinking the only safe way to get Sandra out would be by breaking a window, Joe swam through the kitchen and escaped out the back doorway. He clung to a sharp metal gutter, fighting the raging water, and yelled for someone to call 911, hoping emergency responders would be able to reach Sandra by busting a hole through the roof. 

Buyout Program’s Fatal Flaws

Most homeowners at the Hyder Mountain Road mobile home park didn’t want to endure another flood after Helene, but they didn’t own the land underneath them so they couldn’t pursue a buyout. It was the park’s owners who would need to apply to the government and ask it to buy the land. 

But that’s not what the owners of the mobile home park did. After Helene, Haywood County officials spoke with local mobile home park owners about “how they wanted to recover” and “based on those conversations, none of them seemed interested to be done” with running the mobile home communities, said Grasty, the county’s Helene recovery officer. 

The buyouts he manages are voluntary, and the county will not consider condemning the land, Grasty said, noting the property owner could choose to not lease out the low-lying lots, to require homes to be elevated as part of lease agreements or to use the land for something else.  

“It comes back to that property rights thing,” Grasty said. “We can work on solutions, but not until the property owner or homeowner even says, ‘I want to do this.’”

Pam Quinn, who owned the wood-frame home that Haywood County purchased across the Pigeon River in 2007, said she is baffled that the county still hasn’t bought out the neighboring mobile home park. 

“It’s right across the river. It’s so close, but they got treated so differently,” Quinn said.

The Assembly and ProPublica reached out to the current and former owners of the Hyder Mountain Road mobile home park on multiple occasions. They briefly spoke to a reporter in person but declined to be interviewed. Terry McCracken owned the property with her husband, who died in 2013, before selling it in 2019. McCracken told a reporter outside her home that she thought the 2004 floods were “once in 100 years” and she didn’t know if her husband ever considered a buyout. 

The park’s current owners, the Heinmillers, have experienced two floods in the seven years they have owned the park. From behind a screen door, Lynne told a reporter that she was not offered an application for a buyout and would need to confer with her husband as to whether the couple would consider one now. Neither Heinmiller returned follow-up calls.

A buyout is often a financial loss for park owners, said John Richardson, who until this year owned a small mobile home park in neighboring Buncombe County. With a housing shortage, even decades-old mobile homes will bring in at least $1,000 a month in rent, and a lot to park one on yields upward of $300 monthly, he said.

“The cash flow is so good once you’re established in it that there isn’t an incentive to take a buyout,” Richardson said.

Still, after the Swannanoa River washed seven of the nine homes in his park off their foundations during Helene, Richardson decided to pursue a buyout. He didn’t want other families to face similar destruction, and, unable to pay his mortgage without the rental income, he felt he had no other choice.

Foreseeing future disasters, local governments in at least 11 states have fully funded buyouts and relocation assistance for mobile home parks, benefiting the park owners and residents of the mobile homes.

Central Pennsylvania’s Greene Township bought out the property owner and paid to relocate residents of a 54-home park after excessive rainfall rendered all but four homes uninhabitable in 2006. In Harris County, Texas, the owner of a mobile home park that endured severe, repetitive flooding received a multimillion-dollar sum for the lot while homeowners were offered up to $210,000 to purchase a home outside of the floodplain and renters received up to 42 months of assistance.

North Carolina attempted to implement its own solution after Hurricane Floyd struck the Cape Fear region in 1999. The state legislature funded a Crisis Housing Assistance Fund that paid to repair homes or relocate families that didn’t qualify for federal programs, like homeowners in mobile home parks. It also provided funding for families whose buyout did not cover a comparable home.

A lot of the families the program assisted were in mobile homes, said Yolanda Abram, the retired director of the North Carolina Redevelopment Center, which oversaw the program. In almost every circumstance, the program would not allow new homes to go back in the floodplain and paid to help families relocate.

The program got additional state funding in 2005 to relocate homeowners in flood and landslide zones impacted by the past season’s hurricanes. Roughly 40 Haywood County families participated, including Masters’ father.  

But the program did nothing to prevent new families from moving to the same lots.

“I Watch the River”

As homeowners started to rebuild after the devastation wrought by Helene, Haywood County required homes in the floodplain to be elevated and securely anchored into the ground to limit catastrophic damages. 

At the Hyder Mountain Road park, that means new mobile homes along the river would need to be raised at least 8 feet off the ground. So far, only staircases leading to raised electrical boxes have been added, but no mobile homes have returned to those lots as the elevation costs could reach tens of thousands of dollars. 

But the rule doesn’t apply to campers. 

Recreational vehicles can be in the floodplain, so long as they can be driven or towed away in case of a storm. After the floods, the county issued permits for five campers to occupy the same lots the formerly flooded homes did. 

But at least here, those campers have become year-round homes, their undercarriages wrapped in insulation. The county approved them for water, sewer and electric hookups. Yet without elevation and anchoring, fast-moving waters could easily sweep them downstream. 

The image of homes going back in where others have repeatedly washed away astonished Abram, whose team helped relocate past residents of the park.

“It continues to happen where homes are being placed in floodplains, and maybe that shouldn’t be happening now,” Abram said.

K.K. Bautista, a single mother, lives in one of the campers in the same row where Masters’ father and Rogers lived. She never wanted to be this close to the water again. The Pigeon River tore through her trailer at another mobile home park during Helene, ripping off the siding so passersby could see through her entire house.

Bautista lost almost everything except her car. A nonprofit gave her a small Jayco Eagle travel trailer, and the lot at Hyder Mountain Road was the only place she could afford. She knew the river had also surged there during Helene but felt she had no other choice.

“When it rains, I don’t sleep and I watch the river,” Bautista said, clutching a cup of McDonald’s coffee, her eyes jumping between the river, her 2-year-old daughter and the road. 

The post Hurricane Helene Killed His Wife and Destroyed His Mobile Home. New Tenants Are Now Renting the Same Flood-Prone Land. appeared first on ProPublica.