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If you’re among the more than 1 million people who make Nike’s sneakers and apparel around the world, the company says you should be able to support your family. You should earn enough to pay your living expenses and have some discretionary money left over. If your factory wages don’t cut it, your employer should have a plan to get you there.

But Nike’s expansion in Indonesia over the last decade has directly undermined these goals, an analysis by ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive found.

Over the last decade, employment at factories supplying the world’s largest athletic apparel brand expanded dramatically in regions of Indonesia where, according to one leading estimate, the minimum wage is less than the amount workers need to live on. Meanwhile, Nike’s supply chain shrank overall in places that pay this estimated living wage, our analysis found.

The trend shows how the movement of multinational corporations to countries with ever-lower labor costs is being replaced, in some cases, by movements within a country that can achieve major savings and improve the bottom line.

Nike’s suppliers employ 280,000 people in Indonesia, the company’s second-largest production center.

From 2015 through last year, these suppliers shed around 36,000 jobs in places where the monthly minimum wage exceeds or comes close to a living wage. In these high-wage areas, which include the capital of Jakarta, the minimum typically equates to about $300 a month.

By contrast, the company’s supplier workforce grew by nearly 112,000 in parts of Central and West Java with local minimum wages that are typically about $165 a month — far from what’s considered enough to live on. Dozens of workers employed by Nike suppliers in Indonesia told the news organizations the minimum is about all they make.

“If it’s very labor intensive, then you go where labor is cheapest,” said Nurina Merdikawati, a lecturer in the Indonesia Project at Australian National University. In Indonesia, she said, “that’s going to be Central Java.”

Other brands have also moved to Central Java and other low-wage regions of Indonesia in recent years and continue expanding there, local news organizations have reported.

For Nike, the trend threatens the jobs of the existing factory workforce elsewhere in the country. Last October, more than 2,000 workers were laid off by Victory Chingluh, one of Nike’s longtime suppliers near Jakarta. In 2024, another 1,500 workers were cut by a Nike shoe supplier nearby, Adis Dimension, according to local news reports.

Labor advocates say the geographic shift is concerning because the Jakarta area has a stronger union presence that ensures working conditions and wages get closer attention than in less-developed places like Central Java.

At Victory Chingluh, three employees told the news organizations that the fear of more job cuts hangs over their work. They said the company is building a new factory in Cirebon, in West Java, where the minimum wage is 45% lower.

Over the Past Decade, Nike’s Workforce Ballooned in Areas Where Workers Do Not Make a Living Wage

Factory employment shrank in the areas near Jakarta where the minimum wage is considered enough to meet basic needs.

Employees said when they were offered a choice between keeping their jobs and accepting severance packages during layoffs last year, workers were willing to take the buyout, fearing that they wouldn’t get anything if the factory closed altogether.

That happened in 2018 when one Nike supplier near Jakarta, Kahoindah Citragarment, shut down without paying workers their full severance after Nike pulled its orders, an investigation by the Worker Rights Consortium found. The factory’s South Korean parent company, Hojeon, eventually agreed to pay workers $4.5 million after labor advocates argued they were legally owed separation pay. Hojeon did not respond to requests for comment.

At Victory Chingluh, two union leaders said in December that they anticipated another 5,000 layoffs at a company that once employed about 15,000.

“Almost all employees here are worried about that,” one of them said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they feared repercussions from talking to reporters.

The leaders said they’ve been told the factory being built in Cirebon could be ready by 2027. They said they’ve been told it’s for an expansion — even though their factory recently lost thousands of jobs.

Victory Chingluh did not respond to questions. Nike said in a statement that it works closely with suppliers during layoffs to minimize disruptions. “We mandate that suppliers pay all statutory severance, social security, and other separation benefits required by local law and often assemble working groups — which may include civil society, unions, and local governments — to aid in proper execution,” the company said.

Business leaders near Jakarta have voiced concern about the wage disparity between their region and Central Java, more than 150 miles away, saying that mandated pay increases around Jakarta could lead to mass layoffs and cause manufacturers to shift production.

“There is a real possibility that many labor-intensive industries will move to other regions,” Herry Rumawatine, the head of a local employers association, told the Jakarta Globe in January.

Asked whether the geographic shifts in Nike’s Indonesian supply chain were aimed at improving the bottom line, the company said that creating “operational efficiencies” is part of doing business in a competitive environment.

However, the company said treating Nike’s geographic shift primarily as a move to save money “creates an incomplete picture” and cited “other plausible drivers” such as automation or changing production needs.

Less-developed regions shouldn’t be excluded from opportunities for economic growth, Nike said, and it expects its suppliers everywhere to meet its code of conduct.

“Growth and progress go hand in hand,” Nike wrote, “and we remain committed to investing in ways that expand opportunity while strengthening labor standards and worker protections where we operate worldwide.”

Nike suggests that people who work for its foreign suppliers are well paid. In particular, the company says most workers for which it has data earn nearly double the local minimum wage.

As The Oregonian/OregonLive reported in partnership with ProPublica in January, Nike does not pay workers anywhere close to this amount in Indonesia. In interviews across three regions of the country, roughly 100 workers said they made the minimum wage or a little bit more.

Nike told the news organizations that its figure is a global average and variations naturally exist. But the company also told the news organizations that it’s important not just to compare what its suppliers pay relative to the minimum wage. Nike’s focus, one company official said, is on whether workers make a living wage and, if not, whether their employers are trying to get there.

Although Nike does not explicitly require its suppliers to pay this amount, it says every worker “has a right to compensation for a regular work week that is sufficient to meet workers’ basic needs and provide some discretionary income.” The company reported that two-thirds of its key suppliers — it did not say which ones — paid above living wage benchmarks in 2022.

Jason Judd, executive director of the Global Labor Institute at Cornell University, said living wage pledges from companies like Nike are so flexible that they’re almost meaningless. Only asking factories to be working toward living wages, as Nike does, “could go on for 20 years,” Judd said, “until you’ve found yet another lower-wage province.”

Nike’s recent move to Central Java is notable because while wages are far lower there than in urban Jakarta, food and housing are not dramatically cheaper, according to estimates from the WageIndicator Foundation, a Dutch nonprofit. The foundation says a living wage in Central Java starts around $245 a month; in the parts of the province that are home to Nike suppliers, the local minimum wage ranges from only $136 to $215.

Workers in Central Java said second jobs are common, including selling fish and gasoline. One said workers covertly sold snacks inside the factory, out of sight of managers who might fire them if caught.

“At its core, this is about cost reduction and power,” Wiranta Ginting, deputy international coordinator for the Asia Floor Wage Alliance, a labor group, said in an email.

It isn’t clear exactly how much Nike may have saved on labor by growing aggressively in low-wage regions. But some rough calculations are possible, based on addresses Nike has published for its suppliers, the numbers it says they employ and the minimum wage they must pay in each municipality.

If each factory worker made exactly the minimum wage and worked only on Nike products, then the company’s shift into lower-cost areas would have saved about $200 million on labor in 2025 alone. The estimate is based on what Nike’s suppliers paid last year versus what they would have paid in labor costs had the company expanded uniformly across regions where it had factories in 2015.

It’s only a broad indicator of potential savings.

Nike said the analysis “rests on a series of oversimplified assumptions that limit the reliability of its conclusions.”

For example, the company said that to assume the workforce could have grown where suppliers were located in 2015 “does not reflect the realities of manufacturing operations, which are constrained by factors such as facility capacity, workforce availability, skills, technology, and changes in product mix.”

The geographic shift into lower-wage regions of Indonesia shows one way Nike can try to wring more profit from its vast supply chain. The company, which reported $46.3 billion in revenue last year, is struggling with declining annual sales and profits, problems compounded by uncertainty around President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which Nike had estimated would cost $1.5 billion a year before a recent Supreme Court decision struck them down. Its stock has dropped more than 60% from a 2021 peak.

“Margin expansion is a top priority for me and my leadership team,” CEO Elliott Hill told Wall Street analysts in a December earnings call.

Officials in low-wage Central Java have welcomed the industrial expansion. The province’s then-governor said in 2022 that 97 factories had opened there. Another 10 garment and footwear factories were under construction last year, according to local news reports, with 17 more expected to be built this year.

Nike’s explanation of its move into the region was in keeping with assertions decades ago by its co-founder, Phil Knight, that Nike’s arrival was a positive force for local economies and workers in developing countries.

“Increased manufacturing in Central Java is not an accident and, in many ways, is something to be celebrated,” Nike told The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica. “The Indonesian government has taken meaningful, intentional steps to transform Central Java into an industrial hub, with an eye toward extending the economic growth that has benefited other regions of the country for more than 30 years.”

The company added that “manufacturing growth in regions with lower prevailing wages can lead to raised standards, increased worker skills, and positive contributions to local communities.”

Nike’s move has ripple effects around relatively high-wage Jakarta, Indonesia’s biggest city, where the company has sourced sneakers since 1988. Factory workers and union officials there said they’re reluctant to demand wage increases.

They said they fear better pay will mean fewer jobs.

“It’s clear that every company will expand where it’s cheaper,” a union official at a Nike supplier near Jakarta said.

The differences between Indonesia’s well-established urban production centers and the less-developed areas where Nike has expanded employment go beyond wages.

“Greater Jakarta is an older industrial region with a long history of unionization and collective bargaining, reflected in higher minimum wages won through years of worker organizing and mass mobilization,” Ginting, the Asia Floor Wage Alliance representative, said in his email.

By contrast, he said, factories in the new apparel hot spots of Central Java often recruit younger workers, have less union representation and face less scrutiny from labor inspectors.

Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, said problems on the factory floor are more prevalent in this region. Nova’s international watchdog group has conducted investigations at the region’s apparel factories for the past five years.

Despite some recent progress, Nova said by email, workers at many factories “suffer gender-based violence and other abuses at higher rates than in the country’s older production centers.”

“Because unions have a tenuous foothold in the region and face harsh employer resistance,” he added, “workers often cannot fight back.”

An investigation by Nova’s group found that women at a Central Javanese factory producing Nike-licensed goods for Fanatics, a privately owned brand, had been sexually harassed for years. The labor rights group told Fanatics in 2022 it had heard from women who said they had to endure unwanted touching and verbal harassment by supervisors.

After the factory owner pledged to fix the problems, the consortium found even more egregious abuse in 2023 at another Central Java factory owned by the same company, South Korea-based Ontide. The company struck a binding deal with labor unions in 2024 called the Central Java Agreement for Gender Justice, which mandates harassment training and monitoring.

Ontide did not respond to a request for comment. However, Ontide sustainability director John Yoon said in a press release announcing the gender justice agreement that it would protect workers. “As part of our commitment to our workers’ safety and well-being, we are pleased to be seeing initial results,” the release said.

Fanatics said in a statement to The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica that there has been “excellent progress” in implementing the agreement. “We are proud of this work, which has been recognized by the Agreement signatories, and which will continue into 2026,” the company said.

Nova, of the Worker Rights Consortium, called the outcome at Ontide “a ray of hope.”

But workers told the news organizations that problems have persisted at other factories in Central Java. Ten workers at one supplier said many women’s toilets hadn’t been working for months. Two workers at other factories said they received written reprimands after they told their employers they were injured on the job.

Asked about these workers’ accounts, Nike said that a “safe and healthy work environment is a fundamental human right” and that it audits factories annually for compliance with its code of conduct. It said it has not found more problems at suppliers in Central Java than in other parts of Indonesia. The company added that it works quickly with its suppliers when needed to put improvement plans in place.

At Selalu Cinta, a Central Java factory that employs 18,000 people and has made Nike Burrow slippers, Blazer Mid ’77 sneakers and other shoes, hundreds of workers signed petitions asking the factory to remove a manager they said repeatedly screamed at and intimidated workers.

Leaders at the factory have failed to remove him, 10 workers told the news organizations.

Nike said it required Selalu Cinta to engage in an independent third-party investigation and is overseeing corrective actions in consultation with unions. Nike said it plans follow-up verification. Selalu Cinta officials did not respond to requests for comment.

A woman who worked for the manager said in an interview last summer that her parents depended on her wages, forcing her to keep her job despite what she described as her boss’ frequent tantrums.

“Working like that,” she said, “feels like you’re in hell.”

How We Tracked Nike’s Factories

Overall employment at Nike suppliers in Indonesia grew by 39% from 2015 to 2025. To see where in Indonesia that growth occurred, we used factory-level data self-reported by Nike in November 2015 and November 2025.

Because Nike said it began working to increase its disclosure of materials and components factories in 2021, we excluded any factories of this kind that appeared on Nike’s list in 2025 but not in 2015, to avoid counting Nike’s expanded disclosure as employment growth. This eliminated 12 materials factories from 2025, removing about 3,500 workers from the analysis.

ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive assigned minimum and living wages to each factory based on their locations. Wage and location data was manually reviewed, and when information was incomplete or inconsistent, classification was based on the data that appeared to be the most reliable.

The city or regency of each factory was identified using factory addresses and verified against Google Maps, factory websites, shipping records and other public disclosures.

We assigned minimum wages at the municipal level based on 2025 government decrees. Some municipalities specify a single minimum wage across all sectors. Others specify wages by sector (in which case we used the sectoral wage that best matched what each factory produces) and/or by nature of the work and employer (in which case we used the rate for labor-intensive multinational companies).

Unlike minimum wages, which are defined by law, living wage estimates can vary. We used estimates from the WageIndicator Foundation, an independent Dutch nonprofit. While the group calculates living wages as a range, we used the group’s lowest estimate for 2025 of what a worker would need to provide a decent standard of living for a typical family.

Factories were classified as “at or above living wage” if the applicable minimum wage was at least 95% of WageIndicator Foundation’s lowest living wage estimate for the province.

Wages were converted from Indonesian rupiah to U.S. dollars using the mean of monthly average daily USD/IDR exchange rates for 2025 from the Federal Reserve.

For the graphic, factory coordinates were manually reviewed, then grouped when multiple factories were close to one another. Factories were grouped when located within 15 kilometers of at least one other factory, forming density-based clusters that were represented on the map as the geometric center of those points. We verified that factories in different wage classifications were not lumped together. For municipalities without a Nike factory, we assigned the highest 2025 minimum wage that could apply if a Nike factory was located there.

To estimate potential savings based on where Nike expanded production between 2015 and 2025, we compared actual 2025 supplier payroll (based on reported number of factory workers and municipal minimum wages) to a counterfactual scenario in which employment grew proportionally across the same municipalities where Nike had factories in 2015. The calculation reflects what Nike’s suppliers would have paid in labor costs under each scenario if all workers earned the applicable minimum wage and factory employment were dedicated to Nike production. Because suppliers can produce for multiple brands and some workers earn above minimum wage, the estimate merely provides a broad sense of potential savings rather than a precise measure of how much the company and its suppliers actually saved in labor costs.

The post Nike Wants Factory Workers to Earn a Decent Living. In Indonesia, It’s Moved Into Areas Where Workers Don’t. appeared first on ProPublica.

ProPublica has sued the U.S. Department of Education in federal court in New York, accusing it of withholding public records about how it’s enforcing civil rights protections for millions of American students.

The Education Department has failed to provide public records related to its investigations, communications and other work that ProPublica sought through four Freedom of Information Act requests filed last year.

The Education Department’s civil rights arm for decades has investigated allegations of discrimination in schools. It historically has kept an online list of its open investigations and posted the findings of completed inquiries. But under Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, the Office for Civil Rights has been decimated and the work of its remaining investigators is largely cloaked in secrecy.

ProPublica submitted three FOIA requests — the first of them more than a year ago — seeking records about civil rights investigations that have been opened or closed, notices sent to institutions being investigated and previous findings of discrimination that have been reversed under the Trump administration. A fourth request sought communication between top Education Department officials and conservative groups that have criticized public schools. Some of the groups have urged the OCR to investigate specific school districts and have met often with McMahon.

The department has not responded to the requests other than to acknowledge that it received them.

“Actions by the Department of Education have real consequences for millions of students and families,” said Alexandra Perloff-Giles of the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, which is representing ProPublica.

“The public deserves to understand how executive authority is being exercised so that it can hold government accountable,” she said. “Congress enacted FOIA to offer the public that necessary transparency, and we’re asking the court to enforce it.”

Spokespeople for the department did not respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit. The department has not yet responded to the complaint in court.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, argues that since Trump took office, the work of the OCR — once one of the federal government’s largest enforcers of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — has become significantly more opaque. Though each presidential administration has its priorities, OCR has consistently worked to uphold constitutional rights against discrimination based on disability, race and gender.

But the focus of the OCR under Trump has shifted to investigations relating to curbing antisemitism, ending participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports and combating alleged discrimination against white students. Complaints about transgender students playing sports and using girls’ bathrooms at school have been fast-tracked while cases of racial harassment of Black students last year were ignored.

And although some documents that detail how cases were resolved are being posted online, some older resolution agreements have been terminated. Those terminations have not been disclosed to the public.

“The public interest in this information is substantial and ongoing. Since there are approximately 49.6 million students in the U.S., changes to the ED and its policies affect millions of families,” the lawsuit says.

Trump has been working to shutter the department. Hundreds of department workers have been laid off and official employee counts at the OCR went from 568 in 2024 to 403 as of December 2025. McMahon closed seven of the 12 regional OCR offices that handled discrimination complaints across the country. Amid the staffing difficulties and the shift in priorities at the OCR, families’ discrimination complaints have piled up.

When President Joe Biden left office, about 12,000 investigations were open; by December 2025, there were nearly 24,000. ProPublica reporting has found that new complaints as well as older ones included in the backlog often are dismissed without investigation. OCR workers have said they feel as if they’re working in a “dismissal factory.”

In the past year, ProPublica has filed several other lawsuits seeking to force transparency in courts and the federal government. That includes a lawsuit filed in May against the State Department. ProPublica also has joined other media organizations in lawsuits.

The post ProPublica Sues Education Department for Withholding Records About Discrimination in Schools appeared first on ProPublica.

Local emergency managers, the behind-the-scenes coordinators who mobilize help during disasters, have raised the same point time and again: We need adequate resources to protect people in harm’s way — before the harm arrives. 

In some notable cases, resources didn’t come soon enough. It wasn’t until after Hurricane Helene devastated Yancey County, North Carolina, in 2024 that commissioners there hired additional emergency management staff, which the former emergency manager said he’d requested for years. City officials in St. Louis, Missouri, were in the process of upgrading their faulty outdoor warning system when a tornado killed four people and injured dozens of others in May 2025. 

We wanted to know more about the cracks in the systems meant to keep communities safe when disasters strike. To do that, we reached out to dozens of emergency management agencies and wound up hearing from more than 40 current and former emergency managers in 11 states. They described common concerns. 

Some said their agencies have been saddled with an ever-growing list of responsibilities. In Saluda County, South Carolina, the emergency management director said his team of six is responsible for everything from the county’s IT department to a spay and neuter program. In San Bernardino County, California, the emergency manager said that she has had to help respond to new challenges like a lithium battery fire and, at a previous agency, was tasked with responding to busloads of immigrants arriving from other states.

Funding for additional staff was the most pressing issue they cited. One North Carolina emergency management director said an internal study from about three years ago recommended their agency have more than 20 staffers, but they still only have 10. Across the country, more than half of the 1,689 local emergency management agencies that responded to Argonne National Laboratory’s July 2025 emergency management survey have either one or no permanent full-time employees, and a “notable percentage” of local emergency managers who responded are volunteers.

Given the wide-ranging responsibilities and increasing risk due to climate change, part-time or volunteer emergency management positions shouldn’t exist, said Samantha Montano, an emergency management associate professor and researcher at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. 

“To expect somebody to understand how to mitigate cyber risks and also recover from a tornado, I mean, these are different skill sets,” Montano said. “So to think that one person is going to be capable of doing all of those things, especially working part time or as a volunteer, is ludicrous.” 

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s administration has caused delays in emergency management funding to state and local agencies and issued an executive order to shift more of the weight of disaster preparedness to state and local governments. 

Kelly McKinney, the vice president of emergency management at NYU Langone Health and a former deputy commissioner at the New York City Emergency Management office, said that over the years states have become “overly dependent” on funding administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But there is no clear plan for alternative funding streams, according to McKinney.

“This crisis-management system in the United States is itself in crisis,” he said.

“There’s Only So Much You Can Do” 

Several emergency managers we heard from said one of the only times they’re able to draw attention to their agency’s needs is in the aftermath of a wide-scale disaster. Wike Graham, the emergency management director for the Charlotte-Mecklenberg area of North Carolina, said the first question the media typically asks following such a disaster is: “Did emergency management do what they were supposed to do?”

According to Graham, that’s almost always the wrong question. He instead asks: “Did you properly fund emergency management staff? And did you provide them with the resources that they need? Did you make emergency management a priority for your community?” 

Unlike firefighters, EMTs or law enforcement, emergency managers face a “public identity issue” that can result in agencies receiving smaller budgets, Montano said. 

Several emergency managers told ProPublica that because people in their field operate mostly behind the scenes or as part of larger departments, they often find themselves competing for funding with better-recognized agencies, and they say elected officials frequently don’t have a clear understanding of their role. Some said it’s simply difficult to get people to care about a disaster that hasn’t happened yet.

Several others told ProPublica they are also seeing an uptick in the frequency and intensity of disasters, which makes it difficult to manage recovery (which can take years) while preparing for the next storm or fire. In St. Louis, for example, emergency management commissioner Sarah Russell was still in the midst of managing recovery efforts from 2022 flash flooding when the 2025 tornado hit.

During the St. Louis tornado, the sirens — which the city was in the early process of upgrading — weren’t activated, in part due to a miscommunication between Russell and a fire alarm dispatcher, according to an external investigation commissioned by the city. Russell, who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, told ProPublica that the fire department was responsible for sounding the sirens. 

But even if the activation button had been pressed, more than a third of the sirens weren’t working, and a later test showed that the button at the fire alarm office wasn’t either. 

Russell was terminated in August 2025, in part due to their management of the tornado response, according to their termination letter. But Russell, who is appealing the termination, said the incident highlights the need to proactively invest in emergency management. 

Russell had made several requests for additional staff who specialize in emergency management to help with core responsibilities, like updating the city’s outdated plan for responding to emergencies.

“There’s always things that you would do different with hindsight,” Russell said. “But there’s only so much you can do with so little resources and support.”

St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer, who had been in office for a month at the time of the tornado and who was an alderwoman for the decade prior, told ProPublica that she was aware of the agency’s requests for additional funding, but that most city departments make such requests. After the tragedy, the city fully automated the tornado sirens and issued an executive order declaring that the fire department would have primary authority over the sirens, replacing an unclear protocol. 

A city spokesperson said the new emergency management commissioner has “implemented several improvements” to the emergency operations plan. 

“Recognizing that budget restraints are unfortunately the reality across many aspects of government,” Spencer said via email, “I’m incredibly proud of the improvements this team has been able to implement with almost no additional funding.”

“This Isn’t a Quick Fix”

Strained budgets for local emergency management agencies aren’t a new issue. But in recent months, federal funding has become uncertain. 

In April 2025, the Trump administration cut federal grants that pay for local disaster-preparedness projects — but a judge later halted the administration’s efforts to shutter the grant program. In May 2025, federal officials delayed grants that help fund local and state emergency managers’ salaries. 

In December, the FEMA Review Council, which Trump created to advise on ways to reform the agency, was expected to vote on a long-awaited report that would outline the agency’s future. But after a draft was leaked to CNN, the meeting was abruptly canceled. The work of the review council has been extended until late March. 

Several emergency managers told ProPublica they would welcome change at FEMA. But many voiced concerns about the federal government shuttering grant programs — which fund salaries, upgrades to equipment and disaster-mitigation efforts — or drastically reducing reimbursement for local agencies responding to large-scale disasters without alternative funding in place. They said such actions would be detrimental, especially in small, rural regions with limited local budgets. 

In North Carolina, one emergency manager said that without federal emergency management performance grants, which can be used to pay 50% of an emergency manager’s salary, “we are looking at the loss of preparedness and response capabilities.” Another called the grant “vital” to daily operations. 

FEMA did not respond to requests for comment. 

Claire Connolly Knox, who directs the University of Central Florida’s master’s program for emergency and crisis management, has been studying what a “decentralized FEMA” could mean for state agencies. She said it could take several legislative cycles before states are prepared to fill in the gaps that changes to FEMA might create. Many states, Knox said, are not closely tracking spending across multiple departments and multiple phases of emergency management, meaning “we don’t know the true cost” of mitigating, preparing for, responding to and recovering from disasters. 

“When you start breaking that down,” Knox said. “You start seeing that this isn’t a quick fix.”

The post What Emergency Managers Say They Need More Than Ever appeared first on ProPublica.

We know disasters are a matter of where and when, not if. And just like you, our reporting team at ProPublica wants to be prepared well in advance.

If you are a local, state or federal emergency manager, former emergency manager, emergency management researcher, or a part of the broader network of disaster response and recovery partners, we want to hear your concerns. Dozens of current and former emergency managers working everywhere from large cities to rural counties have already told us about the growing challenges they face amid more frequent disasters and uncertain federal funding.

Now we need your help to build a comprehensive picture of the real conditions across the country. What resources do you need to feel prepared for the next gray-sky day? How have or will changes to the Federal Emergency Management Agency impact the work you’re doing? How are alerts and warning systems working in your region? Have you been hit by multiple large-scale disasters in recent years? What new hazards are on your radar?

We know that emergency managers are critically important but aren’t often thought about until after tragedy strikes. We are building this source network to fuel in-depth coverage of the nation’s emergency preparedness and disaster response and recovery infrastructure that goes far beyond breaking news and brings attention to important issues across the country. As with all ProPublica journalism, our goal is impact.

Fill out the brief form below to tell us what we should be covering, or to stay in touch as changes unfold. You may hear from our team as we report on major overhauls to the emergency management system, develop emergency preparedness guides or provide crucial information to communities that have just experienced their worst day.

The post Emergency Managers: Help ProPublica Prepare to Report on the Next Disaster appeared first on ProPublica.

For the fourth year, ProPublica will invite up to 10 news editors from media companies across the country to participate in a yearlong investigative editing training program, led by the newsroom’s award-winning staff.

Applications are now open for the ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program. Submissions are due Monday, March 30, at 9 a.m. Eastern time.

As the nation’s premier nonprofit investigative newsroom, ProPublica is dedicated to journalism that changes laws and lives and to advancing the careers of the people who produce it. The goal of this program is to address our industry’s critical need to broaden the ranks of investigative editors. Building a pipeline of talent is a priority that serves us and our industry.

“Journalism is vital to a healthy democracy, and it is clear that our world needs more investigative journalism at this moment, not less,” Managing Editor Ginger Thompson said. “We see the Editor Training Program as an indispensable training ground to ensure the future of investigative journalism. Where others are contracting, we are investing in the future of our industry, and that of talented journalists across the country.”

This year’s program will begin with a weeklong boot camp in New York that will include courses and panel discussions on how to conceive of and produce investigative projects that expose harm and have impact. The editors will also get training in how to manage reporters who are working with data, documents and sensitive sources, including whistleblowers, agency insiders and people who have suffered trauma. The program also includes virtual continuing education sessions and support from a ProPublica mentor.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is this?

The ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program is designed to help expand the ranks of editors with investigative experience in newsrooms across the country, to help better reflect the nation as a whole.

What kind of experience can you expect?

The program kicks off with a five-day intensive editing boot camp in New York, which includes a series of courses and panel discussions led by ProPublica’s senior editors, veteran reporters and other newsroom leaders. The boot camp will include hands-on editing exercises and opportunities for participants to workshop projects underway in their own newsrooms.

Afterward, participants will gather virtually for seminars and career development discussions with their cohort and ProPublica journalists. Each of the participants will also be assigned a ProPublica senior editor as a mentor for advice on story and management challenges or on how to most effectively pursue their own professional aspirations.

What skills should I expect to learn?

• How to evaluate story ideas and determine the right scope, length and time for getting the work done.
• How to manage a reporter through a complicated accountability story and communicate feedback in ways that build trust and confidence.
• How to edit investigative drafts, spot holes in reporting logic, organize a narrative and guide the reporter through the fact-checking process.
• How to work collaboratively with research, data and multimedia teams to elevate an investigative project.

When is the boot camp?

The five-day, all-expenses-paid boot camp will be held May 31 to June 4, 2026, in New York, with remote sessions via Google Meet throughout the year.

Is there a virtual option for the boot camp?

This boot camp will be held in person and will not have a virtual option.

Will I be responsible for my expenses in New York?

ProPublica will cover participants’ expenses for meals, travel and lodging during the boot camp.

How many participants will be selected each year?

Up to 10 journalists.

Who is eligible?

The program is open to all. The aim is to help broaden our industry’s investigative editing ranks to include journalists from a wide array of backgrounds. We encourage everyone to apply, including those from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds and rural news organizations, as well as women, people of color, veterans, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities. Past participants have come from a wide range of news outlets across the country.

The ideal participants will have: 

• A minimum of five years of journalism experience, either as an editor or as a reporter primarily doing work with an investigative or accountability focus. 
• A strong grasp of the basics of editing, storytelling, structure and framing.
• Experience managing a team of journalists or a complicated multipronged reporting project.
• An accountability mindset: You don’t have to have been on the investigative team, but we are looking for people with an eye for watchdog reporting and editing.

Am I eligible if I live outside of the United States?

No.

How do I apply?

The application period is now open and closes Monday, March 30, at 9 a.m. Eastern time. You can find the posting to apply at propublica.org/jobs.

What if I have other questions?

Send an email to Assistant Managing Editor Talia Buford at talent@propublica.org.

The post Applications Open for 2026 ProPublica Investigative Editor Training Program appeared first on ProPublica.

Several high-ranking federal election officials attended a summit last week at which prominent figures who worked to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election pressed the president to declare a national emergency to take over this year’s midterms.

According to videos, photos and social media posts reviewed by ProPublica, the meeting’s participants included Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer charged with reinvestigating the 2020 election, and Heather Honey, the Department of Homeland Security official in charge of election integrity. The event was convened by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and attended by Cleta Mitchell, who directs the Election Integrity Network, a group that has spread false claims about election fraud and noncitizen voting. 

Election experts say that the meeting reflects an intensifying push to persuade Trump to take unprecedented actions to affect the vote in November. Courts have largely blocked his efforts to reshape elections through an executive order, and legislation has stalled in Congress that would mandate strict voter ID requirements across the country.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that activists associated with those at the summit have been circulating a draft of an executive order that would ban mail-in ballots and get rid of voting machines as part of a federal takeover. Peter Ticktin, a lawyer who worked on the executive order and had a client at the summit, told ProPublica these actions were “all part of the same effort.” 

The summit followed other meetings and discussions between administration officials and activists — many not previously reported — stretching back to at least last fall, according to emails and recordings obtained by ProPublica. The coordination between those inside and outside the government represents a breakdown of crucial guardrails, experts on U.S. elections said.

“The meeting shows that the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 election have only grown better organized and are now embedded in the machinery of government,” said Brendan Fischer, a director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan pro-democracy organization. “This creates substantial risk that the administration is laying the groundwork to improperly reshape elections ahead of the midterms or even go against the will of the voters.”

Five of six federal officials who attended the summit didn’t answer questions about the event from ProPublica. 

A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said federal officials’ attendance at the gathering shouldn’t be construed as support for a national emergency declaration and that it was “common practice” for staffers to communicate with outside advocates who want to share policy ideas. The official pointed to comments Trump made to PBS News denying he was considering a national emergency or had read the draft executive order. “Any speculation about policies the administration may or may not undertake is just that — speculation,” the official said.

In the past, Trump has expressed an openness to a federal takeover as a way to stem projected Republican losses in November. This month, he said in an interview with conservative podcaster Dan Bongino that Republicans need “to take over” elections and “to nationalize the voting.”

Mitchell did not respond to questions from ProPublica about the summit. A spokesperson for Flynn responded to detailed questions from ProPublica by disparaging experts who expressed concerns, texting, “LOL ‘EXPERTS.’” 

The 30-person roundtable discussion on Feb. 19, at an office building in downtown Washington, D.C., was sponsored by the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a conservative think tank. Afterward, activists and government officials dined together, photos reviewed by ProPublica showed.

Flynn, the institute’s chair, told a social media personality why he’d arranged the event. 

“I wanted to bring this group together physically, because most of us have met online” while “fighting battles” in swing states from Arizona to Georgia, Flynn said to Tommy Robinson on the gathering’s sidelines. Robinson posted videos of these interactions online. “The overall theme of this event was to make sure that all of us aren’t operating in our own little bubbles.”

Flynn has repeatedly advocated for Trump to declare a national emergency and posted on social media after the event addressing Trump, “We The People want fair elections and we know there is only one office in the land that can make that happen given the current political environment in the United States.”

In addition to Olsen and Honey, four other federal officials from agencies that will shape the upcoming elections attended the event. At least four of the six attended the dinner.

One is Clay Parikh, a special government employee at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who’s helping Olsen with the 2020 inquiry. A spokesperson at ODNI said Parikh had attended the summit “in his personal capacity.” 

Another, Mac Warner, handled election litigation at the Justice Department. A department spokesperson said that Warner had resigned the day after the event and had not received the required approval from agency ethics officials to participate.  

The department “remains committed to upholding the integrity of our electoral system and will continue to prioritize efforts to ensure all elections remain free, fair, and transparent,” the spokesperson said in an email.

A third administration official who attended the summit, Marci McCarthy, directs communications for the nation’s cyber defense agency, which oversees the security of elections infrastructure like voting machines. 

Kari Lake, whom Trump appointed as senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, was a featured speaker. Lake worked with Olsen and Parikh in her unsuccessful bid to overturn her loss in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election.

Lake said in an email that she “showed up to the event, spoke for about 20 minutes about the overall importance of election integrity, a non-partisan issue that matters to all citizens — both in the United States and abroad. I left without listening to any other speeches.” 

“Elections should be free from fraud or any other malfeasance that subverts the will of the people,” she added. 

At the meeting, activists presented on ways to transform American elections that would help conservatives, according to social media posts and interviews they gave on conservative media, such as LindellTV, a streaming platform created by the pillow mogul Mike Lindell. They said the group broke down into two camps: those who wanted to pursue a more incremental legal and legislative strategy and those who wanted Trump to declare a national emergency.

Multiple activists left the meeting convinced Trump should do the latter, a step they believe would allow the president to get around the Constitution’s directive that elections should be run by states. 

Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, a prominent funder of efforts to overturn the 2020 election, told LindellTV that Trump has “played nice” so far in not seizing control of American elections. “But at some point,” Byrne said, “he’s got to do something, the muscular thing: declare a national emergency.”

Byrne responded to questions from ProPublica by sending a screenshot of a poll that he said suggested “2/3 of Americans correctly do not trust” voting machines, which the proposed national emergency declaration aims to do away with.

Will Huff, who has advocated for doing away with voting machines, told a conservative vlogger that Olsen, the White House lawyer, and other administration representatives would take the “consensus” from the gathering back to Trump. “It’s got to be a national emergency,” said Huff, the campaign manager for a Republican candidate for Arkansas secretary of state.

In response to questions from ProPublica, Huff said in an email that Olsen and Trump would use their judgment to decide whether to declare a national emergency. 

“The President has been briefed on findings of shortcomings in election infrastructure,” Huff wrote. “I believe there are steady hands around the President wanting to ensure that any action taken is, first, constitutional and legal, but also backed by evidence.”

McCarthy, the cybersecurity official, expressed more general solidarity with fellow attendees in a post on social media about the summit. “Grateful for friendships forged through years of standing shoulder-to-shoulder, united by purpose and conviction,” she wrote. “The mission continues… and so does the fellowship.”

Last week’s gathering was the latest in a string of private interactions between conservative election activists and administration officials, according to emails, documents and recordings obtained by ProPublica. Many have involved Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. Before taking her government post, Honey was a leader in the Election Integrity Network, ProPublica has reported, as was McCarthy.

Previously unreported emails obtained by ProPublica show that just weeks after Honey started at the Department of Homeland Security, she briefed election activists, a Republican secretary of state and another federal official on a conference call arranged by her former boss, Mitchell.

“We are excited to welcome her on our call this morning to hear about her work for election integrity inside DHS,” Mitchell wrote in an email introducing presenters on the call.

Honey didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about the call. Experts said Honey’s briefing gave her former employer access that likely would have violated ethics rules in place under previous administrations, including the first Trump administration — though not this one.

The prior “ethics guardrails would have prevented some of the revolving door issues we’re seeing between the election denial movement and the government officials,” said Fischer, the Campaign Legal Center director. Those prior rules “were supposed to prevent former employers and clients from receiving privileged access.”

The post Trump Officials Attended a Summit of Election Deniers Who Want the President to Take Over the Midterms appeared first on ProPublica.

Last summer, I traveled to McLoud, Oklahoma, home to the state’s largest women’s prison. McLoud — a town of fewer than 5,000 residents — lies 30 miles east of Oklahoma City on a wide expanse of prairie. At the edge of town, off a rutted road, stands Mabel Bassett Correctional Center, a sprawl of concrete and razor wire. 

I went there to meet April Wilkens, who has spent more than a quarter century at Mabel Bassett for the 1998 shooting death of her ex-fiancé, Terry Carlton. Wilkens had repeatedly sought help from law enforcement after Carlton beat, raped and stalked her — pleas that, according to trial testimony, were met with indifference. She was convicted of first-degree murder and handed a life sentence.

More than two decades later, her case drew renewed attention. Wilkens became a central figure in the push for new legislation that would allow survivors of domestic violence to seek reduced sentences when their crimes stemmed from their abuse.

Read More

The Victims Who Fought Back

The state’s high incarceration rate — and the mounting human and financial costs of keeping so many people behind bars — had created an opening, one that a Tulsa lawyer named Colleen McCarty recognized. Troubled by Oklahoma’s dual distinction as a state that consistently has one of the highest rates of female imprisonment and of domestic abuse, she and another Tulsa attorney, Leslie Briggs, visited Wilkens in prison in 2022. In that meeting, the lawyers explained that they wanted to pass legislation that could reduce the long sentences that survivors of domestic abuse faced, even when their crimes were a direct result of their abuse. After two years of advocacy, the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act was passed into law in 2024.

The law did not automatically reduce survivors’ sentences. Instead, it created a mechanism for them to petition for relief — requiring them to demonstrate that domestic abuse was a “substantial contributing factor” in their offense and leaving the ultimate decision to a judge.

When I first heard about the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act, I was floored. I live in Texas and cover criminal justice, so I spend a lot of time tracking where change is — and isn’t — politically possible. I knew how unusual it was for ambitious sentencing reform to emerge from a deep red state where lawmakers have long favored harsh punishment. Oklahoma, which has put to death 130 people since capital punishment resumed in 1976, has the most executions per capita of any state in the nation.

I wanted to understand how that law came to be, and, just as importantly, if it was working as intended. As I chronicle in my story, “The Victims Who Fought Back,” the path to the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act began with that meeting in 2022 between the two lawyers and Wilkens. McCarty and Briggs wanted a sense of how many women were imprisoned for crimes tied to their own abuse. After their meeting, Wilkens came up with a solution; she decided to draft a questionnaire asking other prisoners about the abuse they had endured. She wanted to know: How many other women at Mabel Bassett had cases like hers? 

Wilkens distributed the questionnaire one weekend that fall. She chatted up anyone she saw in the rec yard, the library, the chow hall. Conducting an unauthorized survey could’ve earned her a disciplinary write-up, but Wilkens, who had a nearly spotless record, decided it was a risk worth taking. 

For years, she had listened to women describe the violence they had endured — stories that had barely surfaced in courtrooms, if at all. She could see the intersection between their abuse and the crimes they went on to commit. Some had been prosecuted for failing to protect their children from their abusive partners; others had committed crimes alongside their abusers under threat of further harm — offenses that, like Wilkens’, could not be understood apart from the abuse that preceded them.

Among Mabel Bassett’s lifers, Wilkens stood out as a leader; she was well-liked and respected, and as she moved through the prison with her questionnaire, women stopped to hear what she had to say. There was no incentive to fill it out, because no law yet existed to help survivors. There was only Wilkens’ force of personality and a simple request: “If you’ve experienced domestic violence, and that’s connected to why you’re here, will you fill this out?”

One hundred and fifty-six women filled out the survey. McCarty, who would go on to become Wilkens’ attorney, told me she read them in a single sitting, so unmoored by the women’s stories that she had to lie down when she finished. When I went to talk to her last year in Tulsa, she told me that I could read them, too. 

I’m sharing brief excerpts of them here because they do more than document individual suffering. They also expose something broader: the systemic blind spots that allowed so many of these women’s histories to go unheard in police reports, courtrooms and sentencing decisions.

Fear and terror are the predominant themes. “The abuse graduated from emotional to verbal to physical to sexual,” wrote one woman. 

“He said he was going to kill me and hide the body,” wrote another. “His wife before me had her nose broken twice.”

“I kept begging for a divorce and he’d threaten to kill my children.”

“From the beating I received, my left ear I don’t hear well.”

“My children’s father he beat me barely made it out alive.”

A fraction of the respondents had, like Wilkens, gone on to kill their abusers. “I didn’t realize I shot him until the gun went off,” wrote one woman.

Another wrote, “One night just snapped, shot & killed my husband.”

Many described a system that had failed them. “My lawyer was arrested during my trial,” wrote one woman whose children were put in foster care after her arrest. “I never even got a chance.” 

“Am ready to tell my story,” wrote a woman who was convicted when Ronald Reagan was president. “Have been for a long time.”

The questionnaires became part of the foundation for a legislative push, helping lawmakers grasp how often abuse and criminal charges intersected, and how rarely that history was fully considered in court. When the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act passed in 2024, there was hope that it would offer women like Wilkens and others at Mabel Bassett a meaningful second look at their sentences. 

What I learned through my reporting, though, is just how resistant that system can be to change. Wilkens, along with many other women with similar stories, still waits behind bars. 

With her, inside Mabel Bassett, is another prisoner whose response to the questionnaire has stayed with me: “I was in a very abusive, sick relationship,” she wrote. “I am FREE now.”

The post A Secret Survey From Inside a Women’s Prison Tells Stories of Domestic Abuse Untold in Court appeared first on ProPublica.

You know what we do here at ProPublica: investigative reporting that sparks change and holds power to account. As we near the end of February, we wanted to share five examples of how our investigations have already done that this year.

From Colorado to Massachusetts to Texas, ProPublica investigations, many of them published in collaboration with local partners, led to proposed changes to laws and practices. And while we report on the details of how these changes happen, we aim to never lose sight of how these changes could affect actual people. This may mean, for example, people under New York’s guardianship system receiving better care, or survivors of rape in Massachusetts being able to pursue justice without a deadline.

Read on to learn more about our recent reporting that’s making an impact. 

Colorado Marijuana Regulators Consider Major Changes to How Labs Test for Contaminants

More than a decade ago, Colorado created the first regulated recreational marijuana market in the nation. Lawmakers promised the state’s voters that the move to legalize marijuana would drive out the black market and create a safer environment through regulation. But, as Denver Gazette reporters Christopher Osher and Evan Wyloge revealed in a January investigation in partnership with ProPublica, hemp derivatives have jeopardized that promise. 

For years, hemp, which is a close cousin of marijuana and is cheaper to produce, seeped into the Colorado marijuana market. While Colorado allows the use of hemp in some items such as clothing and rope, the state banned companies from using it to make intoxicating products sold in the state. Our investigation found that despite the ban, the Colorado legislature and regulators failed to adopt critical regulations that other states have employed to keep harmful hemp products off the shelves. One result, some marijuana manufacturers say, is that some companies are sending samples and products that they know will pass mandatory testing to labs; dispensaries, meanwhile, might receive products that could be contaminated with chemical solvents, fungus or pesticides.

But, as Osher and Wyloge reported this month, Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Division may now require independent labs or outside vendors to collect product samples for testing before they can be sold. That would remove marijuana manufacturers’ ability to choose which products they send in. 

Read the full story.

The Clear Labels Act Would Change What You Know About Your Prescription Medication

U.S. senators introduced legislation this month that would require prescription drug labels to identify where the medication was made, adding momentum to a yearslong campaign to bring more transparency to the often elusive generic drug industry.

Current labels often list only a distributor or repackager of a medication and sometimes provide no information at all. The Clear Labels Act, introduced by Sens. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., calls for labels to disclose the original manufacturer as well as the suppliers that produced key ingredients.

A spokesperson for the trade group for brand-name drugmakers told ProPublica that the industry would “welcome conversations about how to strengthen the biopharmaceutical supply chain.” The generic drug lobbying group said that additional labeling requirements would impose “significant costs in exchange for limited returns,” adding that drug manufacturers already disclose country of origin information under U.S. Customs and Border Protection rules.

Our reporters had to file public records requests and sue the FDA in federal court to obtain information about where generic drugs are made and whether government inspectors had flagged those factories for safety or quality concerns. We ultimately created a first-of-its-kind tool that allows consumers to find the information themselves.

Read the full story.

Mass. Governor Proposes Eliminating Statute of Limitations for Rape When DNA Evidence Exists

Last year, WBUR and ProPublica told the story of a woman who, according to a police report, had been raped and stabbed after accepting a ride in 2005 from a man who said he recognized her from college. DNA testing later connected a man accused of multiple assaults to her case, but prosecutors had to drop charges under Massachusetts’ statute of limitations.

Under Massachusetts law, prosecutors have only 15 years to file charges after an alleged rape — and it’s nearly impossible to bring charges past that statute of limitations even if new evidence emerges. That places Massachusetts behind almost every other state in the country. Attempts to expand that window have failed every year since 2011 in part because defense attorneys have opposed changes, arguing a longer deadline risks violating the rights of the accused.

WBUR’s Willoughby Mariano reported that Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey wants to eliminate that deadline for rape cases when DNA evidence exists. The provision, which is included in Healey’s budget proposal for the 2027 fiscal year, needs to pass both chambers of the state Legislature. If enacted, it would affect cases where the statute of limitations has not yet expired and future cases, but not older cases.

Read the full story.

We Found New York’s Guardianship System in Shambles. Now State Lawmakers Say They Have a Plan to Help Fix It.

Two years after ProPublica’s Jake Pearson first documented New York’s dire shortage of guardians — and the substandard care some provide — state lawmakers introduced legislation to boost spending on the system by $15 million a year. It would be an unprecedented cash infusion for a bureaucracy that has long struggled to care for the tens of thousands of disabled or elderly New Yorkers who cannot care for themselves.

The new bill, called the Good Guardianship Act, aims to help the most vulnerable segment of this population: those who are too poor to pay for a private guardian and who have no family or friends willing to serve. Advocates say the Good Guardianship Act is the most promising step to date in improving the system — if it can get the support of Gov. Kathy Hochul. 

The proposal follows a 2024 ProPublica investigation that revealed how the state’s guardianship system was failing this group in particular by conducting little to no oversight of guardians, some of whom provided substandard care and exploited those they were charged with looking after. The stories also prompted the state attorney general to open an investigation into several guardianship providers and spurred the court system to appoint a special counsel to enact reforms.

Read the full story.

After Years of Silence, Texas Medical Board Issues Training for Doctors on How to Legally Provide Abortions

For the first time since Texas criminalized abortion, the state’s medical regulator is instructing doctors on when they can legally terminate a pregnancy to protect the life of the patient — guidance physicians have long sought as women died and doctors feared imprisonment for intervening.

The new mandated training for any doctor providing obstetric care goes over nine case studies for physicians where abortion is considered legal to protect the life of the patient. Some of the scenarios in the training are similar to instances ProPublica investigated, such as miscarriages where a patient’s water breaks before term but there is still a fetal heartbeat or when someone is experiencing complications from an incomplete abortion.

ProPublica’s reporting has shown that pregnancy became far more dangerous in the state after the law took effect: Sepsis rates spiked for women suffering a pregnancy loss, as did emergency room visits in which miscarrying patients needed a blood transfusion; at least four women in the state died after they didn’t receive timely reproductive care. More than a hundred OB-GYNs said the state’s abortion ban was to blame.

Read the full story.

The post 5 Investigations Sparking Change This Month appeared first on ProPublica.

When guards appeared earlier this month outside the room Christian Hinojosa shared with her son and other women and children at the immigrant detention center in Dilley, Texas, she guessed what they might be after. She quickly donned her puffy winter jacket, then slipped a manila envelope inside it. “Thank God the weather was cool,” she said — the jacket didn’t raise suspicions.

Then, she said, she was instructed to leave the room while eight to 10 guards lifted up mattresses, opened drawers and rifled through papers. In the envelope were kids’ writings and artwork about life in America’s only detention facility for immigrant families, a collection of trailers and dormitories in the brush country south of San Antonio. She planned to share their letters with the outside world.

Guards have taken away crayons, colored pencils and drawing paper during recent room searches at Dilley, according to Hinojosa and three other former detainees, along with lawyers and advocates in contact with the families inside.

Guards have taken artwork, too, they said — even one child’s drawing of Bratz fashion dolls.

They said detainees have lost access to Gmail and other Google services in the Dilley library amid stepped up searches, seizures and restrictions on communications, making it more difficult for them to contact lawyers and advocates.

They and family members said guards sometimes hover within earshot during detainees’ video calls to relatives and reporters.

“We Are Kidnapped Help!”

The detainees and others interviewed for this story said these measures increased after the Jan. 22 arrival of Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old in a blue bunny hat, sparked protests and congressional visits. They said the clampdown intensified as children and parents at Dilley wrote letters to share with the public and reporters and relatives recorded video calls with the detainees, including those published by ProPublica this month. The children’s stories, many told in their own words, fueled an outcry over the scope of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign, which the president had promised would focus on criminals.

The detainees said the more they tried to make their voices heard, the more difficult it became.

One mother, who asked to remain anonymous because her immigration case is still pending, told ProPublica that she and her three kids watched through a window as guards swept through their room in late January, removing drawings from the walls and placing colored pencils and crayons in plastic bags before taking them away. 

With little schooling available at Dilley and weather too chilly for kids to want to play outdoors, drawing had been the children’s main diversion, the former detainee said. “What were they going to do now?” she said. “They were so bored.”

After the room inspection, the woman said, the children just “cried and cried and cried.”

“I Can’t See My Pet Willi”

CoreCivic, the private prison company that runs the Dilley facility for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a written statement that routine inspections of living facilities are a common practice and that detainees are informed of what items they are allowed to have in their rooms. 

“We vehemently deny any claims that our staff have confiscated or destroyed children’s personal artwork or their related supplies,” the statement reads, adding that there are examples of kids’ artwork “proudly displayed” throughout the facility.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a statement that “ICE is not destroying children’s letters,” but the agency acknowledged that in one case “all the written items in the cell were seized” as part of an investigation of a mother who DHS said refused to comply with a search and pushed a detention center employee. CoreCivic referred questions to DHS when asked about this incident. ProPublica was unable to reach the mother for comment.  

This week, DHS issued press releases that it said were “correcting the record” about Dilley, saying “adults with children are housed in facilities that provide for their safety, security, and medical needs.” DHS’ and CoreCivic’s statements to ProPublica did not answer questions about Google services being blocked or whether guards listen in on Dilley detainees’ calls.

U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, visited Dilley after Liam and his father, both originally from Ecuador, were picked up in Minnesota and transferred in January. He went again last week and was asked at a Friday news conference about reports of children’s letters and drawings being suppressed.

“I believe those stories, because I’ve heard similar stories myself,” Castro said. 

He said he’d been told repeatedly that guards had warned detainees not to talk to him. “Yes, I think there’s a lot of secrecy there,” Castro said.

DHS did not respond when asked to comment on Castro’s assertion about the guards. A CoreCivic spokesperson said, “We are not aware of any staff member warning residents not to speak with Rep. Castro.”

“I Feel Bored Here”

The Dilley Immigration Processing Center first opened during the Obama administration primarily to hold families that had just crossed the border. Then Biden ended the practice of detaining families in 2021. President Donald Trump restarted it even as border crossings in his second term hit record lows. Now ICE is ramping up immigration arrests inside the country, and Dilley holds many families who have been living in the United States for years.

The families spend their days behind a metal fence, sleeping in rooms that hold six bunk beds and a common area with a few small tables and desks. More than 3,500 people have cycled through the detention center since the Trump administration began sending families here last spring. 

A ProPublica reporter who had been speaking with families at Dilley since late last year went to the center for an in-person visit in mid-January and asked families whether their children would want to write about their experiences. On Jan. 22, we received a packet of colorful drawings and handwritten letters from a detainee who had been recently released, which we later published. 

Then on Jan. 24, dozens of detainees staged a mass protest in the yard, which was photographed from above, where they yelled “libertad” and held up hand-drawn signs. The signs were made using the detention center’s art supplies, former detainees said. 

That protest and Liam’s detention triggered widespread media coverage and a visit by Castro, who arrived on Jan 28. Supporters gathered outside Dilley, and some clashed with state troopers. At the beginning of February, Liam and his father were released, and ProPublica published the letters it had received.  By that time, it had become clear to detainees that their voices — especially children’s voices — had gotten broad public attention. 

They kept writing.

“We were looking for help,” said Hinojosa, who collected letters at ProPublica’s request. “We were looking to be heard.” 

Hinojosa, along with her 13-year-old son, Gustavo, both originally from Mexico, were released in early February after four months at Dilley to return home to San Antonio. (Although a 1990s legal settlement holds that children should generally not be detained for  more than 20 days, DHS has said the settlement should be terminated because newer regulations have addressed the needs of child detainees.)

“My parents say it’s been 4 months but for me and my little sister,” a 9-year-old wrote in one of the letters Hinojosa gathered. “It feels like a year I just want to go to the United States to be with my grandparents and finally end this nightmare.”

“I’m writing this letter so that you can hear my story,” a 7-year-old wrote in another of the letters. “I need you to help us … I cry a lot. I want to get out of here go back to my school.”

“I see how they treat us like criminals,” wrote Edison, a seventh grader from Chicago who was born in Guatemala, “and we’re not.”

“We Are Not Criminals”

CoreCivic said that Dilley residents are given a written description of property they’re allowed to have in their living areas, and that decorating rooms with personal items is permitted “provided they do not present a health or safety hazard.”

Former detainees told ProPublica they experienced room searches before January but that they typically were carried out by just two employees at a time, not eight or more. 

After guards searched Hinojosa’s room following the protest, she said, she and the other residents were unable to locate their colored pencils, which were purchased at the commissary and stored in a little cup atop the writing table where the kids liked to doodle. “Even knowing that we had paid for those ourselves,” she said, “they removed them.”

“There were many, many families whose children had their pencils and what they created thrown away,” said a third mother, who also asked to remain anonymous because of her immigration status. 

“I Just Want to … Finally End This Nightmare”

Former detainees and their family members described close attention by guards during calls home, some of which happened via tablet computers in a common area.

Edison, the 13-year-old Chicago seventh grader, cried during a recent video call home that his father shared with ProPublica, saying he felt locked up.

The father, who asked that his son’s last name not be used, recalled the boy saying before the recording began, “Dad, there’s an agent here and he’s watching us.” He said his son sounded panicked.

The mother who said she watched guards sweep her room told ProPublica that after the January protest inside Dilley, a half-dozen guards were posted in a room where calls took place. “Every time someone came in to make a call,” she said, “they practically stood behind you.”

As families held at Dilley continue to try to make themselves heard, Hinojosa and other recently released detainees are determined to help. 

Hinojosa carefully protected her fellow residents’ letters and drawings before her release. Every time she left her room, she wore the CoreCivic-issued puffy gray jacket and tucked the drawings and letters inside. 

“I carried them around with me all day to prevent anyone from taking them,” she told ProPublica. “I knew they were valuable.”

Many of the pieces she carried were different from the vibrant paper drawings ProPublica received in January. With paper in short supply, Hinojosa said, children drew pictures on the backs of old artworks. With crayons and colored pencils now scarce, some drew in plain pencil.

Hinojosa walked out of Dilley earlier this month with her son Gustavo and with 34 pages of drawings and letters. They capture the names and lives of dozens of people.

Along with long notes from moms who remain inside are simple sketches by the kids detained with them: a teddy bear. A bus going home. A pet cat named Willi. A family of three stick figures trapped behind a wire fence. A family of six stick figures trapped behind a wire fence. A single small stick figure trapped behind a wire fence. Many of the drawings show faces, and most of the faces are frowning.

“I Want to Leave”

The post Seized Art, Eavesdropping Guards: Parents Describe a Clampdown at Dilley Detention Center as Kids Shared Their Stories appeared first on ProPublica.

Senate leaders are urging the Department of Defense to prioritize the purchase of generic drugs manufactured in the United States, warning that the country’s overreliance on foreign factories poses an “existential risk” to the military.

In a letter last week, Sens. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., asked Defense Department Secretary Pete Hegseth to provide information about drugs or key ingredients purchased from foreign sources and how long the department’s inventory would last if China restricted exports. They also sought details about whether the Food and Drug Administration had imposed any import bans on the department’s suppliers.

The letter cited ProPublica reporting last year that found the FDA allowed dozens of foreign drugmakers, mostly in India and China, to continue sending generic medication to the U.S. even after the factories were banned because of serious safety and quality-control failures. Since 2013, ProPublica found, the FDA allowed more than 150 drugs or their ingredients into the United States from banned factories, including antibiotics, anti-seizure drugs and chemotherapy treatments.

The agency has said that the exemptions helped prevent drug shortages and that factories were required to conduct extra quality testing with third-party oversight.

“Exempting these drugs or facilities allows for substandard and potentially unsafe drugs to enter the U.S. market,” the senators wrote in their letter. “These exemptions can pose a threat to drug safety for American consumers.”

Scott and Gillibrand also noted they are worried about instability in global trade and politics, which they said can create “profound ramifications for the availability of medications” and pose public health and national security risks.

Nine in 10 prescriptions in the United States are for generics, many of them made overseas. Last year, the senators, who lead the Senate Special Committee on Aging, released an investigative report demanding changes in the FDA’s oversight of the generic drug industry. Among other things, they asked the FDA to alert hospitals and other group purchasers when troubled foreign drugmakers are given a special pass to continue sending their products to the United States.

This month, Scott and Gillibrand introduced legislation known as the Clear Labels Act to help patients, doctors and pharmacists know more about the drugs they use and prescribe. The proposal calls for prescription labels to disclose the original manufacturer as well as the suppliers of key ingredients. The generic drug lobbying group has said that the labeling requirements would be costly and that drug manufacturers already disclose country of origin information under U.S. Customs and Border Protection rules. The trade group for brand-name drugmakers said the industry would “welcome conversations” about strengthening the supply chain.

ProPublica had to sue the FDA in federal court last year to learn more about where generic drugs were made and whether the agency’s inspectors had ever flagged those factories for safety and quality lapses. ProPublica ultimately created a first-of-its-kind tool that empowers consumers to find the information themselves.

Now, Scott and Gillibrand are turning their attention to the medications used by millions of U.S. servicemembers, veterans and their families. They requested a briefing by the Pentagon to explore whether officials are prioritizing the purchase of American-made drugs.

Drug safety experts said the push could ultimately help shore up a vulnerable supply chain.

“Before you can be deployed, you have to be stable on your medications,” said David Light, president of the independent testing lab Valisure, which is conducting drug-quality testing for the Defense Department. “If you purposely add more variability to your drugs, you could prevent the deployment of thousands of troops without a single shot.”

Last year, ProPublica engaged Valisure to test several widely used generic drugs and found several samples had irregularities that experts say could compromise their effectiveness.

Vic Suarez, a retired Army medical supply-chain commander, said he hopes the effort in the Senate will lead to stronger drug acquisition policies.

“This is a national security issue. It is an economic security issue. And it is a patient safety issue,” he said.

The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Senate Leaders Warn Defense Department About Procuring Generic Drugs Overseas appeared first on ProPublica.

Four House Democrats demanded the top Federal Bureau of Prisons official explain how he plans to address the agency’s “persistent, unsafe conditions” and “pervasive shortage of critical staff,” driven in part by corrections officers fleeing the bureau for more lucrative jobs at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Outlined in a six-page letter sent Friday to BOP Director William Marshall III, the lawmakers’ questions come after a ProPublica investigation found that workers at federal lockups from Florida to California had been lured away by the $50,000 starting bonus and higher pay at ICE, which more than doubled its number of officers and agents last year during the Trump administration’s monthslong recruiting blitz. The prisons bureau, meanwhile, lost a net of more than 1,800 workers last year.

“We are deeply concerned that these developments compromise the safety and security of both inmates and staff,” Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Lucy McBath of Georgia, Jasmine Crockett of Texas and Joe Neguse of Colorado wrote in their letter. “The shrinking existing workforce has been left to contend with an ever-growing use of overtime, which leads to fatigue, burnout, and increased attrition.”

The representatives said that short staffing, in turn, has led to more lockdowns, more violence and less access to recidivism-reducing programs for prisoners. Their letter also raised questions about the cancellation of the union contract, which they noted critics have said “appears retaliatory,” and the ongoing reliance on “augmentation” — the practice of forcing nurses, teachers and plumbers who work in the prisons to fill in as corrections officers — to plug staffing gaps.

“We believe these deeply troubling issues require concrete answers,” the lawmakers wrote. They set a 30-day deadline for the bureau to respond in writing.

Prison union officials have also pressed the case, urging lawmakers to insist that Marshall and his deputy, Josh Smith, testify before Congress on the issue.

The prison agency declined to answer questions from ProPublica about the lawmakers’ letter, saying it would respond directly to Congress.

In a statement, a spokesperson said that the BOP “continues to prioritize efforts” to increase staffing, adding that some staff will always have to step in as corrections officers “for the safety and security of staff, inmates and the public.”

The BOP has long struggled to hire and retain enough workers to staff its facilities, where roughly 34,700 employees are responsible for more than 138,000 prisoners. As of 2023, union officials said some 40% of corrections officer jobs remained vacant. That same year, the lack of staff helped land the prison system on a government list of high-risk agencies with serious vulnerabilities.

As part of a long-term hiring push, the bureau turned to signing bonuses, retention pay and a fast-tracked hiring process. Although those efforts drew in a net of more than 1,200 people in 2024 — the bureau’s largest workforce increase in a decade — the cost of hiring incentives, along with raises, overtime and inflation, strained an already-stagnant budget.

Early last year, the agency paused hiring and retention incentives to save money, a move that threatened to undermine the prior year’s staffing gains. Still, the financial strain continued and, by the fall, dozens of staff and prisoners were telling ProPublica about unusual scarcities in facilities across the country. Some prisons fell behind on utility and trash bills, while others ran out of staple foods including eggs and beef. At one point, a prison in Louisiana came within days of running out of food for inmates before union officials intervened and urged agency leaders to fix the problem.

In their letter last week, the representatives said they were “alarmed” by the financial shortfalls ProPublica reported, as well as by the worsening staffing figures. Last year, the bureau’s net loss of employees was larger than in any other year since 2017, according to data ProPublica obtained through an open records request.

With a dwindling workforce, the bureau’s overtime costs have soared. According to a recent Congressional Research Service report, in 2025 the federal prison system spent more than $387 million on overtime, a number surpassed only once in the past decade.

Several prison officials who asked to remain anonymous told ProPublica this month that officers at some facilities are often forced to work two to four double shifts per week, sometimes putting in so many overtime hours that prisoners have expressed concern.

“The only ones who like it are the predatory inmates,” one corrections officer told ProPublica. “Inmates don’t like super cops, but they at least want to feel like if they are attacked, someone will see it and stop it as quickly as they can. You ain’t getting that with a CO on a double who can barely keep his eyes open.”

Meanwhile, the lawmakers said they were “gravely concerned” about some of the ways BOP leaders have tried to save money and minimize the use of overtime, including by locking down facilities and skimping on staff, which, lawmakers said, the bureau then attempted to cover up.

When the Office of Inspector General visited one facility last year, the housing units were all well staffed, “a trick” the lawmakers said was accomplished only by extreme use of augmentation. “Reportedly, after the visit, the facility immediately resumed short-staffing units,” the lawmakers wrote. “Committee staff have reviewed housing unit staffing and augmentation rosters documenting this apparent effort to mislead the OIG.”

Read more

“We’re Broken”: As Federal Prisons Run Low on Food and Toilet Paper, Corrections Officers Are Leaving in Droves for ICE

Last year, prison employees worked more than 700,000 augmentation hours, the most in any single year for at least a decade, according to the Congressional Research Service report.

“That’s why I left,” one former prison official told ProPublica last year, explaining that he chose to retire instead of being forced to abandon his duties resolving discrimination complaints to instead work as an officer on a housing unit two days a week.

The post Democrats Demand Answers for Federal Prison Staffing Shortage After Corrections Officers Flee for ICE Jobs appeared first on ProPublica.

The Trump administration is loosening restrictions on the sharing of law enforcement information with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, officials said, overriding controls that have been in place for decades to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens.

Government officials said the changes could give the intelligence agencies access to a database containing hundreds of millions of documents — from FBI case files and banking records to criminal investigations of labor unions — that touch on the activities of law-abiding Americans.

Administration officials said they are providing the intelligence agencies with more information from investigations by the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to combat drug gangs and other transnational criminal groups that the administration has classified as terrorists.

But they have taken these steps with almost no public acknowledgement or notification to Congress. Inside the government, officials said, the process has been marked by a similar lack of transparency, with scant high-level discussion and little debate among government lawyers.

“None of this has been thought through very carefully — which is shocking,” one intelligence official said of the moves to expand information sharing. “There are a lot of privacy concerns out there, and nobody really wants to deal with them.”

A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Olivia Coleman, declined to answer specific questions about the expanded information sharing or the legal basis for it.

Instead, she cited some recent public statements by senior administration officials, including one in which the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, emphasized the importance of “making sure that we have seamless two-way push communications with our law enforcement partners to facilitate that bi-directional sharing of information.”

In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, revelations that Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had used the CIA to spy on American anti-war and civil rights activists outraged Americans who feared the specter of a secret police. The congressional reforms that followed reinforced the long-standing ban on intelligence agencies gathering information about the domestic activities of U.S. citizens.

Compared with the FBI and other federal law enforcement organizations, the intelligence agencies operate with far greater secrecy and less scrutiny from Congress and the courts. They are generally allowed to collect information on Americans only as part of foreign intelligence investigations. Exemptions must be approved by the U.S. attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The National Security Agency, for example, can intercept communications between people inside the United States and terror suspects abroad without the probable cause or judicial warrants that are generally required of law enforcement agencies.

Since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the expansion of that surveillance authority in the fight against Islamist terrorism has been the subject of often intense debates among the three branches of government. 

Word of the Trump administration’s efforts to expand the sharing of law enforcement information with the intelligence agencies was met with alarm by advocates for civil liberties protections.

“The Intelligence Community operates with broad authorities, constant secrecy and little-to-no judicial oversight because it is meant to focus on foreign threats,” Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a senior Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement to ProPublica.

Giving the intelligence agencies wider access to information on the activities of U.S. citizens not suspected of any crime “puts Americans’ freedoms at risk,” the senator added. “The potential for abuse of that information is staggering.”

Most of the current and former officials interviewed for this story would speak only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the matter and because they feared retaliation for criticizing the administration’s approach.

Virtually all those officials said they supported the goal of sharing law enforcement information more effectively, so long as sensitive investigations and citizens’ privacy were protected. But after years in which Republican and Democratic administrations weighed those considerations deliberately — and made little headway with proposed reforms — officials said the Trump administration has pushed ahead with little regard for those concerns.

“There will always be those who simply want to turn on a spigot and comingle all available information, but you can’t just flip a switch — at least not if you want the government to uphold the rule of law,” said Russell Travers, a former acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center who served in senior intelligence roles under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

The 9/11 attacks — which exposed the CIA’s failure to share intelligence with the FBI even as Al Qaida moved its operatives into the United States — led to a series of reforms intended to transform how the government managed terrorism information.

A centerpiece of that effort was the establishment of the NCTC, as the counterterrorism center is known, to collect and analyze intelligence on foreign terrorist groups. The statutes that established the NCTC explicitly prohibit it from collecting information on domestic terror threats.

National security officials have spent much less time trying to remedy what they have acknowledged are serious deficiencies in the government’s management of intelligence on organized crime groups.

In 2011, President Barack Obama noted those problems in issuing a new national strategy to “build, balance and integrate the tools of American power to combat transnational organized crime.” Although the Obama plan stressed the need for improved information-sharing, it led to only minimal changes.

President Donald Trump has seized on the issue with greater urgency. He has also declared his intention to improve information-sharing across the government, signing an executive order to eliminate “information silos” of unclassified information.

More consequentially, he went on to brand more than a dozen Latin American drug mafias and criminal gangs as terrorist organizations.

The administration has used those designations to justify more extreme measures against the criminal groups. Since last year, it has killed at least 148 suspected drug smugglers with missile strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, steps that many legal experts have denounced as violations of international law.

Some administration officials have argued that the terror designations entitle intelligence agencies to access all law enforcement case files related to the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and other gangs designated by the State Department as foreign terrorist organizations.

The first criterion for those designations is that a group must “be a foreign organization.” Yet unlike Islamist terror groups such as al-Qaida or al-Shabab, Latin drug mafias and criminal gangs like MS-13 have a large and complex presence inside the United States. Their members are much more likely to be U.S. citizens and to live and operate here.

On Sept. 22, the Trump administration also designated the loosely organized antifascist political movement antifa as a terrorist group, despite the lack of any federal law authorizing it to do so. Weeks later, the administration named four European militant groups said to be aligned with antifa to the government’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.

Those steps were seen by some intelligence experts as potentially opening the door for the CIA and other agencies to monitor Americans who support antifa in violation of their free speech rights. The approach also echoed justifications that both Johnson and Nixon used for domestic spying by the CIA: that such investigations were needed to determine whether government critics were being supported by foreign governments.

The wider sharing of law enforcement case files is also being driven by the administration’s abrupt decision to disband the Justice Department office that for decades coordinated the work of different agencies on major drug trafficking and organized crime cases. That office, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, was abruptly shut down on Sept. 30 as the Trump administration was setting up a new network of Homeland Security Task Forces designed by the White House homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller.

The new task forces, which were first described in detail by ProPublica last year, are designed to refocus federal law enforcement agencies on what Miller and other officials have portrayed as an alarming nexus of immigration and transnational crime. The reorganization also gives the White House and the Department of Homeland Security new authority to oversee transnational crime investigations, subordinating the DEA and federal prosecutors, who were central to the previous system.

That reorganization has set off a struggle over the control of OCDETF’s crown jewel, a database of some 770 million records that is the only central, searchable repository of drug trafficking and organized crime case files in the federal government.

Until now, the records of that database, which is called Compass, have only been accessible to investigators under elaborate rules agreed to by the more than 20 agencies that shared their information. The system was widely viewed as cumbersome, but officials said it also encouraged cooperation among the agencies while protecting sensitive case files and U.S. citizens’ privacy.

Although the Homeland Security Task Forces took possession of the Compass system when their leadership moved into OCDETF’s headquarters in suburban Virginia, the administration is still deciding how it will operate that database, officials said.

However, officials said, intelligence agencies and the Defense Department have already taken a series of technical steps to connect their networks to Compass so they can access its information if they are permitted to do so.

The White House press office did not respond to questions about how the government will manage the Compass database and whether it will remain under the control of the Homeland Security Task Forces.

The National Counterterrorism Center, under its new director, Joe Kent, has been notably forceful in seeking to manage the Compass system, several officials said. Kent, a former Army Special Forces and CIA paramilitary officer who twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Washington state, was previously a top aide to the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard.

The FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies have strongly opposed the NCTC effort, the officials said. In internal discussions, they added, the law enforcement agencies have argued that it makes no sense for an intelligence agency to manage sensitive information that comes almost entirely from law enforcement.

“The NCTC has taken a very aggressive stance,” one official said. “They think the agencies should be sharing everything with them, and it should be up to them to decide what is relevant and what U.S. citizen information they shouldn’t keep.”

The FBI declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica. A DEA spokesperson also would not discuss the agency’s actions or views on the wider sharing of its information with the intelligence community. But in a statement the spokesman added, “DEA is committed to working with our IC and law enforcement partners to ensure reliable information-sharing and strong coordination to most effectively target the designated cartels.”

Even with the Trump administration’s expanded definition of what might constitute terrorist activity, the information on terror groups accounts for only a small fraction of the records in the Compass system, current and former officials said.

The records include State Department visa records, some files of U.S. Postal Service inspectors, years of suspicious transaction reports from the Treasury Department and call records from the Bureau of Prisons.

Investigative files of the FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies often include information about witnesses, associates of suspects and others who have never committed any crimes, officials said.

“You have witness information, target information, bank account information,” the former OCDETF director, Thomas Padden, said in an interview. “I can’t think of a dataset that would not be a concern if it were shared without some controls. You need checks and balances, and it’s not clear to me that those are in place.”

Officials familiar with the interagency discussions said NCTC and other intelligence officials have insisted they are interested only in terror-related information and that they have electronic systems that can appropriately filter out information on U.S. persons.

But FBI and other law enforcement agencies have challenged those arguments, officials said, contending that the NCTC proposal would almost inevitably breach privacy laws and imperil sensitive case information without necessarily strengthening the fight against transnational criminals.

Already, NCTC officials have been pressing the FBI and DEA to share all the information they have on the criminal groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations, officials said.

The DEA, which had previously earned a reputation for jealously guarding its case files, authorized the transfer of at least some of those files, officials said, adding to pressure on the FBI to do the same.

Administration lawyers have argued that such information sharing is authorized by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, the law that reorganized intelligence activities after 9/11. Officials have also cited the 2001 Patriot Act, which gives law enforcement agencies power to obtain financial, communications and other information on a subject they certify as having ties to terrorism.

The central role of the NCTC in collecting and analyzing terrorism information specifically excludes “intelligence pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorists and domestic counterterrorism.” But that has not stopped Kent or his boss, intelligence director Gabbard, from stepping over red lines that their predecessors carefully avoided.

In October, Kent drew sharp criticism from the FBI after he examined files from the bureau’s ongoing investigation of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist. That episode was first reported by The New York Times.

Last month, Gabbard appeared to lead a raid at which the FBI seized truckloads of 2020 presidential voting records from an election center in Fulton County, Georgia. Officials later said she was sent by Trump but did not oversee the operation.

In years past, officials said, the possibility of crossing long-settled legal boundaries on citizens’ privacy would have precipitated a flurry of high-level meetings, legal opinions and policy memos. But almost none of that internal discussion has taken place, they said.

“We had lengthy interagency meetings that involved lawyers, civil liberties, privacy and operational security types to ensure that we were being good stewards of information and not trampling all over U.S. persons’ privacy rights,” said Travers, the former NCTC director.

When administration officials abruptly moved to close down OCDETF and supplant it with the Homeland Security Task Forces network, they seemed to have little grasp of the complexities of such a transition, several people involved in the process said.

The agencies that contributed records to OCDETF were ordered to sign over their information to the task forces, but they did so without knowing if the system’s new custodians would observe the conditions under which the files were shared.

Nor were they encouraged to ask, officials said.

While both the FBI and DEA have objected to a change in the protocols, officials said smaller agencies that contributed some of their records to the OCDETF system have been “reluctant to push back too hard,” as one of them put it.

The NCTC, which faced budget cuts during the Biden administration, has been among those most eager to service the new Homeland Security Task Forces. To that end, it set up a new fusion center to promote “two-way intelligence sharing of actionable information between the intelligence community and law enforcement,” as Gabbard described it.

The expanded sharing of law enforcement and intelligence information on trafficking groups is also a key goal of the Pentagon’s new Tucson, Arizona-based Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel. In announcing the task force’s creation last month, the U.S. Northern Command said it would work with the Homeland Security Task Forces “to ensure we are sharing all intelligence between our Department of War, law enforcement and Intelligence Community partners.”

In the last months of the Biden administration, a somewhat similar proposal was put forward by the then-DEA administrator, Anne Milgram. That plan involved setting up a pair of centers where DEA, CIA and other agencies would pool information on major Mexican drug trafficking groups.

At the time, one particularly strong objection came from the Defense Department’s counternarcotics and stabilization office, officials said. The sharing of such law enforcement information with the intelligence community, an official there noted, could violate laws prohibiting the CIA from gathering intelligence on Americans inside the United States.

The Pentagon, he warned, would want no part of such a plan.

The post Trump Administration Moves to Allow Intelligence Agencies Easier Access to Law Enforcement Files appeared first on ProPublica.

Should a person be deported because once, a decade and a half ago, they left their toddlers home alone for a half hour to buy them pajamas at Walmart? That’s what the Trump administration is arguing in a little-noticed federal appeals court case being decided in California, with sweeping implications for both the immigration and child welfare systems. A ruling is expected in the coming months.

In 2010, Sotero Mendoza-Rivera, an undocumented farmworker who’d immigrated from Mexico 10 years earlier, made a fateful decision. He drove with his girlfriend, Angelica Ortega-Vasquez, to their local Walmart in McMinnville, Oregon, according to a police report. The store was seven minutes from their apartment. In addition to the pajamas, they purchased motor oil and brake fluid for their car.

When they got back to the apartment, their 2-year-old son, who’d been in bed asleep when they’d left, had woken up and somehow gotten out the door. A bystander found him by the street outside the complex, baby bottle in hand, and called the police.

The responding officer issued Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez a misdemeanor citation, which they resolved with a guilty plea, a fine and probation. The officer stated in his report that the little boy and his 3-year-old sister were healthy and clean, that the apartment was well-kept and stocked with food, and that a neighbor said that the mother was usually home with the kids.

The Obama administration then opened deportation proceedings against Mendoza-Rivera, but did not keep him in detention. He appealed, and the case wound its way slowly through the legal system before hitting a backlog at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where some immigration matters from nearly a decade ago are still being decided.

But in August, amid the Trump administration’s campaign of mass deportations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Mendoza-Rivera and locked him up in another state. And the Department of Justice is now arguing that what he did in 2010 (the current case is against him only) is a crime deserving of immediate removal from the country. A DOJ lawyer argued before a panel of the 9th Circuit in Pasadena, California, last month that it doesn’t matter if no harm to children occurred, saying an immigrant parent should still get deported if their parenting decision involved a “substantial” deviation from a “normal” standard of care for kids.

Child welfare officials and experts told ProPublica they are deeply concerned by the case, as well as several others like it that have been making their way through the courts and are now reaching a decisive point. “Imagine what a weapon it would be in ICE’s hands if child welfare is added to all the other areas where a conviction for the most minor offense means deportation,” said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, an advocacy group.

Indeed, if Attorney General Pam Bondi’s team wins this case, thousands of immigrant moms and dads could be exposed to deportation for minor involvement in the juvenile court system, a new realm for President Donald Trump’s deportation regime. There aren’t exact numbers as to how many immigrants are accused of low-level parental negligence in juvenile courts. But as ProPublica has previously reported, millions of parents are accused of child neglect every year in this country, in many instances for reasons stemming from poverty like a lack of child care or food in the fridge, rather than physical or sexual abuse.

Immigrant parents are no more likely than U.S.-born parents to abuse children. But undocumented parents may be more likely to be accused of certain low-level forms of neglect, according to legal aid attorneys. For one thing, due to their lack of legal status, they sometimes avoid interactions with officials at schools and hospitals, leading to potential allegations against them for neglecting their kids’ health or education. They also disproportionately work long and unpredictable hours, sometimes having their older children look after their younger ones, which in the U.S. can be deemed inadequate supervision. Differing cultural norms regarding how much hands-on supervision is necessary also play a role.

There is no evidence yet that ICE has been actively looking for cases like these to identify parents to deport, according to interviews with over a dozen federal and state child welfare officials. But data on specific child welfare cases is reported from states to the federal government annually, via the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System. (The data contain identifiers for children but not their names, though state agencies have those.)

“The million or so reports in NCANDS would be a gold mine for Noem and Miller,” said Andy Barclay, a longtime child welfare statistician, referring to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and top Trump adviser Stephen Miller.

The first Trump administration did not seek to use such data for deportations, according to Jerry Milner, who was appointed to oversee the U.S. child welfare system as head of the federal Children’s Bureau from 2017 to 2021. “I never had any of those discussions around the data,” Milner told ProPublica. “I can’t guarantee that others did not, but they never made it to me.” But, he said, “things are different now.”

“I would have strong concerns if any of the data are used for purposes other than what they were intended for,” Milner said.

Medicaid data, for instance, is now reportedly being shared with the Department of Homeland Security, and those files can have more identifying information than NCANDS does on families with child welfare cases. DHS has also accessed Office of Refugee Resettlement data on migrant children, which can be used to identify young people’s locations and the (sometimes undocumented) adults taking care of them. Indeed, DHS and FBI agents have visited migrant kids at the homes of their caretakers, ostensibly to perform “welfare checks.”

The White House declined to answer questions for this article. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. A Justice Department spokesperson in an email accused the Biden administration of letting Mendoza-Rivera’s case languish and said that “as part of this Administration’s commitment to making America safe again, the Attorney General will continue to defend efforts to remove criminal illegal aliens, especially those convicted of offenses which place children in situations likely to endanger their health or welfare.”

The Trump administration’s view, according to the Justice Department’s filings in Mendoza-Rivera’s case, is that undocumented parents convicted of even the most minor forms of parental negligence should be ineligible for a type of legal relief called “cancellation of removal.” (Mendoza-Rivera sought this relief during his initial deportation proceedings, which is part of what spurred the current appeals case.) It’s an off-ramp from deportation that until now has been available to such moms and dads if they’ve been in the U.S. for 10 or more years, they have “good moral character,” and their deportation would cause extreme hardship to their U.S. citizen children. This would apply to Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez’s kids, who are American citizens.

One of the main federal laws that the Trump administration has been relying on in its effort to deport millions of people comes from the Bill Clinton era. In 1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act overhauled immigration enforcement in part by stating that noncitizens, even lawful permanent residents, must be expeditiously deported if they’ve been convicted of certain offenses, including aggravated felonies, crimes of “moral turpitude,” drug crimes or domestic violence, or a “crime of child abuse, child neglect, or child abandonment.”

The motivation for including this sort of language, at the time, was clear. Amid the violent crime wave of the ’90s, the law’s co-author, Bob Dole, said on the Senate floor that the crimes he wanted to make deportable included “vicious acts of stalking, child abuse and sexual abuse.”

Yet over the three decades since, societal norms around what constitutes bad — and even criminal — parenting have come to include all sorts of nonviolent and even harmless behavior. A range of parenting practices that were considered normal for most of the 20th century are now investigated and prosecuted as child maltreatment in many states; letting your kids play at the park and walk home alone could be “neglect,” especially if you’re poor and a person of color. So could leaving them in their car seats briefly with the windows cracked and the car alarm on while you run into a store to buy diapers, or failing to properly secure their bedroom windows at night.

Some rulings by other courts have blocked deportations for people with these sorts of alleged parenting lapses, while the federal Board of Immigration Appeals has offered changing guidance on the issue. Immigration advocates fear that the current appeals court proceeding, which groups together several similar cases including Mendoza-Rivera’s, could become hugely influential across the legal system — and with much higher stakes now given the present administration’s enforcement focus.

Although the Obama and Biden administrations took similar positions to the Trump administration on this point, in general they didn’t pursue deportations as aggressively. “There was some discretion being exercised,” said David Zimmer, Mendoza-Rivera’s appellate attorney. “So it was at least possible, in a given case, that they might have decided not to pursue removal if the parent hadn’t done anything meaningfully wrong.” That’s no longer the case in a regime that is seeking any reason to expel an immigrant, Zimmer said.

This case could be heard by the full 9th Circuit next and then head to the U.S. Supreme Court, if the justices choose to take it up. Much of the debate rests on the question of whether it matters if immigrant parents meant to harm their children, given that intention is part of the definition of most crimes. If the parent both didn’t harm and wasn’t aware they might harm their child, advocates argue, it shouldn’t qualify as a “crime” worthy of deportation.

The Oregon misdemeanor negligence statute under which Mendoza-Rivera was convicted doesn’t require proving any intent to harm a child, any actual harm to a child or even exposure of a child to any harm, acknowledged Justice Department lawyer Imran Zaidi at a 9th Circuit hearing in January. But negligence is still a “culpable mental state” deserving of deportation, he said, because it is “incompatible with a proper regard for consequences.”

Jed Rakoff, a New York federal district judge serving as a visiting member of the 9th Circuit panel, responded that he’s been hearing this argument since “my first year of torts class.” Negligence, he said, is by definition unconscious; otherwise it would be “recklessness,” which is a different, more serious act involving consciously disregarding potential harm. In the context of these family court cases, it is often just conduct that’s a small deviation from some middle-class “reasonable person’s” — a neighbor’s, a caseworker’s — subjective opinion of what “good” parenting looks like.

“I’m talking about the term ‘crime’: What did Congress mean by that single word?” Rakoff said, referring to the 1996 law’s description of a “crime” of “child abuse, child neglect, or child abandonment.” Lawmakers clearly meant something more serious than briefly leaving kids unattended, Rakoff continued. After all, the consequence they were prescribing — deportation — was so much more severe than any other possible consequence for any similar misdemeanor.

Zaidi, the Justice Department lawyer, responded that if many state laws say that something is a crime of child neglect, then it is a crime of child neglect, and Congress said that a crime of child neglect is deportable. The two judges other than Rakoff seemed more open to this argument.

The fundamental question that the appeals court is considering, then, is whether these essentially harmless parental “crimes” alleged by increasingly hands-on local child welfare authorities are the same category of crime that the U.S. Congress was talking about when it passed a law on immigrants committing violent crime, domestic violence and terrorism.

Josh Gupta-Kagan, founder and director of the Columbia Law School Family Defense Clinic, said that it appears Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez “were not a safety threat to their children, let alone to anyone else,” even if they showed bad judgment by leaving toddlers alone for a half hour. So it is “fair to question,” he said, how pursuing either of their deportations serves the Trump administration’s “stated interest in public safety.”

McMinnville, Oregon, where Mendoza-Rivera and Ortega-Vasquez bought those pajamas at Walmart, is where they’ve lived for nearly a quarter century and where they had their two children, who are now teenagers. It’s also where Mendoza-Rivera spent all those years picking and packaging produce.

But he has now been locked up for months in a detention center in Tacoma, Washington, and his family has in turn lost much of its income. His kids are without him. And if the Trump administration gets to use a law against him that was intended to protect children, they will lose their dad to a foreign country for good.

The post Trump’s Latest Deportation Tactic: Targeting Immigrants With Minor Family Court Cases appeared first on ProPublica.

Following a ProPublica article revealing that the U.S. Forest Service had for years issued clothing to wildland firefighters that it knew contained potentially dangerous “forever chemicals,” the agency has stopped distributing those garments. It also says that it will instruct its equipment manufacturers to avoid using PFAS in the future.

This month, ProPublica reported that until at least 2023 one of the Forest Service’s suppliers, TenCate, used finishing products made with a PFAS compound on a Kevlar-blend pant fabric. According to emails from the supplier, the finishes were used to repel gasoline and water. Despite knowing about the use of PFAS, officials with the Forest Service had not previously informed wildland firefighters about it.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, have long been used in protective gear to repel substances like fuels. But many municipal fire departments have moved away from the chemicals as researchers revealed more about health risks associated with them. Firefighters in multiple states have filed class-action lawsuits against manufacturers alleging they were harmed by PFAS in the gear they wore. Research specific to wildland firefighters has lagged, and wildland firefighting agencies have been slower to publicly address the issue.

On Feb. 11, one day after ProPublica published its article, a Forest Service cache manager — an official who oversees a gear repository — wrote in an email that he asked colleagues to distribute widely, “I received notice from the Washington Office Cache Management staff late last night that we are to place a hold on issuing” the pants. But the agency didn’t immediately clarify further. A wildland firefighter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their employment said last week that incident management teams had been asking the agency for advice about the pants. “As of right now, our logistics folks haven’t gotten any guidance at all from higher-ups,” the firefighter said.

On Friday, the Forest Service issued a statement to ProPublica: “PFAS in protective gear is a complex, industry-wide issue and any suggestion that the agency has sought to obscure information does not reflect the extensive work to expand testing and improve long-term occupational health protections for firefighters. Firefighter pants manufactured with PFAS water repellent fabric treatments have been removed from available stock in the National Interagency Support Caches.”

TenCate has not responded to repeated inquiries, but in an email reviewed by ProPublica, it told the Forest Service that a PFAS-free finish was available in January 2023. On Friday, the Forest Service sent an email to its staff saying that its supplier had switched to a PFAS-free finish that year. In the same email, the Forest Service wrote that anyone with the older pants “should discontinue use and replace” them. The agency also said that it was updating its requirements “to specify that fabric treatments and fabrics will not contain PFAS.”

Read More

Firefighters Wore Gear Containing “Forever Chemicals.” The Forest Service Knew and Stayed Silent for Years.

Fire departments typically adhere to safety standards set by the National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit that gathers input from expert committees including firefighters and representatives from companies that supply them with equipment. While the association is not a certifying body, its standards are used by government agencies including the Forest Service. Last year, an NFPA technical committee updated its standards for municipal firefighters to restrict levels of certain PFAS chemicals in protective gear. But the organization has not yet made a parallel update to its standard for wildland firefighters. 

Rick Swan, an NFPA committee member, said the lag reflects a long and deliberative process for developing standards, but he added that a restriction on PFAS chemicals in wildland gear is all but inevitable. “I think it’s a no-brainer,” Swan said. In an email, a spokesperson for the NFPA wrote that the committee overseeing the wildland firefighting standard “will likely consider this issue again.”

Experts can’t say for certain what risks PFAS in gear pose to the health of wildland firefighters and agree more research is needed. Jeff Burgess, a professor and researcher at the University of Arizona who is leading a series of long-term studies of firefighter health, said smoke inhalation and the accumulation of soot on gear are primary ways wildland firefighters encounter carcinogens. Understanding of wildland firefighters’ exposures to PFAS has lagged behind understanding of exposure in municipal fire departments. Historically, researchers have had less access to wildland crews, and in recent years they have focused on studying risks related to smoke.

The post U.S. Forest Service Stops Issuing Firefighter Pants That Contain PFAS, Following ProPublica’s Reporting appeared first on ProPublica.

Lisa Rae Moss — serving a life sentence for her involvement in the 1990 murder of her husband, Mike Moss — sat in the witness box in a courtroom in Seminole, Oklahoma, on a frigid January morning in 2025, her hands knotted in her lap. Moss, who is 60, was asked to recount what she endured in her 20s, during her marriage to a volatile man a dozen years her senior. Her long silver hair and prison-issued glasses accentuated the years between her and the younger self she was describing.

“Did Mike ever use a gun on you in the bedroom?” her lawyer, Colleen McCarty, asked.

“He had a gun that usually lay on top of the chest of drawers at night,” Moss said quietly. She explained that her husband would place it there before they went to bed.

“There were a number of occasions where he took the gun — and I wasn’t in the mood to have sex and I didn’t want to have sex — and he would move the gun up and down my inner thigh and then lay it on the pillow next to the bed.” She stopped to correct herself: “Next to my head, I’m sorry.”

Under her lawyer’s questioning, Moss described a pattern of abuse that began six months after their wedding, when her husband grabbed her by the throat and threw her against the fireplace. She recalled how, during an argument, he tried to shove a tennis ball into her mouth. How she was knocked unconscious when he once slammed her head against their refrigerator so hard that it left a dent. How he repeatedly punched her in the stomach when she was pregnant with their son. How he raped her multiple times, once with a curling iron — an assault that caused lasting injuries. “I bled every day for five years until I finally had a hysterectomy,” she said. When her 4-year-old daughter from a previous marriage complained that Mike had done something to make her bottom hurt, Moss feared he was sexually abusing her little girl, too.

“Were you afraid for your life?” McCarty said.

Moss nodded. “Absolutely.”

Her testimony put her at the center of an extraordinary legal experiment unfolding in Oklahoma, where a new state law, the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act, passed in 2024, offers prisoners like her a chance at freedom. Under the law, a domestic-violence victim who is serving time can petition for a reduced sentence, which the law mandates if a judge decides that the abuse she endured was a “substantial contributing factor” to her crime.

Moss was the first to get her day in court and test whether the law could deliver on its promise. Unlike most other defendants in cases the statute was intended to remedy, Moss did not carry out the violence herself. She was not present when her older brother, Richard Wright, shot her husband. But at her 1990 trial, prosecutors argued that she had solicited and helped orchestrate the killing, introducing testimony that she once asked an acquaintance to “get rid of” her husband in exchange for an initial payment of $500. She was convicted of first-degree murder and lesser charges and was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. (Her brother is currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.)

The question before the court that morning in Seminole was not one of guilt or innocence; it was whether Moss’ punishment failed to account for the role that years of physical and sexual abuse played in her crime. McCarty called Margaret Black, a licensed counselor specializing in domestic violence, to the stand. Black, who had evaluated Moss, explained that each time Moss tried to leave her husband, the violence escalated. Black described a lethality assessment she had conducted to measure the risk Moss faced of being killed or seriously injured. “Eighteen and above is what’s called extreme danger,” Black said. In Moss’ case, her review of the evidence led her to assign a score of 24. “This was a very, very dangerous situation for Lisa and her children.”

That afternoon, District Judge C. Steven Kessinger announced that he had reached a decision. “The court finds that the defendant has provided clear and convincing evidence that she was a survivor of domestic violence, having endured physical, sexual and psychological abuse,” he told the crowded courtroom. “The court further finds that such violence and abuse was a substantial contributing factor in causing the defendant to commit the offenses for which she is presently incarcerated.” Under the statute, this finding made her eligible for a sentence of 30 years or fewer — and because she had already served more than that, the judge ordered her to be freed that day.

The exultation that broke out inside the courtroom as Moss embraced her grown daughter, who was 5 when Moss was incarcerated, soon reached Mabel Bassett Correctional Center. The prison, a low sprawl of concrete and razor wire that sits on the outskirts of the small town McLoud, was where Moss had spent virtually all her adult life. One of Moss’ oldest friends there, April Wilkens, was bent over the tablet that connected her with the outside world when she received a text message with the news of the judge’s ruling. She leaped off her bunk and ran out of her cell, shouting, “Lisa’s going home!”

The prison’s day room erupted at the news of Moss’ release. The outpouring of joy was about more than one woman’s walking free. Moss’ lawyer, McCarty, had identified dozens of other prisoners at Mabel Bassett, including Wilkens, who she believed would qualify for relief under the new law, and the hearing suggested they had reason to hope. “The feeling was electric — pure elation,” Wilkens told me. “Our survivor exodus had begun.”

When Wilkens returned to her tablet, she saw a text from McCarty: “You’re next!”

Wilkens first met McCarty when the lawyer came to visit her at Mabel Bassett, Oklahoma’s largest women’s prison, in the summer of 2022. Wilkens was serving a life sentence for shooting and killing her ex-fiancé after years of abuse and stalking and indifference from the police. She had already spent 24 years behind bars. McCarty had just founded the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, and in Wilkens’ case, she saw an opportunity to compel the justice system to do what it rarely did: revisit harsh punishments that the criminal-justice system had long treated as final.

For years, only a handful of states had tried to grapple with cases like Moss’ and Wilkens’, and even then, survivors faced steep barriers to having their sentences reconsidered. That began to change in 2019, when New York passed a law empowering judges to reduce sentences when they found that abuse had been a “significant contributing factor” to a defendant’s crime.

Accompanying McCarty that day was Leslie Briggs, another lawyer who would later become the center’s legal director. Briggs had learned of Wilkens’ case from Wilkens’ niece, who had collected boxes and boxes of records related to her aunt’s conviction. The two lawyers had reviewed the transcripts of the long-forgotten case and saw Wilkens’ prosecution as a stark example of a justice system that often fails to stop abusers but proves swift to punish those who fight back.

The case had particular resonance for McCarty. One of her earliest memories was of her teenage sister sitting at the kitchen table one morning with a bruised eye and split lip, having been thrown down a flight of stairs by a boyfriend. McCarty’s mother had escaped an abusive relationship only to be victimized again by a different partner before McCarty graduated from high school.

The lawyers wanted to pass legislation modeled on New York’s law, the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act. They thought that calling attention to Wilkens’ case, in which the abuse was both extensive and thoroughly documented, might be the way to do it. But first McCarty needed a sense of how many women were imprisoned at Mabel Bassett for crimes tied to their own abuse — a phenomenon that sentencing-reform advocates call criminalized survivorship.

Though there was no system to identify these women within the prison, Wilkens came up with a solution: She wrote an informal questionnaire aimed at survivors of domestic violence. A friend of hers inside the penitentiary managed to type up and print hundreds of copies, and that September, Wilkens and her contacts in other parts of the prison began circulating them. (“It certainly helps to have friends in low places,” Wilkens told me.) The questionnaire asked each respondent to provide the length of her sentence, the county of her conviction and an account of her crime, and to mail the responses to Appleseed’s office in Tulsa.

One hundred and fifty-six questionnaires arrived over the course of several weeks in the fall of 2022. Each envelope held a harrowing narrative, some in polite, looping script, some in block letters. The respondents were Black and white, Native American and Hispanic, young and old, from big cities and small towns. “I kept begging for a divorce, and he’d threaten to kill my children.” “His wife before me had her nose broken twice.” “Whenever I didn’t want to have sex with him, he would twist my wrists as far as he could until I gave in to him.” Another woman recounted the feeling of liberation she felt behind bars, where her partner could no longer hurt her: “I was in a very abusive, sick relationship,” she wrote. “I am FREE now.” A few were vague about their crimes. Others were blunt: “One night just snapped, shot & killed husband.”

Oklahoma consistently ranks among the states with the highest rates of domestic violence; it also has one of the highest rates of female imprisonment. McCarty believed the two were connected, and the surveys seemed to bear that out. Some respondents claimed to have participated in robberies or other crimes under the threat of violence from their abusers. More had been convicted under Oklahoma’s “failure to protect” law, punished for not doing enough to shield their children from the brutality of their partners, often while enduring that violence themselves. But the women serving the longest sentences were typically those who had struck back at their abusers. McCarty began talking to lawmakers about these findings, and in 2023, an early version of a domestic violence survivors’ bill was introduced.

Nothing might seem to have longer odds in deep-red Oklahoma than an effort to lessen punishments for violent crimes, but overcrowded prisons and rising costs were already forcing a rethinking of harsh, decades-old sentencing laws. In 2016, voters approved a landmark ballot initiative reducing penalties for certain low-level drug and property crimes; three years later, lawmakers made those changes retroactive, leading to one of the largest single-day prisoner releases in American history.

McCarty hoped to build on that momentum. Wilkens advocated for the bill from prison, writing an opinion piece in The Oklahoman and telling her story on a local TV-news program, and she became the focus of a social media campaign, #FreeAprilWilkens.

Not everyone in Oklahoma supported the proposed law for domestic-abuse survivors. Prosecutors warned that the statute encouraged exaggerated or bad-faith claims that would be difficult to disprove years after the fact. The law, they argued, opened a Pandora’s box — one in which potentially anyone who had suffered violence could seek a lesser punishment.

Arguing that the bill took too broad a view of who should be eligible for resentencing, the Tulsa County district attorney, Steve Kunzweiler, wrote in a 2024 email to a lawmaker that the legislation “presents a risk to public safety.” He went on to cite an infamous case, which he had prosecuted, to make his point: “The Bever brothers, who slaughtered their family in Broken Arrow, would be eligible for sentence modification under this bill in its present form.”

The case, from 2015, fell well outside the law’s scope. Robert and Michael Bever had killed their parents, who a surviving sister testified were not physically abusive, and three younger siblings. The proposed legislation required that any claims of abuse be corroborated with some kind of documentary evidence — evidence that case did not have.

Kunzweiler had given voice to a broader concern among prosecutors: that undeserving and dangerous defendants could exploit the law to seek reduced sentences. Pushback from elected district attorneys led to changes in the bill; cases involving death sentences were excluded. It would take two legislative sessions and a sustained effort by a bipartisan coalition to pass a version lawmakers could agree on. The Oklahoma Survivors’ Act was signed into law in May 2024.

But its passage did not quiet criticism from the state’s district attorneys. They would play a central role in how the law was applied, because they had the authority to oppose any applications they believed were unfounded. Prosecutors could challenge a survivor’s account of abuse or argue that it played no meaningful role in the crime. A judge would make the final determination, but the law’s promise of sentence reduction would depend, in part, on the discretion of prosecutors.

New York’s Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act offered a glimpse of the challenges that lay ahead in Oklahoma. The act had produced sharply different results from county to county. In a 2025 article for The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Alexandra Harrington, a law professor at the University at Buffalo, found that whether a defendant had her sentence reduced or not largely depended on the local district attorney.

When prosecutors supported an application for resentencing, judges frequently granted relief. When prosecutors opposed an application, only a fraction succeeded. Opposition from district attorneys was most common when the crime was seen as too egregious; or when the defendant had a criminal history or a substance abuse problem, or was perceived as aggressive or otherwise viewed as unsympathetic; or when the applicant had previously received a plea deal in the case. “In some jurisdictions, the D.A.’s office has served almost entirely to obstruct the path to relief,” Harrington wrote.

McCarty was clear-eyed when we first spoke last spring about the challenges ahead. Many of the resentencing cases she was working on — including Wilkens’ — were in Tulsa, where Kunzweiler was the top prosecutor, and they had very different visions of what justice looked like. McCarty, animated and intense, with large brown eyes that widened as she talked, spoke passionately about the possibility of second chances for those the system had failed. Kunzweiler, a phlegmatic, gray-haired career prosecutor a generation older, prized the finality of a jury verdict — and the punishment that went with it. Signaling just how seriously he took Wilkens’ request for resentencing, he had chosen to represent the state along with one of his best prosecutors, and he had repeatedly asked for more time to prepare. After numerous delays, there was still no hearing set, and McCarty was growing impatient. “We wrote this law with April in mind,” she said.

Wilkens had filed her application for resentencing on Aug. 29, 2024 — the day the law took effect — and she had expected to lead the way. But Moss was the first to receive a hearing, and in the wake of her release, four other women at Mabel Bassett were given court dates, the first of which was in July 2025. Wilkens would have to wait.

Wilkens grew up in the 1970s and early ’80s in Kellyville, a no-stoplight town, where her father’s moodiness and brute discipline dominated the household. Wilkens says he whipped her with a belt or switch for minor infractions and once punched her square in the mouth. Wilkens cultivated a sunny, high-energy persona: cheerleader, honor student, the kind of girl untouched by turmoil. She propelled herself out of Kellyville by excelling academically, graduating from high school two years early. She attended Oklahoma State University and completed a graduate program in prosthetics at Northwestern University’s medical school in Chicago.

An early marriage to her college sweetheart produced a little boy, Hunter, but ended after four years. In 1995, when she was 25, she was newly divorced, running her own prosthetics business in Tulsa and ready for a new chapter. She began dating again. Tall and willowy, with long chestnut hair and a bright smile, she drew attention.

That fall, she met Terry Carlton, who was 12 years older and the son of a prominent auto dealer. Handsome and magnetic, with an impulsive streak, he flew them first class to Dallas and hired a chauffeured limousine for their first date. He proposed two months later, on Christmas Eve, when he slipped a $25,000 engagement ring onto her finger. She did not yet know that he had both a drug problem and a history of violence with women. Two of his previous romantic partners had gone to the police to report abuse; one of them, citing repeated chokings and “severe emotional trauma,” secured a protective order against him.

Four months into Wilkens’ engagement to Carlton, he grabbed her by the throat during an argument. Afterward, he swore to her that he would never hurt her again. But over the next two years, during their on-again-off-again relationship, Wilkens called 911 at least 10 times to plead for help. She was granted three emergency protective orders and sought medical attention for injuries sustained during a rape and multiple beatings.

Police reports, medical records and trial testimony document what Wilkens endured — sometimes in full view of witnesses. A neighbor once watched as Carlton chased her down the driveway, grabbed her by the hair and dragged her, screaming, back toward her house. The same neighbor also saw him, on another occasion, pounding on Wilkens’ back door with what looked like a metal pipe. A doctor who lived across the street from Carlton discovered Wilkens in her car, bleeding, after Carlton smashed her driver-side window and grabbed her keys so she couldn’t leave.

Yet Carlton — whose family wielded influence in Tulsa — seemed untouchable. “When the police were called, his timing was impeccable,” a neighbor, Glenda McCarley, testified at Wilkens’ 1999 trial. “He could be in his car and gone just as they rounded the corner.” Officers responded but rarely intervened. Their attitude toward Wilkens was typified by one officer whom McCarley remembered as “put out, impatient, in a hurry.”

Carlton, whose sports car was often seen idling outside Wilkens’ house at odd hours of the night, was arrested only once, after the police found him at her home in February  1998, with a loaded 9-millimeter pistol and a stun gun. He faced no meaningful consequences: Rather than pursue assault or stalking charges — both felonies — the authorities cited him for a misdemeanor weapons violation. When he skipped his court date, a warrant was issued for his arrest, but the Tulsa police never enforced it.

His relentless harassment left Wilkens in a fragile state of mind; twice that spring, she was involuntarily committed to psychiatric hospitals. Her unraveling was further accelerated by a growing dependence on drugs. She would later testify that Carlton had introduced her first to cocaine, then to meth, taken intravenously. As his erratic behavior intensified, so did her drug abuse. By the time she appeared on his doorstep at around 3 a.m. on April 28 — on the day that she killed him — she was a shadow of the vibrant young woman she was when they first met.

In less than three years, she had lost everything: her business, which went under as her focus drifted; her family and friends, from whom Carlton kept her isolated; and her son, now in her ex-husband’s sole custody. She would later testify that she went to Carlton’s house in the middle of the night with a singular, desperate purpose: to beg him to leave her alone for good. Facing him directly, she would later say, seemed like the only way she could reclaim some measure of control. But the encounter quickly turned violent. She said that after she refused to have sex with him, he raped her and threatened to kill her. Eventually, she managed to grab his .22 handgun, and when he came toward her, enraged, she fired. She kept firing — eight shots in all.

After undergoing questioning and a sexual-assault exam that documented vaginal tearing, Wilkens was jailed and charged with first-degree murder.

“When in trouble, cry rape,” District Attorney Tim Harris said in closing arguments at her 1999 trial, in which prosecutors cast her as a manipulative, mentally unstable, meth-crazed fabulist who went to Carlton’s home looking for drugs and revenge. Though Wilkens’ attorney argued that she acted in self-defense because she feared for her life, Harris suggested that she and Carlton had a mutually destructive relationship, in which Wilkens — who weighed 107 pounds at the time of the murder — met Carlton’s abuse with her own aggression.

“There is no doubt he physically abused her,” Harris told the jury. “But is there not some doubt that she also abused him? He abused her, she abused him, I file a protective order, I cry rape, now I’m back, let’s get high, I hate you, I love you, you owe me money. Man, what a dysfunctional life.” Harris blamed her for resorting to violence: “If April Wilkens had really been serious about her fear of Terry Carlton, she could have allowed the system to come to her aid.” Wilkens was found guilty and sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.

Harris was succeeded 16 years later, in 2015, by Kunzweiler, who had been one of his top lieutenants. As district attorney, Kunzweiler took the same hard line on Wilkens’ case, repeatedly opposing her bids for parole. In 2022, the district attorney’s office stated in a letter to the parole board that her sentence reflected the gravity of her crime and that she should remain in prison. “She presents a risk to the safety of the public,” the letter read.

Wilkens was denied parole once again. McCarty emphasized this to lawmakers when she fought for passage of the Survivors’ Act; without a new law, Wilkens faced the prospect of remaining locked up for the rest of her life.

In June, after nearly a year of delays, a Tulsa judge scheduled Wilkens’ resentencing hearing for September. She, and the three other women who would have their hearings first, were part of the loose-knit group at Mabel Bassett that Wilkens called the “survivor sisterhood.”

Erica Harrison, the unofficial den mother to the young women in her housing unit, was serving a 20-year sentence for having shot and killed a family friend after he raped her in 2013. Norma Jane Lumpkin, whose long hair hung past her waist, was four decades into a life sentence for her role in the 1981 bludgeoning death of her husband. Tyesha Long, who is 27 — the youngest of the group and a former rodeo competitor in barrel racing — had a 27-year sentence for shooting her abusive on-again-off-again boyfriend to death in 2020. “Jane and I have both been locked up longer than Tyesha has been alive,” Wilkens told me.

Aside from minor driving infractions, none of the women had been in trouble with the law before their arrests, and Wilkens saw their crimes, like hers, as aberrations, acts she believed were inseparable from the abuse each woman had endured. Before they were led out of Mabel Bassett in handcuffs and leg irons, to face their resentencing hearings in the county courts where they were convicted, Wilkens tried to prepare them. She quoted her favorite passage from Ecclesiastes, reminding them that there is power in numbers. She urged them to listen carefully to each question when they were on the stand and to take a breath before responding. And she advised them on how to prepare for their processing photos. Don’t grimace, she told them. Your mug shot is going to be all over the local news.

Moss, the only woman who had been freed under the Survivors’ Act, attended the hearings that summer. She deliberately positioned herself where she could be seen by whichever woman from Mabel Bassett was sitting at the defense table, and she met the defendant’s gaze, offering reassurance that she was there and that she remembered exactly what this moment felt like. She made a point of looking her best, knowing that she embodied the promise of the freedom that might lie ahead. Wearing bright colors and simple but elegant jewelry, she looked polished, with her hair blown out, her nails lacquered, her lipstick fresh. After 35 years behind bars, she was not going to keep her head down. “Freedom looks good on her,” Wilkens later told me.

But it soon became clear that not everyone’s resentencing hearing would unfold the way Moss’ did in Seminole, under a different district attorney. Harrison, the first in the sisterhood to go before a judge that summer, testified in a Tulsa court in July. “I was going through a terrible divorce,” Harrison said, recalling a period when she was on her own with three children and a totaled car. “I had just left the domestic-violence shelter and moved into a little, small, no-name apartment.” Harrison had a drink with a family friend, Calvin Anderson, and passed out. She woke to find him on top of her, and after he sodomized her, she managed to fight him off. In the hours that followed, he loitered around her apartment complex, and when her eventual calls to 911 did not bring a timely response, she shot him in the parking lot.

Prosecutors challenged her account, emphasizing that elements of her story had changed since she was first questioned by the police in 2013; they capitalized on the fact that she did not call 911 right after the assault, suggesting the danger she claimed to feel afterward was invented. “At what point did he magically become a threat?” Assistant District Attorney Meghan Hilborn asked. The judge in Harrison’s case said she would hand down a ruling later that summer.

The oldest of the group, Lumpkin, appeared in court the following week. Her crime — committed with a neighbor who was also charged in connection with the killing — had been particularly gruesome. Her husband was beaten to death, his body later found in the trunk of her car. Yet it did not seem inconceivable that she might be granted some measure of leniency, because she was 75 and had been incarcerated for the past 44 years. But as Lumpkin sat at the defense table, the victim’s family delivered searing statements that undercut her long-standing claims of abuse, portraying her instead as a calculating, coldblooded killer. Lumpkin’s daughter, Alisha Keeney, who was 12 when her father was bludgeoned to death, told the court her mother had not served enough time for the brutal slaying. “That’s the only resentencing she deserves, is jail forever,” Keeney said.

Again, no immediate ruling came down from the bench. Eleven days later, Tyesha Long settled into the witness box in an Oklahoma City courtroom and recounted how a local businessman named Ray Brown began pursuing her when she was 17. Brown, who was in his early 50s, had been the subject of protective orders obtained by multiple women. The first time he was violent with her, she testified, he sucker-punched her in the mouth. He went on to stalk her, choke her, threaten her life and push her down a flight of stairs, causing her to have a miscarriage, she said. After he chased her in his car and rammed her vehicle, she received a protective order against him. But their relationship never completely ended. During one heated argument, she said, he reached for her throat — and Long, who said Brown had strangled her before, thought she was going to die. “I pulled out my gun and I shot him,” she testified.

The problem Long faced at her trial, when she argued that she acted in self-defense, was that she shot Brown in the back. This was at odds with how she remembered it, with Brown advancing toward her. Experts on domestic violence say that cases in which survivors kill their abusers often look different from typical self-defense cases, which hinge on an obvious, imminent danger, like a drawn weapon. For a survivor who has been repeatedly and continuously terrorized, the perception of being in mortal danger does not come into focus in a single, dramatic moment. She may be moved to fight back not when being attacked but in the lull between violent episodes, when the abuser is momentarily disengaged. To a jury, it may be hard to see the imminent threat in such a scenario — as when Brown turned and walked away from Long.

That gap, between how the law traditionally understands self-defense and how domestic-violence victims experience danger, is one the Survivors’ Act sought to address. Violence within intimate relationships is understood to be part of what researchers call “coercive control”: a sustained pattern of domination enforced through intimidation, threats, surveillance and social isolation. Research has shown that living under such conditions can alter threat perception and decision-making, narrowing a survivor’s perceived options when danger feels imminent. To a victim who has learned that such a moment of calm could be the prelude to the next round of violence, it may feel like her last opportunity to act before she is assaulted again.

Long had another challenge, which was that her descriptions of Brown’s abuse had varied over her police interview, her trial and now the hearing. Trauma “impacts the way our brain stores memory,” the defense’s expert witness Angela Beatty, a social worker and vice president at YWCA Oklahoma City whose work focuses on survivors of domestic violence, explained at the hearing. Such experiences, Beatty said, can fracture memory, leaving recollections fragmented rather than organized and chronological.

But Assistant District Attorney Madeline Coffey seized on those inconsistencies to argue that Long wasn’t credible. Long seemed to fold in on herself, her shoulders drawn tight and her voice barely audible, as Coffey dissected each claim: How many times, exactly, was Long strangled to the point of unconsciousness? Wasn’t the sex sometimes consensual? What was the precise number of punches Brown dealt her? “Is that testimony at trial — that he only punched you one time — different than your testimony today, that he punched you probably two times?” Coffey pressed. Again, there was no ruling from the bench, but the mood among Long’s supporters was grim. She had remained on the stand for nearly five hours.

Word of the grueling cross-examinations quickly got back to Wilkens, who was busy preparing for her upcoming hearing. Prosecutors had warned that these hearings could retraumatize victims’ families, but she could see that the hearings had also traumatized the defendants themselves. Testifying at her own trial had been an excruciating exercise, Wilkens told me, not only because describing the abuse meant reliving it. Her cross-examination — with its rapid-fire accusations, caustic tone and presumption of dishonesty — had felt eerily familiar after years of verbal abuse. It had also proved to be an impossible test. “I would challenge anyone to sit on the stand and just be berated and asked the same question 20 different times in 20 different ways,” she said. “On top of that, you’ve got an audience. It’s very public. Your whole life is laid bare for everyone to see.”

Every seat in the courtroom was taken when Wilkens’ resentencing hearing got underway in Tulsa one morning in September. Members of her family sat shoulder to shoulder with women Wilkens once served time with. Next to a group of law students who had come to observe the proceedings was Wilkens’ niece, Amanda Ross, who years earlier had first brought her aunt’s case to McCarty’s attention.

Ross, who was 7 when Wilkens was arrested, had corresponded with her aunt since elementary school. Growing up, she knew only the vague outlines of Wilkens’ case; the crime had never squared with the woman she knew. After college, Ross became a librarian and put her skills to work, trying to understand, as she traced her aunt’s odyssey through the courts, how Wilkens ended up with a life sentence. By the time of the hearing, Ross had spent nearly a decade trying to chase down every relevant document and public record. Having long since run out of space to store her growing archive, she stashed boxes of legal papers in the trunk of her Toyota Corolla.

Wilkens sat at the defense table, taking in the room; she wore no makeup, and her hair, streaked with gray, hung loose past her shoulders. She had been warned by a sheriff’s deputy not to speak to anyone, but when she spotted Lisa Rae Moss sitting in the gallery, she caught Moss’ eye and smiled.

Kunzweiler was representing the state that day alongside Meghan Hilborn, the assistant district attorney who had conducted the bruising cross-examination of Erica Harrison in July. The judge in that case announced five days earlier that she was denying Harrison relief. Though Lumpkin and Long were still awaiting rulings, there was little reason to believe they would fare differently.

In Kunzweiler’s brief opening statement, he made clear that he saw no reason for a renewed debate over Wilkens’ punishment. “Twelve men and women sat in a courtroom very much like this,” Kunzweiler said. “They saw all the evidence.” It was a pointed reminder that a jury had already weighed much of what the court was now being asked to reconsider. Invoking her “extreme methamphetamine use,” he emphasized that Wilkens sought out Terry Carlton on the morning she shot him, arriving at his house unannounced. Kunzweiler gestured toward the defense table, where Wilkens sat in a striped orange jail jumpsuit, her handcuffs padlocked to a heavy chain at her waist, her ankles shackled together in leg irons. “She sits here as a convicted murderer,” Kunzweiler said.

Despite Kunzweiler’s initial comments to the court, there was a piece of evidence that jurors at her 1999 trial had not been given to consider — a tape recording Wilkens made of a phone call between her and Carlton, in which he angrily admitted to raping, beating and choking her, while blaming her for provoking him. Now, at the hearing, it was entered into the record when the defense called a federal judge, Judge Claire Eagan of the Northern District of Oklahoma, to the stand.

Eagan had an unexpected personal connection to the case; as a lawyer in private practice in 1996, she helped Wilkens obtain an emergency protective order. She testified that when Wilkens came to her office, she had injuries that included black eyes and bruises on her face and arms. A few days later, Wilkens brought the tape recording with her and played it for Eagan. Wilkens later failed to come to court to extend the protective order, too frightened to see Carlton in person. Because she did not appear, the order was dismissed — a moment Eagan said she still remembered. “Mr. Carlton was there with his attorney,” she said. “He looked at me when it was dismissed and smiled.”

The recording was given to the court — along with police reports, protective orders and medical records — to show that Wilkens was abused by the man she killed. Wilkens, however, would not be taking the stand. After the summer’s punishing cross-examinations of the other women, Wilkens’ lawyers — Colleen McCarty and a veteran of the public defender’s office, Abby Gore — had made the difficult decision, along with Wilkens, that she should not testify. Their appraisal underscored the challenges the Survivors’ Act was encountering in the courtroom. Its most visible and articulate champion in Mabel Bassett would go unheard. The strategic calculation was made to ensure that an aggressive cross-examination did not overshadow the well-documented evidence of abuse at the heart of Wilkens’ case.

The remaining question was whether Carlton’s abuse was a substantial contributing factor, under the statute, when Wilkens killed him — a point the defense sought to establish through Angela Beatty, the social worker who previously testified at Tyesha Long’s hearing. Beatty, who had interviewed Wilkens and reviewed her medical records, said that the “coercive control” exerted by abusers like Carlton can impair survivors’ ability to weigh options and make reasoned decisions, narrowing their focus to survival. “Ms. Wilkens shared that Mr. Carlton did threaten her life that night,” Beatty said, adding that Wilkens believed she was going to die. “He told her he would kill her.”

On cross-examination, Assistant District Attorney Hilborn pressed Beatty. “Can you ever tell if you’re being deceived by a victim?” she asked. “Would you agree that April Wilkens has a good reason to say certain things to you for a sentence modification?” Having cast doubt on Beatty’s objectivity, Hilborn then made the case that Wilkens’ fear may have stemmed from something other than abuse. She returned again and again to Wilkens’ substance use, emphasizing that Wilkens had used meth intravenously. “When you’re talking about her being paranoid that somebody is stalking her, are you able to tell the court that is definitively from domestic violence?” Hilborn asked. “Or can it also be caused by methamphetamine use?”

On the second day of the hearing, the state called its own witness, Jarrod Steffan, a forensic psychologist it had hired. Steffan had evaluated Wilkens and found her to be psychologically well adjusted. But her decades-old medical records, he testified, showed “she was experiencing severe mental-health issues, such as hallucinations and delusions, leading up to Mr. Carlton’s death.” He played down the impact that ongoing physical and sexual abuse may have had on her mental state: “Her actions in Mr. Carlton’s death were not due to domestic violence,” he said. “It was her mental illness and heavy meth use that led to Mr. Carlton’s death.”

A rebuttal witness called by Wilkens’ lawyers, Dr. Reagan Gill, a forensic psychiatrist, questioned Steffan’s methodology, saying that his characterization of Wilkens’ past behavior — which Steffan described in a written report as “nefarious” and “irrational” — had no place in a clinical assessment. “These are not words we use,” Gill said.

Judge David Guten did not wait to hand down a ruling. “There was more than sufficient evidence that there was violence in this relationship,” he said from the bench that afternoon. But he concluded that the defense had failed to meet the second requirement of the Oklahoma Survivor’s Act: to show, “by clear and convincing evidence,” that the abuse substantially contributed to the crime itself. Guten singled out the defense’s witness, Beatty, as too biased to render an impartial assessment, characterizing the social worker’s testimony as advocacy, not an expert opinion. “I could not give her testimony any weight,” he said. Moments later, Guten pronounced the proceedings over: “I am going to deny the request for a sentence modification.”

The morning after the hearing, I met Lisa Rae Moss in a downtown Tulsa coffee shop. Eight months had passed since she walked out of the Seminole County Courthouse. In that time, she had met her grandchildren and relearned how to drive. She had found joy in walking barefoot, and picking out produce at the grocery store, and sitting alone in silence. She had legally changed her name back to her maiden name, Wright.

She was living with Vicki Thorp, a lay pastor who visited her throughout her years in prison, and Thorp’s husband in their spacious home outside Oklahoma City, which afforded her the kind of privacy she never had at Mabel Bassett. Most mornings, she listened to the birds outside her bedroom window, sometimes studying them through a pair of binoculars. Evenings, she went out to the Thorps’ deck to stare up at the stars.

Now Moss looked tired and uncertain. Those small freedoms were shadowed by what had happened to Wilkens. “I feel such, such — guilt,” she said, almost choking on the word. “How can I be sitting here and April has to go back to prison?”

More losses followed. In October, Lumpkin and Long were each denied relief, and in early December, a judge declined to reduce the life sentence of another woman at Mabel Bassett, Kimberley Perigo, who shot and killed her ex-husband in 2001. Perigo, who had taken the stand to recount years of physical and sexual abuse and stalking, was the fifth applicant to be denied since Moss’ release.

The string of denials gave rise to questions inside Mabel Bassett: Had Moss been the only one to walk free in Oklahoma because she wasn’t at the scene of the crime? Was it because her case originated in a county where the district attorney did not try to discredit her accounts of abuse? Or was it simply the luck of having the first hearing at a time when the law was animated by rare bipartisan support? Among advocates for domestic-violence victims, much of their anger was directed at the district attorney’s office, which had spent more than $16,000 on expert witness testimony in Wilkens’ case alone.

Kunzweiler, who is up for reelection this year, made clear to me that he believed he had a duty to rigorously probe applicants’ claims, including through cross-examination. “Aren’t we all trying to get to the truth?” he said. “That’s our obligation: to find the truth and then seek justice.” When I asked what he thought justice looked like in Wilkens’ case, he said that the system had worked as it should; she had been afforded a trial and the opportunity to challenge her conviction through her appeals. The jury’s verdict had been upheld each time, Kunzweiler noted, and when Guten later considered her request for resentencing, he saw no reason to modify her punishment. “She has the right to appeal the finding of this judge,” Kunzweiler said. “But the process is here for a reason.”

McCarty asked Guten to reconsider his decision in the Wilkens case on the grounds that he misinterpreted the Survivors’ Act by relying so heavily on expert testimony. The facts of the case alone should guide him, she argued, and those facts — which included police reports, medical records, protective orders and witness testimony — pointed to only one conclusion.

In late November, Guten denied the motion to reconsider. Wilkens and her lawyers, he stated in a written order, “are requesting this court to accept evidence of abuse while completely discarding all other factors surrounding the homicide.” Guten continued, “This court declines to view the evidence with tunnel vision.” He lauded the jury in Wilkens’ trial, which “appropriately weighed evidence of substance abuse and mental health.” He dismissed the claim “with prejudice,” foreclosing any further reconsideration of it in his court.

McCarty believed institutional resistance had stacked the deck against Wilkens. As evidence, she pointed to text messages of Kunzweiler’s she obtained through a public records request, including one he sent to several state employees after Wilkens’ hearing. “Sorry about just now getting back with you,” it read. “I was busy keeping April Wilkens in prison.” More text messages McCarty uncovered showed that Guten texted the district attorney in September asking if he had seen a letter The Tulsa World had just published, written by one of the jurors at Wilkens’ 1990 trial; the juror claimed Wilkens’ sentence had been fair and her claims of self-defense were “a fabrication.”

To McCarty, the texts reflected just how determined the system’s gatekeepers were to preserve the status quo, despite the new law. On Jan. 29, she announced that she would be running for district attorney, challenging Kunzweiler in the Republican primary.

Wilkens is appealing her case to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, where the court’s review of Guten’s ruling will help determine how judges will apply the Survivors’ Act moving forward. As more states — most recently Georgia — enact survivor-justice laws, it remains to be seen if the criminal-justice system is capable of perceiving someone like Wilkens not just as a perpetrator who must be punished but also as a victim deserving of mercy.

The Oklahoma Court of Appeals will wrestle with what the Survivors’ Act means when it asks judges to evaluate whether domestic abuse was a substantial contributing factor in a crime. That appeal will be led not by McCarty but by a lawyer whom she asked to take the case: Garrard Beeney, at the white-shoe law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, who won the first appellate court ruling under New York’s Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act in 2021.

Appellate courts move slowly, however, and it may be years before the court hands down a ruling. All Wilkens can do in the meantime is wait. After I visited her at Mabel Bassett last summer, she wrote to me about a tree that she planted when she first arrived there. “It was just a scrawny little thing back then, barely waist-high,” Wilkens said. It now towers over her, its branches reaching toward the sky.

The post The Victims Who Fought Back appeared first on ProPublica.

In mid-January, an unassuming man in khakis and a button-down shirt walked to a wooden lectern at a school board meeting in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. Most chairs in the audience were empty. The man, Tim Smith, was the only person signed up to speak during public comments. He had five minutes.

“I trust that each one of you had a good Christmas and New Year’s,” he began. “Unfortunately, I can’t say the same thing.”

His wife is an assistant teacher at a public elementary school in the county, epicenter of the state’s historic measles outbreak, and shortly before winter break she’d received a notice that a child in her classroom had measles. Given his wife is fully vaccinated, he wasn’t worried. 

Then, she began to get sick. And sicker. She got a measles test and, to their shock, it came back positive. She was apparently among the very rare breakthrough infections. 

Frightened, they took her to the hospital that night. “My wife was throwing up,” Smith said at the meeting. “She had diarrhea. She couldn’t breathe. All for what? This is — it’s absolute insanity.” 

Dr. Leigh Bragg, a pediatrician working a county away, wasn’t even aware that anyone in South Carolina had been hospitalized with measles-related illnesses until a short time later when she logged on to Facebook and saw someone relay the distraught husband’s comments. 

Part of the reason Bragg didn’t know is that South Carolina doesn’t require hospitals to report admissions for measles, potentially obscuring the disease’s severity. In the absence of mandatory reporting rules, she and other doctors are often left to rely on rumors, their grapevines of colleagues, and the fragments of information the state public health agency is able to gather and willing to share. 

With 973 reported cases, South Carolina’s measles outbreak has ballooned into the nation’s largest since the virus was declared eliminated in the U.S. 25 years ago. Yet, since state health officials first confirmed the outbreak on Oct. 2, the state’s hospitals have reported only 20 measles-related admissions, or about 2% of cases. Some infectious disease experts say that the true number is likely much higher. 

Hospitalization rates can vary greatly by a measles outbreak’s location and who is getting infected. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates about 20% of measles cases will result in admissions.  

“A hospitalization rate at 2% is ludicrous,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an infectious disease physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who served on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s immunization advisory committee. 

“It’s vast underreporting,” Offit said. “Measles makes you sick.”

Measles is among the most contagious of viruses. In 2026 so far, almost half of states have reported cases. Yet it’s left largely to each state to decide how much infectious disease reporting to require about it. 

“We don’t think we are getting an accurate picture at all of how these illnesses are impacting our community,” Linda Bell, the South Carolina state epidemiologist, said at a briefing last month. “We’re just not getting a picture of that now with the small number of hospitalizations that are known to us.” 

Bell said the state Department of Public Health is urging hospitals to report their measles-related admissions, and seven hospitals have done so. (There are at least a dozen acute care hospitals in the Upstate alone.) But the state cannot force them to do so. Bell also said that the agency, which sets infectious disease reporting requirements, hasn’t considered adding hospitalizations to the list because the primary purpose of public health surveillance is to understand disease transmission, frequency and distribution — not to track complications.

That leaves doctors like Bragg advising patients, including vaccine-resistant parents, without the benefit of confirmed, real-time data about how many South Carolinians have been hospitalized with measles. Severe complications include pneumonia, dehydration and a potentially life-threatening brain swelling called encephalitis.

“It’s a very big disservice to the public not reporting complications we are seeing in hospitals or even ERs,” Bragg said. “Measles isn’t just a cold.”

ProPublica contacted state health agencies across the South and found most do not require hospitals to report measles-related admissions. Alabama does. So does Virginia, although it doesn’t release that data to the public. Like South Carolina, North Carolina and Texas don’t require reporting of hospitalizations, but epidemiologists can identify them during case investigations.

During the Texas measles outbreak last year, 99 people were hospitalized out of 762 cases. 

That’s a rate of about 13%. In South Carolina, the reported rate is 2%.

Real-time hospitalization data can show where to target resources and help hospitals prepare for an influx of patients. “As vaccine rates decrease, it could also really help us understand the changing epidemiology of measles in this current context,” said Gabriel Benavidez, an epidemiology professor at Baylor University in Texas.

When ProPublica asked hospitals across the Upstate, the northwest quadrant of South Carolina where the outbreak is concentrated, if they are reporting their measles-related admissions to the state and how many patients they had treated, few responded. Only Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System shared its total. (As of mid-February, the number was four.) 

A spokesperson for Prisma Health, a Greenville-based nonprofit that owns eight acute-care hospitals in the Upstate, said its hospitals are “reporting everything we are supposed to report.” She wouldn’t say how many measles patients have been hospitalized at Prisma hospitals or how many the system has reported to the state. 

Doctors in the Dark 

Bragg, who is board certified in pediatrics and pediatric infectious disease, works in the region of South Carolina where the outbreak is concentrated. It’s a highly religious expanse with the state’s lowest student vaccination rates. She recently met with a parent questioning the recommended vaccines for a 1-year-old child, which includes a first dose of measles vaccine.  

“We’re in the middle of a measles outbreak,” Bragg thought.

Then she began a 30-minute discussion of the vaccine’s extreme safety and 97% lifetime effectiveness when two doses are given. She explained that 95% of people in South Carolina who have gotten measles were unvaccinated. She rattled off historic risks of measles complications. 

Yet Bragg couldn’t tell the parent just how severely ill their fellow South Carolinians were getting from the outbreak sickening people around them. 

She had heard about pneumonia, ICU admissions — and even a case of encephalitis. But she hadn’t been able to confirm it, or find out if it was a child, much less how the patient fared. (Shortly after, Bell announced that the state health agency had learned of encephalitis cases in children, but she didn’t provide the numbers of patients or their outcomes.) 

As president of the South Carolina chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Dr. Martha Edwards is connected to physicians across the state. “All I’m hearing about are ‘complications of measles,’” which can mean a lot of different things, she said.

Communicating the risks of severe illness is all the more important because few of today’s parents have seen measles up close. Neither have most practicing doctors. 

Early in his career, Dr. William Schaffner, a professor at Vanderbilt University who focuses on the prevention of infectious diseases, worked with the CDC to implement the measles vaccine. When he tells medical students today that in the 1960s, before the measles vaccine, 400 to 500 kids died of measles and its complications each year, “They’re stunned.” 

“If the severity of the illness cannot be ascertained — if it can’t be determined — it can’t be appropriately communicated to the public,” Schaffner said. “And the public might get the false impression that measles is milder than it really is.”

At a briefing, Dr. Robin LaCroix, a Prisma pediatric infectious disease physician, said the organization’s physicians “have seen the whole gamut of acute and post-measles infections that have afflicted these children. They are sick.” Children have become listless and suffered blotchy rashes, coughing and coughing spasms, dehydration and secondary infections including pneumonias.

Measles infections are particularly dangerous for babies who cannot get vaccinated yet and young children who haven’t gotten the second dose. Infections during pregnancy also pose severe risks for mothers who are not vaccinated or immune, including miscarriage and a tenfold increase in death due to pneumonia. Mothers can pass on the virus to their babies, “which can be catastrophic,” said Dr. Kendreia Dickens-Carr, a Prisma OB-GYN.

More than 900 confirmed measles cases have been reported across the country already in 2026, compared with 2,281 in all of 2025. Most of this year’s cases are in South Carolina, but Florida has reported 63 cases and neighboring North Carolina 15, including one hospitalization. 

“We really do need to think about the way in which we report these things, because viruses and bacteria don’t respect state lines,” said Dr. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina. “Public health professionals from one state to another should be comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges.” 

The most advanced pediatric care in the state is provided at the Medical University of South Carolina’s campus in Charleston, several hours away from the Upstate on the coast. So far, its children’s hospital hasn’t admitted any measles patients, doctors said. 

Dr. Danielle Scheurer, the chief quality officer at MUSC, celebrated the state’s low hospitalization rate and said she doubted hospitals would object to required reporting of measles-related admissions if the state health agency were to change its rules. 

“Transparency here is going to help other states,” Scheurer said. “The more transparent we are about all of our statistics, the better off any other state is going to be in preparing.” 

Political Pressures

Across South Carolina, large health care systems have bought up local hospitals and doctors’ practices. With that control, they can exert influence over what those doctors and hospital employees say publicly, especially when it comes to potentially controversial topics like vaccines. At the same time, they face pressure from Republican lawmakers and a growing segment of vaccine-wary patients. 

The result is often highly controlled information sharing, or a lack thereof.

“There’s this level of caution that wasn’t there before,” Edwards said. She understands that hospitals don’t want to offend patients who are dubious of vaccines. Bragg agreed but said given that 93% of the state’s students are vaccinated, she worries the hospitals are “pandering to a small group.”

A pending bill, sponsored by several of Spartanburg County’s state representatives, seeks to prevent hospitals and doctors from questioning or interfering “in any manner” with a patient’s right to refuse treatments or vaccines. During COVID-19, the bill contends, federal agencies collaborated with medical organizations and others “to orchestrate a coordinated and coercive propaganda campaign” to shame people who declined COVID-19 vaccines. Doctors and hospitals argue they must balance public health risks with individuals who decline to take vaccines.

The state’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, and major GOP candidates to replace him have largely framed their responses to the measles outbreak around the concept of medical freedom, particularly when discussing vaccine mandates. 

Andrews, the pediatrician running for the U.S. Senate, said she’s experienced the “chilling effect” the GOP’s “anti-science movements” have had on health care systems and individual physicians. “If you speak up, you are at risk of being censored,” Andrews said. “If you speak up, you are at risk of losing your job. So everyone is just trying to keep their head down and do what’s best for their patients.”

Bragg is among the declining ranks of doctors who run their own independent practices. She has the freedom to post what she wants to on social media and to wear pro-vaccine T-shirts that say things like, “Got polio? Me neither because I got the vaccine.” 

But one recent day, her 10-year-old son asked why she insisted on wearing the T-shirts. “Even a 10-year-old can tell you how polarizing vaccines have become,” Bragg said. Despite that, she has continued to wear them.

The post South Carolina Hospitals Aren’t Required to Disclose Measles-Related Admissions. That Leaves Doctors in the Dark. appeared first on ProPublica.

For years, Wisconsin’s powerful Assembly speaker refused to allow a bipartisan bill to come to a vote that extends postpartum Medicaid coverage for new moms. Finally, this week, he relented.

“Go out and take your victory lap,” Republican Robin Vos told caucus members late Wednesday, according to one lawmaker. 

“You won,” Vos added. 

On Thursday, the Assembly agreed 95-1 to opt in to a federal program that provides free health insurance to low-income mothers for a year after giving birth, up from 60 days. Vos was among those voting yes. 

The legislation, which had already been adopted by the Senate, now goes to Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. He has openly supported such legislation for years and is expected to sign it.

Every other state in the nation, except Arkansas, has already taken the step. 

The vote represented a rare capitulation for Wisconsin’s longest-serving Assembly speaker — a man who controls the legislative agenda, provides campaign cash to those he favors and punishes those who antagonize him. ProPublica wrote about Vos’ opposition to the bill last fall.

The turnaround came on a day of surprises involving Vos. Earlier, at the start of the session, he announced that he would retire at year’s end, revealing that he’d had a slight heart attack in the fall and needed to reduce his stress. “To my leadership team and my caucus colleagues, thank you for your trust, thank you for your candor and your willingness to carry responsibility when it is heavy,” he said. 

Rep. Patrick Snyder, a Republican and the lead sponsor on the postpartum bill, threatened to not pursue reelection if he did not succeed in getting the measure passed — a legislative goal he had promised constituents he would deliver. That would have left an open GOP seat in a swing district. Typically, incumbents have an advantage in elections. 

“I just said if we can’t get this thing passed, I just don’t feel I can come back,” Snyder said he told the speaker. “It was that important of a bill.”

Vos has long opposed extending Medicaid coverage for new moms, explaining that he opposes spending more money on welfare in Wisconsin. The state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau estimated that, once fully phased in, the 12-month policy would cost the state about $9.4 million, with the federal government paying an additional $14.1 million. 

All sides have felt a sense of urgency as the Legislature, controlled by Republicans, intends to wrap up the session soon to hit the campaign trail for the remainder of the year.

On Wednesday, Democrats moved aggressively on the postpartum extension issue, proposing amendments that attached the Medicaid change to bill after bill, creating a bit of legislative havoc as Republicans repeatedly ruled the matter not germane to the legislation under consideration. (Democrats did the same for another stalled bipartisan bill on insurance coverage for breast cancer screenings, a measure that also passed Thursday.) 

Snyder said the Democrats’ tactic nearly derailed GOP efforts to convince Vos to let both bills advance. In a press conference, a dismayed Snyder likened it to someone tripping him as he made a dash for the finish line.

“I guess maybe they just didn’t think I could get it done,” he later told ProPublica. “And now we did.”

In recent weeks, seven other GOP members joined Snyder to push Vos to reconsider his stance. In a letter to Vos dated Feb. 3, the group told the speaker the legislation aligns with core Republican priorities, including safeguarding infants by ensuring they have healthy mothers.

The eight lawmakers are all in competitive districts. This week, despite whatever conflict they had with Vos, they still were careful to pay him homage, with one calling the speaker “a tough negotiator” and another publicly thanking Vos for “his understanding.”

Read More

He Vowed to “Protect the Unborn.” Now He’s Blocking a Bill to Expand Medicaid for Wisconsin’s New Moms.

The legislation was backed by hospitals and medical groups as well as anti-abortion advocates, who favor robust support for pregnant women and new moms. Research has shown that the year after birth can be a dangerous time for women, who can face postpartum depression, blood clots, hypertension, cardiovascular ailments and other long-term health issues.

Kate Duffy, a Wisconsin mom who amplifies political issues on social media under the moniker Motherhood for Good, has fought for the extended postpartum coverage and challenged Vos on the topic for about a year. She’s grown a sizable audience, especially among Wisconsin women, many of whom responded to the call to urge lawmakers to act.

She credited the bill’s passage to “good old-fashioned organizing and relentless persistence.” 

Said Duffy: “We just would not shut up about this.”

The post New Moms in Wisconsin to Get Extension of Vital Benefits After GOP Powerbroker Ends Holdout appeared first on ProPublica.

One of New York’s largest health insurers is set to pay a multimillion-dollar fine for failing to fix a series of errors that made it harder for its customers to get mental health care.

EmblemHealth this week agreed to a $2.5 million settlement with the New York attorney general’s office because of the large number of inaccuracies in its listings of in-network mental health providers, a problem that has persisted for years.

The fine is the biggest secured by the state attorney general’s office in its yearslong quest to clamp down on the chronic problem of provider directory errors, also known as ghost networks. It’s an issue that has led customers to postpone treatment, forgo care and pay for more expensive out-of-network providers. 

The office found that EmblemHealth overstated the availability of in-network mental health providers and failed to comply with state and federal laws requiring that insurers make mental health care as available as other kinds of medical care.

“Health insurers cannot mislead consumers with inaccurate provider directories while families are left without care,” Letitia James, the state’s attorney general, said in a statement.

EmblemHealth did not answer ProPublica’s questions. In a statement, a spokesperson said the insurer does “not admit” to the state attorney general’s findings but agreed to the settlement “to avoid time-consuming litigation.” The spokesperson added that the insurer has “focused on taking immediate steps to further support our members’ access to care.”

ProPublica’s 2024 series “America’s Mental Barrier” examined the ways that ghost networks can limit patients’ access to mental health care. Our reporting showed that the investigation by the state attorney general’s office into the ghost networks was one of the rare instances nationwide where health insurers faced consequences from elected officials. 

Between 2018 and 2024, more than 360 EmblemHealth customers complained to either the insurer, a subcontractor that administered mental health benefits for the insurer or the attorney general’s office about such errors, the settlement said. But EmblemHealth failed to address the issue, the settlement said, even though the insurer had promised to do so as part of a settlement agreement reached in 2011.

A report from the office published in 2023 found that EmblemHealth and another dozen insurers had failed to keep their listings of mental health providers free of extensive errors. The office had contacted a sample of providers — nearly 400 listed in the 13 insurers’ directories — and most of them were “unreachable, not in-network, or not accepting new patients,” according to the report. The report found that 82% of the providers in EmblemHealth’s directory that were called were not available for an appointment. 

This week’s settlement noted that EmblemHealth’s own investigations into the accuracy of its directory listings “have produced results similar to” those found by James’ office.

Read More

They Couldn’t Access Mental Health Care When They Needed It. Now They’re Suing Their Insurer.

The insurer, which covers more than 3 million people in New York and in surrounding states, has now agreed to compensate customers who paid out of pocket for mental health care because they couldn’t secure an appointment with a provider listed as being in-network.

EmblemHealth also has pledged as part of the settlement to take additional steps to fix the errors in its listings. The insurer promised to correct inaccurate listings within two business days of being made aware of an error and to check every 90 days that each listing is accurate. 

The settlement further calls for an independent monitor to oversee EmblemHealth’s progress to ensure that it complies with the settlement’s terms.
EmblemHealth is also the subject of a lawsuit filed in December by employees of the city of New York, who alleged that the errors in the insurer’s directory left them with a “deceptive” and “misleading” impression about the size of the company’s provider network. A spokesperson for EmblemHealth recently told ProPublica that the insurer does not comment on pending litigation.

The post Insurer Agrees to Pay Millions for Failing to Fix Errors That Made It Harder for Customers to Get Mental Health Care appeared first on ProPublica.

For months, President Donald Trump has railed against Latin American narcoterrorists flooding the United States with “lethal poison.” He has used the scourge of drug trafficking as a rationale for dozens of military strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, which have left more than 140 people dead.

Last month, Trump cheered a military assault by U.S. forces that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and brought them to the U.S. to face charges related to cocaine trafficking. Maduro, Trump said, led a “vicious cartel” that “flooded our nation with lethal poison responsible for the deaths of countless Americans.”

But when it comes to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was tried and convicted in the U.S. in 2024 and sentenced to 45 years in prison for taking bribes and allowing traffickers to export more than 400 tons of cocaine to the U.S., Trump has taken a decidedly softer tone.

Hernández, he said, has been “treated very harshly and unfairly” — so unfairly that on Dec. 1, Trump pardoned the former president after he served less than four of those 45 years.

But the federal government’s magnanimity did not end there. On the day he was to be released, records show, Hernández had an immigration detainer — a request for law enforcement agencies to hold noncitizens for pickup by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — in place.  

Here, too, the Trump’s administration’s treatment of Hernández differed from its public objectives. Other noncitizens caught up in recent immigration sweeps — the vast majority of whom do not have criminal records — have faced swift efforts to deport them, even to countries where they may face threats. But in Hernández’s case, the Federal Bureau of Prisons scrambled to get his detainer removed so he could walk free.

And Hernández did not just walk out of the prison. Despite persistent budget and staffing shortages, prison officials paid a specialized tactical team overtime to drive Hernández from a high-security facility in West Virginia to the famed five-star Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City, according to records and three people familiar with the situation. Before he left, Hernández was allowed to use the captain’s government phone to talk to the federal prison system’s deputy director, Joshua Smith, who was convicted in a drug trafficking conspiracy before Trump pardoned him in 2021. 

“The [prisons bureau] administration rolled out the red carpet for him,” said Joe Rojas, a retired prison worker and former union leader who has been speaking to the media on behalf of staff who fear reprisals for doing so since bureau leaders stopped recognizing the union last year. “The staff are disgusted.” 

Renato Stabile, the court-appointed lawyer representing Hernández — who has long maintained his innocence — said his client’s treatment was appropriate. 

“It would be particularly cruel to grant somebody a pardon and have them released from prison — only to have them immediately shipped back to a place like Honduras where they would’ve immediately arrested him or he would’ve been killed on sight by criminal elements that wanted to do him harm,” Stabile told ProPublica. Through his attorney, Hernández declined to comment.

ICE referred all questions to the White House, which responded with a link to a November social media post announcing the President’s intent to pardon Hernández. Smith didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment. A BOP spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the bureau does not discuss conditions of confinement or security procedures and that employee standards of conduct prohibit staff from giving any prisoners preferential treatment. “Violators may be subject to disciplinary actions, including removal from federal service and criminal prosecution,” the statement said. 

The investigation that ultimately ensnared Hernández stretched across several U.S. presidencies. Despite looming legal trouble stateside and widespread allegations of corruption in his country, Hernández — often known by his initials, JOH — was seen as a key U.S. ally under the Obama and first Trump administrations, ostensibly because of his apparent willingness to help tackle drug trafficking and migration issues. 

In 2012, as president of Honduras’ National Congress, he famously pushed through a legal change allowing for the extradition of accused criminals to the U.S. — a reform that his attorney pointed out was ironically later used to extradite him. 

But in 2018, less than halfway through Hernández’s second term as president, the Drug Enforcement Administration arrested his younger brother, former Honduran congressman Tony Hernández, in Miami for a series of weapons and drug trafficking charges. A jury found him guilty the following year at a Manhattan federal trial in which Emil Bove — the federal prosecutor who would later become Trump’s personal defense lawyer — gave a closing argument replete with allegations implicating the Honduran president in criminal schemes. (Bove could not be reached for comment.)

Although the sprawling criminal case focused on narcotrafficking concerns, Juan Orlando Hernández’s political career was fraught in other ways. Dana Frank, a University of California, Santa Cruz history professor who studies Honduras, described him as a “repressive criminal on multiple fronts.”

While in congress in 2012, he led a “technical coup” in overthrowing the supreme court, she said. Then, he ran for reelection to the presidency in 2017 “in complete violation of the constitution,” she said. Amid the resulting protests, security forces shot and killed at least 16 people, including two children, among other human rights abuses, a United Nations report found. Hernández has said little publicly, but his government told the U.N. it would look into those cases. His party has tweeted that it has an “unwavering commitment to democracy and freedom.”

Weeks after Hernández left office in 2022, he was arrested at his home in Honduras and extradited to the U.S. to face drug trafficking and weapons charges. Prosecutors said he funded his political career with millions of dollars he received from “violent drug-trafficking organizations” in exchange for allowing them to “move mountains of cocaine” out of the country.  

Stabile told ProPublica the case against his client was always a weak one, relying heavily on the word of unreliable drug traffickers with outlandish stories and little in the way of hard evidence.

Still, the government’s case was enough to convince a jury to convict Hernández after just over eight hours of deliberations, and in June 2024 he was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison. Afterward, Stabile and his client began working on an appeal, which at that point appeared to be Hernández’s only shot at freedom.

Early last year, prison officials transferred Hernández out of the federal detention center in Brooklyn, which largely holds pretrial detainees, and sent him to the high-security Hazelton penitentiary in West Virginia. Dubbed “Misery Mountain,” the notoriously violent prison is the same facility where mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger was beaten to death in his cell hours after his arrival in 2018.

Yet prison sources said Hernández seemed to do his time quietly, eventually landing in the coveted housing unit set aside for a therapeutic program used to treat drug addiction, mental illness and “criminal thinking errors.” 

But after Trump returned to office last year, a much quicker route to freedom suddenly seemed possible: a pardon.

Like Trump, Hernández was a member of his country’s right-wing party. And, like Trump, he believed he’d been targeted by leftist forces. He also had other reasons to be hopeful. 

During his time in office, Hernández had championed the creation of special economic zones that could set their own taxes and regulations, a move that benefitted the Trump-aligned Silicon Valley titans who invested in them, including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. But the law was repealed by his successor, center-left party Libre member Xiomara Castro, putting plans for the zones in jeopardy. (Andreessen responded to a request for comment with a link to a social media post disavowing any involvement in the pardon. Thiel could not be reached for comment, though he has previously said he was not involved either.)

Longtime political operative Roger Stone also suggested in a blog post co-authored with conservative activist Shane Trejo in January 2025 that pardoning Hernández could have political benefits for Trump. In the post, Trejo and Stone — who was pardoned by Trump five years ago after he was convicted of obstructing a congressional investigation into Russian election interference — urged the president to “crush socialism and save a freedom city in Honduras” with a “well-timed pardon” that “could be the final death blow to [Xiomara] Castro” in the 2025 elections.

Eventually, Stone took on a more direct role in advocating for clemency when he gave Trump a four-page letter Hernández had written to the U.S. president, asking for a pardon and making the case that his conviction was a “political persecution” by the Biden administration. In a text message with ProPublica, Stone said he had received the letter from a journalist who’d gotten it from the family. He emphasized repeatedly that he was not compensated for his involvement.

“I read the letter and then did my own research and elected to send the letter to President Trump,” Stone wrote. “I actually had no contact with JOH or anyone in his family until after the pardon.”

On Nov. 28, two days before the Honduran presidential election, Trump announced his intent to pardon Hernández. Stabile said he didn’t learn the news until Ana García Carías, the former president’s wife, called him in tears:

“He’s letting him out! Trump’s pardoning Juan Orlando!” 

She sent Stabile a screenshot from Truth Social, where Trump had written that he would grant him a “Full and Complete Pardon.” 

The decision met with bipartisan backlash from lawmakers. Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, called the unexpected reprieve “disgusting and incomprehensible,” while Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, described it as “horrible optics.”

In his post, Trump also urged Hondurans to vote for the National Party candidate, Nasry “Tito” Asfura, who was trailing in multiple polls, adding what to observers of Latin American politics was a thinly veiled threat: If Asfura did not win, Trump said, the U.S. would “not be throwing good money after bad” in support of Honduras.

The message was obvious, experts said. “That pardon was a clear green light for the National Party to manipulate the vote,” one former high-ranking U.S. diplomat told ProPublica. 

In the end, Asfura narrowly edged out center-right candidate Salvador Nasralla and handily defeated the incumbent Libre party. But the count was plagued by delays, reports of voter intimidation and allegations of fraud, and Nasralla later formally challenged the outcome. 

On Dec. 1 — while the votes were still being counted in Honduras — Trump posted again on Truth Social in support of Asfura. “Looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election. If they do, there will be hell to pay!” The former president’s pardon officially went through that same day. 

That evening at Hazelton, after the prisoners had already been fed dinner, corrections officers showed up at the housing unit to get Hernández. Smith, the bureau’s deputy director, wanted to speak with him. The newly pardoned inmate was escorted to the captain’s office, where he used the captain’s phone to talk to Smith, his fellow pardon recipient, according to a source familiar with the situation. The move shocked current and former prison staff. 

Hernández was also allowed to talk with his family, who then phoned Stabile and told him the good news. Within the hour, Stabile said, he got a call from Smith, inquiring about a release plan. 

“I’m in Manhattan and he’s in West Virginia,” Stabile told Smith. “It would take me six hours to come pick him up. Can you transport him?”

Because most inmate releases are done during the daytime, prison staff had to be called back in to handle the paperwork and logistics of freeing an inmate. But there was a problem: Hernández had an immigration hold. 

When noncitizens are convicted of crimes in the U.S., immigration officials routinely sign detainers asking prisons and jails to turn them over to ICE for possible deportation proceedings  following their release date. In Hernández’s case, records show immigration agents sent the prison notice of a detainer in February 2025, two months after he was sentenced in court.

For several hours on the night of his release, prison officials scrambled to get the detainer removed so he could walk free, according to several sources familiar with the situation.      

“It’s definitely special treatment. That’s not normally the way it goes,” said Lena Graber, a senior staff attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. “Most people with drug convictions would never get their ICE detainer removed just because the conviction was pardoned.”

Records show immigration officials lifted the detainer on Hernández just after 11 p.m. 

Typically, according to a source familiar with the situation, prisoners who are released from Hazelton when there’s inclement weather or when it’s too late in the day to catch a plane or bus home are put up at the Microtel Inn and Suites at the bottom of the hill. It’s a two-star hotel where a room costs $69 per night. In the morning, they’re given a ticket and sent on their way. 

But for Hernández, prison officials activated a four-man tactical team, paying at least three of them overtime to drive him to the luxury hotel in Manhattan, according to government records and law enforcement sources. A standard room there costs more than $1,000 per night. Stabile declined to comment on where Hernández stayed but said the government did not pay for it.

It was another move that stunned prisons bureau staff. One official called it “absolutely fucking nuts,” adding, “I don’t even think that’s ever been done, not just for a pardoned inmate but for anyone who’s been released.” Another agreed that it was unprecedented: “Usually, they get a shitty bus ride or a cheap plane ticket. They don’t get the carpet rolled out for them.”

As of now, the former president’s whereabouts are unknown. A few days after his release, Hernández said in Spanish in a social media post that he had “no intention of returning to Honduras” immediately because he and his family would be in “grave danger given the evident persecution and the weaponization of justice against me.” 

If Hernández is in the U.S., it’s unclear what his immigration status is.

Meanwhile, Honduran officials have issued a warrant for Hernández’s arrest over years-old fraud allegations and, in a social media post, asked Interpol and other international allies to honor it. But a law enforcement official familiar with the situation told ProPublica there is currently no pending Interpol red notice asking for law enforcement to detain him. The only request the network received to issue such a notice, the official said, was declined while Hernández was still in prison.

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