A Government Official Helped Them Register

By Bianca Fortis, ProPublica

July 25, 2022

His last night as a prisoner in North Florida, Kelvin Bolton couldn’t sleep. Fifty-five years old, with a wispy goatee the same color as the gray flecks in his hair, he was about to get out after serving a 2 1/2-year sentence for theft and battery. The last time he’d seen his brothers and sisters at a big family gathering, he’d marched onto the dance floor ostentatiously, turned away and wrapped his arms around himself to caress his own back. As he swayed goofily to the music, everybody laughed.

Now Bolton was so close to being free and seeing his family again. The next morning, a bright Wednesday in April, he was already dressed in his street clothes and cleared to go when the woman processing his paperwork stopped him.

“The lady said, ‘Hold on, you can’t go anywhere,’” Bolton remembered in a recent phone call.

Confused, he asked her what was going on, he recalled. There was a warrant out for his arrest for incidents in 2020, she explained gruffly. But that was impossible. He’d been in jail at the time, awaiting his prison stint.

Guards loaded Bolton into a van, then drove an hour and a half south to deposit him in Alachua County Jail.

There, he found out what he’d done wrong.

He’d voted.

In 2018, Florida voters overwhelmingly passed Amendment 4, in a historic ballot initiative that restored the right to vote to most state residents with felony convictions. Until then, Florida had been one of only four states — the others were Iowa, Kentucky and Virginia — where people who had committed felonies needed to petition the governor to have their voting rights restored. It was a grim legacy of 19th-century laws passed after the 15th Amendment granted African American men the right to vote.

Supporters applauded the law as restoring voting rights to what experts estimate is over 1 million people in Florida, about 5% of the population of the state.

But the state’s dominant Republican lawmakers quickly installed a financial hurdle to those new rights. The following year, they passed a law to clarify that people convicted of felonies could only vote if they first paid off any money they owed for committing their crimes. The penalty for registering or voting without doing so: a felony charge for voter fraud.

On the surface, the mandate seemed reasonable: Even advocates for Amendment 4 agreed that requiring paying off fines and restitution to victims was just. In Florida, however, that task proved a sometimes insurmountable challenge — one that disproportionately hit Black people. Florida has no centralized database to allow people to figure out what legal financial obligations they owe to the state. Instead, its 67 counties and various state agencies each maintain their own databases. The state also does not track information for federal or out-of-state convictions, which people are also required to pay off before voting.

On top of the fines and restitution, Florida layers on court fees that can run into the hundreds of dollars. Together, a voter’s debt can run into the thousands, a financial hole that some may never climb out of.

“That’s kind of the bottom line of the absurdity of this — it’s Kafkaesque,” said Dan Smith, chair of the political science department at the University of Florida. “It’s very troubling that we would have state attorneys prosecuting individuals who did not know their status, and there was no way for them to determine their status.”

Florida’s voting hurdles are part of a national pattern. For years across the country, Republican state lawmakers have been implementing new restrictive voting laws, including reducing access to vote-by-mail ballots, stricter voter identification rules and limits on early voting. These efforts have accelerated since Donald Trump promoted the false claims that Joe Biden stole the 2020 presidential election. Democrats, meanwhile, have pushed to expand voting access.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis boasted that in 2020, Florida, a swing state with a history of contentious elections, “held the smoothest, most successful election of any state in the country,” while he also signed a flurry of voting law changes that he said would further strengthen the integrity of future votes. And DeSantis has tacitly endorsed prosecuting people convicted of felonies for voter fraud. In April, he signed a bill establishing the Office of Election Crimes and Security, which will investigate alleged election violations.

Despite the increased scrutiny, voting fraud remains so rare in Florida that it hasn’t come close to altering election outcomes. The Florida Department of State in 2020 received 262 election fraud complaints, just 75 of which were referred to law enforcement or prosecuting authorities, according to the agency.

“Florida is an outlier, because the intentional targeting of citizens with felony convictions as a way to undermine democracy has been a throughline in that state,” said Nicole Porter, senior director of advocacy for the Sentencing Project. “And the attempt to address that, by popular vote, has been undermined by the legislature.”

In 2020, a representative of the Alachua County Supervisor of Elections conducted a series of outreach efforts at the local county jail to let inmates know of their new rights and offer to help them add their names to the voter rolls.

During three visits to the jail, the official helped sign up at least 10 inmates, including John Boyd Rivers, Dedrick Baldwin and Bolton.

Rivers, 44, felt a visceral thrill at the prospect. Sitting in his cell in February 2020 facing a battery charge for hitting his wife, he was told by the county representative that he could register to vote. The official, he said, told him that he could disregard the check box on the form that asks whether the applicant has a felony conviction because he didn’t have a disqualifying felony. That seemed odd to Rivers, since he had a previous felony conviction. (He subsequently was sentenced for the battery charge.) No one told him anything about needing to pay off his financial obligations before registering to vote, Rivers said, and the jail didn’t give him an accounting of those debts when he was later released.

Back at home, Rivers was excited when his voter registration card arrived in the mail. He’d lost his right to vote at 18, he said, after voting just once. Now he could vote in a presidential election. He and his wife went to their polling place, and he cast his vote for Donald Trump.

Bolton, too, was excited to sign up. He also said no one told him he’d need to pay off his debts before casting his ballot. Although he registered as a Republican, he said he decided to vote for Biden.

In all, 10 of the men who the official helped register to vote have been charged with voter fraud on the grounds they were ineligible.

Their alleged illegal voting was first spotted by a citizen who analyzed Florida’s voting rolls and then shared the information with the state. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement subsequently launched an eight-month investigation, after which it identified the 10 inmates.

State investigators found that some jail employees remembered the elections official giving clear directions to inmates about having to pay off financial obligations, while others did not. The investigation concluded that the jail visits were “lacking in both quality and longevity” and “showed a haphazard registration of inmates.” But the state prosecutor nevertheless proceeded with charges, although not against county officials.

Officials at the Alachua Supervisor of Elections office declined to comment to ProPublica. But Supervisor of Elections Kim Barton denied any wrongdoing in a statement released in June.

Brian Kramer, the state attorney for the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Florida, defended his office’s prosecutions to ProPublica, saying he believed the 10 men knew they were committing fraud. “I’m not going to say I will prosecute or not prosecute because it’s politically popular or unpopular,” he said.

Four of the 10 have pleaded guilty and have been sentenced to between 364 days and three years in prison. Bolton and three others have vowed to go to trial, while the remaining two await arraignment. They face charges that carry a penalty of up to five years in prison, five years of probation or $5,000 in fines. Eight of the men are Black, and two are white.

Critics say the charges are unjust and, at a bare minimum, excessive. In nearby Lake County, the state prosecutor declined to bring charges against sex offenders who had registered to vote despite the law prohibiting voting rights restoration for those charged with sex offenses or murder. In April, two white men living in The Villages in Sumter County, an overwhelmingly white county in central Florida, pleaded guilty to each casting two ballots for Donald Trump during the 2020 election. Rather than face prosecution, they entered a pretrial intervention program, under which they must serve 50 hours of community service and attend an adult civics class, among other requirements. Because the men in Alachua County have prior felony convictions, they are ineligible for pretrial intervention and face harsher sentences.

“I’m thinking I’m doing something good for the community, so that’s why I chose to try to do it,” Bolton said. “It was not malicious — I was not trying to commit a felony of voting fraud. I never would have voted.”

Baldwin, 47, who is in prison on a manslaughter conviction, was sentenced to an additional 364 days. He felt “set up,” he said, since nobody told him he wasn’t eligible.

“There’s no way Biden was that important to me to vote for him,” he said in an email to ProPublica from prison. “We were flat out tricked into voting.”

The elections official who visited the jail denied telling the men that they could disregard the check box and said he warned them that they’d need to pay off their financial obligations, according to a person familiar with the matter who declined to be named because he feared reprisals. The elections official declined to comment to ProPublica on the record.

The voter fraud charges were especially bitter for Rivers. By the time they were filed, Rivers said, he had already used part of his federal stimulus check to pay off more than $3,000 in costs related to his criminal record so he could reinstate his driver’s license and return to work.

“I should have known there would be some kind of catch,” Rivers said.

Florida’s history of felon disenfranchisement dates back to 1838, when the state’s first constitution prohibited people convicted of bribery or assorted “high crimes and misdemeanors” from voting. After the Civil War, faced with the prospect of formerly enslaved Black men voting, the state expanded the law so that anyone convicted of a felony lost the franchise. But in 2018, 64% of Florida voters approved Amendment 4, allowing people convicted of felonies, except for murder or sexual offense convictions, to vote.

This embrace of new voters became more complicated the following year when the state legislature passed its law. It required that people convicted of felonies must determine their own eligibility before registering to vote. The Florida Department of Corrections and county detention facilities are required to provide notice to inmates at the time of their release of their outstanding financial obligations.

But it is unclear if all of the facilities do so.

Florida charges those convicted of crimes with an array of fines and fees, some of which statutorily cannot be eliminated or reduced. Defendants facing felony charges are assessed $100 to use a public defender, as well as a $100 prosecution fee. At least one person already sentenced in the Alachua County cases has been charged an additional $671 for his voting fraud charges on top of the financial obligations he already owed.

Finding out what someone owes is time-consuming and expensive. An analysis led by Traci Burch, a political science professor at Northwestern University, tried to determine the legal financial obligations owed by a random sample of 153 Florida residents convicted of felonies and found consistent information for only three of them. Counties often keep poor records, have cumbersome websites and employ unhelpful clerks.

What’s more, it can cost money merely to find out how much money you owe. Four in 10 Florida counties charged either a payment or processing fee to look at their databases, and 15% charged a fee to access certain records, according to Burch’s research.

In 2020, Smith, the Florida political scientist, estimated that just over 1 million people would be eligible to vote under Amendment 4. Of that number, about 77% had outstanding legal financial obligations, rendering them ineligible to vote under Florida’s new law until they paid their debts. Four out of five Floridians with felony convictions owed at least $500 in fines and fees, Smith’s analysis found. More than 59% owed more than $1,000.

The state legislature immediately disqualified about 750,000 people from being able to vote when it passed its law requiring people convicted of felonies to pay their debts first, Smith estimated. And the new law’s impact was felt much more harshly by Black people, who faced greater fines and fees: 26% of white Floridians with a felony conviction would be eligible to get their voting rights restored under the new requirement, but only 18% of Black people, according to Smith.

In May 2020, a district court judge ruled that parts of the law were unconstitutional and that the law had established a pay-to-vote system. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the ruling the following September, saying it was in the state’s power to require the payoffs and the law didn’t violate people’s rights. The state Supreme Court has also issued an advisory opinion that deemed the law legitimate.

Unsurprisingly, the number of people with felony convictions who have registered to vote has fallen far short of what supporters hoped. More than 85,000 such people registered in Florida ahead of the 2020 election.

Supporters of the law say that it’s only fair to have people fulfill their full sentences, including paying any crime-related debts. Some state attorneys, including Kramer, the attorney prosecuting the Alachua cases, have also developed processes within their jurisdictions by which people with felony convictions can verify their voting eligibility or request to reduce their fines and fees.

Felons who have not yet registered to vote can also appeal to the state to have certain fees reduced or eliminated, said Republican State Sen. Jeff Brandes, the sponsor of the law demanding the payoffs before voting rights restoration.

“We truly believe there are people who are indigent that will just simply never be able to pay,” he said. “The court only collects a fraction of what is given out anyways. And so there should be a way for the state to grant some grace or for the court to grant some grace and provide people flexibility.”

Kelvin Bolton has been sitting in the Alachua Council Jail since April, waiting for his case to proceed.

He’s been in and out of the system since he was 16, piling up a long record of mostly nonviolent crimes, most recently for stealing a car, groping a woman in a store and taking cigarettes from a Dollar General.

He aims this time to keep a vow he made to his family and himself to stay straight. He said he is frustrated that the prosecutor subsequently created a program for people convicted of felonies to check their voting eligibility while he and the others are still facing charges.

“Why would they want to keep charging us for something that they’re in the wrong for?” he said. “The state is in the wrong for what they did to us.”

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by Lomi Kriel

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This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

While celebrating last month’s U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pointed to the millions of dollars in spending that state lawmakers approved during the 2021 legislative session to help pregnant women and new mothers.

Among the measures he touted was a law that extended Medicaid health care coverage for pregnant women until six months after they give birth or miscarry, exceeding the federal government’s requirement that states provide at least two months of the benefit.

“Texas is a pro-life state, and we have taken significant action to protect the sanctity of life,” the Republican governor said in a June 24 statement. “Texas has also prioritized supporting women’s healthcare and expectant mothers in need to give them the necessary resources so that they can choose life for their child.”

Abbott’s statement neglected to mention that Texas lags behind at least 33 states, including 11 led by Republican governors, as well as the District of Columbia, all of which have already expanded or are working with the federal government to extend postpartum Medicaid benefits for a full year after giving birth. In 2021, the Texas Housepassed a measure that would have lengthened that coverage to 12 months, but during the waning days of the legislative session one of the senators who co-authored the state’s restrictive abortion law halved the time period.

Texas is among a dozen states that have also declined to expand broader Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act to additional people with low incomes, leaving it with some of the strictest eligibility requirements in the country. For example, single parents with one child must earn $196 or less a month to qualify.

“It is such hypocrisy,” Adrienne Lloyd, a senior health policy associate for the Children’s Defense Fund Texas, said about the contrast between state legislators’ battle against abortion access and the services they provide to pregnant people. “If you really care about that health and safety, then the pregnant person and baby will have so much better outcomes if they're covered long before and after giving birth.”

The state’s Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee recommended extending postpartum Medicaid to one year in a 2020 report that showed cardiovascular and coronary conditions, along with mental disorders, were the leading causes of deaths related to pregnancy. Nearly a third of 54 deaths determined to be directly tied to pregnancy occurred between six weeks and 12 months after birth, the committee found as part of an analysis of 2013 data, the most recent available.

Medicaid is the most comprehensive federal- and state-funded health coverage offered to pregnant people and new parents. The assistance, which is generally available to people with low incomes or with disabilities, has higher income thresholds for those who are pregnant. Medicaid covers hospital visits, specialist care and X-rays that are not provided by other Texas programs.

Extending the eligibility period is critical, said Dr. Carla Ortique, a gynecologist and vice chair of the review committee, because treatments for many of the primary causes of pregnancy-related deaths, such as postpartum depression and cardiomyopathy, take time to work.

“It makes a difference in your outcomes and has been shown to make a difference for future pregnancies,” Ortique said.

Had the state’s lawmakers heeded recommendations to extend the eligibility period beyond six months, Texas could have led the nation in expanding postpartum Medicaid for pregnant people instead of trailing behind, said Diana Forester, director of health care policy at Texans Care for Children, an advocacy group.

“Why wouldn’t we want to manage those chronic conditions for that first year postpartum so that they can focus on getting healthy and getting back to work and ensuring their kid has what they need to succeed? It just seems like a no-brainer,” Forester said.

A spokesperson for Abbott did not respond to questions about the Legislature’s decision or whether the governor supports the longer coverage period.

As it stands now, people who are eligible for Medicaid during their pregnancies are allowed to stay on the program indefinitely under federal pandemic rules. But that extended coverage could end as soon as this fall if President Joe Biden’s administration allows the emergency declaration to lapse, making states’ Medicaid eligibility decisions critical for new parents in need of health care coverage.

To qualify for pregnancy-related Medicaid, single people having their first child need to make $3,022 or less a month, compared to a $196 monthly income cap otherwise.

Connie Bunch, a single mother from Abilene, Texas, a city about 150 miles west of Fort Worth, understands the consequences of losing health care coverage too soon after giving birth.

Bunch received Medicaid in 2013 while pregnant with her first child at age 28, marking the first time she had health care coverage as an adult. At the time, Texas had not yet passed any legislation that exceeded the federal government’s requirement, so she lost the benefits two months after giving birth.

The new mother couldn’t manage the cost of private insurance through the Affordable Care Act. And the $600 average monthly income Bunch received from her part-time job, child support, and disability assistance for her daughter’s cerebral palsy kept her from qualifying for Medicaid under Texas’ income requirements once her postpartum benefits expired.

As a result, Bunch could no longer pay for doctors’ visits and treatment related to the high blood pressure, hypertension and gestational diabetes that doctors had diagnosed her with during her pregnancy. Diabetes affects about one in 10 pregnant people across the country, and two of the top six causes of maternal mortality in Texas are related to high blood pressure.

Without medication, Bunch said, she suffered debilitating headaches, exhaustion and a loss of appetite.

Once Bunch became pregnant with her second child last year, she again qualified for Medicaid. Her extended coverage has allowed her to once more have access to hypertension and diabetes medications. She said her headaches have disappeared, she’s no longer tired all day and her blood pressure has stabilized.

Now living closer to family in Austin, Bunch said she hasn’t been able to work because she cannot afford child care. Her monthly income shrunk to $350 from the child support and disability payments she receives. But it is still too much to qualify for Medicaid coverage, except for that specifically provided to people after they give birth.

This means that as soon as the federal freeze ends, Bunch will lose coverage.

“That’s really scary,” Bunch said. “That’s something that I really worry about.”

In April 2021, Toni Rose, a Democratic state representative from Dallas, went before the 150-member Texas House to lay out her bill to expand Medicaid to a full year after pregnancy. Within three minutes, the bill passed the chamber with bipartisan support. Some lawmakers applauded its passage.

The ease with which the measure sailed through the House inspired advocates to hope that the 12 months of coverage stood a chance to become law in Texas. Of the 14 members of the public who testified on the bill during a House committee hearing, not one spoke against the measure. And not a single representative publicly raised concerns about the bill before it eventually passed by a 121-24 vote.

More than a month later, on the same day that Abbott signed into law the Texas Heartbeat Act, which banned most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, the state Senate took a different approach.

During a hearing that month, Lois Kolkhorst, the Senate sponsor for the postpartum Medicaid bill, ticked off a list of states that had applied to the federal government to extend coverage for new parents to 12 months or that were considering passing legislation to do so.

But she said that, at the time, only Illinois had fully enacted such coverage. Missouri, she said, had limited its extensions to substance abuse and mental health services. On the other hand, Georgia had extended full Medicaid benefits but limited them to six months, said the Republican, who represents the small Central Texas city of Brenham and chairs the Senate’s health and human services committee.

“Certainly, Texas would be on the cutting edge of this if we were to pass this bill in any form, extending past the 60 days,” Kolkhorst said.

Although her bill put forward the 12-month extension approved by the House, Kolkhorst did not indicate a preference for the full year of postpartum coverage. Instead she referenced what she characterized as a common criticism of the federal program, saying, “I think it’s a great discussion of what is the right number and some people say, well, once you get pregnant, you stay on Medicaid for forever.”

Kolkhorst suggested that Texas was already a leader, pointing to a program that she helped create in 2019 called Healthy Texas Women Plus that offers 12 months of postpartum coverage. The program aims to provide some of the benefits available through Medicaid, primarily those that would help prevent the leading causes of deaths associated with childbirth. Most eligible Texans haven’t had to use it because they still qualify for Medicaid under the federal pandemic freeze. And Kolkhorst acknowledged that Medicaid was a “more comprehensive plan.”

Women’s health advocates and physicians have criticized the Texas program as what one called a limited “package of outpatient services,” because it does not include what they said is the full range of necessary care, such as emergency room visits, specialist appointments and hospitalizations. The state initiative also has a far smaller network of providers, which experts said makes it harder to get treatment.

After the May hearing, Kolkhorst accepted an amendment by Sen. Dawn Buckingham, a Republican from Austin and an eye surgeon, that slashed the House’s proposed postpartum coverage in half.

Buckingham never publicly raised concerns about the 12 months of care during committee hearings or before the full Senate. Rose, the representative who authored the measure in the House, said when she raised questions about the cut, Kolkhorst replied that she thought six months was “progress.”

The Senate passed the amended bill just after 3 a.m. on May 27, four days before the end of the session.

Neither Kolkhorst nor Buckingham, who were among the authors of the state’s restrictive abortion bill during the same legislative session, responded to requests for comment.

Kel Seliger, a Republican senator from Amarillo who serves on the health and human services committee, said the aversion to further extending postpartum coverage stems from a fundamental opposition by some Republicans to Medicaid expansion.

“There was philosophical resistance,” he said. “Medicaid is quite removed from Obamacare. We’ve been doing Medicaid for a long time. But it got to the point where Medicaid expansion was simply a buzzword for Obamacare.”

Seliger said he thought six months of postpartum Medicaid coverage was a sufficient compromise.

“I think it’s practical to increase Medicaid by three times” the minimum required by the federal government, he said. “And let’s see what the effect is. And let’s see where the Medicaid population goes and let’s see what the cost is.”

Texas House researchers estimated in March 2021 that the cost to the state of extending postpartum Medicaid coverage to a full 12 months would be about $84 million over the first two years. The six months of care that was instead approved by the Legislature is projected to cost an average of about $40 million annually during its first four years of implementation.

The federal government pays for nearly 60% of overall Medicaid expenses in the state. It does not contribute to Healthy Texas Women Plus, although the state requested federal funding for the program in December. Approval from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is pending.

Dade Phelan, the Republican Texas House speaker, blamed the Senate in a statement to ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, noting his chamber voted overwhelmingly for the expanded coverage.

“The Senate refused that proposed extension for vulnerable mothers who chose life, so ultimately we landed on extending coverage to six months,” said Phelan, who is from Beaumont in southeast Texas. “The Texas House has and will continue to make certain that we support Texas women and children.”

Extending postpartum Medicaid coverage does not force states to accept the federal government’s broader Medicaid expansion.

Nearly three dozen states have opted to lengthen postpartum care to 12 months since April 2021, including seven that, like Texas, did not expand Medicaid more broadly, according to KFF, a national health care nonprofit tracking the proposals. Even Georgia, the state Kolkhorst referenced in her Senate testimony as having extended benefits for only six months, approved a full year of postpartum care in May.

If all states approved that coverage, as many as 720,000 pregnant and postpartum people in all could qualify, according to the federal government.

Many states took advantage of a streamlined process for taking such action under the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act. States must seek permission from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services if they want to provide health care coverage beyond the 60 days required under the law, but the act made it easier to extend coverage to a full year.

Texas and Wisconsin, the two states so far to request approval for shorter time periods, must still go through a lengthy waiver process. If the Medicaid freeze ends before the federal government approves Texas’ proposal, people who would have been included in the state’s six-month postpartum coverage could temporarily lose that care, experts said.

The Biden administration, in a maternal mortality report released last month, called on Congress to require extending postpartum Medicaid to a full year. The report said this could eliminate “potentially deadly gaps in health insurance at a critical time for individuals.”

People are dying from pregnancy-related causes in the U.S. at a higher rate than in any other developed nation, the report said.

About 700 people die annually in the U.S. because of pregnancy-related complications, about one-third occuring one week to a year after they have given birth, according to the CDC. Texas ranks among the 10 worst states in the country for maternal mortality.

Rose said the Supreme Court’s elimination of the constitutional right to an abortion is an important test to see if her Republican colleagues in the Senate are willing to provide other basic supports to pregnant people.

She plans to re-file the bill to extend Medicaid coverage to a full year on the first day of the upcoming legislative session in January.

“If you want women to have babies, then you need to make sure that they have the health care that they need in order to carry those babies and to have the comprehensive health care that they need after delivery,” Rose said.

She has support from health care advocates who have been asking for the bill to be reconsidered and from Phelan, the Republican House speaker, who told the news organizations that next session “the House will double down on prioritizing maternal health care and other resources for women, children and families in our state.”

Phelan specifically cited the one-year postpartum Medicaid extension as a priority.

A spokesperson for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who sets the legislative agenda for the Senate, did not respond to questions about whether he would support the passage of such a measure. Last May, Patrick told Spectrum News that he supported the bill but “we just needed to make it less than a year.”

For Bunch, remaining on Medicaid during the federal government’s public health emergency beyond what the Texas Legislature would have allowed has meant that she could treat many of her health conditions.

She will undergo a hysterectomy in August after she said physicians told her that her health conditions mean “another baby will kill you.” She could not afford a sterilization procedure, which typically would require hospitalization not paid for by Texas programs, without her Medicaid coverage.

Last month, doctors found a small aneurysm on Bunch’s brain, which can result from high blood pressure. Bunch said they told her that her family history made treatment particularly important. Doctors said she should also see a cardiologist for abnormalities with her heart rhythm.

Several of the additional services Bunch would need are not covered by the state’s postpartum pregnancy program, leaving her fretting about how she will manage if she loses Medicaid.

The mother said she does not personally believe in abortion. But she criticized Republican lawmakers for pushing to outlaw the procedure without doing more to care for women like her after they give birth.

“On the one hand, they say, ‘No, you need to be a parent,’” Bunch said. “But then it’s like, ‘We don’t care if you’re a healthy parent.’”

She added, “It's like, ‘Have that baby, but then we're throwing you to the wolves.’”

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This article is co-published with The Atlantic.

On Dec. 31, 2020, a 40-year-old man named Leon Casiquito walked into Kelly Liquors on Route 66 in Albuquerque and tried to shoplift a bottle of tequila. When one of the owners, Danny Choi, tried to stop him, Casiquito flashed a small pocketknife. Choi told police he knocked the bottle out of Casiquito’s hand with a stick and Casiquito left the store.

Choi locked the door, but Casiquito hung around in the parking lot, shouting that he was going to beat up the store’s employees. One of them called the police, and soon four officers arrived and wrestled Casiquito to the ground. He was charged with armed robbery and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon — despite not actually attacking anyone with the pocketknife — and held without bail at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Albuquerque.

Casiquito had had similar run-ins with law enforcement before, mostly related to his troubles with alcohol and drugs. Those problems, his family believes, may have started with the pills he was prescribed in his teens after he was hit by a car while riding a four-wheeler and thrown 30 feet, putting him into a coma for a few days. At 30, he suffered another accident: a car hit him while he was out walking, breaking both his legs and requiring more pain medication. By the time of his 2020 arrest, his family thought that a brief sojourn in jail — which is what someone in Casiquito’s situation could expect under normal circumstances — might help him get himself clean.

But these were not normal circumstances. Like many states, New Mexico had drastically curtailed the operation of its courts in response to the pandemic. Some civil trials and preliminary hearings for criminal matters moved online, but actual criminal trials needed to be conducted in person in front of juries. Bernalillo County, which includes Albuquerque, suspended such trials for much of 2020 and 2021. Meanwhile, new cases kept pouring in, partly as a result of the surge in violent crime that accompanied the pandemic. The nation’s homicide rate rose by nearly 30% in 2020 and another 5% in 2021, essentially erasing two decades’ worth of declines in deadly violence.

Criminologists have offered several explanations for the increase, including the rise in gun sales early in the pandemic, changes in police behavior following the protests over the murder of George Floyd, and the social disruptions caused by closures of schools and interruptions in social services. But many people who work in criminal justice are zeroing in on another possible factor: the extended shutdown of so much of the court system, the institution at the heart of public order.

This could have led to more violence in a number of ways. Prosecutors confronted with a growing volume of cases decided not to take action against certain suspects, who went on to commit other crimes. Victims or witnesses became less willing to testify as time passed and their memories of events grew foggy, weakening cases against perpetrators. Suspects were denied substance-abuse treatment or other services that they would normally have accessed through the criminal justice system, with dangerous consequences.

Above all, experts say, the shutdowns undermined the promise that crimes would be promptly punished. The theory that “swift, certain and fair” consequences deter crimes is credited to the late criminologist Mark Kleiman. The idea is that it’s the speed of repercussions, rather than their severity, that matters most. By putting the justice system on hold for so long, many jurisdictions weakened that effect. In some cases, people were left to seek street justice in the absence of institutional justice. As Reygan Cunningham, a senior partner at the California Partnership for Safe Communities, put it, closing courts sent “a message that there are no consequences, and there is no help.”

Many courts around the country still aren’t operating at full capacity, and law-and-order types aren’t the only ones concerned. Defense attorneys and members of the progressive prosecutor movement are worried too. The Sixth Amendment guarantees defendants a speedy trial, but many have been sitting in jail for months on end. “A lot of the Constitution has been kind of glossed over,” Doug Wilber, a public defender in Albuquerque, told me.

The link between any one instance of violence and courtroom delays can be hard to prove. But sometimes it couldn’t be more obvious.

Leon Casiquito’s case had been categorized as “track one,” meaning it was supposed to be heard within six months. But by the time that deadline rolled around in spring of 2021, Bernalillo County had fallen far behind schedule. The Second Judicial District Court had held 86 criminal jury trials in 2019. In 2020, that tally plunged to 18.

Casiquito had spent almost six months in jail when, on June 29, 2021, a district judge issued an order postponing his case indefinitely. During daily calls to his mother, he described how jail conditions were worsening. The inmate population was growing and the jail was short on staff. Inmates were frequently placed on lockdown — confined to their cells for virtually the entire day.

Casiquito was spending all that time locked in with his cellmate, Telea Lui, who had schizophrenia and had been charged with aggravated battery after attacking his mother with a 20-pound dumbbell. On the evening of Oct. 25, Lui flew into a rage, punching and kicking Casiquito for such a long time — more than 20 minutes — that, as Lui later told officers, he had to pause to catch his breath and get a drink of water. Inmates in nearby cells called for help, but no guards were nearby. By the time corrections officers finally entered the cell, Casiquito was not breathing and had “severe trauma” to the head. They pronounced him dead shortly afterward.

(Lui’s lawyer would later state that Lui was defending himself against Casiquito, who he said “hitting him in the legs in a nagging manner.” Lui has since been found dangerous and incompetent to stand trial and has been referred to a state psychiatric hospital.)

It had been nearly 10 months since Casiquito was arrested for trying to steal a bottle of tequila with a pocketknife. His death was one of 116 homicides in Albuquerque in 2021, by far the most the city had ever recorded in a single year.

Six hundred miles east of Albuquerque, in Wichita, Kansas, authorities had worried from early in the pandemic about the effect of closing courtrooms. They decided to do something about it.

Violence had surged in the spring and early summer of 2020, as it had in so many other cities. Wichita police saw a sharp rise in drive-by shootings. And officials noticed something else, said then-police chief Gordon Ramsay: Many suspects arrested in the shootings were defiant, suggesting that nothing would come of the charges against them because the pandemic had shut down most of the court system. Defendants were, as a result, disinclined to take a plea deal. Why plead guilty to avoid a trial when there were no trials happening anyway?

Ramsay contacted the Sedgwick County district attorney and others about the need to get the system back on track as soon as possible. He found allies in the county’s chief judge, Jeffrey Goering, and in Kevin O’Connor, the presiding judge of the court’s criminal department.

“The option of just having cases pile up in high-volume dockets was not an option at all,” Goering told me. “If that meant thinking outside the box, that’s what it meant.”

After consultations with the county health director, the county courthouse resumed jury trials in July 2020, just four months after having suspended them. It got creative. It spent more than $30,000 to outfit its two largest courtrooms with plexiglass dividers and set up a big tent outside. At first, it called only less serious cases, because lawyers got fewer peremptory strikes to use in jury selection for those cases, which meant that juries could be selected from smaller candidate pools.

Wichita judges were adamant that the move to reopen was not intended as some sort of political statement — prioritizing prosecutions over public health. Goering himself hardly fits the red-state law-and-order stereotype: He studied philosophy in college and has decorated his chambers with homages to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. With his beard and shaggy hair, he bears an uncanny resemblance to his cinematic hero, The Dude from “The Big Lebowski.” Getting trials going again was a pure civic reflex, he told me. “I took the opinion that the cost to society was greater from the consequences of not moving these cases and keeping the courtroom locked down too long than from an outbreak of COVID,” he said.

Goering and O’Connor tried to make the restart as palatable as possible. Judges with health concerns were exempted from jury trials. Citizens called for jury duty were told they could opt out if they had concerns about catching the coronavirus. O’Connor gave a local hospital administrator his cellphone number in case any hospital staff were called as potential jurors, saying that he would make sure to waive them.

These steps raised a different concern among some defense lawyers, that the jurors would be pandemic-dismissing hang-’em-high types. But that turned out not to be the case. The initial batch of cases resulted in an unusually high rate of acquittals. “I don’t have any problem with any of these juries,” a defense lawyer, Bradley Sylvester, who worked on some of those cases, told me. “I had a lot of faith in the jury system.”

There were wrinkles to iron out. Some lawyers asked for and received exceptions to the courtroom mask mandate during jury selection, so they could see potential jurors’ faces as they answered questions. The plexiglass could be tricky to see through if the light hit it at certain angles. One juror had to be replaced after he tested positive for COVID-19. But the judges said they knew of no serious illnesses traced to the court.

By the end of 2020, homicides were up sharply in Wichita, as elsewhere, thanks in large part to the early-summer shooting spike that had motivated the court reopening. But the court was ready to process those cases. In January 2021 it expanded its list of jury trials to include murder cases and other major felonies. Overall, it managed to hold 32 criminal jury trials in 2020, compared with 75 in 2019 — a much smaller drop than the ones in Albuquerque and other cities. “It’s important for the community to see the courts functioning,” said O’Connor. And in Wichita, they did.

Albuquerque had struggled with court backlogs and jail overcrowding long before the pandemic. In the mid-1990s, inmates at the city’s Metropolitan Detention Center filed a federal class-action lawsuit over the crowded conditions, and it remained in litigation for two decades before being settled.

In 2019, the district attorney’s office had put out a glossy report that stressed the importance of accelerating the workings of the criminal-justice system. “Speed is the best deterrent,” the report stated. “Through continually improved processes to swiftly intervene by initiating cases quickly, we are seeing a sustained drop in crime.” Accompanying this was a graph showing a sharp decline in overall crime since 2017.

But then came the pandemic and the courthouse closures. The New Mexico Supreme Court suspended jury trials from March to July 2020, restarted them with strict limits that summer, then shut them down again from November 2020 to February 2021. Instead of grand juries, the district attorney’s office had to rely on preliminary hearings, held largely online, to initiate cases. This complicated matters, because New Mexico’s stricter evidentiary rules for such hearings meant that lawyers had to get defendants and witnesses to show up, almost like a mini trial. In many instances they didn’t, making it impossible to move forward. The number of new cases fell dramatically. In 2019, the county initiated about 4,300 cases; in 2020 and 2021, the number plunged to about 2,700 and 2,600, respectively. And very few of these made it to trial. Last year, the resumption of court operations happened so haltingly that the county held only 29 criminal jury trials — two-thirds less than in 2019.

For Adolfo Mendez, the chief of policy and planning for the district attorney’s office, the consequence of this falloff was plain. A person charged with a crime, he told me, “doesn’t see any consequence of it. They’re released back into the community.”

In Albuquerque, as elsewhere, the new constraints worried defense lawyers too. Wilber, the public defender, was concerned about the “dehumanizing” effect of defendants having to appear remotely, over Zoom, for their preliminary examinations or detention hearings. When defendants appeared on a video feed from jail, he feared, judges were more inclined to keep them there. “It’s human nature: It’s easy to remain with the default,” he told me. “They’re already sitting in jail, so why not just stay there?”

Wilber also worried about how COVID-19 restrictions limited defendants’ access to their lawyers, and that the backlogs were giving judges and prosecutors an excuse to push past due-process protections once cases finally did get to the front of the line, to keep things moving as fast as possible. “At first, it was about safety and public health,” he said of the backlog, “but from our angle, it started to feel like an excuse, an easy way to do away with a lot of protections.”

Meanwhile, defense lawyers were hearing from their clients about the worsening conditions at the jail. Reporting by the Albuquerque Journal revealed just how dire things had become. By late 2021, the jail was short about 150 officers, a vacancy rate of more than 30%. (The jail's then-chief told the Journal that the administration was taking various steps to improve officer morale and recruiting.) At the time of Casiquito’s death, the corrections officer on that pod was overseeing 64 cells, double the normal purview. “It’s like a medieval Turkish prison,” Wilber told me.

As the nationwide homicide rate continued to increase in 2021, Wichita managed to buck the trend: Homicides there declined that year, to 54, a drop of 9% from the year before. Countless factors probably contributed, but local officials are convinced that their ability to get the courts running played a role.

In addition to resuming jury trials, the county has taken other steps to reduce its backlog. Last October, it summoned back a quartet of retired judges to head up what it called the “ARPA Court,” because the judges were paid for by funds from the federal American Rescue Plan Act. With their help, the county held 54 criminal jury trials last year, only 28% less than in 2019. This year, it’s roughly on track to return to its pre-pandemic pace.

On one recent weekday, the Wichita courthouse was buzzing. In O’Connor’s courtroom, the plexiglass dividers were stacked in a pile, awaiting removal. The judge was presiding over a sentencing hearing for a man convicted of murder in the July 2019 shooting of a 20-year-old Air Force member outside a party. The victim’s family had come from South Carolina and his father gave a wrenching testimonial about the loss of his son.

Afterward, in his chambers, O’Connor said this was another reason to get court operations moving again: to provide grieving family members with some closure. “You see just how important it is for family members to come to court,” he told me.

In another courtroom, a jury trial was underway for a 2021 domestic-violence-assault charge. Goering, sitting nearby in his chambers under the Hendrix and Joplin posters, said he was relieved to see just how close to normally the court was functioning. “We were going to have a backlog no matter what,” he said. “But I was just determined that it was going to be as small as possible.”

Over the past few months, I’ve visited a few cities where the courts underwent some of the country’s longest suspensions, and I found a very different scene. In Oakland, California, where jury trials started resuming only in the spring of 2021, the Alameda County Superior Courthouse still seemed frozen at the peak of the pandemic, with signs ordering visitors to take staircases only in certain directions and jurors and courtroom personnel still in mandatory masks.

In an interview in late April, the district attorney, Nancy O’Malley, told me that the county had about 4,700 felony cases and 6,000 misdemeanor cases pending with a future court date, up by a third from before the pandemic began. “The court is still not fully operational,” she said. She wasn’t sure if the county could have done differently, given California’s strict edicts on social distancing. “With rules for 6 feet apart, there was no way you could have people sitting in a box made for 12 people,” she said. “I don’t know how you do it while keeping people healthy.”

But she had little doubt that the court constraints had played a role in the rise in crime in Oakland, which last year saw homicides jump to 134, its highest tally since 2006. The absence or delay of consequences for many offenders created the perception of a “lawless society,” she told me.

In Seattle, the backlog of felony cases in the King County Superior Court stood at 4,800 in May, about 50% above pre-pandemic averages, after the court repeatedly suspended jury trials, including early this year, during the spread of the omicron variant. Seattle has also experienced a sharp rise in violent crime. The number of shootings last year, both fatal and nonfatal, was up 78% over 2019.

While I was there, I spoke with the director of the county’s Department of Public Defense, Anita Khandelwal, who offered a contrary view: She said that the solution to the backlogs was not simply to try to push through as many cases as quickly as possible. Prosecutors, she said, should rethink whether it was really necessary to bring so many cases in the first place, and should divert more people accused of nonviolent crimes into alternative, community-based resolution programs.

Back in Albuquerque, Mendez, in the district attorney’s office, said he could see the case for such a rethinking, but legislators would have to take that on. For his office, the immediate challenge remained working through a backlog that now had prosecutors facing a typical caseload of 80 felonies each, up from 50 pre-pandemic.

When I visited the Bernalillo County Courthouse and the nearby Metropolitan Court in April, many proceedings remained online, and the buildings were eerily still. One would not have guessed that the county was groaning under a pile of untried cases. The costs of the delays were not hard to discern, though. In one trial, on charges of criminal sexual penetration of a minor in 2014, the defendant’s father struggled to recall his responses to attorneys’ questions in 2018. It had, after all, been four years.

Still, the state and local courts defend the approach they took. “In developing public health safeguards and operating procedures for courthouses during the pandemic, members of the Supreme Court monitored COVID conditions in New Mexico, consulted with state health officials and regularly convened virtual meetings of chief judges across the state,” wrote Barry Massey, a spokesperson for the state’s Supreme Court, in a statement. And a spokesperson for the county court system said it was simply following the Supreme Court’s protocols.

Leon Casiquito’s family has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against both the county and the company that provides the jail’s medical services. (The defendants have denied most of the allegations and moved to have the case dismissed.) The law firm handling the suit is well acquainted with the costs of the extended court hiatus; two of its other clients were found not guilty in murder cases, both on claims of self-defense, but had to sit in jail for a year longer than typical before their trials. The Casiquitos’ case is still in the discovery phase, but the family’s lawyers expect the trial will be delayed.

Casiquito’s older half-brother, Erik Fisher, who helped raise him, visits Casiquito’s grave almost every day and calls his mother to console her. “Leon was her baby,” he said. “They were very close. She took it really, really hard.”

Out on Route 66, the man who chased Casiquito out of Kelly’s Liquors, Danny Choi, was unaware of what exactly had become of him. Choi had gotten a call from the district attorney’s office telling him only that the case had been closed.

“I asked the prosecutor what happened, and he said he died,” Choi said. “He didn’t tell me how.”

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by Ava Kofman

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In the years since his byline first appeared in The New Yorker in 2006, Patrick Radden Keefe has become known for his revealing portraits of powerful people who refuse to speak to him. It is a testament to Keefe’s prowess that his subjects end up feeling more lifelike in his stories — more brazen, vulnerable, even sympathetic — than they do in their own memoirs and authorized biographies. This might explain why El Chapo, the Mexican drug lord and the focus of two of Keefe’s articles, wanted him to ghostwrite a book about his life — an assignment that Keefe politely declined.

Keefe’s recent output has cemented his reputation as one of the most popular and thrilling journalists at work today. In 2018, he published “Say Nothing,” a rigorously psychological account of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. A bestseller, it was followed by the hit podcast “Wind of Change,” a picaresque tour of the Cold War’s cultural front, and last year’s “Empire of Pain,” a meticulous investigation of the Sackler family’s role in the opioid crisis.

This summer marks the publication of “Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks,” which collects a dozen of Keefe’s stories for The New Yorker, including his profiles of the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, the Hollywood producer Mark Burnett and the mass shooter Amy Bishop. Keefe has never had a dedicated beat at the magazine, but “Rogues” highlights his obsession with the mechanisms of repression and denial. Like Janet Malcolm, one of his influences, he’s unusually attuned to the self-delusions of both criminals and crusaders.

It can sometimes seem as though Keefe’s interest in a subject is proportional to the reporting difficulties it presents, and his stories hold a particular how-did-he-do-that? fascination for other journalists. A typical Keefe narrative will tend to note the formidable obstacle course that stands in his way. “Steinmetz, who made his name in the diamond trade, hardly ever speaks to the press, and the corporate structures of his various enterprises are so convoluted that it is difficult to assess the extent of his holdings” reads one characteristic setup. For fellow practitioners, part of the pleasure of Keefe’s work comes from watching him ingeniously clear each hurdle without seeming to break a sweat.

Last month, Keefe spoke to me about his reporting strategies and writing process over Zoom from his home in Westchester County, New York. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Gosh. If someone like me were profiling me, I would run in the opposite direction. [Laughs] I don’t know. My mother is a retired professor of philosophy who wrote books about a series of psychiatric conditions — about madness and multiple personality disorder and melancholy and depression. This idea that we are all strangers to ourselves is an idea that I was probably exposed to growing up because it was a theme that animated a lot of her work. It’s not that I grew up — at least, I don’t think I did — in an environment where I was surrounded by great secrets, but certainly the ways in which truth can be warped in the retelling and the ways in which there are strains of denial in my family, as there are in most families, propels some of this interest.

But there’s no “Rosebud” moment, and that’s funny because I’m often looking for those types of moments with the people I write about. In “Empire of Pain,” there’s one story about Isaac Sackler, the original patriarch, losing everything and telling his children that he’d given them a good name. I remember when I stumbled across that in an interview that Arthur Sackler gave to the student newspaper at Tufts in the ’80s. It wasn’t online, but I got somebody to digitize it, and just discovering that unlocked so much of what I hadn’t been able to understand about him as a person. But listen, if Arthur Sackler were alive and with us, he would probably contest the notion that his whole life could be summed up by that anecdote. There is something reductive about this kind of writing, right?

I never heard back from Judy Clarke. I did hear from some people who know her, who felt that it was quite an accurate portrait and a flattering one, I should say. Part of what I like about that piece is that there are people who read it and are uncomfortable about her and the role that she plays and there are others who regard her as very saintly.

It’s awkward. I remember having a conversation with Anthony Bourdain about this. I spent a year working on the profile, and I said something to him about how if any of us were shown a very close-up photo of our own faces in a harsh light — I don’t mean designed to be unflattering, I just mean in a way that wasn’t airbrushed or tweaked — that would make most of us uncomfortable. In a strange way, if a portrait that I’m writing about somebody doesn’t induce a little bit of discomfort in them, I would almost feel that I hadn’t done my job. It would be weird for me to have somebody come back and say: “Thank God, finally, somebody’s captured my true essence as I see myself in the mirror.” I’m not the ventriloquist for the person I’m writing about. There’s always that little bit of dissonance there.

I can answer both questions with the same answer. For years, I would bring my editor at The New Yorker, Daniel Zalewski, ideas that were mysteries that I didn’t have the solution to. He always had a view — and he eventually brought me around to this view — that if it’s an 8,000-word magazine article and it’s a mystery story, you pretty much need to solve it. Occasionally there are exceptions, but there’s something about the compact with the reader that if they’re going to devote 45 minutes of their life to reading your piece, and at the end, you throw your hands in the air and say, “We’ll never know,” they feel cheated.

What that has meant for me is that, by and large, I don’t go into stories that are open-ended mysteries if I feel as though I may not be able to crack them. In the case of “Say Nothing,” what was funny was that it was a whodunit, but I never thought of it as a mystery story. I didn’t care who killed Jean McConville, because I always assumed that it was some anonymous IRA gunman, it wasn’t one of my characters, and I had been so ruthless with that book about making sure that the narrative didn’t get too far afield from my central characters. The weirdness of that experience was that it turned out to have been one of my characters all along.

With “Wind of Change,” I did it as a podcast and not as an article because I knew from the start that it would end in an ambiguous place. If it was true, it would be very difficult for me to prove that dead to rights, and if it wasn’t true, it would also be difficult for me to prove that negative. I struggled, because I wanted to write about it, but I didn’t know how to do it in a way that wouldn’t feel indulgent. Then I woke up in the middle of the night one day and thought: “No, it’s a podcast. That’s what it wants to be.” There’s something weird about podcasting where I think there’s more generosity, maybe even more indulgence, from the listener.

When I talk about this stuff, I always want to acknowledge the enormous privilege I have to be doing this work. It’s a huge luxury to be able to spend six or eight months or a year on a piece and to write 10,000 or 12,000 or 15,000 words. When it comes to the reporting, it’s not that I’m driving around in town cars and staying in nice hotels, but it’s basically carte blanche if I need to buy court transcripts, or hire fixers, or go back to France, or go back to Northern Ireland the second time, or whatever it is, and all of that really helps.

What it means is that there sometimes are stories that have been explored in one way or another by newspapers or by other magazines. In terms of the books, sometimes there are other books. There was already a huge literature on the Troubles, obviously, and same with the opioid crisis. So a lot of the time, what’s happening is, I’m coming in, as you say, from a different angle. It’s not that I’m a hugely counterintuitive thinker. It’s much more driven by my own desires as a reader. I had read the other opioid crisis books, and two of them had a few chapters about the Sacklers, and I found, when I was reading them, that I wanted to skip ahead to the next chapters about the Sacklers, which, right there, told me something.

Similarly, with the Troubles. There are a lot of amazing books about the Troubles, but many of them are impenetrable because there’s a highly digressive style of telling stories about the Troubles. You have all these people who are interconnected, so there’s this idea that you can’t tell the story of this person without telling the story of that other person, but then in order to understand them, you need to move to a third person. They’re full of names and acronyms of different armed groups. There’s also this notion that you can’t really understand 1972 without first looking at 1916, but in order to understand 1916, you really need to go back to the 19th century, and suddenly, you’re a thousand years off from where you started. As a reader, I had found that frustrating and forbidding, so I set out to do it a little differently. But it’s more driven by what’s interesting to me than it is by any crafty meta effort to tell a different story.

I often know it when I see it. I’m always thinking about structure, and I’ve gotten better at that over the years having the confidence as I’m reporting to be thinking, “How am I going to tell this story?” To me, an opening is like the top of the water slide. I just need to get you over there and get you going, and hopefully, once I have you there, the rest of it will fall into place.

A lot of the time I’m thinking about trying to upend your expectations. In the case of Bourdain, here was a guy who’d been profiled a thousand times, so it was very important to me to try and start in a place that no other Bourdain profile started before you found your way to him. There’s a wonderful screenwriting expression — the cold open — where you start an episode in a TV show and you’re not with your characters, you’re somewhere else. The back-of-the-mind analytical pleasure for the viewer is: You’ve deposited me in some random place. How are you going to get me back to the main road?

Another example would be the El Chapo story. There’s a certain person who feels like they’ve read drug cartel stories or that they aren’t the kind of person who reads drug cartel stories. There’s a sameness to it all. So when I found this very dramatic moment where an assassin was arrested in Amsterdam at the airport, I knew that was the way in. He wasn’t even a central character, but I thought, if you can see that it’s a story about a Mexican drug cartel but you find yourself in Amsterdam in the first paragraph, I’ll be hopefully overcoming that impulse you have to say, “I’m going to turn the page because I’ve already read this story.” Better yet, maybe I’m putting a question in your mind, which is, “How is Keefe going to get me from Amsterdam back to where I know this story will ultimately unfold, which is Mexico?”

The screenplays I’ve written, none of which have been made — I’m a terrible screenwriter — I don’t know if they’ve actually changed my reporting much. There’s a schlocky journalism that aspires to be a screenplay — and I think a lot of the time is aspiring for a Hollywood option — that I really hate. I have an allergy to a certain “We open on...” writing that is striving for the adjective “cinematic.” Even just using that adjective, I feel, gives short shrift to good narrative nonfiction. As much as I can, I always want you to be able to see things in your mind’s eye. I want to know what things smell like. I want to know how things sound. But none of that is the screenwriting. The sense in which screenwriting has been helpful has much more to do with transitions: when you get into a scene, when you get out of a scene and how you juxtapose scenes. There’s a kind of economy to the structure of a screenplay that I have found really helpful.

It’s always the same: It starts with a series of big beats. If it’s an article, it starts with eight beats on the back of an envelope, so I’ll know where the piece starts, I’ll know where I want the transition after the first section to be, and even if I’m feeling my way, I’ll know where the big moments are later on. The reason it’s useful to do the outline on the back of an envelope is that I naturally gravitate to complicated stories — and I like the complication — but I think you need to back away from that and be able to see the topography of the story.

Then, as I’m reporting, I’m filling those beats in with more detail along the way, and I’m always trying to find ways to fold in exposition so that, hopefully, you don’t notice it. That’s something I’m pretty fanatical about. One thing I really dislike is the paragraph break or the chapter break, where it’s like, “Now, 5,000 words of exposition.”

As I’m filling it in, I try to get to the point where when I sit down to write, all the ingredients are there. I think of it like a chef with his mise en place. Of course, when I cook, I never do this, but people who are cooking the way they’re supposed to will have all their ingredients measured out and ready before they start preparing the meal. The way I like to feel with writing is that I don’t have to go digging around in a notebook, because it’s all right there, laid out in roughly the right place, so that all I’m doing is coming in and putting the finishing work on something that is already pretty well-populated.

It totally varies from story to story. I have the advantage of spending months and months and months working on these pieces, and I’ll often interview 25, 40, 60 people for a piece. The advantage of that is that sometimes people will say “no” initially and then they just keep getting emails from people they know saying, “Oh, I just talked to that reporter.” Or, when I make a second overture, I’ll say, “Oh, I just talked to this person and this person,” and so sometimes people do come around, even the central people, but it really varies.

In the reporting phase, I try to be compassionate and to meet people where they live. I don’t usually come in with a big agenda, which is not to say that I don’t form judgments, but that all happens later in the writing phase. I’m pretty bloodless in the writing phase, but in the reporting, I want to be open. It’s helpful if I can interview somebody for two hours and they really get a sense of the cut of my jib: they know the kinds of questions I’m asking, they get a sense of the other people I’ve talked to and then they can report back to the subject. I think the fear that people often have is, “Oh, this is going to be a hatchet job.” But the truth is if you interview somebody for two hours and you really get into the nitty-gritty, they can usually see that you’re going to approach the story responsibly.

In terms of the case that I make, I always say: “I’m going to do the work. I’ll keep coming back. I’ll talk to as many people as possible.” Sometimes that backfires. What I said to Gerry Adams’ people was something like: “Nobody works harder than me. I’ll get to the bottom of everything,” and in retrospect, I realized that was not what they wanted to hear at all. [Laughs] When I said that, they said, “OK, well, we won’t be talking to you.” But I think most of the time you’re just earnestly telling people that you want to understand.

by Paige Pfleger

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Nashville Public Radio. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

For two decades, Judge Donna Scott Davenport oversaw the illegal arrests and detentions of more than a thousand children in her Rutherford County courtroom.

Her decisions eventually caught up with her: The county settled a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, and an investigation by Nashville Public Radio and ProPublica brought to light what had been happening for years, unchecked. Tennessee lawmakers called for her ousting, the governor asked for a review, and Middle Tennessee State University cut ties with the judge, who taught criminal justice at the school. There were nationwide calls for reform.

As pressure mounted, Davenport announced her retirement as juvenile court judge one afternoon in January, leaving voters to pick a new judge to fill her seat. Early voting starts today and runs through July 30, and election day is Aug. 4.

From the outside, her retirement might seem like the end of a painful chapter. Within the community, local pastor Vincent Windrow said, it’s far from over.

“Those young children who were victimized, that’s not closure for them,” Windrow said. “Just because she’s off the bench and retired, does that mean that they won’t have nightmares? Does that mean that suddenly, miraculously, they’re going to start trusting in law enforcement again?”

That’s the level of distrust that the candidates to replace her must confront, on top of convincing voters that they have the skills for the job.

The challengers are assistant district attorney Travis Lampley and pastor and Legal Aid Society attorney Andrae Crismon.

In a Republican-dominated district, Lampley has the benefit of having the letter “R” next to his name. He’s worked for a decade in juvenile courts.

In a recent WGNS radio forum, he was asked how he would rebuild trust.

“I would like to think that my experience would restore confidence,” he said.

He doesn’t dwell on the controversy over Davenport’s legacy. Instead, he is sharing ideas about other aspects of the job, like shortening the court’s months-long backlog.

“Justice delayed is justice denied,” Lampley said. “So the biggest obstacle is just to get in there, right the ship and plow forward.”

He said he wants to establish a family preservation court, which would connect people to support systems like substance abuse programs.

Lampley comes at the position from his experience inside the courtroom. Crismon, on the other hand, is vowing to be accessible to the community.

“I earnestly believe that there’s nothing wrong with Rutherford County that cannot be turned around by what’s right with Rutherford County,” Crismon said during a meet-and-greet at a coffee shop forum.

He is running as an independent because he believes it’s nonpartisan to do the right thing for kids.

And he doesn’t shy away from talking about the last judge. Crismon said Davenport operated behind closed doors. He said he hopes to turn the position inside out by hosting regular community and school meetings and educating people about what the role of juvenile court judge could be.

“We don’t want to be insular,” Crismon said. “We want to be leading the conversation of how to best deliver juvenile care services in the state. And we can do that and we can make that turnaround. But we’ve got to be willing to listen.”

Both candidates are focused on early intervention, but Crismon has proposals to keep kids out of the justice system altogether. For example, he said he’d like to work with law enforcement to create a list of juvenile offenses that would be handled with citations, instead of arrests.

That resonates with community member Robbie Snapp.

“It’s not always about a child being in trouble and you need to lock them up,” Snapp told Nashville Public Radio. “Everybody doesn’t need to be locked up. Somebody needs to be helped and have a hand up, instead of pushing them down.”

She said Crismon’s history as a legal aid lawyer and a pastor demonstrates his ability to bring compassion to the bench.

Whoever wins will be stepping into the role under more scrutiny than their predecessor, and more oversight.

One concrete change is that a newly appointed board will take over supervision of the county’s juvenile detention facility. That responsibility was taken away from Davenport after what happened.

But a more difficult change will be getting people to believe that the system will treat them fairly, said Dylan Geerts. He was locked up illegally by Davenport when he was 15, and was denied medication he had been prescribed for his bipolar disorder.

“A normal human being forgives when people apologize,” Geerts said. “But I mean, there’s not much to forgive, because at the end of the day, she doesn’t even think she did anything wrong.”

In announcing her retirement, Davenport said she was proud of her legacy on the court. She has since declined to be interviewed.

Without her taking responsibility, making amends will fall to the candidate who takes her seat.

But Windrow, the local pastor, warned that change cannot stop there. The new judge, he said, needs to be part of reforms to Rutherford County’s criminal justice system — a system that allowed illegal detentions to happen for so long. Otherwise?

“We’re just still the same horse,” he said. “We’re just changing riders.”

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Meribah Knight, Nashville Public Radio, contributed reporting.

by Nicole Santa Cruz

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Nearly four years after a woman ended an unwanted pregnancy with abortion pills obtained at a Phoenix clinic, she finds herself mired in an ongoing lawsuit over that decision.

A judge allowed the woman’s ex-husband to establish an estate for the embryo, which had been aborted in its seventh week of development. The ex-husband filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the clinic and its doctors in 2020, alleging that physicians failed to obtain proper informed consent from the woman as required by Arizona law.

Across the U.S., people have sued for negligence in the death of a fetus or embryo in cases where a pregnant person has been killed in a car crash or a pregnancy was lost because of alleged wrongdoing by a physician. But a court action claiming the wrongful death of an aborted embryo or fetus is a more novel strategy, legal experts said.

The experts said this rare tactic could become more common, as anti-abortion groups have signaled their desire to further limit reproductive rights following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade. The Arizona lawsuit and others that may follow could also be an attempt to discourage and intimidate providers and harass plaintiffs’ former romantic partners, experts said.

Lucinda Finley, a law professor at the University at Buffalo who specializes in tort law and reproductive rights, said the Arizona case is a “harbinger of things to come” and called it “troubling for the future.”

Finley said she expects state lawmakers and anti-abortion groups to use “unprecedented strategies” to try to prevent people from traveling to obtain abortions or block them from obtaining information on where to seek one.

Perhaps the most extreme example is in Texas, where the Texas Heartbeat Act, signed into law in May 2021 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in December, allows private citizens to sue a person who performs or aids in an abortion.

“It’s much bigger than these wrongful death suits,” Finley said.

Civia Tamarkin, president of the National Council of Jewish Women Arizona, which advocates for reproductive rights, said the Arizona lawsuit is part of a larger agenda that anti-abortion advocates are working toward.

“It’s a lawsuit that appears to be a trial balloon to see how far the attorney and the plaintiff can push the limits of the law, the limits of reason, the limits of science and medicine,” Tamarkin said.

In July 2018, the ex-husband, Mario Villegas, accompanied his then-wife to three medical appointments — a consultation, the abortion and a follow-up. The woman, who ProPublica is not identifying for privacy reasons, said in a deposition in the wrongful death suit that at the time of the procedure the two were already talking about obtaining a divorce, which was finalized later that year.

“We were not happy together at all,” she said.

Villegas, a former Marine from Globe, Arizona, a mining town east of Phoenix, had been married twice before and has other children. He has since moved out of state.

In a form his then-wife filled out at the clinic, she said she was seeking an abortion because she was not ready to be a parent and her relationship with Villegas was unstable, according to court records. She also checked a box affirming that “I am comfortable with my decision to terminate this pregnancy.” The woman declined to speak on the record with ProPublica out of fear for her safety.

The following year, in 2019, Villegas learned about an Alabama man who hadn’t wanted his ex-girlfriend to have an abortion and sued the Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives in Huntsville on behalf of an embryo that was aborted at six weeks.

To sue on behalf of the embryo, the would-be father, Ryan Magers, went to probate court where he asked a judge to appoint him as the personal representative of the estate. In probate court, a judge may appoint someone to represent the estate of a person who has died without a will. That representative then has the authority to distribute the estate’s assets to beneficiaries.

When Magers filed to open an estate for the embryo, his attorney cited various Alabama court rulings involving pregnant people and a 2018 amendment to the Alabama Constitution recognizing the “sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children.”

A probate judge appointed Magers representative of the estate, giving him legal standing to sue for damages in the wrongful death claim. The case, believed to be the first instance in which an aborted embryo was given legal rights, made national headlines.

It’s unclear how many states allow an estate to be opened on behalf of an embryo or fetus. Some states, like Arizona, don’t explicitly define what counts as a deceased person in their probate code, leaving it to a judge to decide. In a handful of states, laws define embryos and fetuses as a person at conception, which could allow for an estate, but it’s rare.

An Alabama circuit court judge eventually dismissed Magers’ wrongful death lawsuit, stating that the claims were “precluded by State and Federal laws.”

Villegas contacted Magers’ attorney, Brent Helms, about pursuing a similar action in Arizona and was referred to J. Stanley Martineau, an Arizona attorney who had flown to Alabama to talk to Helms about Magers’ case.

In August 2020, Villegas filed a petition to be appointed personal representative of the estate of “Baby Villegas.” His ex-wife opposed the action and contacted a legal advocacy organization focused on reproductive justice, which helped her obtain a lawyer.

In court filings, Villegas said he prefers to think of “Baby Villegas” as a girl, although the sex of the embryo was never determined, and his lawyer argued that there isn’t an Arizona case that explicitly defines a deceased person, “so the issue appears to be an open one in Arizona.”

In a 2021 motion arguing for dismissal, the ex-wife’s attorney, Louis Silverman, argued that Arizona’s probate code doesn’t authorize the appointment of a personal representative for an embryo, and that granting Villegas’ request would violate a woman’s constitutional right to decide whether to carry a pregnancy to term.

“U.S. Supreme Court precedent has long protected the constitutional right of a woman to obtain an abortion, including that the decision whether to do so belongs to the woman alone — even where her partner, spouse, or ex-spouse disagrees with that decision,” Silverman said last year.

Gila County Superior Court Judge Bryan B. Chambers said in an order denying the motion that his decision allows Villegas to make the argument that the embryo is a person in a wrongful death lawsuit, but that he has not reached that conclusion at this stage. Villegas was later appointed the personal representative of the estate.

As states determine what is legal in the wake of Dobbs and legislators propose new abortion laws, anti-abortion groups such as the National Right to Life Committee see civil suits as a way to enforce abortion bans and have released model legislation they hope sympathetic legislators will duplicate in statehouses nationwide.

“In addition to criminal penalties and medical license revocation, civil remedies will be critical to ensure that unborn lives are protected from illegal abortions,” the group wrote in a June 15 letter to its state affiliates that included the model legislation.

James Bopp Jr.,general counsel for the committee, said in an interview with ProPublica that such actions will be necessary because some “radical Democrat” prosecutors have signaled they won’t enforce criminal abortion bans. Last month, 90 prosecutors from across the country indicated that they would not prosecute those who seek abortions.

“The civil remedies follow what the criminal law makes unlawful,” he said. “And that’s what we’re doing.”

The National Right to Life Committee’s model legislation, which advocates prohibiting abortion except to prevent the death of the pregnant person, recommends that states permit civil actions against people or entities that violate abortion laws “to prevent future violations.” It also suggests that people who have had or have sought to have an illegal abortion, as well as the expectant father and the parents of a pregnant minor, be allowed to pursue wrongful death actions.

Under the legislation, an action for wrongful death of an “unborn child” would be treated like that of a child who died after being born.

In one regard, Arizona has already implemented a piece of this model legislation as the state’s lawmakers have chipped away at access to abortion and enacted a myriad of regulations on doctors who provide the procedure.

The state’s “informed consent” statute for abortion, first signed into law by then-Gov. Jan Brewer in 2009, mandated an in-person counseling session and a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion. It allows a pregnant person, their husband or a maternal grandparent of a minor to sue if a physician does not properly obtain the pregnant person’s informed consent, and to receive damages for psychological, emotional and physical injuries, statutory damages and attorney fees.

The informed consent laws, which have changed over time, mandate that the patient be told about the “probable anatomical and physiological characteristics” of the embryo or fetus and the “immediate and long-term medical risks” associated with abortion, as well as alternatives to the procedure. Some abortion-rights groups and medical professionals have criticized informed consent processes, arguing the materials can be misleading and personify the embryo or fetus. A 2018 review of numerous studies concluded that having an abortion does not increase a person’s risk of infertility in their next pregnancy, nor is it linked to a higher risk of breast cancer or preterm birth, among other issues.

The wrongful death suit comes at a time of extraordinary confusion over abortion law in Arizona.

Until Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973, establishing a constitutional right to abortion, a law dating to before statehood had banned the procedure. In March, Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who has called Arizona “the most pro-life state in the country,” signed into law a bill outlawing abortions after 15 weeks, and said that law would supersede the pre-statehood ban if Roe were overturned. But now that Roe has been overturned, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, another Republican, said he intends to enforce the pre-statehood ban, which outlawed abortion except to preserve the life of the person seeking the procedure. On Thursday, he filed a motion to lift an injunction on the law, which would make it enforceable.

Adding to the muddle, a U.S. district court judge on Monday blocked part of a 2021 Arizona law that would classify fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses as people starting at conception, ruling that the attorney general cannot use the so-called personhood law against abortion providers. Following the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs, eight of the state’s nine abortion providers — all located in three Arizona counties — halted abortion services, but following the emergency injunction some are again offering them.

In the wrongful death claim, Martineau argued that the woman’s consent was invalidated because the doctors didn’t follow the informed consent statute. Although the woman signed four consent documents, the suit claims that “evidence shows that in her rush to maximize profits,” the clinic’s owner, Dr. Gabrielle Goodrick, “cut corners.” Martineau alleged that Goodrick and another doctor didn’t inform the woman of the loss of “maternal-fetal” attachment, about the alternatives to abortion or that if not for the abortion, the embryo would likely have been “delivered to term,” among other violations.

Tom Slutes, Goodrick’s lawyer, called the lawsuit “ridiculous.”

“They didn’t cut any corners,” he said, adding that the woman “clearly knew what was going to happen and definitely, strongly” wanted the abortion. Regardless of the information the woman received, she wouldn’t have changed her mind, Slutes said. Slutes referenced the deposition, where the woman said she “felt completely informed.”

Martineau said in an interview that Villegas isn’t motivated by collecting money from the lawsuit.

“He has no desire to harass” his ex-wife, Martineau said. “All he wants to do is make sure it doesn’t happen to another father.”

In a deposition, Villegas’ ex-wife said that he was emotionally abusive during their marriage, which lasted nearly five years. At first, she said, Villegas seemed like the “greatest guy I’ve ever met in my life,” taking her to California for a week as a birthday gift. But as the marriage progressed, she said, there were times he wouldn’t allow her to get a job or leave the house unless she was with him.

The woman alleged that Villegas made fake social media profiles, hacked into her social media accounts and threatened to “blackmail” her if she left him during his failed campaign to be a justice of the peace in Gila County, outside of Phoenix.

Villegas denied the allegations about his relationship but declined to comment further for this story, Martineau said.

Carliss Chatman, an associate law professor at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, said certain civil remedies can also be a mechanism for men to continue to abuse their former partners through the court system.

“What happens if the father who is suing on behalf of the fetus is your rapist or your abuser? It’s another way to torture a woman,” Chatman said.

Chatman added that these legal actions can be a deterrent for physicians in states where abortion is banned after a certain gestational period, because the threat of civil suits makes it harder for doctors to get insurance.

The lawsuit has added to the stresses on Goodrick, who has been performing abortions in Arizona since the mid-1990s, and her practice. She said that since the lawsuit was filed, the annual cost of her medical malpractice insurance has risen from $32,000 to $67,000.

Before providers in Arizona halted abortions following the Supreme Court decision, people would begin lining up outside Goodrick’s clinic at 6 a.m., sometimes with lawn chairs in hand, like “a concert line,” Goodrick said.

“Every year there’s something and we never know what it’s going to be,” Goodrick said recently at her Phoenix clinic. “I’m kind of desensitized to it all.”

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by Stefanie Dodt, ARD German TV

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This story was co-published with ARD German TV.

In the year since the United States blocked Mexicans from entering the country to sell their blood, the two global pharmaceutical companies that operate the largest number of plasma clinics along the border say they have seen a sharp drop in supply.

In a suit challenging the ban, the companies acknowledged for the first time the extent to which Mexicans visiting the U.S. on short-term visas contribute to the world’s supply of blood plasma. In court filings, the companies revealed that up to 10% of the blood plasma collected in the U.S. — millions of liters a year — came from Mexicans who crossed the border with visas that allow brief visits for business and tourism.

The legal challenge by Spain-based Grifols and CSL of Australia relates to an announcement last June that U.S. Customs and Border Protection doesn’t permit Mexican citizens to cross into the U.S. on temporary visas to sell their blood plasma. The suit was initially dismissed by a federal judge but reinstated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The drug companies’ lawyers have said in court filings that the sharp reduction in Mexicans selling blood to the border clinics is contributing to a worldwide shortage of plasma and is “precipitating a worldwide public-health crisis that is costing patients dearly.”

ProPublica, ARD German TV and Searchlight New Mexico reported in 2019 that thousands of Mexicans were crossing the border to donate blood as often as twice a week, earning as much as $400 per month. Selling blood has been illegal in Mexico since 1987.

Many countries place strict limits on blood donations — Germany, for example, allows a maximum of 60 donations per year with intensive checkups before every fifth donation. But the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t require comparable donor checkups and allows people visiting American clinics to sell their blood twice a week, or up to 104 times a year.

The limits that other countries set on blood donations have made the U.S. one of the world’s leading exporters of blood. In 2020, U.S. facilities collected 38.2 million liters of plasma for the production of medicine, accounting for approximately 60% of such blood plasma collected worldwide.

Until now, it has been unclear how much of the U.S. blood plasma supply came from Mexican citizens, and pharmaceutical companies had downplayed border clinics’ role in meeting demand for plasma. Grifols noted in 2019 that “more than 93% of the centers [are] at a far distance from the border between the U.S. and Mexico.”

But in its recent court filings, Grifols stressed the importance of the border clinics. A statement from a company executive disclosed that at the company’s Texas centers alone, there were “approximately 30,000 Mexican nationals donating and supplying over 600,000 liters of plasma [a year].” He describes Mexican donors as “loyal and selfless in their commitment to donating plasma.”

According to a filing by Grifols and CSL, the 24 border centers run by Grifols alone account for an “annual economic impact of well over $150 million” and represent approximately 1,000 jobs.

The trade organization for the pharmaceutical companies, the Plasma Protein Therapeutics Association, has similarly reframed its arguments on the issue. In a 2019 statement, the association urged reporters not to attach any significance to “donation centers that happen to fall within areas states define as border zones.” It said then that it had no estimate of how much blood was being bought at the border or whether the amount was disproportionate when compared to the rest of the country.

But a recent court filing by the association said there are 52 plasma centers in the border zone, and “the average center along the border collects higher than average (31% more) plasma than the average center nationwide.”

Some of those donation centers were set up just steps away from the U.S.-Mexico border. Their location, court papers make clear, was part of a strategic effort to bring in Mexican donors: A memorandum written by the companies’ lawyers acknowledged that the centers were located to “facilitate” donations made by Mexican nationals, and that Grifols and CSL “have also spent ‘several million dollars in the last several years’ on advertising to encourage Mexican citizens to donate plasma in exchange for payment at the centers located along the border.” The memorandum did not specify if the ads were published in Mexico, but advertising for paid plasma donations is illegal in Mexico.

The Mexican nationals selling their blood previously entered the U.S. on what are known as B-1 or B-2 visas, documents that allow visitors to shop, do business or visit tourist sites. U.S. Customs and Border Protection had long viewed the practice of selling blood as a “gray area,” with some officials allowing short-term visitors to go to the centers while others did not. In 2021, about a year and a half after we published our 2019 story, the Border Patrol issued internal guidance that barred short-term visa holders from selling blood.

CSL and Grifols challenged that action, asserting that for 30 years, CBP had “largely allowed B-1/B-2 visa holders from Mexico to enter this country for the purpose of donating their plasma at collection centers that provide a payment to donors.” The CPB disagreed. Matthew Davies, a supervisory border security officer, told the court that selling plasma for compensation had never been a permissible activity.

On June 14, 2021, CBP sent out “clarifying guidance” that selling plasma on a visitor visa was not allowed. The announcement created chaos at the border centers. Two days later, Grifols wrote — and later deleted — a post on its Spanish-language Facebook page that said, “We are replying to the hundreds of messages asking when people with a visa can come back to donate. For the moment, the response is, you can’t.” An angry reply stated “Now, we’re no longer heroes who are saving lives. They just used us.”

Since then, donations at border centers have dropped dramatically. The pharmaceutical companies told the court that a survey of 12 centers in Texas found a 20% to 90% decline. “One particularly large center, which normally collects 5000+ donations per week, has decreased to a level closer to 200,” said the plasma association president, Amy Efantis.

Some previous donors interviewed by ProPublica said they would welcome a court ruling that set clear rules for people crossing the border to sell their blood. Genesis, a 23-year-old student from Ciudad Juárez, said she had worried about losing her visa when she entered the United States for her regular visits to the border clinics.

A current manager of a plasma collection center at the border, who asked not to be named because of the ongoing court case, said that he had to lay off about two-thirds of his employees and cut the center’s hours. “It would be good if they allowed [Mexicans] to donate again,” he said. “People are depending on this, on both sides.”

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July 14, 2022: This story originally misidentified one of the news organizations involved in the 2019 investigation. It was Searchlight New Mexico, not Searchlight Mexico.

by Jeremy Schwartz and Kiah Collier

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This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

In the spring of 2009, Elliott Naishtat persuaded his colleagues in the Texas Legislature to pass a bill that he believed would require the state to report court-ordered mental health hospitalizations for Texans of all ages to the national firearms background check system.

Nearly two years had passed since a student with a history of serious mental illness had gone on a deadly shooting rampage that left 32 dead at Virginia Tech. And Naishtat, then a Democratic state representative from Austin, argued that Texas was as vulnerable as Virginia had been to such mass shootings because it didn’t require the reporting of involuntary mental health commitments to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, known as NICS. Federally licensed dealers are required to check the system before they sell someone a firearm.

“This bill will ultimately save lives, and I hope you’ll give it your most serious consideration,” Naishtat said when he introduced the measure.

But 13 years after the legislation became law, following a string of mass shootings carried out by troubled young men, an investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune has uncovered a major gap in the law and its implementation.

Despite language in Naishtat’s bill that says local courts should report to the state’s top law enforcement agency any time a judge orders any person, regardless of age, to receive inpatient mental health treatment, the news organizations found that they are not reporting juvenile records because of problems with the way the law was written, vague guidance from the state and conflicts with other Texas laws.

The widespread reporting failures are all the more important today because Congress passed legislation last month that requires checks of various state databases that should include juvenile mental health records for would-be gun buyers under 21. The bipartisan measure was passed swiftly after the May 24 school shooting in Uvalde that left 21 dead.

Currently, Texans who were involuntarily committed to a mental institution as minors aren’t ending up in NICS, so as soon as they turn 18 they can walk into a federally licensed gun shop and legally acquire a rifle because they will pass the required background check, assuming they do not have criminal records. (Americans typically have to be 21 to purchase handguns.)

County and district court clerks and juvenile probation officials in five of the state’s six largest counties, as well as Uvalde County, told the news organizations they weren’t reporting juvenile mental health commitments, either as a matter of policy or because they didn’t think they had to. These include Harris, Tarrant, Bexar, Travis and Collin.

“In light of what is happening too many times these days and in recent years, it bothers me tremendously to hear that this law may not have been implemented in the way that it clearly was intended to be implemented,” Naishtat said in an interview. “That legislation with respect to juveniles is probably more important today than ever.”

The gap came to light only after the Uvalde massacre, when ProPublica and the Tribune started asking questions about reporting requirements for juveniles. The shooter was an 18-year-old who had passed a background check before buying two AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, despite what officials have described as a troubled mental health history. It is unclear if he was ever committed.

Officials with the Texas Department of Public Safety, which under the 2009 law is charged with collecting mental health records from local courts and passing them along to the FBI for inclusion in NICS, said that the agency routinely reports juvenile criminal records but not juvenile mental health records. Local courts do not provide DPS with juvenile mental health data, agency officials said.

“There are a lot of protections that surround mental health data and juvenile mental health data,” ML Calcote, assistant general counsel for DPS, said in a statement.

Experts, including county juvenile probation department officials and a former longtime juvenile judge, say the 2009 state law did not take into account the complexities of the juvenile justice system in Texas, which places strict limits on what records can be reported.

Following questions about reporting requirements from ProPublica and the Tribune, the state agency tasked with helping local courts abide by new laws moved to update its official guidance to clerks to make clear that the mental health reporting requirement applies to juveniles as well. A spokesperson for the Office of Court Administration shared a draft version of supplementary guidance that she said the office would put on its website and incorporate into future manuals.

ProPublica and the Tribune presented a summary of their findings to the offices of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan, who control the legislative agenda. They did not respond to questions about whether the issue is a priority for discussion in the next legislative session, which begins in January.

When it comes to the reporting of adult mental health records, the Texas law has been highly effective. By the end of 2021, the state had sent more than 332,000 mental health records — the sixth-highest number in the country — to the national background check system, according to FBI data.

Unlike adult records, juvenile records are tightly controlled under state law, which includes criminal penalties for officials who release them unlawfully. That has likely contributed to widespread confusion about the reach of the 2009 law, which does not differentiate between adults and minors, said Dru Stevenson, a South Texas College of Law professor whose research focuses on gun violence and regulation.

“Anybody dealing with either health records or juveniles are super skittish about preserving privacy and confidentiality,” he said.

Mike Schneider, a former Harris County juvenile court judge, said the 2009 law fails to account for nuances in the juvenile code. For example, the law requires the reporting of all court-ordered mental health commitments. But Schneider and other juvenile officials say that in many cases juveniles end up in inpatient treatment not through a judge’s order, but via treatment plans agreed to by mental health professionals working on their cases. Additionally, Schneider said he interprets the law to directly address only the mental health commitments of juveniles already in lockup, not those first entering the system.

As a result, he estimated that some 99% of juvenile mental health commitments in the state are not the result of the kinds of judicial orders spelled out in the 2009 law.

“It’s just a really, really, really tiny sliver and would miss most of the people who are juveniles who have court-ordered mental health services,” he said.

The Office of Court Administration convened a task force of clerks, judges and various state officials more than a decade ago to figure out how to increase the number of all mental health records being sent to DPS.

The resulting report, published in 2012, found that “DPS lacks the resources to assist the district and county clerks with reporting mental health information.” It made a number of recommendations for ensuring better reporting across the state, including that OCA distribute a reporting manual to clerks detailing the law’s exact requirements. But neither the report nor the resulting manual addressed the reporting of juvenile records.

The agency has since moved to remedy that.

“Recently, because of increased questions, we decided to update the quick reference table to make it even more clear that juvenile records should be included under those provisions, and an updated FAQ section will be going in the manual,” spokesperson Megan LaVoie wrote in an email last month.

Amid a lack of clear direction, courts across the state aren’t following the law as Naishtat intended.

In Uvalde County, for instance, Chief Juvenile Probation Officer Mary Lou Ruiz said “there’s no specific way for us to report that to DPS.” When asked why, Ruiz cited limitations of electronic reporting tools.

Travis County Probate Judge Guy Herman, who was a driving force behind the 2009 law and also chaired the OCA task force, said that his court has reported juvenile mental health commitments to DPS in the past, but that it hasn’t had such a case in several years. Juvenile department and district clerk officials in the county say they operate under the belief that state guidelines don’t require juvenile mental health reporting, according to a county spokesperson.

In Harris County, which oversees the largest juvenile justice system in Texas, district clerk spokesperson Al Ortiz told the publications no juvenile mental health records are reported to the state, citing what he described as long-standing guidance from the OCA and DPS.

On the other hand, the Dallas County District Clerk Felicia Pitre said her office reports juvenile mental health records to DPS, in accordance with state law. Pitre declined to say how many commitments have been sent. She did not respond to a request for comment about DPS’ statement that Texas courts are not reporting juvenile mental health records.

LaVoie, the OCA spokesperson, said in an email that the office communicated to clerks that they had to report certain juvenile mental health commitments to DPS but declined to say when or provide specifics about its messaging. DPS’ press office has not responded to questions about what reporting guidance it has provided to clerks.

Juvenile advocates and gun rights groups have urged caution in the reporting of juvenile records, calling for avenues to allow young adults to have their gun rights restored.

And mental health advocates have warned against using mental illness as a scapegoat when it comes to gun violence. “A vast majority of firearm violence is not attributed to mental illness,” the American Psychiatric Association said in a statement after the Uvalde shooting. “Rhetoric that argues otherwise will further stigmatize and interfere with people accessing needed treatment without addressing the root causes of firearm violence.”

But recent shootings have again raised questions about whether it is too easy for young people with histories of mental illness to obtain firearms.

As in Texas, questions emerged about New York’s mental health reporting laws following the May 14 supermarket shooting in Buffalo that killed 10 people, most of them Black.

The gunman, an 18-year-old New York man, had been taken into custody as a juvenile for a psychiatric evaluation after he threatened to commit a murder-suicide. But under the state’s mental health reporting law, because the gunman wasn’t ordered into treatment, the psychiatric evaluation alone did not trigger a report to the background check system. A 2013 New York law requires mental health professionals in the state to report patients who in their “reasonable professional judgment” are likely to harm themselves or others, but no such report was made.

It’s unclear whether Texas’ law would have prevented the Uvalde gunman from purchasing two semi-automatic rifles at a federally licensed local gun shop.

DPS has said the 18-year-old Uvalde shooter, who killed 19 children and two teachers, didn’t have a mental health record, but agency officials also have consistently added a caveat: “That we know of.”

In news reports, the gunman’s acquaintances have alleged that he had a history of truancy, cruelty to animals and violence at home and at school.

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the GOP negotiator in the recently passed federal legislation, has implied the shooter had mental health issues as a juvenile.

“Enhanced background checks of juvenile court, police, and mental health records likely would have disclosed what everyone in the community knew,” he wrote on Twitter on June 12. “The shooter was a ticking time bomb.”

The new federal legislation was mostly met with praise from gun control groups, especially for its provisions on juvenile records.

Lindsay Nichols, federal policy director with the Giffords Law Center, which is the legal arm of a national gun safety group created by Gabrielle Giffords, a former Democratic congresswoman who survived a shooting in 2011, said the measure now gives the background check system enough time to “make an accurate determination about whether the person is eligible to purchase guns.”

The new federal law gives the FBI up to 10 business days — seven more than are allotted under current rules — to investigate if an initial background check on a would-be firearm purchaser under 21 flags potentially disqualifying juvenile records. If the agency doesn’t find anything during that time frame, dealers are legally able to make the sale. Any mental health commitments ordered before the person is 16 would not disqualify them from purchasing a firearm.

The law also directs federal investigators conducting background checks to contact local law enforcement agencies and state-level custodians of mental health records, as well as search juvenile criminal history databases, for information that would disqualify a person from purchasing a firearm. Yet as it stands today in Texas, checks with such entities would fail to reveal many court-ordered juvenile commitments.

While most states now require some level of mental health reporting, gun control advocates like Giffords and Everytown for Gun Safety don’t track how many states require searches of juvenile mental health records before gun purchases. An FBI spokesperson said the bureau doesn’t keep track of it either. According to the Giffords Law Center, the 13 states that carry out their own background checks tend to conduct more comprehensive searches on juvenile records. And several of those so-called “point of contact” states appear to offer clearer guidance on the issue.

Like Texas, Florida has a mental health reporting law that doesn’t explicitly mention juveniles. But a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, David Fierro, made clear that the law applies to people who are under 18.

“There are no age limitations or exemptions. All court orders are required to be submitted,” he said. “The subject of these orders is disqualified from the transfer of a firearm.”

Schneider, the former Harris County juvenile judge, said the Legislature should address the narrowness and ambiguity that has resulted in the widespread failure to report juvenile mental health records, though he said such an effort will require lawmakers to answer difficult questions about how to handle sensitive records. In his mind, the law should cover young Texans with troubling histories of bullying, animal cruelty and sexual assault, behavior that foreshadows what experts call “future dangerousness.”

“What do you do with kids who have tortured a cat or a dog or done something really cruel, sexually or not, to another kid?” he said. “Those are, I think, the ones that people really worry about, because that seems to be so strongly correlated with really, really bad outcomes in the future.”

Asked if more clarity from the Legislature would make the law more effective, LaVoie, the OCA spokesperson, said: “Eliminating ambiguity is always helpful.”

by Uri Blau

This article is co-published with Shomrim. Shomrim is an Israel-based nonprofit and nonpartisan independent news organization.

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Israeli cybersecurity company NSO Group, the company behind the notorious Pegasus spyware, has been conducting a broad campaign in the United States to get off the U.S. government’s blacklist.

Pegasus is a hacking tool that could be used to vacuum up a phone’s contents remotely without the target having to fall into a phishing trap by clicking on a deceptive link. The spyware can even use the phone to remotely track and record its user.

The Biden administration added NSO to a Commerce Department list of restricted companies last November after a series of investigations revealed that Pegasus had been used by foreign governments against journalists and human rights activists. A forensic analysis from last July, for example, revealed that two people close to journalist Jamal Khashoggi were targeted by the spyware before and after his assassination in October 2018. Khashoggi, an exiled Saudi Arabian journalist and American resident, was murdered in Turkey by Saudi authorities. The NSO Group has said its technology “was not associated in any way with the heinous murder of Jamal Khashoggi.”

NSO has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past year in payments to lobbyists, public relations companies and law firms in the U.S., in the hope of reversing the Biden administration’s November decision, according to public records filed under the Foreign Agent Registration Act and conversations with people familiar with the effort. These firms have approached members of the U.S. House and Senate, as well as various media outlets and think tanks across the U.S., on NSO’s behalf.

Companies on the Commerce Department’s blacklist, officially called the “Entity List,” are not completely prohibited from doing business in the U.S. However, they are subject to licensing and other trade restrictions, making it more difficult to conduct business in the country or with Americans. NSO’s business has reportedly suffered since the designation.

NSO is trying to get the matter raised during a meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid when the former visits Israel this week. In addition, NSO lobbyists unsuccessfully tried to set up a meeting between representatives of the company and U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, but it did not take place.

Asked for comment, an NSO spokesperson declined to comment on the campaign but “thanked” Shomrim for publishing an article on its efforts, which he described as “supportive.”

The American military contractor L3Harris also held talks to try to purchase NSO, with backing from the Defense Department, according to The New York Times. L3Harris has abandoned the effort, the paper said.

Placement on the Entity List is a serious sanction but less significant than being placed on the Specially Designated Nationals list. In the past, companies have won removal from the Entity List after settling charges with the U.S. government and promising reforms.

NSO said at the time of the U.S. administration’s decision to add it to the list that it would work to have the move reversed. Public records show that the firm started recruiting various North American consultants even before it was blacklisted. In July last year, it hired the Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman law firm to advise it on tenders and various compliance requirements in the United States. The firm was initially hired for six months at a cost of about $75,000 per month. NSO continued to retain its services at least into the first half of 2022.

Pillsbury then hired strategic advisory group Chartwell for six months at a cost of $50,000 to $75,000 per month, according to public records. Chartwell met with representatives of the House Intelligence Committee, whose members called last year for more serious sanctions of NSO under the Magnitsky Act. The lobbying firm also approached, among others, Senators Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., as well as Reps. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J. and Mike Turner, R-Ohio. Romney, Rounds, Malinowsky and Turner did not respond to a request for comment. Chartwell has also reached out to various media outlets on behalf of NSO, and distributed material in which the company reiterated its assurances that it would investigate any misuse of its products.

In January 2022, the company hired the services of the Paul Hastings law firm for $10,000 a month. Hastings then had a call with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., on behalf of NSO. Moreover, less than four months ago, NSO signed an agreement with Washington, D.C.-based public relations and media consulting firm Bluelight Strategies, which has strong ties with the Democratic Party. The firm’s managing director, Aaron Keyak, went on unpaid leave to join Biden’s campaign staff in July 2020 and currently serves as the State Department’s deputy special envoy to combat and monitor antisemitism. NSO paid Bluelight $100,000 in February for two months of work, with an option to extend the contract for $50,000 a month.

The contract between the parties, signed by NSO founder Shalev Hulio and Bluelight President Steve Rabinowitz, also allows Bluelight to hire a subconsultant at a cost of up to $20,000 a month. “NSO’s tools provide limited and specifically targeted intelligence capabilities that have been repeatedly used for instance to help rescue scores of children from human trafficking as well as stopping numerous terrorist attacks,” wrote Brian E. Finch, a partner at Pillsbury, to Rep. Malinowsky earlier this year. “NSO’s Pegasus customers are solely law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and by far are mainly democratic allies of the U.S. and Israel in Western Europe,” he added.

NSO Group “worries about improper or otherwise abusive use of its tools against journalists, human rights advocates, and others,” wrote Finch. “NSO has strict protocols in place to avoid misuse of its products and to terminate access to such products in cases where misuse has been alleged.” The attorney wrote that “NSO stands ready and willing to work with the U.S. government to identify and develop global standards that reflect shared values — protecting citizens of the United States and safeguarding human rights and privacy concerns.”

In a different letter distributed by the firm this year, NSO states it has “developed a human rights governance compliance program,” saying it would conduct a review of all users to see whether they might use the technology used to “violate human rights.”

Pillsbury, Chartwell, Paul Hastings and Bluelight did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Commerce did not respond to a request for comment.

NSO representatives have approached various people within the administration in order to get a clear understanding of what steps the company could and should take to be taken off the blacklist. They presented NSO’s “kill switch,” which allows the company to terminate contracts when their product is misused, and have warned that if NSO shuts down, Chinese and Russian companies will take its place. So far, the lobbying campaign has generated little response. NSO has not been told what it needs to do to remove itself from the list, according to the people familiar with the campaign.

by Umar Farooq

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was in a tough spot last August when he paid a visit to Turkey. For nearly a year, his government had been at war with rebels from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which was now pushing south from its stronghold near the Eritrean border and threatening to move on the country’s capital of Addis Ababa. Thousands had already been killed, and the United States and the United Nations had accused all the warring parties of blockading aid, committing sexual assault and deliberately targeting civilians.

With only a small, aging fleet of Soviet-era military jets, Abiy needed a way to quickly — and cheaply — expand his air campaign against the rebels. Turkey had just the solution: a military drone known as the TB2 that could be piloted from nearly 200 miles away. China and Iran also supplied drones, but the TB2, outfitted with cutting-edge technology, had fast become the new favorite of the world’s embattled nations, helping to win wars even when it was pitted against major powers.

On Aug. 18, Abiy met Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to sign a military pact. It’s unclear whether drones were part of the agreement. But two days after the signing, publicly available flight records showed that an Ethiopian Airlines charter flight took off from Tekirdağ, an hour’s drive west of Istanbul, at an airstrip known for testing and exporting the Turkish drones. It was the first of at least three such runs over roughly a month, the records show. Neither the Turkish nor the Ethiopian governments responded to questions about the flights, but officials in Turkey have previously acknowledged drone sales to Ethiopia.

Within months, Turkish-made drones, as well as ones made by China and Iran, hovered over crowded town centers across rebel-held Ethiopia, watching those below before launching missiles at them. News seeped out of towns like Alamata and Mlazat that the drones’ missiles were killing not just suspected rebels but dozens of people, many of them civilians, as they rode buses or shopped in markets. Human rights groups took note of armed drones in the skies and examined images of missile fragments from airstrikes to try to identify exactly what aircraft were involved, hoping that publicly naming their origin would prompt the sellers to reconsider their actions.

As the death toll mounted, the Biden administration, which had authorized sanctions against any party involved in the fighting, said it had “profound humanitarian concerns” over Turkey’s drone sales to Ethiopia. And U.S. officials meeting with their Turkish counterparts raised reports of drone use in the conflict. But there the warnings stopped. Unlike its decisive actions targeting drone programs in China and Iran, Washington took no further action against the program in Turkey, a NATO ally.

So the Ethiopian air campaign continued, including a strike by a Turkish-made drone on a camp for displaced civilians in Dedebit that killed 59 people and attracted widespread condemnation. The bloodshed again drew a rebuke from the U.S., this time directed at Ethiopia. President Joe Biden called Abiy and “expressed concern that the ongoing hostilities, including recent air strikes, continue to cause civilian casualties and suffering,” according to a White House summary of the conversation. Little changed, and by late February, about six months after Abiy’s visit to Turkey, at least 304 civilians were dead from airstrikes, according to the U.N.

The Ethiopian government did not respond to requests for comment, but authorities have previously denied targeting civilians in the war.

Today, much of the discussion around the TB2 drone centers on Ukraine, where it is playing a pivotal role in the war against Russia. Ukraine has put out a steady stream of propaganda videos that show TB2s taking out equipment like surface-to-air missiles and helping other aircraft and artillery target Moscow’s forces. Some lawmakers in Congress have even cast the drone as a crucial weapon and are pushing for the U.S. to help Ukraine buy more. In Lithuania, a recent crowdfunding campaign raised $5.4 million in three and a half days to help Ukraine purchase another TB2.

But the public relations blitz obscures growing concerns around the world about Turkey and the proliferation of a weapon that is changing the nature of modern warfare. At least 14 countries now own TB2s, and another 16 are seeking to purchase them. The technology offers even the smallest militaries the capacity to inflict the kind of damage that was once the exclusive province of wealthy, Western nations, and Turkey seems eager to expand global sales of the weapon.

“They are a game changer,” said Richard Speier, a former Defense Department official who drafted and negotiated a key international agreement that now governs the sale of armed drones. “It’s going to be necessary to take account of them and put a lot of effort in dealing with the drone problem … [because] you can do things on a small budget that you couldn’t do before.”

Amid the criticism, Turkish officials, along with the drone maker itself, Baykar Technology, have defended the TB2 as a critical tool for developing nations and embattled democracies like Ukraine. The drone “is doing what it was supposed to do — taking out some of the most advanced anti-aircraft systems and advanced artillery systems and armored vehicles," Selçuk Bayraktar, the firm’s chief technology officer, told Reuters in May. “The whole world is a customer.”

Officials tout the drone as the product of Turkish industry, with nearly all of its components coming from within Turkey. But time and again, wreckage from downed drones in multiple conflicts have shown otherwise. In fact, a whole range of components — from antennas to fuel pumps to missile batteries — were made by manufacturers in the U.S., Canada and Europe, according to images of wreckage examined by ProPublica and statements by companies, some of whom have acknowledged sales to Turkey.

Some lawmakers have called on the Biden administration to pressure Turkey to restrict sales of the drone by suspending exports of U.S. technology that could be used in the uncrewed aircraft. They argue that the drones and their missiles are sparking more instability around the world, and, in some cases, violating American and international arms embargoes meant to contain wars like the conflict in Ethiopia.

“Turkey’s drone sales are dangerous, destabilizing and a threat to peace and human rights,” said Sen. Robert Menendez last year, as he pushed for an investigation into whether U.S. exports are being used in the Turkish drones. “The U.S. should have no part of it.” Menendez’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

It’s unclear, though, whether the Biden administration will take any further action. A spokesperson for the State Department declined to answer questions for this story, providing only a general statement about arms sales. “We encourage all countries to abide by U.N. arms embargoes, avoid arms transfers to persons who are sanctioned by the United States or the United Nations, and avoid destabilizing arms transfers,” it read.

To better understand how Western technology has made its way into Turkey’s armed drones, ProPublica reviewed videos and photos of TB2s released by media outlets and government agencies, as well as reports by the United Nations and anti-arms-proliferation advocates. The news organization then compiled a list of key parts and consulted with U.S. arms experts to check whether their sale violated export regulations. They did not. Many of the components in the TB2s were commercial-grade parts found in a variety of consumer products, such as HD video cameras or self-driving cars, so they evaded the strict regulatory scrutiny applied to military parts in the U.S.

Still, other countries, including Canada, have instituted export bans that have kept some key commercial parts from flowing to Turkey. And experts say the U.S., if it chose to, could take similar measures at home and step up enforcement abroad.

Cameron Hudson, former Director for African Affairs on the National Security Council, compared the impact of drones like TB2s to the Stinger missile, the shoulder-fired weapons the U.S. distributed to mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s to repel Soviet forces, then spent decades trying to recover.

“As the technology continues to improve, as they become cheaper, as they become more mobile and portable, as you need less infrastructure to operate them, they modernize conflict around the world,” he said.

The U.S. demonstrated the lethal power of armed drones in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, when officials used them for targeted killings in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Since then, international regulators have largely focused on policing sales of larger models, like the Predator and Reaper drones used by the American military. Their primary enforcement tool: the Missile Technology Control Regime, an agreement developed toward the end of the Cold War that today has 35 signatories, including the U.S., Russia and Turkey. The pact calls on members not to sell so-called Category 1 systems, technology designed to carry missiles long distances and deliver nuclear, chemical or biological payloads.

Thus far, proliferation experts say the agreement has succeeded in stemming the flow of those kinds of weapons. But, they added, it has failed to capture the rising development of smaller drones, like the TB2.

In the last decade, China has developed its own drones and marketed them to developing countries, while Iran has expanded its drone program to help fight its proxy wars in Syria and Yemen. Israel also runs a major export operation — including surveillance and so-called kamikaze drones — though experts say the country officially restricts the sale of drones capable of firing missiles.

Turkey supercharged its own efforts after the U.S. declined to sell the country armed drones. U.S. officials were concerned about potential human rights violations, as Turkish officials planned to use the weapons in conflicts with Kurdish insurgents, said Vann Van Diepen, who helped oversee nonproliferation programs at the State Department until 2016.

The turning point came in 2015 when Bayraktar, an MIT-educated engineer who ran an armed drone program out of his father’s defense manufacturing firm in Istanbul, debuted the TB2. Using a Turkish-made missile, he held a demonstration to show that the drone could hit a target from miles away. Bayraktar, who would later marry Erdoğan’s daughter, touted the TB2s as a way for Turkey to become a global superpower without relying on U.S. drones.

For Baykar and its customers, the design had a key feature: The 40-foot-wide, 20-foot-long drone can be controlled from ground stations up to 185 miles away, just below the range that’s subject to Category 1 missile technology restrictions. The drone also has plenty of high-tech firepower. From an altitude of 18,000 feet, where it can hover for more than 24 hours, the TB2 can find and track targets, then hit them with laser-guided weapons, usually a lightweight missile called an MAM-L, made by the Turkish manufacturer Roketsan.

Bayraktar portrayed the drones as a Turkish success story, designed, manufactured and armed by Turkish companies. But it wasn't long before people searching through the wreckage of downed drones discovered that the TB2s relied on imported parts.

In 2020, for example, amid a conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, images published by local media outlets and the Armenian Ministry of Defense showed parts with identifying information that matched those sold by manufacturers in other countries, including the U.S. Hardware that allowed the drones to receive GPS signals from satellites was made by Trimble, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The drone’s engine was made in Austria by Bombardier Recreational Products, based out of Quebec, Canada. A sophisticated, programmable microchip was made by San Jose, California-based Xilinx. The drone’s camera, perhaps the most important TB2 component, was made by Wescam, a Canadian subsidiary of L3Harris, based in Melbourne, Florida.

In the wake of the revelations, several companies, including Trimble, Bombardier and Xilinx, issued statements saying they were surprised to learn their products were being used in the conflict and had taken steps to ensure their parts no longer ended up in Baykar’s drones.

But today, key parts continue to be sourced from manufacturers based in Western countries. The German company Hensoldt, for example, told ProPublica it supplies one version of the drone’s camera. And video of TB2 strikes in Ukraine, along with Canadian export records, show the drones there still use the camera made by Wescam, according to researchers at Project Ploughshares, a Canadian anti-arms-trade nonprofit that tracks the proliferation of military technology. L3Harris, Wescam’s parent company, did not answer questions for this story, but said it “fully supports and adheres to all government export regulations applicable to our products and services used by the U.S., its allies and partners.”

Baykar declined to respond to questions about the source of key components in its drones or how it had obtained them. The company would only say that ProPublica’s questions were based on unspecified “false accusations.” In March, Bayraktar, the company’s CTO, said on social media that “93%” of the components in the TB2s are locally made.

Baykar is not unique in its use of commercial parts for its drones; many of Iran’s and China’s globally marketed drones also use parts that are not necessarily intended for military purposes. But those countries must find ways around a web of U.S. sanctions and export restrictions, so they cannot simply buy parts directly from U.S. companies. Importers in Turkey, on the other hand, are not subject to such restrictions. The country is a NATO ally and a party not only to the missile technology agreement, but also to the Wassenaar Arrangement, a broader set of voluntary guidelines set by 42 participating states seeking to control the spread of dual-use technologies that could be used for weapons that destabilize the world. Those qualifications put Turkey on a government list of countries preapproved to import many of the commercial parts found in the TB2s.

Under U.S. rules, those components “would not be controlled,” said Kevin Wolf, who helped oversee the export of dual-use technologies in the Commerce Department until 2017. “You have to rely upon the Turkish government for regulating its export to embargoed or other countries of concern.”

Turkey began using, and perfecting, the TB2s in its own war on Kurdish insurgents — the same conflict for which the U.S. had refused to provide armed drones. From 2016 to 2019, authorities trumpeted their success in press releases about strikes that “rendered ineffective” more than 400 people in the Kurdish-majority southeast of the country, where the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, was most active. In strikes both inside Turkey and across the border in northern Syria and Iraq, the TB2s delivered massive losses to the PKK, effectively putting an end to its ability to launch attacks.

But by 2018, this posed problems for U.S. forces, which were relying on the same PKK-linked fighters in the battle against the Islamic State group in the region.

Although Turkey’s actions, including its drone strikes, did not ultimately keep the U.S. and the Kurds from defeating the group, they made the war, and its aftermath, far more complicated, said Gen. Michael Nagata, who headed U.S. Special Operations Command until 2015, then served as director of strategy for the National Counterterrorism Center until 2019.

With the proven success of its new tool, it soon became clear Turkey did not intend to keep the TB2s all to itself.

Countries around the globe are adding TB2s to their arsenals. At least 14 countries now own the drones, and another 16 are seeking to purchase them.

In 2019, Turkey sent TB2 drones, along with pilots to operate them, to Libya to help the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord in a complicated civil war it was fighting against Khalifa Haftar, a warlord backed by Russia, Jordan and Turkey’s regional enemies, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Haftar’s forces — which were themselves equipped with Chinese Wing Loong drones provided by the UAE — had mounted a major assault that threatened Tripoli, but the TB2s helped push them back.

But by supplying drones and other weapons, Turkey, as well as Jordan and the UAE, broke a U.N. arms embargo that was meant to keep the Libyan civil war from escalating, the U.N. would later say in a scathing 548-page report. The U.N. singled out the Chinese and Turkish drones — which carried out more than 1,000 strikes in the battle over Tripoli — saying they transformed the situation from “a low-intensity, low-technology conflict” into a bloody war that, by the World Health Organization’s count, killed more than a thousand people, including about 100 civilians.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment for this story, including on the U.N.’s finding that Turkey broke the arms embargo on Libya. Jordan and the UAE have said they are committed to complying with the U.N. arms embargo.

Alarmed by the U.N.’s findings, Congress called for the White House to put forth a comprehensive strategy for countering the destabilizing influence of foreign powers in 2020. Senators at the time even wrote to the State Department asking it to “press the UAE, Russia, Turkey, and Jordan to halt all transfers of military equipment and personnel to Libya.”

But the White House did not take action against Turkey, or any of the other countries, over Libya. And when Azerbaijan looked to retake the long-disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh from its neighbor Armenia in 2020, Turkey sold its allies, the Azeris, TB2 drones. The TB2s allowed Azerbaijan to quickly control the skies and decisively win the war in just six weeks. Videos of the TB2 drone strikes became ubiquitous propaganda, put out daily by the Azerbaijan defense ministry. Some clips played on giant screens set up in public squares in the capital, Baku.

Nagata, the former special forces commander, said Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh should have been a wake-up call for the U.S. military, which was surprised when the TB2s “literally turned the tide of war there.” Beyond the strategic implications though, it should have also worried U.S. policymakers because it showed how quickly the drones were proliferating, Nagata said. “It is a harbinger of things to come, that this is going to expand beyond Turkey,” he said. “If Turkey can do this, any country with some sort of industrial manufacturing base can do this.”

Indeed, while the U.S. has focused on keeping its most advanced systems under control, Turkey, China and Israel have made hefty profits selling their own drones, which are less-sophisticated but often effective, said Max Hoffman, a former adviser to the U.N. and the House Armed Services Committee.

“The Israelis and the Chinese, and now the Turks, have really not caught up fully [to the U.S.], but exploited that middle and down market that the U.S. had let go,” Hoffman said. “And obviously Turkey has not had many scruples in who they sell the drones to.”

Some of Turkey’s other NATO allies, including Canada, did take action, curtailing defense exports in 2019 after a Turkish incursion into northern Syria threatened to disrupt the fight against the Islamic State group.

Publicly, Turkish officials shrugged off the trade restrictions, saying the country had enough of an industrial base that it could produce what it needed on its own. But in private, Turkish officials, as well as the drone maker Baykar, pushed Canada to allow the sale of a key part: the MX-15 imaging and targeting system, which was made by Wescam. The company had received public funding from Canada, including a $75 million grant in 2015, to develop such a system. Upgraded versions of the MX-15 have been used over the years by the Predator and Reaper, and by a number of other systems by NATO partners.

The Turkish Foreign Minister told his Canadian counterpart the MX-15 would only be used on drones intended for protecting civilians in Syria against Russian attacks, and the Turkish defense ministry told Canada it would not export the cameras to any third party.

But six months later, the TB2s showed up in Azerbaijan, with Baku’s propaganda drone strike videos clearly indicating the MX-15s were being used there. Photos of crashed drones, taken by Armenian forces and posted on social media, showed that the cameras had been made in Canada as late as June 2020. This time the Trudeau government undertook a larger review, and in October 2020 it suspended all existing export permits that had allowed Wescam to ship the cameras to Turkey. Canadian officials said Turkey appeared to have broken the U.N. arms embargo on Libya and illegally exported the TB2s with the Canadian MX-15 camera system to Azerbaijan, in violation of its pledges. (L3Harris, Wescam’s parent company, did not respond to questions about the Canadian actions. At the time, Wescam declined to comment on the Armenian photographs, but it confirmed for Canadian officials that it had sold MX-15s to Turkey under a preexisting permit.)

Less than two weeks later, though, in an apparent bid to keep the parts flowing, Erdoğan called Trudeau and surprised him by putting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the phone. Canadian documents, released as part of an inquiry by lawmakers, show the call’s agenda included the export permits. At the time, Ukraine was seeking to add more TB2 drones to its military arsenal.

In 2020, lawmakers in Germany were also pressing to limit the Turkish drone program, said Andrej Hunko, a member of the Bundestag from the Left Party.

Hunko, who had been outspoken over the years about the U.S. drone program, joined lawmakers from the Green Party in asking the government to explain weapons sales to Turkey that they believed were connected to the TB2 drones. The government confirmed that German defense manufacturer TDW had exported missiles and parts to Turkey while another German firm, Numerics, had sold software. Hunko said he and his colleagues concluded that those sales had helped influence the design of the Turkish MAM-L missiles used by the TB2s. TDW did not answer questions for this story, but referred to a statement it made in 2020, which said it had not sold parts to Turkey since 2019. The statement also said TDW has never had “a relationship for a delivery or supply for the Bayraktar TB2 drone or its armament.” Numerics did not respond to a request for comment.

But Hunko soon found a more direct link after Baykar posted photos of its drone from a military parade in Turkmenistan. The images appeared to show ARGOS II cameras from German manufacturer Hensoldt, which later confirmed it had sold the equipment to Turkey for drones, undercutting Baykar’s claims that it used only local parts. Hensoldt told ProPublica it continues to supply the ARGOS II for Baykar’s TB2 drones. The camera, it said, “is developed by Hensoldt’s South African subsidiary and contains no parts that would fall under German export control law.”

Anti-arms activists in the United Kingdom had previously made a similar discovery when they analyzed wreckage of downed drones in 2020. The TB2s had used a missile rack that came from U.K. firm EDO MBM Technology, another subsidiary of Florida-based L3Harris, despite Baykar’s claims of local sourcing.

Hunko and other opposition lawmakers in Germany ultimately called for halting exports of key drone parts, but the government did not take any such action. Hunko said his concerns continue, prompted not only by Turkey’s own use of drones in the region, but also by what they mean for warfare in general. “It’s not like if you send [manned] military planes,” he said. “It’s lowering the threshold for entering into a war.”

The issue hit Washington’s political radar in November 2020, after a report from the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), a pro-Armenia lobbying group that has pushed for tougher action against Turkey. The report contained evidence that TB2 parts, found in wreckage of drones shot down by Armenian forces in the Nagorno-Karabakh war, had come from U.S.-based firms.

ANCA and other groups critical of Turkey mobilized supporters to write to parts manufacturers, winning pledges from many that they would stop selling to Baykar Technology. Six U.S.-based manufacturers whose parts showed up in the TB2 drones responded to ProPublica, confirming that they had taken steps to stop direct sales to Turkey of parts that could be used by Baykar for the drones. But experts said it was probably difficult to stop Turkey from acquiring the parts through distributors and resellers on the open market.

That dynamic exposes how U.S. laws, which were crafted decades ago to police parts that had an obvious military purpose, fall short in the modern era. For instance, the U.S. Munitions List — which designates certain materials as defense-related, meaning they require licenses from the State Department detailing their buyers and end uses — contains things like flamethrowers and the chemicals needed to make C4 explosives. But other technologies, including those used on the TB2 drones, appear instead on another list, known as the Commerce Control List. Overseen by the Commerce Department, these parts do not usually require prior authorization for sales.

In August 2021, a bipartisan group of 27 members of Congress pressed the Biden administration to take action, saying Turkey was using U.S. technology to fuel drone proliferation around the globe. “Turkish actions have continued to run contrary to its responsibilities as a NATO member state,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter. “The potential for these drones to further destabilize flashpoints in the Caucuses, South Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and North Africa is too great to ignore.”

The group asked the State Department to assess whether Turkey was violating existing sanctions or NATO rules. They also pressed for a suspension of exports of U.S. technology that could be used in the TB2s, a step the administration hasn’t taken.

In November 2021, Menendez, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, followed up by proposing an amendment to the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act. The measure mandated that the Biden administration investigate whether any U.S. exports since 2018 had been used in the Turkish drones and whether that use, and their reexport to other countries, violated U.S. law.

“This amendment is a recognition that we must prevent U.S. parts from being included in these Turkish weapons,” he said in a statement at the time. Menendez’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Turkey pushed back. At the same time that lawmakers were calling on the Biden administration to crack down, the Turkish Embassy in Washington hired LB International Solutions on a $544,998 contract to lobby on its behalf with Congress, according to Foreign Agents Registration Act filings. The firm in turn paid D.C. lobbyist Mark W. Murray $35,000 for setting up more than a dozen meetings with members of Congress, including those on the Senate and House Foreign Affairs Committees. Among the items on the agenda: drone sales to Ukraine. Murray declined to answer questions for this story, saying, “I no longer work for LB International on Turkey.” He referred ProPublica to the lobbying firm, which did not respond to a request for comment.

In the end, the final defense bill, passed in December 2021, did not reference Turkish drones specifically, but still required the Biden administration to report to Congress within 180 days on whether U.S. “weapon systems or controlled technology” were used in the Nagorno-Karabakh war. A spokesperson for the Defense Department, which is tasked with leading that review, said that the department was working on finalizing the report and had not yet delivered it to Congress.

The war in Ukraine, however, has since softened some of the criticism. Much like Azerbaijan did in 2020, Ukraine has produced propaganda videos of TB2 strikes on Russian forces, including a catchy song extolling the drones’ prowess on the battlefield. The drones, in turn, drew praise from some in Congress.

“We must find ways to quickly provide Ukraine with more armed drones, such as the Turkish TB-2, which has been very effective apparently,” said Republican Sen. Rob Portman, speaking on the Senate floor in March. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican who in 2019 criticized then-President Donald Trump for allowing Turkey to fight Kurdish groups in Syria, wrote on Twitter that Ukraine was “inflicting substantial damage on Russia’s supply lines with Bayraktar TB2 Turkish made unmanned combat aerial vehicles.” Rubio, who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, declined to comment for this story. Portman’s staff did not respond to a request for comment.

“Everybody in NATO is now looking for ways to deter Putin and up the cost of further Russian military action in Ukraine, and the [Turkish] drones, as proven on the battlefield, are one of the best ways to do that,” said Matthew Bryza, former U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan.

Indeed, the war has prompted a major effort to arm Ukraine, even in countries that had previously sought to stop or slow drone proliferation.

Canada, for instance, announced in March that it was sending $50 million in lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine, including “Canadian-made cameras used in military drones and other specialized equipment” — the same MX-15 optical systems that it had banned from being exported to Turkey last year over human rights concerns. Even before the announcement, Project Ploughshares, the Canadian anti-arms-trade group, had concluded that Ukraine’s TB2s were using the cameras. The analysis was based in part on Canadian export records and Ukrainian video of drone strikes that show the MX-15’s distinctive overlay. Kelsey Gallagher, a researcher with the group, said the equipment had likely been exported to Ukraine instead of Turkey. Before the Russian invasion, Ukrainian officials had announced plans to set up a joint production facility with Baykar in the country.

Canada’s Global Affairs department forwarded questions for this story to the Department of National Defence, which did not respond.

The U.S. now faces a slippery diplomatic quandary: On one hand, the TB2s are aiding allies like Ukraine, which has used them to turn the tide against Russian forces. On the other hand, they are rapidly changing modern warfare, giving warring factions a way to kill quickly, cheaply and remotely.

Pakistan’s military, which the U.S. has long refused to sell drones to over concerns about the country’s nuclear weapons program, is now advertising the TB2s as a part of its arsenal.

And in Morocco, the Polisario Front, an opposition group in the disputed Western Sahara region, accused the Moroccan air force of deploying drones after a decades-old ceasefire broke down. The Moroccan government has not acknowledged possession of the Turkish drones, but in October 2021 Reuters reported that Turkey was negotiating a sales deal for TB2s with the country. By December, video taken by activists captured the drones in the skies, and local news reports showed fragments of Turkish MAM-L missiles that had reportedly been used in strikes. Neighboring Algeria denounced what it called “targeted killings committed with sophisticated weapons of war … against innocent civilians.” The Moroccan Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment. Officials have previously denied targeting civilians.

Critics say the U.S. should find ways to slow the spread of Turkish drones.

“The proliferation of this kind of weaponized technology is unstoppable, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to at least create friction against it. And that’s a policy choice,” said Nagata, the former head of special operations.

Van Diepen, the former State official who helped oversee nonproliferation programs, said that if the Biden administration chose to take action, it could start by activating so-called end-use checks on key drone parts.

The State Department, for example, has staff in diplomatic missions abroad, including in Istanbul, tasked with carrying out on-site inspections of companies importing goods from the U.S. and ensuring that the products are not being diverted for other uses. The program, called Blue Lantern, focuses mostly on major sanctioned parties, groups like Islamic State, or entities linked to states like Iran. While the TB2 components from the U.S. are not directly controlled as military parts, the fact they were known to be used to build a military weapons system should have raised flags within the Defense, State and Commerce departments, former U.S. officials said.

Experts said the U.S. could also use other tools to slow the flow of parts to the drones. Last September, for example, the White House said it had the authority to penalize any party involved in the Ethiopia conflict. Van Diepen said the Biden administration could use that power to place Baykar Technology on a targeted sanctions list, making it illegal for U.S. companies to do business with the firm altogether.

The U.S. has taken similar measures against China and Iran, sanctioning Iranian companies and individuals for their involvement in Tehran’s armed drone program, and sanctioning Chinese-drone maker DJI for its role in surveillance of ethnic Uyhgurs in Xinjiang.

To some of the strongest critics of Turkey’s armed drones though, it appears there is little will in Washington to do more.

“Canada, they did the due diligence and took actions that haven’t happened here,” said Aram Hamparian, executive director of ANCA.

In the U.S., “it’s just business as usual. So then why even bother having these laws? And the answer to my question is: So we can use them conveniently when it advances some policy aim.”

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by Andrea Suozzo

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The Family Research Council’s multimillion-dollar headquarters sit on G Street in Washington, D.C., just steps from the U.S. Capitol and the White House, a spot ideally situated for its work as a right-wing policy think tank and political pressure group.

From its perch at the heart of the nation’s capital, the FRC has pushed for legislation banning gender-affirming surgery; filed amicus briefs supporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade; and advocated for religious exemptions to civil rights laws. Its longtime head, a former state lawmaker and ordained minister named Tony Perkins, claims credit for pushing the Republican platform rightward over the past two decades.

What is the FRC? Its website sums up the answer to this question in 63 words: “A nonprofit research and educational organization dedicated to articulating and advancing a family-centered philosophy of public life. In addition to providing policy research and analysis for the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the federal government, FRC seeks to inform the news media, the academic community, business leaders, and the general public about family issues that affect the nation from a biblical worldview.”

In the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service, though, it is also a church, with Perkins as its religious leader.

According to documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act and given to ProPublica, the FRC filed an application to change its status to an “association of churches,” a designation commonly used by groups with member churches like the Southern Baptist Convention, in March 2020. The agency approved the change a few months later.

The FRC is one of a growing list of activist groups to seek church status, a designation that comes with the ability for an organization to shield itself from financial scrutiny. Once the IRS blessed it as an association of churches, the FRC was no longer required to file a public tax return, known as a Form 990, revealing key staffer salaries, the names of board members and related organizations, large payments to independent contractors and grants the organization has made. Unlike with other charities, IRS investigators can’t initiate an audit on a church unless a high-level Treasury Department official has approved the investigation.

The FRC declined to make officials available for an interview or answer any questions for this story. Its former parent organization, Focus on the Family, changed its designation to become a church in 2016. In a statement, the organization said it made the switch largely out of concern for donor privacy, noting that many groups like it have made the same change. Many of them claim they operated in practice as churches or associations of churches all along.

Warren Cole Smith, president of the Christian transparency watchdog MinistryWatch, said he believes groups like these are seeking church status with the IRS for the protections it confers.

“I don’t believe that a lot of the organizations that have filed for the church exemption are in fact churches,” he said. “And I don’t think that they think that they are in fact churches.”

The IRS uses a list of 14 characteristics to determine if an organization is a church or an association of churches, though it notes that organizations need not meet all the specifications. The Family Research Council answered in the affirmative for 11 of those points, saying that it has an array of “partner churches” with a shared mission: “to hold all life as sacred, to see families flourish, and to promote religious freedom.” The group says there is no set process for a church to become one of the partners that make up its association, but it says partners (and the FRC’s employees) must affirm a statement of faith to do so. It claims there are nearly 40,000 churches in its association, made up of different creeds and beliefs — saying that this models the pattern of the “first Christian churches described in the New Testament of the Bible.”

Unlike the Southern Baptist Convention, whose website hosts a directory of more than 50,000 affiliated churches, the FRC’s site does not list these partners or mention the word “church” anywhere on its home page. The FRC’s application to become an association of churches didn’t include this list of partner churches, nor did it provide the names to ProPublica.

To the question of whether the organization performs baptisms, weddings and funerals, the FRC answered yes, but it said it left those duties to its partner churches. Did it have schools for religious instruction of the young? That, too, was the job of the partner churches.

The FRC says it does not have members but a congregation made up of its board of directors, employees, supporters and partner churches. Some of those partner churches, it says, do have members.

Does the organization hold regular chapel services? According to the FRC’s letter to the IRS, the answer is yes. It wrote that it holds services at its office building averaging more than 65 people. But when a ProPublica reporter called to inquire about service times, a staffer who answered the phone responded, “We don’t have church service.” Elsewhere in the form, it says that the employees make up those who attend its services.

The following are excerpts from a document obtained by ProPublica. Click the arrows to explore it.

by ProPublica

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Applications are now open for five spots in ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network. We’re seeking to work with local journalists who are interested in investigating wrongdoing and abuses of power in their communities.

Our new partners will begin work on Nov. 1, 2022, and continue for one year. Journalists from all local and regional newsrooms are eligible to apply.

ProPublica will pay the salary (up to $75,000), plus an allowance for benefits, for each full-time reporter. Local reporters work from and report to their home newsrooms, while receiving extensive support and guidance for their work from ProPublica, including collaboration with a senior editor and access to ProPublica’s expertise with data, research, engagement, video and design. The work will be published or broadcast by your newsroom and simultaneously by ProPublica.

Applications are due Aug. 22, 2022, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time. Here are more details for those interested in applying.

ProPublica launched the Local Reporting Network at the beginning of 2018 to boost investigative journalism in local newsrooms. It has since worked with nearly 60 news organizations. The network is part of ProPublica’s local initiative, which includes offices in the Midwest, South and Southwest, plus an investigative unit in partnership with the Texas Tribune.

Reporting by the Local Reporting Network and its local partners have had significant impact.

MLK50, a nonprofit news organization in Memphis, Tennessee, reported on how the area’s largest hospital system sued and garnished the wages of thousands of poor patients, including its own employees, for unpaid medical debts. The hospital subsequently curtailed its lawsuits against patients, erased $11.9 million in unpaid medical debts, dramatically expanded its financial assistance policy for hospital care and raised the minimum wage it pays employees. The stories won the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting.

Our partnership with the Miami Herald looked at the deeply troubled Florida program intended to provide services and a financial cushion for the families of children born with devastating brain injuries. The series found that the program protected doctors at the expense of suffering families and that it had amassed $1.5 billion in assets while families waited for help. The reporting pushed the state legislature to quickly enact long-needed reforms and spurred the program’s executive director to roll out further benefits for the families and subsequently resign.

And our collaboration with Nashville Public Radio (WPLN) went deep into one county in Tennessee that was arresting and locking up children at extraordinary rates. The series about Rutherford County was read more than 3.5 million times and spurred demands for reform. Eleven members of Congress called for the U.S. Department of Justice to open a civil rights investigation. Tennessee’s governor called for a review of Rutherford County’s juvenile court judge. In January 2022, legislators introduced a bill to remove the judge, citing an “appalling abuse of power.” An hour after ProPublica wrote about that bill, the judge announcedshe would retire this year rather than run for election.

Applications to join the Local Reporting Network should be submitted by newsroom leaders proposing a particular project and a specific reporter. If you lead a newsroom and are interested in working with us, we’d like to hear from you about:

Freelancers are also welcome to apply, but must submit a joint application with an eligible news organization willing to publish their work.

Please submit your proposal by Aug. 22, 2022, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time. Entries will be judged principally by ProPublica editors. Selected proposals will be announced by October.

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