ProPublica

Why Did You Leave the Department of Veterans Affairs?

by Vernal Coleman, Topher Sanders and Maryam Jameel

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

If you are a doctor, nurse or other front-line medical provider who has recently left your position at a VA hospital or clinic, we want to hear from you.

We know many of the issues at the VA are long-standing, but our reporting over the last several months has shown that some recent policy changes are having an impact on working conditions and on patient care. We’ve obtained anonymized exit-survey data about departing VA employees’ decisions to leave the department, but we need your help to understand the full picture.

We want to hear your story about leaving the VA and get your insights about the care the VA provides. It’s important that we hear all sides of an issue, so we’re not just interested in stories about problems — if you’ve had a positive experience with the Trump administration’s changes or want to provide additional context, please share it with us.

We take your privacy seriously. **We are gathering this information for the purposes of our reporting and we need your name and contact information so that we can be sure that those who respond actually worked at the VA. We will not publish your name or any part of your story unless we contact you and you give us permission to do so.

If you currently work for the VA or another federal agency, we encourage you to contact our reporters directly via the encrypted messaging app Signal rather than fill out this form. You are welcome to use this option if you’ve left the agency too. Here’s how you can reach us on Signal:

• Vernal Coleman: vcoleman91.99
• Topher Sanders: TopherSanders.02

This Is Ground Zero in the Conservative Quest for More Patriotic and Christian Public Schools

by Jennifer Smith Richards

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

The future that the Trump administration envisions for public schools is more patriotic, more Christian and less “woke.” Want to know how that might play out? Look to Oklahoma.

Oklahoma has spent the past few years reshaping public schools to integrate lessons about Jesus and encourage pride about America’s history, with political leaders and legislators working their way through the conservative agenda for overhauling education.

Academics, educators and critics alike refer to Oklahoma as ground zero for pushing education to the right. Or, as one teacher put it, “the canary on the prairie.”

By the time the second Trump administration began espousing its “America First” agenda, which includes the expansion of private school vouchers and prohibitions on lessons about race and sex, Oklahoma had been there, done that.

The Republican supermajority in the state Legislature — where some members identify as Christian nationalists — passed sweeping restrictions on teaching about racism and gender in 2021, prompting districts to review whether teachers’ lessons might make students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish” or other psychological distress about their race. The following year, it adopted one of the country’s first anti-transgender school bathroom bills, requiring students to use restrooms and locker rooms consistent with the gender they were assigned at birth or face discipline.

While he was state schools superintendent, Ryan Walters demanded Bibles be placed in every classroom, created a state Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism, and encouraged schools to use online “pro-America” content from conservative media nonprofit PragerU. He called teachers unions “terrorist” organizations, railed against “woke” classrooms, threatened to yank the accreditation of school districts that resisted his orders and commissioned a test to measure whether teacher applicants from liberal states had “America First” knowledge.

Many of the changes endorsed by the state’s leaders have elements of Christian nationalism, which holds that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and often downplays troubling episodes in the country’s history to instead emphasize patriotism and a God-given destiny.

Walters, who declined to comment for this story, resigned at the end of September and became CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance, an arm of the conservative think tank Freedom Foundation that aims to “fight the woke liberal union mob.” But much of the transformation in Oklahoma education policy that he helped turbocharge is codified in the state’s rules and laws.

“We are the testing ground. Every single state needs to pay attention,” warned Jena Nelson, a moderate Democrat who lost the state superintendent’s race to Walters in 2022 and is now running for Congress.

ProPublica has reported that Education Secretary Linda McMahon has brought in a team of strategists who are working to radically shift how children will learn in America, even as they carry out the “final mission” to shut down the federal agency. Some of those strategists have spoken of their desire to dismantle public education. Others hope to push it in the same direction as Oklahoma.

Walters tapped the president of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that published Project 2025 and the blueprints that preceded it, to help rewrite Oklahoma’s social studies standards. The Legislature did not reject the rewrite, so the standards now include roughly 40 points about the Bible, Jesus and Christianity that students should learn as well as skepticism about the 2020 presidential election results and the origins of COVID-19. If the new standards survive a legal challenge, they could be in place until they’re up for review again in six years.

But while Oklahoma made these shifts, it has consistently ranked near the bottom on national measures of student performance. Scores on eighth grade reading and math in national evaluations are abysmal. Only New Mexico’s proficiency rates rank lower. The high school dropout rate is one of the highest in the country, while spending on education is one of the lowest. Only three other states — Utah, Idaho and Arizona — spend less per pupil. And in the most recent federal data about average teacher pay, Oklahoma tied with Mississippi for dead last. Many school superintendents and parents say state leaders have been fixated on the wrong things if the goal is to improve schools.

“The attention to the culture war thing means that there’s a lot of distraction from the basic needs of kids being met,” said Aysha Prather, a parent who has closely followed changes in state education policy. Her transgender son is a plaintiff in a 2022 lawsuit challenging the state’s bathroom ban. That case remains on appeal.

“The school should be the nicest, happiest, best resourced place in a community,” she added. “That’s how we show that we value kids. And that is obviously not how most of our Legislature or state government feels about it.”

In a statement to ProPublica, the new state superintendent, Lindel Fields, said that he’s sorting through previous rules and edicts that have created “much confusion” for schools, including about the standards and the PragerU teacher certification tests. He said the public rightfully has questions about how the state Education Department changes after Walters’ tenure, but “given all these pressing tasks, we simply don’t have time for looking backward. Whether we are 50th or 46th or 25th in education, we have work to do to move our state forward,” Fields wrote. He said his first tasks are “resolving a number of outstanding issues that are hindering operations” including creating a budget for the agency.

Public school superintendents do not oppose all of the mandates from the past several years. When Walters directed schools last year to place Bibles in every classroom and teach from them, one district superintendent emailed to thank him for offering “cover” to incorporate Bible-focused lessons, according to news reports.

Another superintendent, Tommy Turner of Battiest Public Schools, said students at his schools have always had access to the Bible. The district still puts on a Christmas program and observes a moment of silence to start the day, and the school board prays before meetings.

“Christ never left the school,” he said in an interview in his office.

A lifelong Republican who works in a remote stretch of southeast Oklahoma, Turner said he is concerned about the state’s priorities and doesn’t see Bibles as the most pressing issues.

In his district, the cafeteria needs repairs even after the emergency replacement of a roof that had a gaping hole in it. Many of his teachers work second jobs on weekends because the pay’s so low. Nail heads are poking through the gym’s thin hardwood floors. The district has lost 15% of its students to an online charter school and homeschooling. Voters have rejected three bond issues in a row for building repairs and renovations.

Turner said he’d like to retire, but he loves the students and wants to protect his little district. He put on his cowboy hat, apologized for the pile of dead wasps on his office floor — the infestations barely register anymore — and walked over to the high school. He said he hadn’t even read the new social studies standards.

“I don’t have time to chase every rabbit,” he said. “I’ve got a school to run.”

The changes to Oklahoma’s curriculum rules don’t just touch on national issues around race and gender. Here, teachers aren’t supposed to tell students that the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 — a defining incident of racial violence in Oklahoma history — was perpetrated by racists.

State social studies standards for years have included discussion of how white Tulsans murdered as many as 300 Black people. But once the 2021 state law that restricted teaching about race and gender passed, some teachers avoided the topic.

The law prohibits teachers from singling out specific racial groups as responsible for past racism. It specifies that individuals of a certain race shouldn’t be portrayed as inherently racist, “whether consciously or unconsciously.” In addition to teachers’ licensure being on the line, repeated failure to comply would allow the state to revoke district accreditation, which could result in a state takeover.

When educators questioned how to teach about a race massacre without running afoul of the law, state legislators and the Tulsa County chapter of the conservative parent group Moms for Liberty weighed in to say that white people today shouldn’t feel shame and that the massacre’s perpetrators shouldn’t be cast as racists. A Moms for Liberty chapter representative did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

At a speaking engagement at the Norman Public Library in 2023, Walters suggested teachers present the facts about the murders but should not say “the skin color determined it.” Even two years after the law went into effect, news reports said teachers were still treading lightly on the race massacre, wary of the state suspending or revoking their licenses for exposing students to prohibited concepts. Those fears are not hypothetical; the state has revoked at least one teacher’s license and suspended two others’.

Other historic episodes that reveal racism also are getting a new look in Oklahoma through the state’s partnership with PragerU Kids, which creates short-form videos to counter what its founder believes is left-wing ideology in schools.

Teachers in the state aren’t required to use the videos, but some like them and show them in class. The videos align with conservatives’ push to teach a positive view of America’s past and with the state’s rules on teaching about race and gender. For instance, PragerU Kids’ version of Booker T. Washington’s story is a cheery lesson in self-sufficiency and acceptance. Once freed from slavery, Washington toiled in coal mines, worked as a janitor in exchange for formal education and became a great American orator and leader of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

The video does not linger on his being born into “the most miserable, desolate and discouraging surroundings” or, as he wrote in his autobiography, that slavery was “a sin that at some time we shall have to pay for.”

“America was one of the first places on Earth to outlaw slavery,” a cartoon version of Washington tells two time-traveling children in the PragerU video, so “I am proud and thankful.” (The U.S. did ban importing slaves in 1808, but it did not enforce that law and did not outlaw owning people altogether until 1865, after Britain, Denmark, France and Spain had done so.)

The Washington character says in the video that he devoted his life to teaching people “the importance of independence and making themselves as valuable as possible.” And when one child says she’s sorry that he and other Black Americans faced segregation and discrimination, Washington thanks her for her sympathy but assures the child, who is white, that she’s done nothing wrong.

Echoing a conservative talking point, the cartoon Washington says, “Future generations are never responsible for the sins of the past.”

Jermaine Thibodeaux, a historian at the University of Oklahoma, said he is familiar with the PragerU videos and considers them an ideological tool of a “reeducation project nationwide” that can be misleading.

“I don’t think that’s something Washington necessarily uttered,” he said of the quote about future generations.

The value Washington placed on independence, Thibodeaux added, was “predicated on the notions of self-sufficiency post-slavery, when there was little help coming from the government.”

A spokesperson for PragerU declined to comment for this story.

Pressure to keep squeezing social justice and LGBTQ+ issues out of classrooms has been intensifying since 2021, when Republican state lawmakers began pushing “dirty book” legislation that would censor school libraries. One bill, which didn’t pass, called for firing school employees and fining offenders $10,000 each time they “promoted positions in opposition to closely held religious beliefs of the student.” That was the backdrop when the state accused Summer Boismier of “moral turpitude” and then revoked her teaching license last year.

The English department at Norman High School near Oklahoma City told Boismier and her colleagues they needed to pull titles that might be considered racially divisive or contain themes about sex and gender. Or they could turn books around on the shelves so students couldn’t see the titles.

“I remember just sitting in my seat shaking. I had colleagues in the room who were in tears,” Boismier said. Given the choice to purge books or hide their covers, Boismier did neither. She wrapped her classroom’s bookshelf in red butcher paper and wrote “books the state doesn’t want you to read” on it in black marker. She added a QR code linking to the Brooklyn Public Library, where students could get a library card and virtual access to books considered inappropriate in Oklahoma, then posted a photo of it all on social media.

Boismier, who resigned in protest of the 2021 law, challenged the license revocation in court, and the case is ongoing. She said she does not regret taking a stand against a law she views as unjust. The state has argued the revocation is valid.

“I am living every teacher in Oklahoma’s worst nightmare right now,” she said. “I am unemployable.”

In the Battiest district, where Turner is superintendent, an elementary reading teacher told ProPublica that just to be safe, she removed books about diversity and including others who are different. She said that was uncomfortable; half of her students are Native American, and so is she.

Adopted this year, the state’s new social studies standards provide even more specifics about what should be taught. They include the expectation that students know “stories from Christianity that influenced the American Founders and culture, including the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth (e.g., the ‘Golden Rule,’ the Sermon on the Mount),” to second graders. A state court last month issued a temporary stay on requiring schools to follow the standards while a lawsuit against them plays out.

In addition, the new standards accept Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. They dictate that ninth graders learn about “discrepancies” in election results including “the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters” and other unsupported conservative talking points. The Trump campaign and supporters filed at least 60 lawsuits covering these points; nearly all were dismissed as meritless or were decided against Trump. The election skepticism standard has left the superintendent of a roughly 2,000-student district north of Tulsa confused. He said he and other superintendents are unsure how they would navigate those but are hopeful that “standards rooted in fact prevail.”

“There comes a point where curriculum cannot be opinion,” said the superintendent, who didn’t want to be named because he feared retaliation. “I’m not trying to get involved in conspiracy theories.”

The push by state leaders to embed more Christian values in schools isn’t what keeps many superintendents in the rural parts of the state up at night. They say the Bible has never left their classrooms.

“I am smack-dab right in the middle of the Bible Belt,” said the leader of a tiny district on the western side of the state. “We are small, but we have seven churches. You’re talking ‘Footloose’ here.”

While she doesn’t disagree with everything the Legislature and Walters have done, she said she feels like some of their actions undermine public schools and could “shut down rural Oklahoma.”

She and other leaders of public school districts worry that the state’s expanded school choice program, which allows families to get tax credits if they attend private and religious schools, will draw away students from their districts and, ultimately, erode their funding. Congress passed the first federal private school tax credit in July.

It’s just the second year of the statewide tax credit program approved by the Legislature that allows students to use public funds to attend private and religious schools. The credits cost the state nearly $250 million in tax revenue this school year and subsidizes almost 40,000 students. That money, superintendents say, is desperately needed in their districts.

The state also has encouraged the growth of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run and subject to fewer regulations. Last year, the state’s third-largest district, behind the Oklahoma City and Tulsa districts, wasn’t a traditional one. It was EPIC, a statewide online charter school. Walters and Gov. Kevin Stitt supported St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in its efforts to become the country’s first religious charter school. The Supreme Court blocked it from opening.

Even communities with few private schools feel threatened by the state’s push toward privatization. At Nashoba Public School, in a rural part of southeast Oklahoma where there’s little else but timber and twisting roads, the roughly 50 kids who make up the elementary and middle grades are taught in split-grade classrooms. Like hundreds of other Oklahoma districts, more than three-quarters of which are rural, it’s not just a school, it’s the school; there are no private schools in Pushmataha County.

When students enroll in charter schools, they often take funding with them while districts have to maintain operations as before.

“You starve your public schools to feed your private schools and charter schools,” said Nashoba Superintendent Charles Caughern Jr. “Our foundation was set up for a free and appropriate education for all kids. All kids!”

Caughern fears students with disabilities will suffer as public schools are weakened. Private schools don’t have to admit students with disabilities, and many won’t, he said.

Erika Wright, a parent who leads the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition, which advocates for public schools, said the state’s deep-red politics might lead outsiders to think Oklahomans support state leaders pushing education far to the right. But that’s not the case, Wright said.

“They don’t understand what’s happening,” Wright said. “They just assume that public schools are always going to be there because they’ve always been there in their lifetime. I think the average Oklahoman does not understand the gravity and complexity of what is taking place.”

That’s not to say there isn’t resistance. A group of about 15 parents and public school advocates that Walters derided as the “woke peanut gallery” goes to State Board of Education meetings — a visual reminder that people care about education policy and public schools. A suburban Oklahoma City district is devising plans to deliver all of the Bible lessons contained in the new social studies standards on the same day, giving parents an easy way to have their children opt out. Court challenges to some of the state’s right-wing policies are pending.

Some are hopeful that Oklahoma will recalibrate the more extreme policies that marked Walters’ tenure. The State Board of Education last week decided not to revoke the licenses of two teachers who Walters wanted punished for their social media posts about Trump. The new superintendent said he would drop Walters’ plan to distribute Bibles to every classroom.

But many of the significant changes in classrooms came out of the Legislature, which has continued this year to propose bills to rid schools of “inappropriate materials” and proclaim that, in Oklahoma, “Christ is King.” A lot of damage already has been done to public schools, said Turner, the Battiest superintendent.

He was only half-joking when he said some parents have been “brainwashed” by right-wing TV news and Oklahoma leaders’ talk of liberal indoctrination to think the district is teaching kids to be gay or converting Christian kids into atheists.

A couple of years ago, one mom stopped him in the parking lot at school to say she was withdrawing her child from the district because its teaching didn’t align with her values. The superintendent was floored.

“That’s the power of the rhetoric,” Turner said.

He said he used to sit a couple of pews behind that mom in church every Sunday.

Help ProPublica Report on Education

Megan O’Matz and Asia Fields contributed reporting.

Joint Congressional Investigation Launched in Response to ProPublica’s Revelations on Detained Americans

by Nicole Foy

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

Democrats in the House and Senate announced plans for a wide-ranging investigation into immigration agents’ detention of citizens after a ProPublica story found that more than 170 Americans have been held by immigration officials this year.

Minority leaders of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said the joint investigation into the detention of U.S. citizens and other allegations of misconduct by immigration agents would include a hearing in Los Angeles.

“Over 170 U.S. Citizens are being arrested. Why? Because they look like me. Because they are of Latino origin. Or because they are suspected to not be a U.S. citizen, or because they are suspected of crimes they have not committed,” Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the ranking Democrat on the House committee, said during a Monday press conference in Los Angeles with Mayor Karen Bass.

Garcia said the investigators are demanding all records and documents showing how U.S. citizens are treated by immigration officials in Los Angeles and around the country. “We want to understand what they are doing in our neighborhoods, how it is being funded,” he said.

Our investigation found that at least 50 citizens have been detained based on questions about their citizenship as of Oct. 5. They were almost all Latino. Roughly 130 others have been detained after raids or protests on allegations of assaulting officers or interfering with arrests. Many of those cases have wilted under scrutiny.

We found Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. At least two dozen citizens have reported being held for at least a day without access to a phone or a lawyer.

Bass and Garcia said the mistreatment of citizens has come amid the arrests of immigrants reporting for check-ins and immigration court, and the administration’s repeated blocking of congressional attempts to visit and conduct oversight in federal detention facilities like the one in Los Angeles.

“It’s important that we say today that what is happening to undocumented residents is also happening to U.S. citizens, which means this can happen to anyone, to all of us, at any period of time,” Bass said.

Our article has also prompted members of Congress to write to the Department of Homeland Security.

In one letter sent on Monday to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Garcia and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said citizens in cities like Los Angeles have borne the brunt of the administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement.

“The impact of these arrests has not been evenly distributed across the country, and cities like Chicago, Portland, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles have been targeted,” Garcia and Blumenthal wrote. “Troublingly, the pattern of U.S. Citizen arrests coincides with an alarming increase in racial profiling — particularly of Latinos — which has been well documented in Los Angeles.”

DHS has not replied to previous letters.

Asked about the concerns from elected leaders, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin rejected claims that immigration agents have been engaging in racial profiling. She said in a statement to ProPublica that a temporary ruling by the Supreme Court in September had “vindicated” the administration “whether Mayor Bass or Rep. Garcia like it or not.”

“DHS enforces federal immigration law without fear, favor, or prejudice,” McLaughlin wrote. “Claims by the media, agitators, and sanctuary politicians like Mayor Bass and Rep. Garcia that ICE is targeting U.S. citizens, making unconstitutional arrests, and ‘trampling on civil liberties’ are FALSE.”

White House Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson told ProPublica in an email that “unhinged rhetoric from activists and Democrat politicians” was responsible for an increase in assaults on ICE officers.

On social media, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller derided Bass’ press conference as “abject lies.”

“Violent leftists have been arrested and charged with illegally obstructing federal law enforcement, a felony,” Miller wrote Monday night on X. “Let that sink in: open borders Democrats have incited leftists to violently attack ICE.”

Of the cases we tracked through Oct. 5, we found nearly 50 instances where charges have never been filed or the cases were dismissed. Our count found at least eight citizens have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors, including for failing to follow orders. Others are still facing charges for more serious accusations, including for allegedly ramming an agent’s car. (The driver has pleaded not guilty.)

Our account did not count citizens arrested later, after some sort of judicial process, or those detained by local law enforcement or the National Guard. That included cases of some people charged with serious crimes, like throwing rocks or tossing a flare to start a fire.

Ethics Watchdog Group Seeks Investigation Into Border Czar and Contracts Following ProPublica Report

by Avi Asher-Schapiro, Mica Rosenberg and Jeff Ernsthausen

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

A Washington-based watchdog is calling for an inspector general investigation into potential conflicts of interest and ethics violations in the office of border czar Tom Homan related to government contracting.

This follows reporting from ProPublica revealing a web of past business relationships involving Homan, his senior adviser Mark Hall, and consultants and firms seeking Department of Homeland Security contracts.

The request by the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit nonpartisan government watchdog, also cites a story by MSNBC that reported that Homan had taken a $50,000 cash payment from undercover FBI agents posing as would-be DHS contractors seeking his help obtaining contracts.

ProPublica revealed that Hall met this August with a company interested in winning contracts for immigrant detention centers. That meeting, at the Texas offices of a firm called Industrial Tent Systems, was also attended by Charlie Sowell, a consultant on ITS’ payroll.

Sowell had paid Hall a $50,000 consulting fee as recently as February — right before Hall entered the border czar’s office working under Homan, government disclosure documents show.

Sowell also had a business relationship with Homan. Before he became border czar, Homan had worked with Sowell’s firm SE&M Solutions to advise clients seeking contracts with DHS, according to government documents and an interview with Sowell. In June, Sowell told ProPublica he and Homan avoided any conflicts of interest. “Tom is an exceptionally ethical person,” said Sowell, who has declined further interview requests.

The August meeting between Hall, ITS and Sowell may have violated federal ethics laws and merits an independent investigation, according to CLC.

“When a senior official is involved in contracting decisions that stand to benefit a recent former employer, it raises serious questions about whether government decision making is impartial,” the CLC wrote in its Oct. 16 letter to DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari.

“An IG investigation is needed to determine whether Hall’s actions violate federal ethics laws.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson dismissed calls for an inquiry into Homan’s office. “Tom has always operated with the utmost integrity and is working tirelessly to keep all Americans safe,” she said, calling recent reports “debunked left-wing talking points.”

Jackson has said that Homan has “no involvement in the actual awarding of a government contract” and that Hall has not been authorized by Homan to represent him.

Homan, Hall and the inspector general’s office did not respond to requests for comment on the letter. Industrial Tent Systems has not responded to a comment request.

Congress recently allocated $45 billion to massively expand immigration detention spaces, including plans to build an unprecedented series of tent camps on military bases across the country. The windfall of government money has drawn intense interest among DHS contractors and consultants, including some with past business relationships with Hall and Homan.

Both men are bound by conflict-of-interest rules barring them from involvement in government discussions that could impact their former business partners, ethics experts have said.

Homan has said repeatedly that he recused himself from all contracting matters. But ProPublica and Bloomberg have reported he has been involved in conversations with industry players about contracts. Neither DHS nor the White House would provide formal recusal documents sought by ProPublica.

In a separate ethics complaint centering on Homan, the CLC asks the IG to “investigate to determine if Homan intentionally excluded information from his financial disclosure statement in violation of federal criminal law.”

The ethics complaint alleges that if Homan received $50,000 from undercover FBI agents, it should have been reported on his financial disclosure forms.

Homan has not only said he did nothing illegal, he recently maintained he never took the $50,000.

“This matter originated under the previous administration and was subjected to a full review by FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors,” Jackson said this week. “They found no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.”

This County Was the “Model” for Local Police Carrying Out Immigration Raids. It Ended in Civil Rights Violations.

by Rafael Carranza, Arizona Luminaria

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Arizona Luminaria. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Manuel Nieto Jr. and his sister had just pulled into a gas station to buy cigarettes and Gatorade when he noticed a sheriff’s deputy standing over two Latino men on the ground.

Their north Phoenix neighborhood was on alert. Sheriff’s deputies had been targeting day-labor centers in the area and making traffic stops — arresting people who couldn’t prove their immigration status. They had one thing in common: They looked Latino.

“No diga nada. Pídale un abogado,” Nieto’s sister, Velia Meraz, yelled to the detained men, according to court testimony. (“Don’t say anything. Ask for an attorney.”)

The deputy warned Nieto and Meraz: “You need to get out of here, now.”

Nieto drove around the corner to his dad’s auto repair shop as another deputy on a motorcycle followed him, siren and lights on, and patrol vehicles swarmed. Deputies approached — guns drawn.

Nieto dialed 911 for help: Officers were harassing him, he would later testify in court. One pulled Nieto from his vehicle. Others pinned him to the ground and handcuffed him.

Nieto’s father came running from his shop.

“Let my children go,” Manuel Nieto Sr. said. “They’re U.S. citizens. What did they do wrong?”

The raid that ensnared Nieto Jr. and Meraz 17 years ago was carried out under a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement program that grants local police powers to check immigration status during traffic stops and other routine encounters. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, under then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio, was among the first in the nation to test out ICE’s 287(g) task force program.

Since President Donald Trump retook office in January, similar scenes of local officers joining in aggressive immigration arrests have multiplied as ICE has rapidly expanded the 287(g) task force program to deputize local police officers as de facto deportation agents.

Moments after Manuel Nieto Sr. stormed out of his north Phoenix auto shop, the deputies left without arresting or citing his children. But Nieto Jr. and Meraz didn’t move on. They joined three other county residents in suing the sheriff’s office, accusing deputies of targeting them solely because they were Latino.

A federal judge agreed that the task force’s traffic stops and raids on Hispanic neighborhoods, day-labor centers and other businesses had violated Latinos’ civil and constitutional rights. Even after the ruling, the judge found Arpaio continued to detain people based solely on suspected civil immigration violations.

The U.S. Department of Justice also conducted a civil rights investigation into the sheriff’s office’s discriminatory practices, and ICE ended Arpaio’s 287(g) agreement. In 2012, ICE suspended all local police deportation task forces nationwide, only restarting them after Trump began his second term in January.

Many Arizonans who lived through Arpaio’s 287(g)-fueled immigration-enforcement campaign see parallels between what happened in Maricopa County and what’s now playing out across the country as local officers join forces with ICE. They also foresee costly troubles for local agencies that follow in Maricopa County’s footsteps, including difficulty regaining the trust of Latino residents whose constitutional rights are violated by local officers.

The White House and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica’s questions.

Arpaio told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that he became a target of political persecution for helping enforce immigration laws, which he saw as part of his job.

“I’d do it over again,” Arpaio said. “I tell everybody: I didn’t do anything wrong. I had a federal court who was biased against me. And all they could get me out on was a contempt of court? Think of that.”

Meanwhile, Maricopa County continues to reckon with its time allowing deputies to act as immigration officers.

Under a settlement agreement, the court mandated broad oversight of the sheriff’s office and appointed a monitor to track its compliance. Since then, the law enforcement agency has been required to meticulously document all interactions with the public. In the 12 years since, the department has yet to convince the judge that its deputies don’t racially profile Latino drivers and that it adequately investigates deputies’ alleged misconduct.

Salvador Reza is a longtime community organizer who advocates for day laborers in Phoenix. He said his work put him in the crosshairs of Arpaio’s immigration enforcement, leading to his arrest for obstruction during a protest. (The county declined to pursue charges against him.) Because of what happened in Maricopa County, he believes Latinos, including in the communities whose police departments have joined forces with ICE, are now more likely to be racially profiled.

“At that time, we were a laboratory,” Reza said. “They did the experiment, and basically now they’re implementing it at the national level.”

The lawsuit brought by Nieto Jr., Meraz and the other county residents became known as Melendres v. Arpaio — for Manuel de Jesus Melendres Ortega, a legal resident who was arrested in one of Arpaio’s sweeps.

When U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow certified it as a class-action suit in December 2011, he indicated racial profiling by the sheriff’s office had been so widespread it could have violated the constitutional rights of any Latino in Maricopa County, one-third of the population.

The settlement contains 368 paragraphs outlining reforms. They range from creating a policy that bars racial profiling to developing a system that collects data on traffic stops to identify disparities in the race of motorists who are pulled over.

To end court oversight, the sheriff’s office must be in “full and effective compliance” with the reforms continuously for three years. The department currently complies with more than 90% of the requirements, according to the monitor, but falls short in the two areas that most directly impact Latino drivers: eliminating racial bias in traffic stops and quickly investigating allegations of deputy misconduct.

Snow found that traffic stops involving Latino drivers and passengers dragged on “beyond the time necessary to resolve the issue that initially justified the stop.”

Ricardo Reyes said he repeatedly endured traffic stops as a young Latino growing up in the Maryvale neighborhood of west Phoenix, where three-quarters of the residents identify as Latino. He drove a nice car and believes deputies under Arpaio racially profiled him.

“They would ask me for my license, they take it and then, ‘You’re free to go,’” recalled Reyes, who leads an advocacy group for military veterans. “Why was I stopped? I never got an answer.”

Snow’s order requires deputies to document 13 data points for every traffic interaction, including when a stop began and ended, the reason for the stop, the driver’s perceived race and whether the deputy inquired about immigration status.

In a preliminary injunction, Snow wrote that sheriff’s deputies, “including officers associated with the special operations, circulated emails that compared Mexicans to dogs, ridiculed stereotypical Mexican accents, and portrayed Mexicans as drunks.”

He singled out two of the deputies Nieto Jr. and Meraz encountered in north Phoenix for making arrests based on race during 287(g) operations. Roughly 77% of all arrests by the first deputy the siblings saw at the gas station had Hispanic surnames, the judge found. The deputy who pulled over Nieto Jr. arrested only Latinos during the operations he participated in.

Even more concerning to Snow was that Arpaio continued such operations as a matter of policy after ICE pulled its 287(g) agreement in 2009. In other words, deputies continued making immigration arrests without authority from the federal government. The judge said that violated constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizures.

After Arpaio defied the order and refused to implement many of the reforms, Snow issued additional mandates in 2016. He also found Arpaio and three of his aides in civil contempt of court and referred all four to face criminal contempt charges, a misdemeanor. Another federal judge convicted only Arpaio of criminal contempt in 2017 and was set to sentence him to up to six months in jail. Two months before sentencing, Trump pardoned Arpaio. However, voters had already voted Arpaio out of office.

His successors have faced the same oversight and have not fully complied with the court’s orders, according to the monitor’s reports.

Kevin Johnson, an immigration law author and professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law who runs the Immigration Professor’s Blog, said settlements related to discrimination and civil rights violations often take a long time to resolve. He pointed to the 28-year-old Flores settlement, which still dictates the federal government’s treatment of children in border and immigration custody. “There may be complaints about the court monitoring, but the burden is on the leaders and the agencies to show that monitoring is no longer necessary,” he said.

This January, newly elected Sheriff Jerry Sheridan, a Republican who had worked as Arpaio’s second-in-command, inherited the Melendres settlement. He argues the department has made enough progress to end the judge’s oversight.

Snow acknowledged recently in court that Sheridan and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office had made significant gains. “But the areas where he’s not in compliance are pretty important areas,” he said.

The sheriff’s office analyzes traffic stop data quarterly to identify deputies with notable disparities in who they stop. An outside auditor evaluates annually any departmentwide disparities.

The latest annual report shows improvements over the past decade, but also that deputies still arrest Latino drivers at higher rates than white drivers. Data from this past year also show that Black drivers, who are not covered by the Melendres settlement, face longer stop times and higher arrest rates. And all drivers of color are more likely to be searched than white drivers.

In addition, the sheriff’s office acknowledged it has not investigated 640 deputy misconduct claims, some dating to 2015, according to the department’s most recent court filing. Snow had ordered that the backlog be cleared to hold the sheriff’s office more accountable after he found that Arpaio refused to implement many reforms.

Raul Piña, a retired educator, witnessed the fear caused by Arpaio’s raids in his Latino-majority school district and surrounding neighborhoods in Maryvale. He has for the past decade served on the court-mandated Community Advisory Board, tasked with relaying to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office any community concerns about policing that may violate the court orders.

Piña says the department hasn’t done enough to regain the trust of Latino residents and its deputies continue targeting Latinos disproportionately. He worries that without court oversight, the department will backslide on policing based on skin color.

“I strongly believe that the only thing holding MCSO back from a very public and enthusiastic participation in workplace raids and other forms of anti-immigrant practices — the only thing holding them back — is Melendres,” he said.

Nationwide, ICE now has more than a thousand 287(g) agreements with local law enforcement. Half are task force agreements like the one Arpaio deployed.

In May, the Tennessee Highway Patrol was carrying out a task force operation in Nashville when troopers pulled over Edgardo David Campos, who had just left a vigil at his church. Campos pulled into a gas station south of the airport, where a swarm of uniformed and plainclothes immigration officers wearing green vests with the word “police” on the back surrounded his car. One began to pull him out of his vehicle, a video of the incident shows, drawing the attention of people nearby, including Dinora Romero. She grabbed her phone and began to record.

“Si se lo llevan, no diga nada,” Romero yelled. (“If they take you, don’t say anything.”)

ICE touted the Nashville operation as a success, even though the agency’s data showed more than half the nearly 200 people arrested had no criminal record.

Advocates accused ICE and the Highway Patrol of using race and ethnicity to target drivers in Nashville’s Latino and immigrant neighborhoods. One in four residents of the neighborhood where Campos was stopped is Latino. In August, the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition filed a lawsuit against the Highway Patrol seeking access to public records about the May sweeps.

Attorneys for the state argued in court that releasing those records would endanger officers. The Highway Patrol and state attorney general did not respond to requests for comment.

With enforcement expanding, U.S. citizens have been wrongfully detained recently, like Nieto Jr. and Meraz were in 2008. In May, an 18-year-old Latino citizen recorded his arrest during an operation by the Florida Highway Patrol and Border Patrol targeting landscapers in West Palm Beach under a 287(g) agreement. He was released after six hours.

In a statement, DHS said the teen “was part of a group of illegal aliens that resisted arrest during a traffic stop.” The Florida Highway Patrol said he “interfered” with a lawful investigation and was charged with obstruction. State prosecutors declined to pursue the charge, citing “insufficient evidence.”

The Trump administration is trying to enlist even more local officers to help ICE and is offering financial incentives for departments that participate in the 287(g) program. Starting this month, the federal government will pay the salaries of officers certified under 287(g) agreements and offer “performance awards” of up to $1,000 for helping ICE with arrests and deportations.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has gutted federal offices that investigate police misconduct and civil rights violations.

Advocates say some of the tactics used by local and federal officers to target Latinos in Trump’s deportation effort draw from Arpaio’s playbook.

“The model was Maricopa County,” said Piña, the advisory board member in the Maricopa County lawsuit.

“The very public, very humiliating, demoralizing approach to the raids, and the cruelty — more than just the images in the television that were humiliating, it was the cruelty — and the violent apprehension of people in front of children,” Piña added. “All of those behaviors. All of those tactics. They stem from Maricopa County.”

Arpaio said he did not want to take credit for the Trump administration’s work but was proud that deputies under his command were among the first local officers to help ICE make immigration arrests.

In Florida, which has more departments with 287(g) agreements than any other state, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has spent $245 million to set up a temporary detention center nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz. There, migrants are housed in chain-link cells inside tents. Some have compared it to Arpaio’s “Tent City,” where prisoners were held outdoors in sweltering desert temperatures. (It closed after Arpaio lost reelection in 2016.)

In California, federal agents have focused on Home Depot stores, arresting people in parking lots — echoing Arpaio’s raids on day laborers. Maricopa County deputies, after getting 287(g) certified in 2007, carried out 11 immigration sweeps within five months outside a former furniture store in Phoenix that was a popular gathering spot for laborers. Snow noted that nearly everyone arrested there was Latino.

“Trump is creating this complete culture of fear and terror in our community. And I think this is exactly what happened under Arpaio, with the workplace raids and the threat of deportation,” said Christine Wee, lead attorney for American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of Nieto Jr., Meraz and Melendres.

In July, a group that includes U.S. citizens, detained immigrants and advocacy groups sued the Trump administration, arguing that “indiscriminate” raids in Los Angeles targeted people with brown skin. A federal judge granted a temporary restraining order, barring immigration arrests based on race, speaking Spanish, type of employment or presence at a particular location.

But on Sept. 8, the Supreme Court stayed the order in a 6-3 vote. Justice Brett Kavanaugh was the lone conservative justice to explain his decision. He affirmed the government can use a combination of factors like race and language to establish reasonable suspicion that a person is in the country unlawfully during the operations in Los Angeles. “To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a ‘relevant factor,’” Kavanaugh wrote.

Even though the case continues, immigration advocates and the attorneys who filed the lawsuit said the court’s action essentially legalized racial profiling.

Experts say that approach could filter down to local agencies partnering with ICE under the 287(g) program. “When you have ICE relying on racial profiling and promoting it as an effective immigration enforcement strategy, you can expect state local governments that are working with ICE to use race immigration enforcement,” said Johnson, the UC Davis law professor.

That idea was echoed in Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent to the ruling lifting the order in the Los Angeles case. She argued the decision makes all Latinos, including U.S. citizens, targets and “improperly shifts the burden onto an entire class of citizens to carry enough documentation to prove that they deserve to walk freely.” Sotomayor added, “The Constitution does not permit the creation of such a second-class citizenship status.”

Arpaio said he believes that had the Supreme Court rendered such a decision two decades ago, the Melendres lawsuit and the legal troubles that followed would not have happened.

“I was vindicated by the Supreme Court,” Arpaio said. “Everything they went after me is legal.”

Civil rights experts dispute that, noting that Arpaio’s enforcement relied on race alone, which remains illegal.

As the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office struggles to fully implement the court-mandated reforms, elected officials are losing patience with the requirements and the costs.

By March, spending on the Melendres case and the implementation of its reforms had surpassed $300 million, the bulk of which — nearly $245 million — has gone to the sheriff’s office.

Sheridan, the new sheriff, attributed those expenses to the creation of two divisions for implementing the settlement and the hiring of investigators to tackle the backlog of complaints against deputies. Thirty million dollars has gone to the monitor team since the monitor was appointed in 2013.

In 2024, the last full fiscal year for which data is available, the county spent more than $39 million on the settlement. “That’s a recurring cost every year in perpetuity,” Sheridan said. Or at least until the settlement ends.

But a report commissioned by Snow last year and published on Oct. 8 found that the sheriff’s office had “consistently overstated” costs attributed to compliance under the Melendres settlement.

Sheridan questioned the report, telling Phoenix talk radio station KTAR that its authors “don’t have the expertise” to audit a large government agency. He said his office will hire an independent accountant to dispute the findings. “There’s no fraud here,” he said.

The Republican majority on the county’s Board of Supervisors is calling for an immediate end to court oversight.

“We just have to figure out a way to end this because it seems like it’s never-ending because the judge, they put on a new order, they change things, they move the goalposts, and so we need to resolve this,” Republican Supervisor Debbie Lesko, who represents communities policed by the sheriff’s office, told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica.

But the decision to end court oversight rests solely with Snow. During a recent hearing, the judge was clearly unhappy with a recent community meeting. The court-mandated meetings provide the plaintiffs — all Latino drivers in Maricopa County — a venue to get updates on progress toward reforms and to voice concerns to the sheriff and the monitor team.

At the July gathering, Sheridan’s supporters packed the room and took control, shouting at speakers and interrupting the interpreter’s translations of the discussion into Spanish. The mostly older, white group of Sheridan supporters demanded an end to court oversight, citing the costs. They outnumbered the Latino community members and activists who want to keep the monitor in place until the sheriff’s office proves to Snow it no longer discriminates against Latinos.

Snow said he would host the next community meeting inside the federal courthouse in downtown Phoenix.

Sheridan also wants out of the settlement. He believes the strict mandates hinder deputies’ ability to do their jobs. “There’s no law enforcement agency that I’m aware of in this country under the same level of scrutiny,” Sheridan said.

Latino advocates and community members worry complaints about the court mandates and the price tag will become an excuse, distracting from the root issue — the need to end racial profiling by the sheriff’s office.

“When Sheridan tells us that it’s done, I’m not going to take his word for it,” said Reyes, who endured repeated traffic stops when Arpaio was sheriff. “I’m going to wait on the monitor. I’m going to wait for the judge. And when they say, ‘You know what? They are compliant.’ Then I’ll believe it. And even then, it’s going to be suspicious.”

Chelsea Curtis of Arizona Luminaria contributed reporting. Gabriel Sandoval of ProPublica contributed research.

Arizona Police Agencies Were Once at the Forefront of Local Immigration Enforcement. Now Most Are Avoiding It.

by Rafael Carranza, Arizona Luminaria

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Arizona Luminaria. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Arizona law enforcement agencies are largely rejecting a fast-growing ICE program that lets local officers act as deportation agents — citing the experience of the state’s largest sheriff’s office, which was booted from the program in 2009 after a federal judge found deputies racially profiled and violated the constitutional rights of Latinos.

Even in Republican-led communities known for backing immigration measures, law enforcement leaders are steering clear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) task force program, which the Trump administration is using to enlist local officers in its mass deportation efforts.

Of at least 106 municipal police departments, sheriff’s offices and county attorneys in the state, nine currently have agreements to cooperate with ICE in making arrests, as of Oct. 15. And only four Arizona departments have signed on since January, amid a national recruitment campaign that has prompted more than 900 agencies to join.

The program’s explosive nationwide growth follows President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order that, among other things, called for local law enforcement to “perform the functions of immigration officers.”

Local police have three ways of participating in the 287(g) program. The first two are through the Jail Enforcement and Warrant Service Officer models, which restrict local collaboration with ICE to people who’ve already been booked into their jails. The third way is through the Task Force Model, in which local officers “serve as a force multiplier” in federal immigration enforcement “during routine police duties,” according to ICE.

ICE did not respond to Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica’s questions.

Half of the agreements in Arizona are for jail enforcement, including the state’s prison system, the only statewide agency. It signed on in 2020. The Republican sheriffs of two Arizona counties that border Mexico, Yuma and Cochise, signed 287(g) warrant service agreements for their jails this year, along with Navajo County, in the far northeast part of the state.

The only local agency in Arizona to sign a task force agreement since ICE revived them in January is the County Attorney’s Office of Pinal County, a Republican stronghold sandwiched between the Phoenix and Tucson metro areas.

ICE, under the Obama administration, suspended all task force agreements in 2012. The move followed a Department of Justice investigation that found the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, which had a task force agreement under former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, used “discriminatory policing practices including unlawful stops, detentions and arrests of Latinos.” In 2013, a federal judge ruled that under Arpaio the sheriff’s office had discriminated against Latinos during immigration enforcement operations, violating their Fourth and 14th amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures and to equal protection under the law, respectively.

“I’ve never been guilty of anything,” Arpaio told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica, despite the judge’s rulings. “They went after me. But that’s OK. And you can tell your audience I’ll do it again.”

Pinal County Attorney Brad Miller, a Republican, said he intends to certify four deputies under the task force agreement he signed in August. Miller said these investigators will process immigration violations involving people they encounter during child abuse and drug investigations, instead of waiting on ICE officers. He said he does not foresee them participating in ICE raids.

Miller prosecuted sex crimes in Maricopa County when Arpaio’s 287(g) task force agreement was in effect. He said he remembers the “chaos that ensued from that” and doesn’t want it repeated in Pinal County. “We have zero intention and we will not be participating in any immigration raids or task forces. I just want to make that clear.”

Miller said he spoke with federal officials his agency works with before signing the task force agreement.

“‘Would we be required to join specifically an immigration task force?’ That was my first question, and the answer came back as no,” he said. “If that were one of the prerequisites, I was not going to do the program.”

Starting in October, ICE began reimbursing local agencies with task force agreements for the salaries of certified officers and paying “performance awards” of up to $1,000 per officer.

Miller said money didn’t influence his decision. None of his four deputies will be assigned full time to the 287(g) agreement, he said, only as needed in the course of their other task force investigations.

Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway, a Democrat, believes the financial incentives are a federal ploy to pull local officers away from their everyday duties and direct them to immigration enforcement.

“I consider the program to be illegal,” said Hathaway, whose county shares a border with Mexico. He bases this view on court rulings on Arizona’s landmark 2010 anti-illegal immigration law. The “show me your papers” law was the toughest state immigration law in the nation at the time. But the Supreme Court struck down most of its provisions, leaving in place only one that allows local police to check immigration status as long as it doesn’t prolong the public’s interaction with officers.

“The Supreme Court said this is not in the realm of local law enforcement,” Hathaway said. “This is entirely a federal issue.”

States including Texas and Florida have since enacted laws to more aggressively curb illegal immigration. Florida was also among the first to require all county law enforcement agencies to sign on to the 287(g) program. Other states, largely in the Southeast, have followed suit.

Arizona’s Republican-controlled Legislature this year passed a similar requirement for its local law enforcement agencies called the Arizona ICE Act. But the state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, vetoed it.

Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos, a Democrat who runs southern Arizona’s largest sheriff’s department, has vowed not to involve his deputies in deportation arrests. The county shares a 130-mile border with Mexico. Nanos has said his department is instead focused on preventing crime, and to do that it’s imperative his deputies build trust with communities they protect, including migrant ones.

“The stance we take is: ‘Look, you have a job to do and I have a job to do,’” Nanos says in a video released by his office this year. “But clearly immigration laws, enforcement of those laws, that is the federal government’s job.”

In Maricopa County, home to a majority of Arizona’s population, Sheriff Jerry Sheridan says he’s hesitant to have his deputies certified to patrol with ICE, mainly because his office remains under strict court oversight related to its past experiment with the 287(g) program. But Sheridan has endorsed the ICE program’s work inside local jails and said that’s where Maricopa County got it right on cooperating with federal immigration enforcement.

“They’re focusing on the criminal illegal aliens,” he said of local jail partnerships with ICE. “And that’s really what a law enforcement agency should be concerned with, is people that commit crimes here in Maricopa County. And that’s what I’m concerned with.”

Sheridan is working to rebuild trust with Latinos that was broken by Arpaio’s raids and sweeps, beginning when the sheriff’s office entered a 287(g) agreement.

For Hathaway, the Santa Cruz county sheriff, lost trust is his biggest concern with deputies enforcing immigration laws in a border county that’s 83% Latino.

“I don’t want to have any animosity between the local population and our sheriff’s office,” he said. “I want them to trust us and not think just because they’re Hispanic, we’re chasing them.”

What You Should Know About Russ Vought, Trump’s Shadow President

by Andy Kroll

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

Join us Nov. 5 for a virtual discussion about our yearlong investigation into Russell Vought. Register now.

On the second day of the federal government shutdown, President Donald Trump shared an AI-generated video set to the classic song “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” by Blue Öyster Cult. The star of that video, which quickly went viral, was Russell Vought, the president’s top budget adviser. More than that, Vought is the architect of Trump’s broader plan to fire civil servants, freeze government programs and dismantle entire agencies, and he’s a big reason the second Trump administration has been more effective at accomplishing its goals than the first. In the video shared by Trump, Vought appeared as the scythe-wielding Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C.

Vought’s title is director of the Office of Management and Budget. The OMB directorship is one of the most powerful jobs in Washington, and Vought has used his position to wage a quiet war to change the shape of the entire U.S. government. In Vought’s hands, OMB has acted as a choke point for the funding that Congress approves and agencies rely on to run the government. While he tends to operate behind the scenes as much as possible, his influence in Trump’s second administration is so pronounced that people have described him as akin to a shadow president.

Here are some of the key things you should know about Vought. Read ProPublica’s full investigation here. (Vought declined to be interviewed for the article. A spokesperson for him at OMB would not comment on the record in response to a detailed list of questions.)

A native of Trumbull, Connecticut, and the son of an electrician father and a mother who spent decades in public education before helping to launch a Christian school, Vought got his first job in D.C. politics working in the mail room for Republican Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, a fierce budget hawk known for criticizing members of his own party for breaking what he viewed as core conservative principles.

As Vought rose through the GOP ranks, eventually going on to advise then-Rep. Mike Pence, he grew disillusioned with members of his party who claimed to care about balanced budgets and spending cuts yet voted to approve bills loaded with pork-barrel spending and corporate giveaways.

In 2010, he quit Congress and helped launch an offshoot of the Heritage Foundation think tank called Heritage Action for America, which was tasked with strong-arming congressional Republicans to act more conservatively.

“I think he thought the Republican leadership was a bigger impediment to conservative causes than Democrats were,” a former Capitol Hill colleague of Vought’s said.

While the Office of Management and Budget is part of the White House, Vought is a member of Trump’s cabinet along with the secretary of defense and attorney general. OMB director has little of the cachet of those jobs, but it plays a vital role. Every penny appropriated by Congress first passes through the OMB. It also reviews all significant regulations proposed by federal agencies, vets executive orders before the president signs them and issues workplace policies for more than 2 million federal employees.

“Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through OMB,” explained Sam Bagenstos, a former OMB official during the Biden administration.

This isn’t Vought’s first stint as OMB director; he held the same position during the first Trump administration.

In 2019, after the Trump White House pressured Ukraine’s government to investigate then-candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter, it asked Vought, then acting director, to freeze $214 million in congressionally approved security assistance for Ukraine. He obliged.

This impoundment, later deemed illegal by the Government Accountability Office, would trigger congressional investigations and, ultimately, Trump’s first impeachment. During that process, Vought refused to cooperate with investigators, calling the probe a “sham process that is designed to relitigate the last election.”

After the attempt to freeze the Ukraine funds ultimately failed, Vought and Mark Paoletta, an attorney and close ally of Vought’s, spent the years between Trump’s presidencies developing a legal argument that not only are such impoundments legal, but there is a long history of presidents using the power. (Legal experts have disputed Vought’s version of that history.)

In 2021, Vought launched the Center for Renewing America, a think tank devoted to keeping the MAGA movement alive and preparing for a second Trump presidency. According to previously unreported recordings obtained by ProPublica, Vought accepted an assignment from Trump to come up with a way for conservatives to counter Black Lives Matter. He popularized the concept of “woke and weaponized” government — a phrase embraced by GOP politicians and activists to disparagingly label policies, people and even agencies that didn’t fit with the MAGA agenda.

“If you’re watching television and the words ‘woke and weaponized’ come out of a politician’s mouth, you can know that this is coming ... from the strategies we’re putting out,” Vought boasted in a recording obtained by ProPublica.

When Vought’s think tank released a federal budget blueprint in 2022, calling for $9 trillion in cuts over 10 years, the word “woke” appeared 77 times across its 103 pages.

In 2017, while an adviser at OMB, Vought played a lead role in trying to implement a Trump executive order that called for a top-to-bottom reorganization of the federal government. A former OMB senior staffer said Vought initially wanted to eliminate the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and to fold the Department of Education and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, along with food stamps programs, into a new Department of Welfare. “They wanted to call it that because they think it sounds bad,” a former OMB analyst said. “There were very few, if any, debates where Russ wouldn’t take the most extreme option available to him, the most conservative, the most budget-cutting.”

Trump’s Cabinet secretaries at the time resisted wholesale cuts, and few of the plans reached fruition. But Vought’s suggestions now read like a guide to the second Trump administration, which has gutted both USAID and the CFPB and is hollowing out the Department of Education.

“I didn’t realize it then,” the former OMB staffer said, “but I was writing the first draft of Project 2025.”

Vought was a key figure in the work of Project 2025, the coalition of conservative groups that created a roadmap and recruited future appointees for the next Republican administration. He led Project 2025’s transition portion, which included writing some 350 executive orders, regulations and other plans to more fully empower the president. “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral,” Vought said in a private 2024 speech.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly claimed to have nothing to do with Project 2025. His campaign aides criticized the initiative, and news reports suggested that Project 2025 leaders would be blacklisted from working in the Trump White House.

But Vought deftly navigated the controversy, and Trump brought him back to OMB. Meanwhile, the administration has moved quickly to fulfill many of Project 2025’s policy objectives. Early on in this month’s government shutdown, when Trump announced that he would soon meet with Vought to decide which “Democrat Agencies” to temporarily or permanently cut, he referred to his budget director as “Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame.”

Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO and the world’s wealthiest person, may have grabbed the headlines as his Department of Government Efficiency took a chainsaw to budgets and staffing. But court records, interviews and other accounts from people close to Vought show that DOGE’s efforts were guided, more than previously known, by the OMB director.

“I can’t imagine that the DOGE team knew to target all these little parts of the government without Russ pointing them there,” a former OMB branch chief told ProPublica.

In May, an official with Citizens for Renewing America, a group founded by Vought, credited Vought with steering DOGE’s cuts. “DOGE is underneath the OMB,” the official said, according to a video of her remarks. “Honestly, a lot of what Elon began pinpointing … was at the direction of Russ.”

An administration official who has worked with Vought and Musk told ProPublica that DOGE showed Vought that it was possible to ignore legal challenges and take dramatic action. “He has the benefit of Elon softening everyone up,” the official said. “Elon terrified the shit out of people. He broke the status quo.”

Vought has frozen $26 billion in federal funding for infrastructure and clean energy projects in blue states in the days after the federal government shut down on Oct. 1. The government has also followed through on Vought’s earlier threat to fire a massive number of civil servants if the shutdown were not averted.

“We work for the president of the United States,” a senior agency official who regularly deals with the OMB told ProPublica. But right now, he added, “it feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.”

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

Idaho Banned Vaccine Mandates. Activists Want to Make It a Model for the Country.

by Audrey Dutton

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Three women become choked up as they deliver news in a video posted to social media. “We did it, everybody,” says Leslie Manookian, the woman in the middle. She is a driving force in a campaign that has chipped away at the foundations of modern public health in Idaho. The group had just gotten lawmakers to pass what she called the first true “medical freedom” bill in the nation. “It’s literally landmark,” Manookian said. “It is changing everything.”

With Manookian in the video are two of her allies, the leaders of Health Freedom Idaho. It was April 4, hours after the governor signed the Idaho Medical Freedom Act into law.

Watch video ➜

The act makes it illegal for state and local governments, private businesses, employers, schools and day cares to require anyone to take a vaccine or receive any other “medical intervention.”

Whether the law will actually alter day-to-day life in Idaho is an open question, because Idaho already made it easy to get around the few existing vaccination requirements.

But it could have a significant effect in other states, where rules aren’t already so relaxed. And it comes at a time when diseases once eradicated from the U.S. through vaccination are making a resurgence.

The law runs against one of the hallmarks of modern public health: that a person’s full participation in society depends on their willingness to follow certain rules. (Want to send your child to public school? They’ll need a measles vaccine. Want to work in a retirement community during flu season? You might have to wear a mask.)

The new Idaho law flips that on its head. It not only removes the obligation to follow such rules, it makes the rules themselves illegal.

The new law sets Idaho apart from even conservative-leaning South Carolina, where two schools recently quarantined more than 150 unvaccinated children after measles arrived.

A person can spread measles for four days before symptoms appear. During the South Carolina schools’ quarantine, five students began to show symptoms, but the quarantine kept them from spreading it, the health department said this month.

That precaution would now be illegal in Idaho.

Idaho’s law caught the attention of people who share Manookian’s belief that — contrary to hundreds of years of public health evidence and rigorous regulation in the U.S. — vaccines are worse than the diseases they prevent.

It also caught the attention of people like Jennifer Herricks, a pro-vaccine advocate in Louisiana and advocacy director for American Families for Vaccines.

Herricks and her counterparts in other states say that vaccine requirements have “done so much good for our kids and for our communities.”

An analysis published last year by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that routine childhood vaccines prevented more than 1.1 million deaths and 32 million hospitalizations in the U.S. over three decades, saving $540 billion in direct costs and saving society about $2.7 trillion. The analysis was limited; it didn’t account for the lives and money saved by vaccines for flu or RSV, which kill and hospitalize babies and children each year.

Idaho’s move was “pretty concerning,” Herricks said, “especially seeing the direction that everything is headed at the federal government.”

The law is the culmination of a decade of anti-vaccine activism that got a boost from the pandemic.

It’s rooted in a belief system that distrusts institutions — government health agencies, vaccine makers, medical societies and others — on the premise that those institutions seek only money and control.

Manookian said in an interview that she believes one person should never be told to risk their health in “the theoretical” service of another.

Now, Manookian and her allies have a new goal in their sights: to make Idaho’s legislation a nationwide standard.

Idaho was already more permissive than other states when it came to vaccine rules. Parents since at least the 1990s could send unvaccinated children to school if they signed a form saying vaccination went against their religious or personal beliefs.

That wasn’t good enough for Idahoans who describe themselves as advocates for health freedom. They worked to shift the paradigm, bit by bit, so that it can be easier now for parents to get a vaccine exemption than to show the school their child is actually vaccinated.

In recent years, lawmakers ordered schools and day care centers to tell parents about the exemptions allowed in Idaho whenever they communicate about immunizations.

The state also decided to let parents exempt their kids by writing a note, instead of having to fill out a form — one that, in the past, required them to acknowledge the risks of going unvaccinated.

(There is conflicting data on whether these changes truly affected vaccination rates or just led more parents to skip the trouble of handing in vaccine records. Starting in 2021, Idaho schools reported a steady drop in the share of kindergartners with documented vaccinations. Phone surveys of parents, by contrast, showed vaccination rates have been largely unchanged.)

An enduring backlash against Idaho’s short-lived COVID-19 mandates gave Manookian’s movement more momentum, culminating this year in what she considered the ultimate step in Idaho’s evolution.

Manookian had a previous career in finance in New York and London. She transitioned to work as a homeopath and advocate, ultimately returning to her home state of Idaho.

The bill she came up with said that almost nobody can be required to have a vaccine or take any test or medical procedure or treatment in order to go to school, get a job or go about life how they’d like to. In practice, that would mean schools couldn’t send unvaccinated kids home, even during a measles outbreak, and private businesses and day cares couldn’t require people on their property to follow public health guidance.

The state had just passed “the Coronavirus Stop Act” in 2023, which banned nearly all COVID-19 vaccine requirements. If lawmakers did that for COVID-19, Manookian reasoned, they could do the same for all communicable diseases and all medical decisions.

Her theory was right, ultimately.

The bill she penned in the summer of 2024 made it through the Republican-controlled House and Senate in early 2025.

Manookian took to social media to rally support for the legislation as it sat on the desk of Gov. Brad Little.

But the governor vetoed it. In a letter, he explained that he saw the bill as government intrusion on “parents’ freedom to ensure their children stay healthy.” During an outbreak, he said, schools wouldn’t be able to send home students “with highly contagious conditions” like measles.

Manookian tried again days after the veto. In the next version of the bill, protections during a disease outbreak applied only to “healthy” people.

This time, Little signed it.

Weeks after the signing, Manookian joined like-minded advocates on a stage in Washington, D.C., for a launch event for the MAHA Institute, a group with strong ties to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (MAHA stands for Make America Healthy Again.) The new Health and Human Services secretary had denounced vaccines for years before President Donald Trump appointed him.

At the gathering, Manookian announced her next mission: to make it “a societal norm and to codify it in law” that nobody can dictate any other person’s medical choices.

“We’re going to roll that out to other states, and we’re going to make America free again,” Manookian told the audience in May.

Manookian’s commitment to bring along the rest of the country has continued ever since.

Her nonprofit, the Health Freedom Defense Fund, is now distributing model legislation and a how-to guide, with talking points to persuade legislators. Manookian said in podcast interviews that she is working with the nonprofit Stand For Health Freedom to mobilize activists in every state.

In an interview with ProPublica, Manookian said her objective is for people to “understand and appreciate that the most basic and fundamental of human rights is the right to direct our own medical treatment — and to codify that in law in every state. Breaking that barrier in Idaho proves that it can be done, that Americans understand the importance of this, and the humanity of it, and that it should be done in other states.”

Her efforts were rewarded over the summer with a visit from none other than Kennedy, who visited Boise and toured a farm with Manookian and state lawmakers in tow.

“This state, more than any other state in the country” aligns with the MAHA campaign, Kennedy told reporters at a news conference where no one was allowed to ask questions. Kennedy called Idaho “the home of medical freedom.”

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment from Kennedy or his staff on Idaho’s law and his visit to the state.

Children’s Health Defense, the organization Kennedy built into one of the fiercest foes of childhood vaccines, took interest in the Idaho bill early on.

The group promoted the bill as it sat on the governor’s desk, as he vetoed it, then as Manookian worked successfully to get a revived bill through the statehouse and signed into law.

The organization’s online video programming featured Manookian five times in late March and early April. One show’s host told viewers they could follow Idaho in its “very smart strategy” of taking a law against COVID-related mandates, “crossing out ‘COVID,’ making a few other tweaks, and you have an incredible health freedom bill after that.”

Children’s Health Defense CEO Mary Holland said she’s known Manookian for more than 15 years and pushed the national organization to publicize Manookian’s work. Holland introduced her at the Washington, D.C., event.

Whereas most states put the onus on unvaccinated people to show why they should opt out of a mandate, Idaho’s legislation made unvaccinated people the norm — shifting the burden of accommodation onto those who support vaccination.

Now, parents of infants too young for a measles vaccine can’t choose a day care that requires immunization. Parents of immune-compromised students must decide whether to keep their children home from school during an outbreak of vaccine-preventable diseases, knowing unvaccinated children won’t be quarantined.

Holland said Idaho parents who want their kids to be in a learning environment with “herd immunity” levels of measles vaccination can start a private “association” — not a school, because schools can’t require vaccines — just as parents who don’t like vaccines have done in order to dodge requirements imposed by states like California and New York.

“I think you could certainly do that in Idaho.” Holland said. “It wouldn’t be a public school. It might be the Church of Vaccinia school.”

The day Idaho’s Medical Freedom Act was signed, a legislator in Louisiana brought forward the Louisiana Medical Freedom Act. In a hearing later, she pointed to Idaho as a model.

Louisiana followed Idaho once before in 2024, when it passed a law that requires schools to describe the exemptions available to parents whenever they communicate about immunizations. Idaho had passed an almost identical law three years earlier.

Herricks, the Louisiana pro-vaccine advocate, said she watched the Idaho Medical Freedom Act’s progress with “a lot of concern, seeing how much progress it was making.” Now it’s set a precedent, Herricks said.

Holland, the Children’s Health Defense CEO, said she looks forward to Idaho’s approach spreading.

She pointed to a September announcement by Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo that he intends to rid his state of all vaccine mandates. Holland said she expects other Republican-controlled states to take a serious look at the Idaho law. (Ladapo’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)

“It’s a big change,” Holland said. “It’s not just related to vaccines. It’s a blow against the notion that there can be compulsory medicine.”

Some people support the more-than-century-old notion that compelling people to be vaccinated or masked will provide such enormous collective benefits that it outweighs any inconvenience or small incursion on personal liberty.

Others, like Holland and Manookian, do not.

At the heart of laws like Idaho’s is a sense of, “‘I’m going to do what I want to do for myself, and I don’t want anybody telling me what to do,’ which is in direct contrast to public health,” said Paul Offit, pediatrician and vaccinologist at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Offit, who co-invented a vaccine against rotavirus, is a critic of Kennedy and was removed from a federal vaccine panel in September.

A more fundamental conflict is that some people believe vaccines and other tools to prevent the spread of illness, like masks, are harmful. That belief is at odds with the overwhelming consensus of scientists and health experts, including Kennedy’s own Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC.

Both tensions are at play in Idaho.

As is the case nationally, Idaho’s “health freedom” movement has long pushed back against being labeled “anti-vaccine.” Idaho lawmakers and advocates have stressed that their goals are bodily autonomy and informed choice.

They do not take a stance on the bodily autonomy principle when it comes to abortion, however. Almost all state legislators who voted for the Idaho Medical Freedom Act also voted to ban abortion, if they were in office at both times.

“Every action has to be evaluated on its individual morality,” not on whether it does the most good for the most people, Manookian said.

But Manookian’s rejection of vaccine mandates goes beyond a libertarian philosophy.

Manookian has said publicly that she thinks vaccines are “poison for profit,” that continuing to let day cares require vaccination would “put our children on the chopping block,” that measles is “positive for the body,” that the virus protects against cancer, and that it can send people “into total remission" — an assertion she made on an Idaho wellness center’s podcast in April.

Manookian told ProPublica she believes infectious diseases have been made “the bogeyman.”

Against those claims, research has shown that having the measles suppresses immunity to other diseases, a phenomenon dubbed “immune amnesia” that can make children who have recovered from measles more susceptible to pneumonia and other bacterial and viral infections. About 20% of unvaccinated people who get measles will be hospitalized, and 1 to 3 of every 1,000 children who are infected will die from complications of the disease, according to the CDC.

And while researchers have studied using engineered measles viruses in a cancer treatment, those same researchers have written that they were “dismayed to learn” their research has been misconstrued by some who oppose vaccination. They said they “very strongly advise” giving children the measles vaccine, that there “is no evidence that measles infection can protect against cancer” and that measles is “a dangerous pathogen, not suitable for use as a cancer therapy.”

(Manookian said she believes she has evidence for her cancer remission claim but couldn’t readily produce it, adding that she may have been mistaken.)

The measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, meanwhile, is safe and highly effective, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others. The CDC says the most common negative reactions are a sore arm, fever or mild rash. Two doses of the vaccine provide near total protection, according to the CDC.

Manookian said she doesn’t believe the research on vaccines has been adequate.

She will have another chance to spread her views from a prominent platform in November, when she’s scheduled to speak at the Children’s Health Defense 2025 conference in Austin, Texas.

She’ll share the stage with celebrities in the anti-vaccine movement: Del Bigtree, communications director for Kennedy’s past presidential campaign; actor Russell Brand; Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson; and Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general who made headlines for his push to end vaccine mandates in Florida, months after Idaho wrote that concept into law.

Unfettered and Unaccountable: How Trump is Building a Violent, Shadowy Federal Police Force

by J. David McSwane and Hannah Allam

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When Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stormed through Santa Ana, California, in June, panicked calls flooded into the city’s emergency response system.

Recordings of those calls, obtained by ProPublica, captured some of the terror residents felt as they watched masked men ambush people and force them into unmarked cars. In some cases, the men wore plain clothes and refused to identify themselves. There was no way to confirm whether they were immigration agents or imposters. In six of the calls to Santa Ana police, residents described what they were seeing as kidnappings.

“He’s bleeding,” one caller said about a person he saw yanked from a car wash lot and beaten. “They dumped him into a white van. It doesn’t say ICE.”

One woman’s voice shook as she asked, “What kind of police go around without license plates?”

And then this from another: “Should we just run from them?”

During a tense public meeting days later, Mayor Valerie Amezcua and the City Council asked their police chief whether there was anything they could do to rein in the federal agents — even if only to ban the use of masks. The answer was a resounding no. Plus, filing complaints with the Department of Homeland Security was likely to go nowhere because the office that once handled them had been dismantled. There was little chance of holding individual agents accountable for alleged abuses because, among other hurdles, there was no way to reliably learn their identities.

Since then, Amezcua, 58, said she has reluctantly accepted the reality: There are virtually no limits on what federal agents can do to achieve President Donald Trump’s goal of mass deportations. Santa Ana has proven to be a template for much larger raids and even more violent arrests in Chicago and elsewhere. “It’s almost like he tries it out in this county and says, ‘It worked there, so now let me send them there,’” Amezcua said.

Current and former national security officials share the mayor’s concerns. They describe the legions of masked immigration officers operating in near-total anonymity on the orders of the president as the crossing of a line that had long set the United States apart from the world’s most repressive regimes. ICE, in their view, has become an unfettered and unaccountable national police force. The transformation, the officials say, unfolded rapidly and in plain sight. Trump’s DHS appointees swiftly dismantled civil rights guardrails, encouraged agents to wear masks, threatened groups and state governments that stood in their way, and then made so many arrests that the influx overwhelmed lawyers trying to defend immigrants taken out of state or out of the country.

And although they are reluctant to predict the future, the current and former officials worry that this force assembled from federal agents across the country could eventually be turned against any groups the administration labels a threat.

One former senior DHS official who was involved in oversight said that what is happening on American streets today “gives me goosebumps.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, the official rattled off scenes that once would’ve triggered investigations: “Accosting people outside of their immigration court hearings where they’re showing up and trying to do the right thing and then hauling them off to an immigration jail in the middle of the country where they can’t access loved ones or speak to counsel. Bands of masked men apprehending people in broad daylight in the streets and hauling them off. Disappearing people to a third country, to a prison where there’s a documented record of serious torture and human rights abuse.”

The former official paused. “We’re at an inflection point in history right now and it’s frightening.”

Although ICE is conducting itself out in the open, even inviting conservative social media influencers to accompany its agents on high-profile raids, the agency operates in darkness. The identities of DHS officers, their salaries and their operations have long been withheld for security reasons and generally exempted from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. However, there were offices within DHS created to hold agents and their supervisors accountable for their actions on the job. The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, created by Congress and led largely by lawyers, investigated allegations of rape and unlawful searches from both the public and within DHS ranks, for instance. Egregious conduct was referred to the Justice Department.

The CRCL office had limited powers; former staffers say their job was to protect DHS by ensuring personnel followed the law and addressed civil rights concerns. Still, it was effective in stalling rushed deportations or ensuring detainees had access to phones and lawyers. And even when its investigations didn’t fix problems, CRCL provided an accounting of allegations and a measure of transparency for Congress and the public.

The office processed thousands of complaints — 3,000 in fiscal year 2023 alone — ranging from allegations of lack of access to medical treatment to reports of sexual assault at detention centers. Former staffers said around 600 complaints were open when work was suspended.

The administration has gutted most of the office. What’s left of it was led, at least for a while, by a 29-year-old White House appointee who helped craft Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint that broadly calls for the curtailment of civil rights enforcement.

Meanwhile, ICE is enjoying a windfall in resources. On top of its annual operating budget of $10 billion a year, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill included an added $7.5 billion a year for the next four years for recruiting and retention alone. As part of its hiring blitz, the agency has dropped age, training and education standards and has offered recruits signing bonuses as high as $50,000.

“Supercharging this law enforcement agency and at the same time you have oversight being eliminated?” said the former DHS official. “This is very scary.”

Michelle Brané, a longtime human rights attorney who directed DHS’ ombudsman office during the Biden administration, said Trump’s adherence to “the authoritarian playbook is not even subtle.”

“ICE, their secret police, is their tool,” Brané said. “Once they have that power, which they have now, there’s nothing stopping them from using it against citizens.”

Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, refuted descriptions of ICE as a secret police force. She called such comparisons the kind of “smears and demonization” that led to the recent attack on an ICE facility in Texas, in which a gunman targeted an ICE transport van and shot three detained migrants, two of them fatally, before killing himself.

In a written response to ProPublica, McLaughlin dismissed the current and former national security officials and scholars interviewed by ProPublica as “far-left champagne socialists” who haven’t seen ICE enforcement up close.

“If they had,” she wrote, “they would know when our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement while wearing masks to protect themselves from being targeted by highly sophisticated gangs” and other criminals.

McLaughlin said the recruiting blitz is not compromising standards. She wrote that the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center is ready for 11,000 new hires by the beginning of next year and that training has been streamlined and boosted by technology. “Our workforce never stops learning,” McLaughlin wrote.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson also praised ICE conduct and accused Democrats of making “dangerous, untrue smears.”

“ICE officers act heroically to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens and protect American communities with the utmost professionalism,” Jackson said. “Anyone pointing the finger at law enforcement officers instead of the criminals are simply doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens and fueling false narratives that lead to violence.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the Trump pick who fired nearly the entire civil rights oversight staff, said the move was in response to CRCL functioning “as internal adversaries that slow down operations,” according to a DHS spokesperson.

Trump also eliminated the department’s Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, which was charged with flagging inhumane conditions at ICE detention facilities where many of the apprehended immigrants are held. The office was resurrected after a lawsuit and court order, though it’s sparsely staffed.

The hobbling of the office comes as the White House embarks on an aggressive expansion of detention sites with an eye toward repurposing old jails or building new ones with names that telegraph harsh conditions: “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades, built by the state and operated in partnership with DHS, or the “Cornhusker Clink” in Nebraska.

“It is a shocking situation to be in that I don’t think anybody anticipated a year ago,” said Erica Frantz, a political scientist at Michigan State University who studies authoritarianism. “We might’ve thought that we were going to see a slide, but I don’t think anybody anticipated how quickly it would transpire, and now people at all levels are scrambling to figure out how to push back.”

Frantz and other scholars who study anti-democratic political systems in other countries said there are numerous examples in which ICE’s activities appear cut from an authoritarian playbook. Among them was the detention of Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was apprehended after co-writing an op-ed for the campus paper that criticized the school’s response to the war in Gaza. ICE held her incommunicado for 24 hours and then shuffled her through three states before jailing her in Louisiana.

“The thing that got me into the topic of ‘maybe ICE is a secret police force’?” said Lee Morgenbesser, an Australian political science professor who studies authoritarianism. “It was that daylight snatching of the Tufts student.”

Morgenbesser was also struck by the high-profile instances of ICE detaining elected officials who attempted to stand in their way. Among them, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was detained for demanding a judicial warrant from ICE, and U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from a DHS press conference.

And David Sklansky, a Stanford Law School professor who researches policing and democracy, said it appears that ICE’s agents are allowed to operate with complete anonymity. “It’s not just that people can’t see faces of the officers,” Sklansky said. “The officers aren’t wearing shoulder insignia or name tags.”

U.S. District Judge William G. Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee, recently pointed out that use of masked law enforcement officers had long been considered anathema to American ideals. In a blistering ruling against the administration’s arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters, he wrote, “To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police.” The Trump administration has said it will appeal that ruling.

The fallout is being felt in places like Hays County, Texas, not far from Austin, where ICE apprehended 47 people, including nine children, during a birthday celebration in the early morning of April 1.

The agency’s only disclosure about the raid in Dripping Springs describes the operation as part of a yearlong investigation targeting “members and associates believed to be part of the Venezuelan transnational gang, Tren de Aragua.”

Six months later, the county’s top elected official told ProPublica the federal government has ignored his attempts to get answers.

“We’re not told why they took them, and we’re not told where they took them,” said County Judge Ruben Becerra, a Democrat. “By definition, that’s a kidnapping.”

In the raid, a Texas trooper secured a search warrant that allowed law enforcement officers to breach the home, an Airbnb rental on a vast stretch of land in the Hill Country. Becerra told ProPublica he believes the suspicion of drugs at the party was a pretense to pull people out of the house so ICE officers who lacked a warrant could take them into custody. The Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration has yet to produce evidence supporting claims of gang involvement, said Karen Muñoz, a civil rights attorney helping families track down their relatives who were jailed or deported. While some court documents are sealed, nothing in the public record verifies the gang affiliation DHS cited as the cause for the birthday party raid.

“There’s no evidence released at all that any person kidnapped at that party was a member of any organized criminal group,” Muñoz said.

McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, did not respond to questions about Hays County and other raids where families and attorneys allege a lack of transparency and due process.

Months after ICE’s widely publicized raids, fear continues to envelop Santa Ana, a majority-Hispanic city with a large immigrant population. Amezcua, the mayor, said the raids have complicated local policing and rendered parents afraid to pick up their children from school. The city manager, a California-born citizen and Latino, carries with him three government IDs, including a passport.

Raids of car washes and apartment buildings continue, but the community has started to “push back,” Amezcua said. “Like many other communities, the neighbors come out. People stop in the middle of traffic.”

With so few institutional checks on ICE’s powers, citizens are increasingly relying on themselves. On at least one occasion in nearby Downey, a citizen’s intervention had some effect.

On June 12, Melyssa Rivas had just started her workday when a colleague burst into her office with urgent news: “ICE is here.”

The commotion was around the corner in Rivas’ hometown, a Los Angeles suburb locals call “Mexican Beverly Hills” for its stately houses and affluent Hispanic families. Rivas, 31, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, belongs to Facebook groups where residents share updates about cultural festivals, church programs and, these days, the presence of Trump’s deportation foot soldiers.

Rivas had seen posts about ICE officers sweeping through LA and figured Downey’s turn had come. She and her co-worker rushed toward the sound of screaming at a nearby intersection. Rivas hit “record” on her phone as a semicircle of trucks and vans came into view. She filmed at least half a dozen masked men in camouflage vests encircling a Hispanic man on his knees.

Her unease deepened as she registered details that “didn’t seem right,” Rivas recalled in an interview. She said the parked vans had out-of-state plates or no tags. The armed men wore only generic “police” patches, and most were in street clothes. No visible insignia identified them as state or federal — or even legal authorities at all.

“When is it that we just decided to do things a different way? There’s due process, there’s a legal way, and it just doesn’t seem to matter anymore,” Rivas said. “Where are human rights?”

Video footage shows Rivas and others berating the officers for complicity in what they called a “kidnapping.” Local news channels later reported that the vehicles had chased the man after a raid at a nearby car wash.

“I know half of you guys know this is fucked up,” Rivas was recorded telling the officers.

Moments later, the scene took a turn. As suddenly as they’d arrived, the officers returned to their vehicles and left, with no apology and no explanation to the distraught man they left on the sidewalk.

Through a mask, one of them said, “Have a good day.”

House Rep Demands Answers About Delayed EPA Report on PFNA, a Toxic Forever Chemical

by Sharon Lerner

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

What Happened: The ranking member of a key House subcommittee demanded answers this week from the Environmental Protection Agency about why it has yet to make public a report documenting the health risks posed by a forever chemical found in the water of millions of Americans.

In a letter sent to the EPA on Thursday, Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, cited a ProPublica story from last week that quoted government scientists saying the report had been ready for publishing in April but had yet to be released. Pingree — the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies — asked EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin for “clear answers” about why the report had not been made public, who directed its delay and when Zeldin would commit to releasing it.

What They Said: Pingree referred to the delay in publishing the report as part of “a growing pattern of interference with the Agency’s scientific work” and pointed to the Integrated Risk Information System, the EPA program that wrote it. IRIS, which was created during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, analyzes the health harm chemicals can cause. “The Trump Administration, Republicans in Congress, and industry have been hostile to the IRIS program,” she wrote, asking whether scientists had been removed or reassigned from the program and, if so, why.

Her letter also noted that the “delay in issuing the PFNA report coincided with EPA’s decision, in May of this year, to rescind” drinking water limits for PFNA and several other forever chemicals, also known as PFAS. “This seems to be more than coincidence given that there has been strong industry pushback on regulating PFAS,” Pingree wrote.

Pingree noted that the delay appears to contradict Zeldin’s repeated public statements about protecting the public from PFAS compounds, which contaminate soil and water in Maine and throughout the country. “Our state is really hoping for help from the federal government. And when you see the federal government turn their back on you and decide to withhold the data … that’s really discouraging,” she told ProPublica. “Reading that piece made my blood boil.”

Background: PFNA is in drinking water systems serving some 26 million people. The report in question found that the chemical interferes with human development by causing lower birth weights and, based on animal evidence, likely causes damage to the liver and to male reproductive systems, including reductions in testosterone levels, sperm production and the size of reproductive organs.

PFNA was a component of firefighting foam and a processing aid to make a kind of plastic used in circuit boards, valves and pipes. Although it was subject to a voluntary phaseout almost two decades ago, the chemical is now widespread in the environment.

ProPublica’s reporting found that IRIS has been drastically reduced under the Trump administration. The program, which calculates values that can be used to set limits for pollutants in drinking water and cleanup levels for toxic sites, has been a frequent target of industry. Project 2025, the conservative blueprint that has set the direction for President Donald Trump’s second administration, called for IRIS to be eliminated. Earlier this year, Republicans in Congress introduced legislation called the “No IRIS Act.” Of 55 EPA scientists Publica identified as having worked on recent IRIS assessments, only eight remain in the office, according to a source familiar with the program.

Why It Matters: The report calculated the amount of PFNA that people can be exposed to without being harmed — a critical measurement that can be used to set limits for cleaning up PFNA in contaminated areas called Superfund sites and for removing the chemical from drinking water. This calculation will prove critical to communities around the country as they battle polluters over who will pay to remove PFNA and other forever chemicals from the environment.

Response: Last week, an EPA spokesperson told ProPublica that the report on PFNA would be published when it was finalized but did not answer questions about what still needed to be done or when that would likely happen. The agency’s press office did not respond to questions about Pingree’s letter.

The Shadow President

by Andy Kroll

This story is exempt from ProPublica’s Creative Commons license until Dec. 19, 2025.

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Join us Nov. 5 for a virtual discussion about our yearlong investigation into Russell Vought with The New Yorker. Register now.

On the afternoon of Feb. 12, Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, summoned a small group of career staffers to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a meeting about foreign aid. A storm had dumped nearly 6 inches of snow on Washington, D.C. The rest of the federal government was running on a two-hour delay, but Vought had offered his team no such reprieve. As they filed into a second-floor conference room decorated with photos of past OMB directors, Vought took his seat at the center of a worn wooden table and laid his briefing materials out before him.

Vought, a bookish technocrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, cuts an unusual figure in Trump’s inner circle of Fox News hosts and right-­wing influencers. He speaks in a flat, nasally monotone and, with his tortoiseshell glasses, standard-issue blue suits and corona of close-cropped hair, most resembles what he claims to despise: a federal bureaucrat. The Office of Management and Budget, like Vought himself, is little known outside the Beltway and poorly understood even among political insiders. What it lacks in cachet, however, it makes up for in the vast influence it wields across the government. Samuel Bagenstos, an OMB general counsel during the Biden administration, told me, “Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through OMB.”

The OMB reviews all significant regulations proposed by individual agencies. It vets executive orders before the president signs them. It issues workforce policies for more than 2 million federal employees. Most notably, every penny appropriated by Congress is dispensed by the OMB, making the agency a potential choke point in a federal bureaucracy that currently spends about $7 trillion a year. Shalanda Young, Vought’s predecessor, told me, “If you’re OK with your name not being in the spotlight and just getting stuff done,” then directing the OMB “can be one of the most powerful jobs in D.C.”

During Donald Trump’s first term, Vought (whose name is pronounced “vote”) did more than perhaps anyone else to turn the president’s demands and personal grievances into government action. In 2019, after Congress refused to fund Trump’s border wall, Vought, then the acting director of the OMB, redirected billions of dollars in Department of Defense money to build it. Later that year, after the Trump White House pressured Ukraine’s government to investigate Joe Biden, who was running for president, Vought froze $214 million in security assistance for Ukraine. “The president loved Russ because he could count on him,” Mark Paoletta, who has served as the OMB general counsel in both Trump administrations, said at a conservative policy summit in 2022, according to a recording I obtained. “He wasn’t a showboat, and he was committed to doing what the president wanted to do.”

After the pro-Trump riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, many Republicans, including top administration officials, disavowed the president. Vought remained loyal. He echoed Trump’s baseless claims about election fraud and publicly defended people who were arrested for their participation in the melee. During the Biden years, Vought labored to translate the lessons of Trump’s tumultuous first term into a more effective second presidency. He chaired the transition portion of Project 2025, a joint effort by a coalition of conservative groups to develop a road map for the next Republican administration, helping to draft some 350 executive orders, regulations and other plans to more fully empower the president. “Despite his best thinking and the ­aggressive things they tried in Trump One, nothing really stuck,” a former OMB branch chief who served under Vought during the first Trump administration told me. “Most administrations don’t get a four-year pause or have the chance to think about ‘Why isn’t this working?’” The former branch chief added, “Now he gets to come back and steamroll everyone.”

At the meeting in February, according to people familiar with the events, Vought’s directive was simple: slash foreign assistance to the greatest extent possible. The U.S. government shouldn’t support overseas anti-malaria initiatives, he argued, because buying mosquito nets doesn’t make Americans safer or more prosperous. He questioned why the U.S. funded an international vaccine alliance, given the anti-vaccine views of Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The conversation turned to the United States Institute of Peace, a government-­funded nonprofit created under Ronald Reagan, which worked to prevent conflicts overseas; Vought asked what options existed to eliminate it. When he was told that the USIP was funded by Congress and legally independent, he replied, “We’ll see what we can do.” (A few days later, Trump signed an executive order that directed the OMB to dismantle the organization.)

The OMB staffers had tried to anticipate Vought’s desired outcome for more than $7 billion that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development spent each year on humanitarian assistance, ­including disaster relief and support for refugees and conflict victims. During the campaign, Trump had vowed to defund agencies that give money to people “who have no respect for us at all,” and Project 2025 had accused USAID of pursuing a “divisive political and cultural agenda.” The staffers proposed a cut of 50%.

Vought was unsatisfied. What would be the consequences, he asked, of a much larger reduction? A career official answered: Less humanitarian aid would mean more people would die. “You could say that about any of these cuts,” Vought replied. A person familiar with the ­meeting described his reaction as “blasé.” Vought reiterated that he wanted spending on foreign aid to be as close to zero as possible, on the fastest timeline possible. Several analysts left the meeting rattled. Word of what had happened spread quickly among the OMB staff. ­Another person familiar with the meeting later told me, “It was the day that broke me.”

What Vought has done in the nine months since Trump took office goes much further than slashing foreign aid. Relying on an expansive theory of presidential power and a willingness to test the rule of law, he has frozen vast sums of federal spending, terminated tens of thousands of federal workers and, in a few cases, brought entire agencies to a standstill. In early October, after Senate Democrats refused to vote for a budget resolution without additional health care protections, effectively shutting down the government, Vought became the face of the White House’s response. On the second day of the closure, Trump shared an AI-generated video that depicted his budget director — who, by then, had threatened mass firings across the federal workforce and paused or canceled $26 billion in funding for infrastructure and clean-­energy projects in blue states — as the Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C. “We work for the president of the United States,” a senior agency official who regularly deals with the OMB told me. But right now “it feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-­making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.”

At the start of Trump’s second term, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which promised to slash spending and root out waste, dominated the headlines. A gaggle of tech bros, with little government experience, appeared to be marching into federal buildings and, with the president’s blessing, purging people and programs seen as “woke” or anti-Trump. The sight of Musk swinging a chainsaw onstage at a conservative conference captured the pell-mell approach, not to mention the brutality, of the billionaire’s plan to bring the federal government to heel.

But, according to court records, interviews and other accounts from people close to Vought, DOGE’s efforts were guided, more than was previously known, by the OMB director. Musk bragged about “feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” but the details of the agency’s downsizing were ironed out by Vought’s office. When DOGE took aim at obscure quasi-government nonprofits, such as the United States Institute of Peace, OMB veterans saw Vought’s influence at work. “I can’t imagine that the DOGE team knew to target all these little parts of the government without Russ pointing them there,” the former OMB branch chief told me. Vought also orchestrated DOGE’s hostile takeover of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, crippling a regulator that Republicans had hoped to shutter during Trump’s first term. “DOGE is underneath the OMB,” Michelle Martin, an official with Citizens for Renewing America, a grassroots group founded by Vought, said in May, according to a video of her remarks. “Honestly, a lot of what Elon began pinpointing ... was at the direction of Russ.”

Vought, who declined to be interviewed for this story, voiced concerns about some of DOGE’s tactics — canceling budget items that the OMB had wanted to keep, for instance — but he mostly saw the department as a useful battering ram. An administration official who has worked with Vought and Musk told me that DOGE showed Vought it was possible to ignore legal challenges and take dramatic action. “He has the benefit of Elon softening everyone up,” the official told me. “Elon terrified the shit out of people. He broke the status quo.”

Vought is a stated opponent of the status quo. One of the few prominent conservatives to embrace the label of “Christian nationalist,” he once told an audience that “the phrasing is too accurate to run away from the term. ... I’m a Christian. I am a nationalist. We were meant to be a Christian nation.” American democracy, he has said, has been hijacked by rogue judges who make law from the bench and by a permanent class of government bureaucrats who want to advance “woke” policies designed to divide Americans and silence political opponents. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus,” Vought said in 2024, during a conference hosted by the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit think tank that he also founded. “And they have aimed it at us.”

The central struggle of our time, he says, pits the defenders of this “post-­constitutional” order — what he calls the “cartel” or the “regime,” which in his telling includes Democrats and Republicans — against a group of “radical constitutionalists” fighting to destroy the deep state and return power to the presidency and, ultimately, the people. Vought counts himself as a member of the latter group, which, in his view, also includes right-wing stalwarts such as the political strategist Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said in a private speech in 2023. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

The ultimate radical constitutionalist, Vought says, is Donald Trump. In Vought’s view, Trump, the subject of four indictments during his time out of office, is a singular figure in the history of the American republic, a once persecuted leader who returns to power to defeat the deep state. “We have in Donald Trump a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role, a man whose own interests perfectly align with the interests of the country,” Vought said in his 2024 speech. “He has seen what it has done to him, and he has seen what they are trying to do to the country. That is nothing more than a gift of God.” As Bannon put it, sitting onstage with Vought at a closed-door conference in 2023, Trump is “a very imperfect instrument, right? But he’s an instrument of the Lord.”

In Vought’s vision for the U.S. government, an all-powerful executive branch would be able to fire workers, cancel programs, shutter agencies, and undo regulations that govern air and water quality, financial markets, workplace protections and civil rights. The Department of Justice, meanwhile, would shed its historical independence and operate at the direction of the White House. All of this puts Vought at the center of what Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown, described to me as the Trump administration’s “complete disregard” for the law. “The president has no authority to not spend money Congress has appropriated — that’s not a debate,” he told me. “The president has no authority to fire civil servants who are protected by statute — that’s not a debate.” He added, “We are seeing exertions of executive power the likes of which we have never seen in this country.”

Vought, who is 49, has spent his entire adult life in Washington. He met his wife, Mary, on Capitol Hill, where they both eventually worked for Mike Pence, at the time a Republican congressman from Indiana. (The Voughts divorced in 2023.) Yet, after nearly 30 years in the nation’s capital, he still views himself as an outsider. He once described his upbringing, in Trumbull, Connecticut, as “blue collar” and his parents as part of America’s “forgotten men and women.”

Vought’s father, Thurlow, served in the Marines and worked as an electrician. His mother, Margaret, spent more than 20 years as a schoolteacher and administrator. Before they married each other, Vought’s parents had both been widowed in their 30s and left to raise families on their own; Russ was their only child together. In 1981, when Russ was 4, one of Thurlow’s daughters died in a car crash. Not long after the accident, Thurlow had a religious awakening. “That completely changed the direction of our immediate family,” one of Vought’s half sisters later wrote on social media.

Vought’s mother helped launch a Christian school, where the curriculum relied heavily on the Bible. One history book the school considered using included the instruction to “Defend the statement that all governmental power and authority come from God.” America was built on Judeo-­Christian values, she told a local newspaper, and if the American people gave up on those values “then they’re going to have to pay the price based on sin, sickness, disease and anarchy.”

Vought attended a private Christian high school, then went to Illinois to study at Wheaton College, which is known as the “evangelical Harvard.” He moved to Washington after graduation and, in 1999, landed a job in the office of Phil Gramm, a Republican senator from Texas. Vought, who started in the mailroom, would later say that working for Gramm laid the “conservative foundation” for the rest of his life.

Gramm was an uncompromising budget hawk. He was famous for the “Dickey Flatt test,” named after a printer Gramm knew in Texas. For every dollar of federal spending, Gramm said, lawmakers must ask themselves: Did it improve the lives of people like Dickey Flatt? (In Gramm’s estimation, the answer was often no; every year, he introduced legislation designed to ruthlessly slash the budget.) Years later, when Vought testified before Congress, he said that people like his parents “have always been my test for federal spending. Did a particular program or spending increase help the nameless wagon pullers across our country, working hard at their job, trying to provide for their family and future?”

Under Gramm’s tutelage, Vought developed a reputation as a master of the arcane rules that can get legislation passed or killed. He climbed the ranks of the Republican Party, going on to advise Pence, who was then the leader of the House Republican Conference. But the closer Vought got to the center of congressional power, the more disillusioned he became. In the late 2000s, when Republican lawmakers, who professed to care about deficits and balanced budgets, voted in favor of bills loaded with corporate giveaways and pork-barrel spending, Vought felt that they were abandoning their principles and duping their constituents. He later recalled of this time, “I would say, ‘If there’s an opinion in this leadership room, I’m telling you it’s 95% wrong.’” A former Capitol Hill colleague of Vought’s told me, “I think he thought the Republican leadership was a bigger impediment to conservative causes than Democrats were.”

In 2010, Vought quit working for House Republicans and helped launch Heritage Action for America, an offshoot of the influential conservative think tank Heritage Foundation. The foundation was known for dense policy papers and its voluminous “Mandate for Leadership” governing guide. Heritage Action had a different purpose — to strong-arm Republicans in Congress into acting more conservatively.

Vought was instrumental in turning Heritage Action into the interest group that congressional Republicans feared most. He picked fights with party leaders over agriculture subsidies and greenhouse gas regulations, and published a scorecard that rated how lawmakers voted on key bills. In Heritage Action’s first year, according to a person familiar with Vought’s work there, he came up with an idea for a mailer that attacked Bob Corker, a Republican senator from Tennessee, for his vote to approve a nuclear ­weapons treaty with Russia. The mailer featured a photograph of Corker alongside images of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and the Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Heritage Action’s tactics so infuriated the Republican leadership that ­Sen. Mitch McConnell called on Heritage donors to stop funding the group. (McConnell did not respond to a request for comment.)

In 2013, Heritage Action announced a campaign to defund the Affordable Care Act. Vought and his colleagues toured the country, whipping up the grassroots, and poured millions of dollars into advertisements and lobbying. They wanted Republicans in the House and the Senate to insist that any spending bill passed to avert a shutdown must also defund Obamacare. The Republican lawmakers who embraced the strategy came to be known as the “suicide caucus,” and their protest led to a 16-day government shutdown. In the end, Republican leaders cut a deal to reopen the government, leaving Obamacare intact.

Heritage Action saw the 2016 presidential election as an opportunity to put a true conservative back in the White House. The group’s CEO, Michael Needham, openly supported Sen. Ted Cruz, of Texas, who, three years earlier, had helped orchestrate the shutdown. Trump, at least initially, was treated with disdain. During an appearance on Fox News in 2015, Needham called him a “clown” who “needs to be out of the race.”

Vought and Trump couldn’t have been more different: One was a deacon at his Baptist church; the other was a twice-­divorced philanderer who had been caught on camera bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy.” But, after Trump won the election, Vought was offered a job as a senior adviser at the OMB, where he’d dreamed of working since his days in Phil Gramm’s office. Years later, Vought would say that, at the time, he had no ambition of one day running the agency. He had planned to help with the transition and some of the OMB’s early efforts, then go to seminary to become a pastor. But, he later said in a podcast interview, “God had other plans.”

In March 2017, Trump signed an executive order that called for a top-to-bottom reorganization of the federal government. Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman, served as Trump’s first budget director, but, inside the OMB, Vought took the lead. According to a former senior staffer at the agency, Vought initially pushed for the president’s plan to eliminate USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He also wanted to fold the Department of Health and Human Services, along with food stamps programs, into a new Department of Health and Public Welfare. “They wanted to call it that because they think it sounds bad,” a former OMB analyst told me. In one meeting, according to a person in the room, Vought asked, “Why do we do economic assistance abroad at all?” The former OMB analyst said, “There were very few, if any, debates where Russ wouldn’t take the most extreme option available to him, the most conservative, the most budget-cutting.”

Trump’s Cabinet secretaries resisted wholesale cuts. The former senior staffer recalled, “The general counsels at these agencies are calling the White House counsel and saying, ‘We’re not trying to introduce legislation to delete ourselves, are we?’” Few of the recommendations in Vought’s final reorganization plan, which was released in 2018, were implemented. But the document now reads like a guide to the second Trump administration. “I didn’t realize it then,” the former OMB senior staffer told me, “but I was writing the first draft of Project 2025.”

Vought increasingly clashed with the OMB’s staff over proposed cuts to popular programs. Meals on Wheels, the food delivery program, was a topic of intense debate. Even after OMB staff explained how the program, which received more than $900 million in funding from Congress, acted as a lifeline for homebound seniors, Vought and Mulvaney pushed for major cuts that would have hobbled its operations, according to the former OMB senior staffer. The staffer added that it was often hard to reconcile Vought’s deeply held Christian faith — he hosted a prayer session for select colleagues — with his eagerness to cut programs that helped the vulnerable. “It always struck me as a strange thing,” the person said. “There’s compassion, but it only extends to certain people.”

In 2018, Mark Paoletta, a former attorney in the George H.W. Bush White House, joined the OMB as general counsel. Paoletta was best known for publicly defending Clarence Thomas, who, during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, in 1991, was accused of sexual harassment by his former colleague Anita Hill. Paoletta had worked on Capitol Hill, then entered private practice, where he advised politicians under scrutiny by Congress. Paoletta and Vought quickly forged an alliance. The former OMB branch chief told me that the office’s culture changed after Paoletta arrived. “There was a shift that we were all deep state,” he said. “They thought we were pushing back because we had our own leftist-leaning agenda.” (Paoletta declined to comment.)

It was Vought’s idea to use an obscure budgetary maneuver called a rescission to claw back funds that Congress had already appropriated, according to Paoletta’s remarks at the conservative policy summit. In 2018, at Vought’s urging, Trump sent Congress the largest rescission request in decades, asking lawmakers to roll back more than $15 billion, including money for USAID’s Ebola response, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and an Energy Department loan program for auto manufacturing. OMB employees “looked at us like we were crazy,” Paoletta said. “They just thought it was something they didn’t do.” Once again, Vought’s own party thwarted him: The measure failed by a single vote in the Republican-held Senate.

Vought also encountered resistance inside the White House. When Congress refused to give Trump billions in funding to construct new border fencing, Vought and Paoletta devised a novel strategy. Trump could declare a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, giving him the authority to seize money from other parts of the government. According to Paoletta, John Kelly, the president’s chief of staff, kept the plan from Trump. Paoletta said that Kelly’s message to the OMB was “We don’t want to tell the president he has that authority, because God knows what he’ll do.”

Eventually, Trump ­badgered Mulvaney, the OMB director, to find him the money for his wall. Mulvaney told the president that he’d been trying to meet with him about the issue, but that Kelly had blocked him. Within days, Trump replaced Kelly with Mulvaney. Vought took over as the acting director of the OMB, and money from the Defense Department was tapped to fund the wall. (Kelly did not respond to requests for comment.)

Under Vought, the OMB produced budgets that called for more cuts than any in modern history. Congress all but ignored them. A former staffer in the OMB’s legislative affairs office recalled that Republicans didn’t believe Trump cared about the sweeping reductions included in his own annual budgets. “They kept saying, ‘The president’s not really pushing this or that cut — that’s a Russ Vought thing, isn’t it?’” the legislative affairs staffer said.

In July 2019, Trump asked the OMB to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance to the government of Ukraine. The request coincided with a phone call Trump had with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which Trump pressured him to investigate Biden and Biden’s son Hunter, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. The money for Ukraine had already been approved by Congress, but Vought agreed to hold back the funds. Paoletta signed off on a memo authorizing the freeze. Under the law, the move was known as an impoundment. (The Government Accountability Office, an independent nonpartisan agency, later deemed it illegal.)

Any fan of “Schoolhouse Rock!” knows that the first job assigned to Congress in the Constitution is the power of the purse. The president, meanwhile, must “take Care that the Laws be faithfully ­executed,” according to Article 2 of the Constitution. Most legal scholars interpret this to mean that the president’s duty is to spend the money Congress appropriates, and that the president does not have the power to withhold funds. In 1969, William Rehnquist, the conservative future Supreme Court chief justice, wrote that the impoundment power was “supported by neither reason nor precedent.”

The question of impoundment’s legality came to a head in the 1970s, when President Richard Nixon withheld billions in congressio­nally approved funds for environmental ­cleanup efforts. Courts undid Nixon’s actions, and Congress eventually passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which outlawed the maneuver, leaving only narrow exceptions — rescissions — that required congressional sign-off. (Democrats are calling for restrictions on the rescission process as part of the current shutdown negotiations.) Over the years, the Impoundment Control Act would come to be viewed as sacrosanct at the OMB. That didn’t stop Vought. “I had been personally told, ‘Look, I want the money cut off until we can figure out where it’s going,’” Vought later said of the Ukraine funding in an interview with the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson. “It was like all hell broke loose within the bureaucracy.”

The impoundment triggered congressional investigations and, ultimately, Trump’s first impeachment. (Ukraine eventually received the money.) Vought refused to cooperate with investigators, calling the probe a “sham process that is designed to relitigate the last election.” One of the impeachment articles named Vought, saying that the president had pressured him and others not to respond to subpoenas. Trump, for his part, continued to express support for impoundment, calling it the “secret weapon” that could tame the “bloated federal bureaucracy.”

In early 2021, on one of the final days of Trump’s first term, Vought visited him in the Oval Office. Both men felt a sense of unfinished business, Vought would later recall. Only a few months earlier, when Vought was sworn in as the OMB director, Trump had told him that, after 3 1/2 years as president, he had finally got the hang of the job. “Russ, we’ve got to get another term,” Trump said. “We finally figured out how to do this.”

Vought, frustrated by what he saw as years of obstruction by civil servants, had recently pushed through a new policy to vastly expand the number of at-will employees in the government, making them easier to fire. But the COVID-19 pandemic had dashed any chance of leaving the government smaller than he’d found it. Trump had signed trillion-­dollar stimulus bills to prop up the American economy; by the time he left office, the national debt had swelled by $7.8 trillion. After the violence on Jan. 6, a second Trump term looked less likely than ever. Vought, however, had not given up hope.

In the Oval Office, he told Trump that he would soon launch a new political operation that would keep the MAGA movement alive while attacking the policies of the incoming Biden administration. Trump blessed the venture, with one request. That summer, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, national protests had forced a racial reckoning in the country. Trump wanted Vought, who as OMB director had scrubbed training materials for federal employees of any references to “white privilege” and “systemic racism,” to find a way for conservatives to push back against the Black Lives Matter movement. “This was an assignment I was given from President Trump,” Vought later recalled. “I’m the budget guy. If I can talk about race, you can talk about race.”

A few days after Trump left office, Vought announced the launch of the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA think tank that aspired to act as an incubator for future Republican administrations. Its activist arm, Citizens for Renewing America, would mobilize grassroots supporters to pressure elected officials to embrace the think tank’s agenda. The overarching goal, Vought wrote in an op-ed for The Federalist, was to “restore an old consensus in America that has been forgotten, that we are a people For God, For Country, and For Community.”

At the Center for Renewing America, Vought surrounded himself with other radical constitutionalists from the first Trump administration. He brought on Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department official who had tried to use his agency to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. (A D.C. disciplinary board recently recommended that Clark, who now works at the OMB, lose his law license as punishment for those efforts, an outcome that Clark is appealing and that his lawyer called a “travesty of justice.”) Kash Patel, Trump’s current FBI director, and Ken Cuccinelli, a top immigration official in the first Trump administration, joined as senior fellows. Working at the center, Cuccinelli explained at the conservative policy summit, allowed him to “stake out the outer boundary of reasonable constitutional law.”

The Center for Renewing America’s ideas included how the president could invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy military troops to American cities to put down protests, how the White House could freeze billions in federal funding without waiting for a vote in Congress, and how agency leaders could defy government unions and fire workers en masse. The think tank also set out to create shadow versions of the OMB and of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to anticipate legal challenges and counter internal pushback. In his 2024 address, Vought explained, “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral.”

Vought and his colleagues at the center also worked closely with the House Freedom Caucus to urge other congressional Republicans to use government shutdowns as a way of forcing through major policy changes. One of their first targets was critical race theory, a once obscure academic concept that had become a flashpoint during the 2020 racial ­justice protests.

According to previously unreported recordings of briefings held by Citizens for Renewing America, Vought said that he had pressured members of the Freedom Caucus to yoke a ban on critical race theory to must-pass bills on raising the debt limit and funding the government. “We have to have a speaker that goes into these funding fights with a love for the shutdowns,” Vought said during a November 2022 briefing call, “because they create an opportunity to save the country.”

But Republicans never shut down the government during the Biden presidency, and Vought grew increasingly frustrated with them for not using more aggressive tactics. On one briefing call, he praised Cori Bush, a progressive Democrat from Missouri, after she camped out for several days on the Capitol steps to protest the end of a pandemic-­era moratorium on evictions. Vought called her politics “very, very bad,” but he admired her methods: “We need this from Republicans.”

The centerpiece of Vought’s work during the Biden years was his campaign to popularize the concept of “woke and weaponized” government. The tagline brought together two of Vought’s rallying cries: “woke” policies, like diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and transgender rights, and a “weaponized” FBI and Justice Department that had allegedly been wielded against the Democrats’ political enemies, including, most notably, Trump. When the Center for Renewing America released a federal budget blueprint in late 2022, calling for nearly $9 trillion in cuts in the course of 10 years, the word “woke” appeared 77 times across 103 pages.

Jessica Riedl, a budget expert who works for the conservative Manhattan Institute, told me that it was “just silly” to claim, as the Center for Renewing America’s budget did, that Veterans Affairs, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and farm subsidies required enormous cuts for being too woke. “It’s a way to dress up spending cuts that aren’t popular on their own merits,” Riedl said. Vought described his framing as an attempt to “change paradigms.” “We have to be able to defund agencies,” he said in the private speech in 2023. “That is why these things have to be indelibly linked, and that is why we are focussing so much on ‘woke and weaponized.’”

Any hope that Vought had of implementing his ideas in a second Trump administration nearly ran aground last summer. He had written a chapter of Project 2025’s 887-page report, arguing for an expansion of executive power that would put the Justice Department and other traditionally independent agencies fully under presidential control. Center for Renewing America fellows had written two more chapters in the report. But, as Election Day neared, Project 2025 became a liability for the Trump campaign. Polls showed that a majority of Americans opposed its most aggressive proposals, including removing the abortion drug mifepristone from the market, eliminating the Department of Education and implementing Vought’s plan to more easily fire nonpolitical federal workers. As criticism of Project 2025 grew, Trump insisted that he knew “nothing” about it, while also claiming that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

The month before the election, Politico reported that Donald Trump Jr., had compiled a list of people who would not be allowed to serve in a second Trump administration, including a number of leading contributors to Project 2025. But, according to a former Trump campaign official with close ties to the White House, Vought deftly navigated the controversy. “Russ is a consummate team player,” the official told me. “He was the one person at Project 2025 that we could have a conversation with during the course of the campaign.”

A week after Trump’s victory, the president-­elect announced his plans for the Department of Government Efficiency. “It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time,” Trump said in a statement. He tapped two of his biggest backers to run it: Elon Musk, who had donated nearly $300 million to help elect Trump and other Republicans, and the biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who briefly ran for president on an anti-woke platform. Two days after the announcement, Vought met with Musk and Ramaswamy at Mar-a-Lago. Vought and Musk “hit it off,” according to The New York Times; both were “on the same wavelength in terms of taking the most extreme action possible.” Soon after the meeting, Trump nominated Vought to run the OMB.

One of DOGE’s first targets was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB had first been proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who, as a law professor, argued for the creation of a regulator that could protect Americans from predatory mortgages and hidden fees. Created by law in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the bureau developed a reputation as an aggressive enforcer of fair lending and consumer ­protection laws. The bureau’s work has led to nearly $20 billion in direct relief to consumers and $5 billion in civil penalties for alleged wrongdoing. For Vought, the bureau embodied the gross regulatory overreach that he loathed; outside of government, the agency’s biggest foes, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, were major funders of Trump’s second campaign.

On Feb. 7, Trump named Vought the bureau’s acting director, a role he would perform on top of his duties at the OMB. That morning, a small team of DOGE staffers arrived at the CFPB’s headquarters. According to previously unreported emails and depositions, the members of DOGE took orders from Vought as they disabled the CFPB’s website and decided which of the agency’s employees to fire. Musk weighed in on X: “CFPB RIP.”

Trump had targeted the CFPB during his first term. “There were days in Trump One where it felt like we were getting punched in the face,” one longtime employee told me. Over time, however, the president seemed to lose interest, and the CFPB’s last ­director under Trump, a political appointee named Kathy Kranin­ger, supported the bureau’s mission. In 2020, under Kraninger, the CFPB filed the second-­highest number of enforcement actions in its nearly 10-year existence.

Current and former CFPB staff told me that they assumed a second Trump administration would look like the first one. “Generally, we thought there would be a conservative agenda we’d be handed, and we’d figure out how to enact it,” the veteran employee said. Soon after taking over, Vought informed Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, which funds the CFPB, that the agency would not need any more money. He barred CFPB employees from doing most types of work and told them not to go to the office. When confusion arose over what duties, if any, remained for the staff to do, Vought clarified the matter in a Feb. 10 email, telling employees to “stand down from performing any work task.”

In the following weeks, Vought and Paoletta stopped oversight activities, quashed ongoing investigations and froze active enforcement cases, which included matters involving some of the largest banks in the nation, such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Capital One. Rohit Chopra, the bureau’s director under Biden, said that Vought’s actions had put the CFPB “in a coma.” The bureau’s top enforcement officer resigned in June, writing in a letter to colleagues that the CFPB’s leadership “has no intention to enforce the law in any meaningful way.”

The final blow came when Vought announced a plan to lay off more than 80% of the CFPB’s employees. A federal appeals court ruled in August that the mass-firing plan could proceed. It took Vought four months to accomplish what the previous Trump administration had been unable to do in four years.

The unwinding of the CFPB, however, was quickly overshadowed by another Vought victory. That same month, he completed his assault on foreign aid. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had been running what was left of USAID, announced that, with Trump’s approval, he had empowered Vought to officially eliminate the agency. “Russ is now at the helm to oversee the closeout of an agency that long ago went off the rails,” Rubio announced. “Congrats, Russ.”

Four months before the 2024 election, the Center for Renewing America had welcomed a small group of congressional staffers to its headquarters, a few blocks from the Capitol. Some of them worked for the House and Senate budget committees, which every year help set spending levels for the federal government. The purpose of the meeting was to brief the staffers on the center’s latest policy fight — an attempt to build the case for the use of impoundment.

At the briefing, Paoletta argued that the Impoundment Control Act was unconstitutional. Spending laws passed by Congress were a ceiling, not a floor, Paoletta argued, according to a person in the room. In that view — which most legal experts dismiss as a fringe position — the White House is not permitted to spend more than a law calls for, but it has the power to spend far less. “Congress passes statutes episodically, and often with conflicting purposes and demands,” Paoletta later wrote in an essay for the Center for Renewing America. “It is left to the President and his subordinates to harmonize their execution in a coherent manner.”

According to Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, the Trump administration has since frozen or canceled more than $410 billion in funding on everything from energy subsidies for low-income households and Head Start after-school programs to President George W. Bush’s HIV-reduction initiative, PEPFAR, and artists’ grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Vought directed the National Institutes of Health to withhold — illegally, according to the Government Accountability Office — an estimated $15 billion in grants for outside research projects. The NIH also moved to cap funding for so-called indirect costs, which research universities rely on to pay for their buildings, utilities and administrative staff. Scientists I interviewed said that these cuts would inevitably lead to less medical research, including into a drug that Vought’s ex-wife credited with improving the life of their 11-year-old daughter, who was born with cystic fibrosis. A scientist who receives government funding to study cystic ­fibrosis treatment told me that, without sufficient money for indirect costs, “we probably won’t be able to do the research and will have to relinquish the grants.”

The OMB claims that it is vetting federal spending to ensure that the money does not fund “woke” programs. “We can confirm that President Trump and Director Vought are carefully scrutinizing spending that has previously run on autopilot or worse — toward transing our kids, the Green New Scam, and funding our own country’s invasion — just as the president promised,” an OMB spokesperson told the Times in August. But blocking funds is also a way to pressure officials and agencies to comply with the administration’s demands. “OMB is like a giant funnel that everything has to go through in order to happen,” Lester Cash, a former OMB employee, told me. “You can get agencies to agree to things just to get the funnel to open back up.”

In March, the OMB took down a legally mandated public website that made it possible to track the funding freezes. The move elicited a rare show of bipartisanship. In a letter to Vought, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate appropriations committees urged him to “restore public access to apportionment data in accordance with statute.” Vought said the information listed on the site was “predecisional” and a risk to national security. The OMB restored the site only when a judge ruled that taking it down was illegal, saying that the government’s position relied “on an extravagant and unsupported theory of presidential power.”

The OMB’s funding freezes have wreaked havoc. On June 30, the Department of Education told state agencies that congressional appropriations for after-school activities and English-as-a-second-language instruction would not arrive the next day, as planned. The unexpected shortfall affected thousands of school districts, which served millions of students, in all 50 states. The administration only backed down after both Democrats and Republicans criticized the move. “When something’s been appropriated, signed into law, and people are writing contracts based on the commitment of the federal government, and then they don’t know if they’re going to get it or not, it creates such chaos,” Don Bacon, a Republican House member from Nebraska, told me. “I’m not sure what the OMB director thought he was doing.” (A spokesperson for Vought at the OMB would not comment on the record in response to a detailed list of questions.)

In June, Trump sent a rescission request to Congress, seeking to cancel roughly $9 billion in funding for foreign aid and for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports NPR, PBS, and other public radio and TV stations nationwide. The programs were viewed, the senior agency official told me, as “soft targets,” a test to see if Vought could persuade Republicans to put aside their concerns about undermining Congress’ power of the purse. Unlike in Trump’s first term, Vought’s rescission plan succeeded. The measure, which faced opposition from Democrats and a few Republicans, passed after Vice President JD Vance cast two tie-­breaking procedural votes. Jeff Merkley, the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, told me, “You’ve basically said to Congress, ‘Hey, compromise all you want, but we’re going to undo that in the way we want as soon as you’ve signed the bill.’”

On the Friday before Labor Day, Vought made his most audacious move yet. The White House sent Congress a new rescissions package, targeting nearly $5 billion in foreign aid. But this time Vought informed lawmakers that he didn’t need their approval. He asserted that the president could make the request, putting a temporary freeze on the funds, then simply wait for the fiscal year to expire, on Sept. 30, at which point the money would be canceled out. Vought called it a “pocket rescission,” but it was impoundment by another name. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, said it was a “clear violation of the law.”

The Government Accountability Office can sue the OMB over an impoundment or pocket rescission to get the money released. In April, Gene Dodaro, who leads the Government Accountability Office, testified that his office had opened 39 investigations into potential violations of the Impoundment Control Act by the Trump administration. The OMB has responded by attacking Dodaro’s agency. In one letter, Paoletta said that the OMB would cooperate with the Government Accountability Office only if its demands didn’t get in the way of Trump’s agenda. In another letter, Paoletta told the Department of Transportation to ignore a Government Accountability Office ruling that found that the OMB had illegally impounded money for electric car development. Vought, for his part, has flatly declared that the Government Accountability Office “shouldn’t exist.”

Vought’s actions could provoke a challenge to the Impoundment Control Act in the Supreme Court. In the meantime, a number of current and former government employees told me that they worried about the long-term consequences of what he has already done: the terminating of vital research projects that could have led to lifesaving breakthroughs, the nation’s lost standing as an international leader, the uncertainty cast over the fundamental workings of government. “They’ve given up on the idea that they need to persuade anybody,” Bagenstos, the former general counsel at the OMB, said of Vought and Paoletta. They’re “just going to use brute force and dominance.” As the former OMB analyst told me, “They’ve dropped a grenade into the system.”

The government shutdown has illustrated, in the starkest terms, Vought’s expansive theory of executive power and his willingness to ignore Congress. On Oct. 2, Trump posted on Truth Social that he would meet with Vought to decide which “Democrat Agencies” to cut on a temporary or permanent basis. A few days later, the OMB released a memo claiming that, seemingly in defiance of a 2019 law, furloughed federal employees were not guaranteed back pay following a shutdown. Then, on Oct. 10, Vought announced that his campaign of mass firings across the bureaucracy had begun. So far, more than 4,000 employees have been laid off, disrupting government services devoted to, among other things, cybersecurity efforts, special education programs, substance abuse treatment and loans for small businesses. A federal judge put a temporary stop to the cuts, but that same day Vought predicted that the total number of firings would be “north of 10,000.” As one official texted me, “Trauma achieved.”

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

Who Is Russell Vought? How a Little-Known D.C. Insider Became Trump’s Dismantler-in-Chief

by Lisa Riordan Seville, Andy Kroll, Katie Campbell and Mauricio Rodríguez Pons

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

Days into the 2025 shutdown that brought the federal government to a halt, President Donald Trump reposted an AI-generated music video set to the tune of Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.” Trump plays the cowbell. Vice President J.D. Vance mans the drums. Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought, wields the scythe. “Russ Vought is the reaper,” goes one lyric.

For most of Vought’s nearly three decades in Washington, D.C., he operated largely behind the scenes. He spent a dozen years as a congressional staffer before going to Heritage Action, the advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, the influential conservative think tank. In 2017, he returned to government, bringing his exhaustive knowledge of the budgetary process to the first Trump administration and becoming one of the president’s most loyal functionaries.

Over the past decade, this unassuming budget wonk and self-proclaimed Christian nationalist has quietly injected his ideas into the bloodstream of American politics. He was one of the chief architects of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and said he spent much of 2024 drafting the executive orders, regulations and other plans to use in a second Trump presidency. Since returning as the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget in January, he has led the president’s effort to dismantle large swaths of the federal government.

ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll spent almost a year chronicling Vought’s rise from the mailroom of the U.S. Senate to his perch as one of the two or three most influential players in the current administration behind only Trump and, arguably, Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff. In his second term as the president’s budget guru, Vought has tried to make good on his desire to put federal workers “in trauma.”

This video is based on scores of interviews, thousands of pages of emails obtained through records requests and dozens of hours of videos and recordings of private briefings given by Vought, most of which have not been previously reported.

Vought declined to be interviewed for this story. His spokesperson at OMB would not comment on the record in response to a detailed list of questions.

The portrait that emerges from Kroll’s reporting is that of a man who is equal parts government technocrat, political operator and zealous iconoclast. Kroll reveals how the seeds of Trump’s presidency in 2025 were planted early in Vought’s career, while uncovering how much Vought has shaped the trajectory of the Trump-era Republican Party from behind the scenes. He also raises questions of what’s to come as Vought leverages his encyclopedic knowledge of the federal government’s inner workings to achieve his goal of remaking the executive branch. As Vought told his supporters in a 2024 speech, “God put us here for such a time as this.”

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days.

by Nicole Foy, photography by Sarahbeth Maney

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

When the Supreme Court recently allowed immigration agents in the Los Angeles area to take race into consideration during sweeps, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn’t be concerned.

“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote, “they promptly let the individual go.”

But that is far from the reality many citizens have experienced. Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.

About two dozen Americans have said they were held for more than a day without being able to phone lawyers or loved ones.

Videos of U.S. citizens being mistreated by immigration agents have filled social media feeds, but there is little clarity on the overall picture. The government does not track how often immigration agents hold Americans.

So ProPublica created its own count.

We compiled and reviewed every case we could find of agents holding citizens against their will, whether during immigration raids or protests. While the tally is almost certainly incomplete, we found more than 170 such incidents during the first nine months of President Donald Trump’s second administration.

Among the citizens detained are nearly 20 children, including two with cancer. That includes four who were held for weeks with their undocumented mother and without access to the family’s attorney until a congresswoman intervened.

Immigration agents do have authority to detain Americans in limited circumstances. Agents can hold people whom they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally. We found more than 50 Americans who were held after agents questioned their citizenship. They were almost all Latino.

Immigration agents also can arrest citizens who allegedly interfered with or assaulted officers. We compiled cases of about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, accused of assaulting or impeding officers.

These cases have often wilted under scrutiny. In nearly 50 instances that we have identified so far, charges have never been filed or the cases were dismissed. Our count found a handful of citizens have pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors.

Among the detentions in which allegations have not stuck, masked agents pointed a gun at, pepper sprayed and punched a young man who had filmed them searching for his relative. In another, agents knocked over and then tackled a 79-year-old car wash owner, pressing their knees into his neck and back. His lawyer said he was held for 12 hours and wasn’t given medical attention despite having broken ribs in the incident and having recently had heart surgery. In a third case, agents grabbed and handcuffed a woman on her way to work who was caught up in a chaotic raid on street vendors. In a complaint filed against the government, she described being held for more than two days, without being allowed to contact the outside world for much of that time. (The Supreme Court has ruled that two days is generally the longest federal officials can hold Americans without charges.)

In response to questions from ProPublica, the Department of Homeland Security said agents do not racially profile or target Americans. “We don’t arrest US citizens for immigration enforcement,” wrote spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.

A top immigration official recently acknowledged agents do consider someone’s looks. “How do they look compared to, say, you?” Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino said to a white reporter in Chicago.

The White House told ProPublica that anyone who assaults federal immigration agents would be prosecuted. “Interfering with law enforcement and assaulting law enforcement is a crime and anyone, regardless of immigration status, will be held accountable,” said the Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson. “Officers act heroically to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens, and protect American communities with the utmost professionalism.”

A spokesperson for Kavanaugh did not return an emailed request for comment.

Watch video ➜

Tallying the number of Americans detained by immigration agents is inherently messy and incomplete. The government has long ignored recommendations for it to track such cases, even as the U.S. has a history of detaining and even deporting citizens, including during the Obama administration and Trump’s first term.

We compiled cases by sifting through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports. We did not include arrests of protesters by local police or the National Guard. Nor did we count cases in which arrests were made at a later date after a judicial process. That included cases of some people charged with serious crimes, like throwing rocks or tossing a flare to start a fire.

Experts say that Americans appear to be getting picked up more now as a result of the government doing something that it hasn’t for decades: large-scale immigration sweeps across the country, often in communities that do not want them.

In earlier administrations, deportation agents used intelligence to target specific individuals, said Scott Shuchart, a top immigration official in the Biden, Obama and first Trump administrations. “The new idea is to use those resources unintelligently” — with officers targeting communities or workplaces where undocumented immigrants may be.

When federal officers roll through communities in the way the Supreme Court permitted, the constitutional rights of both citizens and noncitizens are inevitably violated, argued David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. He recently analyzed how sweeps in Los Angeles have led to racial profiling. “If the government can grab someone because he’s a certain demographic group that’s correlated with some offense category, then they can do that in any context.”

Cody Wofsy, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, put it even more starkly. “Any one of us could be next.”

Watch video ➜

When Kavanaugh issued his opinion that immigration agents can consider race and other factors, the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices strongly dissented. They warned that citizens risked being “grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor.”

Leonardo Garcia Venegas appears to have been just such a case. He was working at a construction site in coastal Alabama when he saw masked immigration agents from Homeland Security Investigations hop a fence and run by a “No trespassing” sign. Garcia Venegas recalled that they moved toward the Latino workers, ignoring the white and Black workers.

Garcia Venegas began filming after his undocumented brother asked agents for a warrant. In response, the footage shows, agents yanked his brother to the ground, shoving his face into wet concrete. Garcia Venegas kept filming until officers grabbed him too and knocked his phone to the ground.

Other co-workers filmed what happened next, as immigration agents twisted the 25-year-old’s arms. They repeatedly tried to take him to the ground while he yelled, “I’m a citizen!”

Officers pulled out his REAL ID, which Alabama only issues to those legally in the U.S. But the agents dismissed it as fake. Officers held Garcia Venegas handcuffed for more than an hour. His brother was later deported.

Garcia Venegas was so shaken that he took two weeks off of work. Soon after he returned, he was working alone inside a nearly built house listening to music on his headphones when he sensed someone watching him. A masked immigration agent was standing in the bedroom doorway.

This time, agents didn’t tackle him. But they again dismissed his REAL ID. And then they held him to check his citizenship. Garcia Venegas says agents also held two other workers who had legal status.

DHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about Garcia Venegas’ detentions, or to a federal lawsuit he filed last month. The agency has previously defended the agents’ conduct, saying he “physically got in between agents and the subject” during the first incident. The footage does not show that, and Garcia Venegas was never charged with obstruction or any other crime.

Garcia Venegas’ lawyers at the nonprofit Institute for Justice hope others may join his suit. After all, the reverberations of the immigration sweeps are being felt widely. Garcia Venegas said he knows of 15 more raids on nearby construction sites, and the industry along his portion of the Gulf Coast is struggling for lack of workers.

Kavanaugh’s assurances hold little weight for Garcia Venegas. He’s a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, who speaks little English and works in construction. Even with his REAL ID and Social Security card in his wallet, Garcia Venegas worries that immigration agents will keep harassing him.

“If they decide they want to detain you,” he said. “You’re not going to get out of it.”

George Retes was among the citizens arrested despite immigration agents appearing to know his legal status. He also disappeared into the system for days without being able to contact anyone on the outside.

The only clue Retes’ family had at first was a brief call he managed to make on his Apple Watch with his hands handcuffed behind his back. He quickly told his wife that “ICE” had arrested him during a massive raid and protest on the marijuana farm where he worked as a security guard.

Still, Retes’ family couldn’t find him. They called every law enforcement agency they could think of. No one gave them any answers.

Eventually, they spotted a TikTok video showing Retes driving to work and slowly trying to back up as he’s caught between agents and protestors. Through the tear gas and dust, his family recognized Retes’ car and the veteran decal on his window. The full video shows a man — Retes — splayed on the ground surrounded by agents.

Watch video ➜

Retes’ family went to the farm, where local TV reporters were interviewing families who couldn’t find their loved ones.

“They broke his window, they pepper sprayed him, they grabbed him, threw him on the floor,” his sister told a reporter between sobs. “We don’t know what to do. We’re just asking to let my brother go. He didn’t do anything wrong. He’s a veteran, disabled citizen. It says it on his car.”

Retes was held for three days without being given an opportunity to make a call. His family only learned where he had been after his release. His leg had been cut from the broken glass, Retes told ProPublica, and lingering pepper spray burned his hands. He tried to soothe them by filling sandwich bags with water.

Retes recalled that agents knew he was a citizen. “They didn’t care.” He said one DHS official laughed at him, saying he shouldn’t have come to work that day. “They still sent me away to jail.” He added that cases like his show Kavanaugh was “wrong completely.”

DHS did not answer our questions about Retes. It did respond on X after Retes wrote an op-ed last month in the San Francisco Chronicle. An agency post asserted he was arrested for assault after he “became violent and refused to comply with law enforcement.” Yet Retes had been released without any charges. Indeed, he says he was never told why he was arrested.

The Department of Justice has encouraged agents to arrest anyone interfering with immigration operations, twice ordering law enforcement to prioritize cases of those suspected of obstructing, interfering with or assaulting immigration officials.

But the government’s claims in those cases have often not been borne out.

Daniel Montenegro was filming a raid at a Van Nuys, California, Home Depot with other day-laborer advocates this summer when, he told ProPublica, he was tackled by several officers who injured his back.

Bovino, the Border Patrol chief who oversaw the LA raids and has since taken similar operations to cities like Sacramento and Chicago, tweeted out the names and photos of Montenegro and three others, accusing them of using homemade tire spikes to disable vehicles.

“I had no idea where that story came from,” Montenegro told ProPublica. “I didn’t find out until we were released. People were like, ‘We saw you on Twitter and the news and you guys are terrorists, you were planning to slash tires.’ I never saw those spike tire-popper things.”

Officials have not charged Montenegro or the others with any crimes. (Bovino did not respond to a request for comment, while DHS defended him in a statement to ProPublica: “Chief Bovino’s success in getting the worst of the worst out of the country speaks for itself.”)

The government’s cases are sometimes so muddied that it’s unclear why agents actually arrested a citizen.

Andrea Velez was charged with assaulting an officer after she was accidentally dropped off for work during a raid on street vendors in downtown Los Angeles. She said in a federal complaint that officers repeatedly assumed she did not speak English. Federal officers later requested access to her phone in an attempt to prove she was colluding with another citizen arrested that day, who was charged with assault. She was one of the Americans held for more than two days.

DHS did not respond to our questions about Velez, but it has previously accused her of assaulting an officer. A federal judge has dismissed the charges.

Other citizens also said officers accused them of crimes and suddenly questioned their citizenship — including a man arrested after filming Border Patrol agents break a truck window, and a pregnant woman who tried to stop officers from taking her boyfriend.

The prospects for any significant reckoning over agents’ conduct, even against citizens, are dim. The paths for suing federal agents are even more limited than they are for local police. And that’s if agents can even be identified. What’s more, the administration has gutted the office that investigates allegations of abuse by agents.

“The often-inadequate guardrails that we have for state and local government — even those guardrails are nonexistent when you’re talking about federal overreach,” said Joanna Schwartz, a professor at UCLA School of Law.

More than 50 members of Congress have also written to the administration, demanding details about Americans who’ve been detained. One is Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat. After trying to question Noem about detained citizens, federal agents grabbed Padilla, pulled him to the ground and handcuffed him. The department later defended the agents, saying they “acted appropriately.”

Americans have reported a wide range of troubling encounters with immigration agents. To get a wider sense of agents’ conduct, we cataloged all incidents we could find of citizens being held against their will by immigration officers.

Critically, there is no way to know the complete scope of these stops since the government itself does not track them. But we were still able to fill in the picture a bit more.

We reviewed more than 170 cases overall, which we sorted into two categories.

The first is Americans who were held because agents questioned their citizenship. We found more than 50 such cases. The second category is Americans arrested by immigration agents after being accused of assaulting or impeding officers at protests or during immigration arrests of others. In that category, we tallied about 130 Americans, including more than a dozen elected officials. In many of these cases, the government never charged these individuals or the cases were dismissed.

We also tracked another nine citizens who reported being concerned about racial profiling after being extensively questioned by immigration officials. This includes a Mescalero Apache tribal member who was pulled out of a store and asked for his passport, and a California man who was previously deported by mistake and got another deportation order in the mail.

We did all this by sifting through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports. We compiled cases from the beginning of the current Trump administration through Oct. 5. Our accounting of arrests in Portland, Oregon, and Chicago is particularly limited, since the events there are still unfolding.

We did not review cases of Americans detained in airports or at the border, where even citizens are more likely to encounter increased questioning. We also did not review cases of Americans arrested at some point after alleged encounters with immigration agents since those involved a judicial process. We similarly excluded arrests of immigration protestors by local police who, unlike many of the federal agencies, booked protesters into a local jail where they could access the legal process and their families could find them.

Do you have information or videos to share about the administration’s immigration crackdown? Contact Nicole Foy via email at nicole.foy@propublica.org or on Signal at nicolefoy.27.

Disabled Idaho Students Lack Access to Playgrounds and Lunchrooms. Historic $2 Billion Funding Will Do Little to Help.

by Becca Savransky, Idaho Statesman

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Idaho Statesman. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

At an elementary school in southwest Boise, Idaho, in the fall of 2020, children in pre-K went to their recess on the playground, laughing and climbing ladders to reach the slide. One 3-year-old boy sat on the sidelines.

The loose woodchips prevented the boy, who uses a wheelchair, from joining his classmates. There were no swings he could use or textured panels or blocks he could play with. The only student in the class who used a medical stroller, he was relegated to watching his classmates play as a staff member stood with him.

Another year, he often spent recess inside his classroom.

“It was heartbreaking,” said his dad, Grant Schlink, at a neighborhood park where he pushed his son laying back on a swing made of a large circular disk that curved up on the sides. The boy, now 8, sported sunglasses and Converse shoes. The Schlinks requested that their child’s name not be used to protect his privacy.

The playgrounds at Silver Sage Elementary excluded children like Schlink’s son, even though they had been updated by the West Ada School District in 2016 — decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act required new construction to be fully accessible to all students.

The Schlinks reached out to the school asking for help. The district told them in 2022 that improvements were in the pipeline, the boy’s mom, Stephanie Schlink, said. But at some point, communication stalled, she said. Another year passed.

“I finally was just like, ‘OK, they’re not going to do anything,’” Stephanie Schlink told the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica. “‘F this, I’m going hard.’” In 2023, she filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights within the U.S. Department of Education, the agency that investigates complaints over discrimination against people with disabilities in schools. The West Ada School District said in an email it is committed to “safe and equitable access” and that it is making progress toward that goal.

Like Silver Sage Elementary, many schools in Idaho struggle to meet the standards laid out under the law. In 2023, nearly 70 superintendents told the Statesman and ProPublica that accessibility for people with disabilities was a concern in at least one of their buildings. In many cases, school leaders said, they would need major renovations to make those schools inclusive to students with disabilities.

Over a year after the state approved $2 billion to help schools repair and replace their aging buildings, around three dozen superintendents told the Statesman and ProPublica that their buildings are still not fully accessible, while others said they had workarounds that were not ideal. Many pointed to funding as a continued challenge. Lawmakers cited the Statesman and ProPublica’s previous reporting last year when they approved the $2 billion investment, while acknowledging the funds still wouldn’t solve all of the issues.

Many of the problems the Statesman and ProPublica heard from superintendents had disproportionate impacts on students with disabilities. One of the most common was broken or outdated HVAC systems, often an expensive upgrade; freezing or overheated classrooms can be especially hard on students who can’t regulate their body temperatures, such as children with Down syndrome.

“Unfortunately there is not nearly enough for us to do any type of major construction that would make our building more ADA compliant particularly in such a rural part of North Idaho where construction is very expensive,” Megan Sindt, the superintendent of the Avery School District, a K-8 district of just about 10 students, said in an email. The North Idaho school, built in 1918, has stairs to the second floor, where most classes are held.

It’s far from the only district trying to navigate these challenges. Despite a historic funding push by the state, that’s not likely to change.

In January 2024, in his State of the State address, Gov. Brad Little pulled up photos from deteriorating school buildings that had appeared in a Statesman and ProPublica investigation. He highlighted the reporting that showed how school districts’ limited ability to fund facility upgrades left students learning in schools with leaky ceilings, failing plumbing and freezing classrooms. Months later, lawmakers approved the $2 billion and celebrated it as the largest investment in school buildings in state history.

In reality, that money will do little to help schools address the needs of students with disabilities. As it is, many districts received only enough to make a few repairs; the smallest ones, which often have significant needs, got less than $1 million to upgrade schools.

Before the state investment, we surveyed superintendents in all districts and heard back from 91%, more than half of whom cited ADA issues in their schools, including multifloor buildings with no elevators or elevators that often don’t work, inaccessible playgrounds and restrooms, plus uneven sidewalks that were difficult to navigate with wheelchairs. We followed up with them again this year. Some superintendents said they planned to use money they received to make accessibility improvements. A handful said they have since been able to fully address such issues but many others said the money wouldn’t be enough to do so.

Small, rural districts didn’t get enough money from the bill to retrofit older buildings “without completely exhausting the funds,” Superintendent Brian Lee of the Nezperce School District in North Idaho said.

“If we don’t have a functional roof, heat, and functional classrooms, electrical, and plumbing, ADA compliance is a non-issue because we can’t have school,” he said in an email. “Most older buildings are not architecturally capable of making small changes to meet ADA compliance.”

The Americans with Disabilities Act, which was updated in 2010, requires schools to provide equal access to programs for students with disabilities and to eliminate barriers to their learning. But schools have some leeway in physical alterations if their buildings were constructed before certain standards were in effect. Schools can still comply with the law without altering their buildings by providing reasonable modifications for students and ensuring equal access. For example, if a library is on the second floor, a school can bring books to a floor that students with disabilities can access.

In struggling to make their schools fully accessible, Idaho is not alone. A 2020 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found most schools had some kind of physical barrier, like steep ramps or door handles that were difficult to use, and noted that schools needed more guidance in interpreting the Americans with Disabilities Act. There’s little enforcement by the federal government or the state to ensure districts follow the law, and little recourse for families when their children are excluded.

Districts have contingency plans for when they can’t make a school accessible. In larger districts, students can be bused to different schools. In other cases, districts will move classrooms to the main floor if a student enrolled in those courses can’t use stairs.

But in some cases, the infrastructure simply prevents students from being able to participate in school in the same way as their peers. At least 10 districts in Idaho said in 2023 that their bathrooms, gyms and cafeterias weren’t all accessible. Students in those schools have been unable to get their meals at lunch, to make it to classes on different floors or even to attend their neighborhood school. Administrators in three districts, like West Ada, said they don’t have playgrounds that all students are able to use.

“When you have old buildings, it’s sometimes difficult to do what is required to meet all of those expectations because they just weren’t built with some of those things in mind,” said Anthony Butler, the superintendent of the Cambridge School District, two hours north of Boise. Butler said the district has an old gym with inaccessible restrooms, and seating can be challenging, but it has made a number of other updates to make its other buildings more inclusive for students with disabilities.

State Superintendent Debbie Critchfield said the state doesn’t track whether buildings are accessible. But she said the state does care about students with disabilities.

“It’s certainly not a lack of desire or commitment to serve students,” she said. “We don’t want the system to exclude a student from enjoying the same experience of any other students because they can’t be with friends at lunch, or for no other reason than, there isn’t a way for them to get to that cafeteria in the basement.” Her office said she encourages districts to make a plan that “prioritizes facilities needs.”

Jeremy Maxand, executive director of LINC Idaho, an organization that helps people with disabilities live independently, said these kinds of issues that can seem less important, like having accessible playgrounds, can affect how students with disabilities are viewed by others and how they see themselves. Students with disabilities “are at a distinct disadvantage when you’re supposed to be getting the playing field level so you have an equal opportunity, like everybody else, to succeed or fail,” Maxand said.

In the Pocatello-Chubbuck School District, Mariah Larkins, a sophomore at the time, approached the doors leading to the elevator on the second floor of her high school in September 2022, according to an account laid out in a 2024 lawsuit. There, she saw a sign that read: “closed for lunch.” The girl has a disorder that causes debilitating bone spurs throughout her body, requiring frequent operations and forcing her to use crutches or wheelchairs at times. She called the front office, but no one answered, according to the lawsuit, which is ongoing. She called her mom, who said she’d come to the school right away.

Trapped upstairs and embarrassed, she tried to traverse the stairs with her crutches in hand. Larkins’ mom met her daughter outside the school, “alone, in pain” and crying, the lawsuit read. The family alleged that from Larkins’ first day of school, she was met with an elevator that didn’t yet work, excluded from classes and physically and emotionally harmed.

It was one of several times the student, who has since graduated, risked injury or was separated from her peers during her years at the school, according to the complaint. The district had installed an elevator in the building before the girl started high school, but it didn’t go to the basement, where the cafeteria and some classes were located. The lawsuit said the district did not move those classes to an accessible location.

Larkins couldn’t get to the cafeteria and on one day couldn’t get lunch at all. She also fell behind in classes and struggled with her mental health, her family said in the lawsuit. Her anxiety and depression worsened as she sat in rooms alone while her classmates were educated downstairs.

Aaron Bergman, Larkins’ attorney, said Larkins, who is now 18, cares about improving access for other children in school now.

“This was a very difficult time in her life that did not need to be as difficult,” he told the publications. “We expect Domino’s to do it for people in their restrooms. I think we can expect school districts to do it for schools, for kids in their schools.”

Pocatello High School was first built over a century ago, long before the ADA was enacted. In 2021, the district completed major construction at the school. Part of that, as required by law, included making the school accessible.

But even at the time, officials acknowledged students still wouldn’t be able to navigate the whole building. In an email earlier this month, Pocatello spokesperson Courtney Fisher said extending the elevator to the basement would have required “significant structural changes,” since storm water drains and sewage pipes run directly underneath the new elevator.

Larkins’ mom asked the district to do more, but little changed, the lawsuit said. Just before her daughter’s senior year, she took it to the courts.

“Because M.L. is disabled, and for no other reason, she received much less than her peers,” the family’s attorney said in the lawsuit, which identifies Larkins only by her initials.

The Pocatello school district declined to comment on pending litigation, but in court filings, denied many of the allegations in the lawsuit. On its accessibility issues in general, the district said it’s addressing some of those problems but, with the lack of funding, can’t make every building fully compliant with current standards.

“The cost of retrofitting our current buildings to full compliance is prohibitive, if not impossible, and that reality does limit our ability to provide every service in every building,” Fisher said in an email. “School districts across Idaho — and across the nation — are grappling with the same issue: aging facilities that were built long before ADA requirements, limited resources to modernize them, and the significant costs associated with comprehensive retrofits.”

Interviews with superintendents across the state revealed similar problems. In 2017, parents sued the Oneida School District, in southeast Idaho, after their children struggled for years to navigate an old building with no elevator and at times had to crawl up stairs and got injured. In 2019, a judge ruled against the district, requiring it to pay two families $1.2 million. It wasn’t until 2023 that the district passed a bond to build a new school.

In West Ada, the Schlinks’ son spent years on the sidelines before the district agreed to address their concerns.

On a warm day in September, Schlink’s son crawled on the squishy, rubber surface of the large playground near their house. The playground was built to be inclusive of children with mobility challenges, according to the city of Boise, describing it as one of the “most unique playgrounds” in the system.

On the side sat his wheelchair with wheels featuring Lilo and Stitch decals.

At his school down the road, the playground was renovated earlier this year. Before the Office for Civil Rights had completed its investigation, the district agreed to a voluntary resolution to make its playgrounds more accessible. It was the second time in as many years that the agency responded to a complaint about playgrounds at West Ada schools and forced change, according to resolutions posted on the federal government’s website. West Ada said the district has “met OCR standards” at Silver Sage. In addition to updating the playground, it said it brought the parking lot and sidewalks into compliance. Next summer, the district plans to update the second playground at the school. The district said it couldn’t comment on why the playgrounds weren’t made accessible in 2016 because it was a decision made by previous district leadership.

President Donald Trump’s administration has pushed to largely gut the civil rights office, creating uncertainty around whether it will remain an effective resource for families. The administration has argued that cuts to the department will give “parents and states control over their children’s education” and relieve taxpayers from “progressive social experiments and obsolete programs.”

But for the Schlinks’ son, it made a big difference. This is the first year he can participate in recess.

The updates aren’t perfect. The ground is now a material he can use a wheelchair on, but it gets too hot in the sun for him to crawl around, his mother, Stephanie Schlink, said. The structures don’t include accessible swings or merry-go-rounds, or any kind of enrichment such as textured panels or chimes for kids with disabilities.

Still, after years of watching their son be relegated to the side at recess, “there’s a clear indicator that he is really enjoying himself and happy at school now,” she said. When she picked her son up from school last month, his classmates ran up to her to share how they played with him. He’s social and loves outings and being around people, Stephanie Schlink said.

Finally, she said, he's part of the class.

Asia Fields contributed reporting.

A Year Before Trump’s Crime Rhetoric, Dallas Voted to Increase Police. The City Is Wrestling With the Consequences.

by Rebecca Lopez and Jason Trahan, WFAA

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

This article is co-published with WFAA and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

The year before President Donald Trump announced he was sending National Guard troops and federal agents into major cities like Washington, D.C., and Chicago, declaring crime out of control, a Dallas nonprofit made a similar case for putting more police on the streets.

“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” Trump said at an Aug. 11 press conference, announcing the unprecedented federal takeover of the Washington police force and the deployment of the National Guard to the city.

A year earlier, a man named Pete Marocco told Dallas City Council members that Dallas was descending into comparable anarchy.

“We cannot wait until Dallas looks like other degenerate cities that have made irreversible mistakes, devaluing their police force and destroying their city center,” said Marocco, who would go on to briefly lead the U.S. Agency for International Development under Trump.

At that time, Marocco was speaking as the executive director of a nonprofit called Dallas HERO, whose leaders wanted voters to pass propositions that would radically overhaul the city’s charter. One of them, a ballot measure known as Proposition U, would force Dallas to grow its police force to 4,000 officers, and significantly raise their starting pay, in order to address the kind of lawlessness Marocco claimed the city was experiencing.

Voters went on to narrowly pass the proposition in the same November election that put Trump back in the Oval Office. They also approved another “citizen enforcement” measure Dallas HERO got onto the ballot, Proposition S, which gave residents the right to more easily sue the city to block policies and have them declared unlawful by stripping Dallas of its immunity from litigation. The measure makes Dallas the first city in the country to lose its governmental immunity, legal experts said.

Few people in Dallas dispute that more police are needed; 911 call response times have increased in recent years, and growing the department’s size has been a goal of mayors, City Council members and police chiefs for decades. But violent crime here, as elsewhere nationally, is trending downward despite the growing claims by Trump and other leaders that certain cities are incapable of governing or policing themselves.

“We’re seeing the national government going into Washington and making noises about going into other cities — we’re talking about blue cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Oakland, maybe New York,” said Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor who studies outside influences on city governments.

But what happened in Dallas last fall, he said, follows a different pattern from these federal or state government takeovers.

“It’s coming up from within the city,” he said. “The state isn’t imposing this; local voters have.”

Now, almost a year after voters approved these measures in Dallas, WFAA set out to understand how the Dallas HERO measures came to pass, look into the often misleading statements about violent crime that the group made to voters and explore the long-term effects of these changes.

Already, the city is feeling the effects of the two Dallas HERO-backed propositions voters passed on that November ballot.

In June, the Dallas City Council voted to change its police-hiring standards, eliminating its college credit requirement in an effort to hire more officers. Critics say lowering standards to boost hiring can lead to less-qualified officers patrolling the streets.

In September, the City Council approved a new budget for next fiscal year. It includes cuts to popular libraries and city pools and eliminates some city jobs, but adds money for 350 new police officers — still far short of the nearly 800 needed to reach the 4,000-officer minimum mandated by Proposition U, which had no timeline for compliance.

And earlier this year, a Dallas couple became the first known litigants against the city to cite Proposition S, the measure that eliminated the city’s governmental immunity, in a lawsuit over construction of a church game court. The couple initiated the lawsuit before Proposition S was passed but filed motions citing the city’s lack of immunity in March. The city of Dallas said in court that the proposition is unconstitutional but declined to comment about the lawsuit. The lawsuit, which is still pending, has not been previously reported.

All of this has locals, including local law enforcement, concerned.

One of the most vocal critics of the HERO initiative is Frederick Frazier, a Trump-endorsed former state lawmaker who spent nearly 30 years as a Dallas police officer. He asked a question many others have had in the course of WFAA’s reporting: Are Dallas HERO’s local efforts a precursor to similar changes in other cities?

“Are you trying to build a better department? Or are you trying to destroy a city?” Frazier said. “I want to know: Are we the experiment?”

This summer, Dallas-area hotelier and GOP megadonor Monty Bennett joined a conversation on X Spaces to discuss Dallas HERO’s efforts.

“Every American city in this country of any size is a disaster,” Bennett said in that recorded audio discussion, “and it’s terrible.”

Last year, Bennett confirmed to WFAA that he helped fund the group, formed in 2023. But because it is a nonprofit organization, it’s not required to disclose its donor lists, so it’s unclear how much of its $3 million in donations in 2023 and 2024 came from him. Bennett declined to answer WFAA’s questions about how much he contributed to the group, but his office did provide a copy of the organization’s 2024 990 tax form.

Both before the November election and after, Bennett — who has contributed money to Trump’s presidential campaign and to local conservative political action committees advocating for school vouchers — pushed HERO’s message that Dallas, in particular downtown Dallas, is a dangerous place, frequently via his conservative online news site The Dallas Express.

Bennett lives in Highland Park, an affluent community that’s surrounded by Dallas but boasts its own city government and police force. The headquarters of his hotel company, Ashford Inc., is just outside the city limits in Farmers Branch, a suburb northwest of Dallas.

His messaging fits an idea that conservatives have increasingly pushed. Trump, in announcing his 2024 campaign for president, referred to the “blood-soaked streets of our once great cities,” calling them “cesspools of violent crimes.”

A group called Save Austin Now tried unsuccessfully in 2021 to convince voters in that city to pass an ordinance forcing it to hire hundreds more police officers.

Bennett later met with Matt Mackowiak, a longtime Austin-based Republican strategist who co-founded Save Austin Now. Mackowiak said he spoke to Bennett about Dallas HERO’s messaging and how to collect enough signatures to get its propositions on the November 2024 ballot.

A spokesperson for Bennett told WFAA that Dallas HERO’s efforts were not modeled after Save Austin Now and that Bennett is not affiliated with the Austin group.

According to city police statistics during the 2021 Austin campaign, violent crime rates in that city were up by 5% compared with 2020, although property crime overall was down in 2021 compared with 2020.

In Dallas, however, violent crime is on track to go down for a fifth year in a row. Last year, Dallas had one of its lowest homicide rates in decades, 14 per 100,000 residents, down from 2023’s rate of 19 per 100,000.

Jay Coons, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Sam Houston State University, said Dallas voters in November responded strongly to perceptions about crime — regardless of whether it’s actually declining or on the rise.

“Let’s face it: Fear sells,” Coons said. “If you want people to do something, if you can instill fear, that’s a very powerful motivator.”

But that fear isn’t justified in Dallas, said former interim police Chief Mike Igo.

“To the point of crime is out of control?” Igo said. “It’s not.”

Igo and Frazier are among the unusual collection of voices who opposed the Dallas HERO propositions. The Dallas Police Association, which represents thousands of officers, spoke out against the measures, calling them “contrived by a small group of people who do not live in Dallas, with no open dialogue.” The association’s leaders argued the propositions would affect its ability to negotiate pay raises for all of its officers and had questions about the department’s ability to train so many new officers while retaining current ones. Former police chiefs, all 14 of Dallas’ City Council members at the time, nearly all of the city’s prominent civic and business groups, and at least four former Dallas mayors publicly opposed the measures as well.

Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson, who switched from the Democratic to the Republican party in 2023, lauded HERO’s efforts but still urged voters to reject the propositions.

“Their policy language is deeply flawed, and they would create more problems for the city than they would solve,” Johnson and Cara Mendelsohn, one of the more conservative Dallas City Council members, wrote in an October 2024 op-ed in The Dallas Morning News.

Bennett, who declined an interview request for this story but answered a few questions via email, said he was disappointed in their positions on the measures.

Opponents to the propositions Dallas HERO pushed warned that shackling the city’s budget to such a huge public safety commitment, while at the same time making Dallas vulnerable to lawsuits, could mean cuts to other critical services.

Bennett, in his recent X Spaces conversation, said hiring hundreds of police is simple, though experts have told WFAA it is not.

He also argued that building a new Dallas police academy, which has been in the planning stages for years, is not necessary. He suggested the department instead raise its pay rates in order to hire back officers it had trained but lost to other departments.

Hiring back officers who’ve left for other departments, or recruiting from other departments in general (a practice called lateral hiring that’s regularly employed among police recruiters in Fort Worth, Dallas and other cities across Texas), can indeed be an effective hiring tool, said a police official who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak for the department. But those hires account for only a fraction of the new officers brought on every year. And, after serving in smaller departments, some officers may learn they prefer the slower pace afforded by those jobs, the official said.

Bennett said in an email that the city could hire more officers if it raised their salaries. “The solution to hiring more police officers is to pay them better,” Bennett wrote. “It’s no more complicated than that. Pay them what they’re worth." He didn’t explain how he thought the city would budget for those increases.

Hiring more police officers has been a goal of the Dallas Police Department for more than two decades, Frazier said. But, he argued, the city doesn’t have enough field trainers, cars or physical spaces to accommodate so many new officers joining its ranks in such a short period of time.

“I would say that would be very difficult,” Frazier said. “I’ve heard a lot of folks say that — ‘We could fix you in a minute.’ No one’s done it.”

The new city budget, which took effect Oct. 1, increased the police department’s minimum starting pay, raising it from about $75,000 to more than $81,000 annually. But that still falls thousands of dollars short of several smaller suburban departments in the area.

According to city reports, DPD had 3,215 officers as of June. The city manager’s goal is to gradually increase that number — but at the current rate, she said, the department won’t reach HERO’s 4,000-officer demand until around 2029.

“It’s a balancing act,” City Manager Kim Tolbert told WFAA during a recent extended sitdown when asked about the impact of the HERO amendments on the budget. “We’re listening, we’re being responsive, but we’re also being good stewards of the public dollar.”

In an email, Bennett wrote, “Government will always blame imposed outside requirements when it has to curb its profligate spending.”

WFAA has tried to better understand not just why Dallas HERO’s efforts were successful in the city, but also the motivations of the people behind the initiative. The group bills itself as bipartisan, but at least some of its current and former leaders and associates, like Bennett and Marocco, have championed conservative interests.

HERO’s founding president, Stefani Carter, is a Republican former state representative who is now the lead director on the board of Braemar Hotels & Resorts, a real estate investment trust focused on investing in luxury hotels and resorts. Bennett is Braemar’s founder and chair of its board. (Braemar is for sale, and Carter’s fate on its board is unclear; she did not respond to questions about her status or about the Dallas HERO initiative.)

HERO’s attorney, Art Martinez de Vara, is a municipal lawyer, a historian and the mayor of a small town near San Antonio called Von Ormy, which he helped to incorporate almost 20 years ago as a so-called “liberty city,” operating with minimal levels of government oversight but facing myriad issues including lack of a sewer system. He declined to speak to WFAA about the propositions, citing anticipated litigation.

During the fall campaign to pass the propositions, Marocco led Dallas HERO as its executive director while living in University Park, a self-governed suburban enclave nestled inside Dallas similar to where Bennett calls home. Dallas HERO told WFAA Marocco is no longer with the organization. Trump later tapped Marocco to run USAID, where he wrote the cable ordering a freeze on all U.S. foreign and humanitarian aid, resulting in furloughs and layoffs across the agency.

Marocco did not respond to the news organization’s efforts to reach him.

The man who replaced Marocco in early February as HERO’s executive director, Damien LeVeck, is a horror film director whose social media account Dallas En Fuego trolls city officials with what he refers to as “spicy videos & memes.” He also sells branded merchandise, including a T-shirt with a picture of a Dallas City Council member he often criticizes.

“Show your support for combatting Dallas municipal tyranny (and stupidity) with our great merchandise,” the language on his merch site reads.

All refused to speak with WFAA on camera.

LeVeck provided a statement, on behalf of HERO, that read, in part: “The HERO amendments … decisively passed by voters last November, will boost public safety by expanding the police force and strengthening government accountability. Residents deserve to feel safe where they live and work, and we are committed to ensuring city leadership upholds the will of the voters."

Coons, who spent nearly four decades with the Harris County sheriff’s office as a patrol commander before entering academia, said even in a city like Dallas with declining violent crime, people can still be scared into making political decisions.

“Whether crime is rampant and people are being murdered in the streets, or whether it’s an extraordinarily safe place to be, the truth probably is going to be a little bit separate than the individual Dallasite’s perception of what’s going on,” he said.

Voters in the city’s more affluent northern side narrowly voted against the measure, with 49.3% voting in favor, an analysis by ProPublica and WFAA found. But in the south, where crime rates are higher and police response times are longer, 52.9% of voters cast ballots in favor.

Dallas City Council member Carolyn King Arnold, who represents part of southern Dallas and was an outspoken opponent of the HERO amendments, said the organization’s backers exploited her constituents’ frustrations over crime in order to get their measures passed.

“In talking to some who actually voted in the southern sector for this, they told me basically, ‘I just want to see one officer ride through, that’s why I voted for it,’ not understanding the full impact of that amendment,” Arnold said. “It's always about fear.”

It’s not clear what’s next for the Dallas HERO team.

Since its win in November, the group has taken to social media and spoken at City Council meetings to demand more money be devoted to the police department.

“Crime, homelessness, and property destruction is rampant throughout Dallas,” HERO posted on X on Aug. 19.

Within hours of the City Council passing the coming year’s budget, HERO publicly took issue with it. According to a Sept. 18 statement, the organization said the budget “fails to comply with Proposition U.”

Asked about the city’s argument that the budget meets the proposition requirements, Bennett wrote in an email, “With respect, it just doesn’t seem like this is true.”

LeVeck swore in the organization’s Sept. 18 statement that Dallas HERO will “hold city leaders accountable.”

“Sue them into submission!” one X user wrote in response to that promise.

The organization has already threatened to do so.

In December, HERO, citing Proposition S, the immunity measure, argued that the city isn’t enforcing state laws banning people from sleeping in encampments on public property. In March, the group’s attorney sent a letter to the city threatening to sue it for not hiring police fast enough. The city declined to comment about both incidents.

Frazier said he and other local law enforcement stakeholders remain concerned about Dallas HERO’s efforts. While their actions are abundant, their ultimate goals are murky.

“When you ask that question around,” Frazier said, “no one really knows what the end game is.”

Tanya Eiserer of WFAA contributed reporting, and ProPublica Deputy Data Editor Ryan Little contributed data analysis.

Rebecca Lopez is the senior crime and justice reporter, and Jason Trahan is managing editor of investigations at WFAA-TV in Dallas. Reach them at investigates@wfaa.com.

Oct. 16, 2025: This story originally misstated the location of Monty Bennett’s hotel company, Ashford Inc. The company is headquartered in Farmers Branch, Texas, not Dallas.

ProPublica Names Kenneth Morales as David Burnham-TRAC Data Fellow

ProPublica

ProPublica has selected Kenneth Morales as the inaugural David Burnham-TRAC data fellow. In this two-year fellowship, Morales will work with our data and news applications team to shed light on both the inner workings of the government and the impacts of federal policy.

The fellowship is named in honor of David Burnham, an investigative journalist who reported on local, state and federal enforcement corruption for 50 years, and it was made possible through funding from David Sobel and Beth Critchley.

“David Burnham was a pioneering investigative journalist who believed in speaking truth to power. As an early and skilled proponent of rigorous data collection and analysis, he did cutting edge reporting on law enforcement and intelligence agencies,” said Sobel. “Those skills and techniques are critical today, and ProPublica is the obvious home for work that will continue his legacy.”

Morales was most recently a senior data scientist at the office of the New York state attorney general. His casework there involved a wide range of matters before the office, including investigations of the firearms industry, pharmaceutical manufacturers and lead exposure in public schools, along with civil rights investigations of law enforcement agencies and antitrust litigation. He also served as the primary data analyst for the office’s report into fake comments submitted to the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed “net neutrality” rulemaking. Prior to this role, Morales conducted research at Johns Hopkins University, studying opioid use during the advent of the fentanyl crisis.

“Kenneth brings a passion for public interest work and extensive experience doing rigorous analysis that needs to stand up in the court of law,” said Ken Schwencke, senior editor for data and news applications. “Federal data is becoming more scarce as the importance of the government’s actions only grow, and we’re grateful to be able to bring on more people to cover it.”

“For years I have been an admirer of ProPublica’s investigative reportage, their independence and their drive to hold power to account,” said Morales. “I am passionate about the intersections of data science and social justice, and I am thrilled to have been selected to use those skills during this critical American moment.”

Students With Hearing and Vision Loss Get Funding Back Despite Trump’s Anti-DEI Campaign

by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards

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

Following public outcry, the U.S. Department of Education has restored funding for students who have both hearing and vision loss, about a month after cutting it.

But rather than sending the money directly to the four programs that are part of a national network helping students who are deaf and blind, a condition known as deafblindness, the department has instead rerouted the grants to a different organization that will provide funding for those vulnerable students.

The Trump administration targeted the programs in its attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion; a department spokesperson had cited concerns about “divisive concepts” and “fairness” in explaining the decision to withhold the funding.

ProPublica and other news organizations reported last month on the canceled grants to agencies that serve these students in Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin, as well as in five states that are part of a New England consortium.

Programs then appealed to the Education Department to retain their funding, but the appeals were denied. Last week, the National Center on Deafblindness, the parent organization of the agencies that were denied, told the four programs that the Education Department had provided it with additional grant money and the center was passing it on to them.

“This will enable families, schools, and early intervention programs to continue to … meet the unique needs of children who are deafblind,” according to the letter from the organization to the agencies, which was provided to ProPublica. Education Department officials did not respond to questions from ProPublica; automatic email replies cited the government shutdown.

When the funding was canceled, the programs were in the middle of a five-year grant that was expected to continue through September 2028. The funding from the center is only for one year.

“We don’t know what will happen” in future years, said Lisa McConachie of the Oregon DeafBlind Project, which serves 114 students in the state. McConachie said that with uncertain funding, her agency had to cancel a retreat this fall that had been organized for parents to swap medical equipment, share resources and learn about services to help students when they get older. She hopes to reschedule it for the spring.

“It is still a disruption to families,’’ she said. “It creates this mistrust, that you are gone and back and gone and back.”

Oregon’s grant application for its deafblind program, submitted in 2023, included a statement about its commitment to address “inequities, racism, bias” and the marginalization of disability groups, language that was encouraged by the Biden administration. It also attached the strategic plan for Portland Public Schools, where the Oregon DeafBlind Project is headquartered, that mentioned the establishment of a Center for Black Student Excellence — which is unrelated to the deafblind project. The Education Department’s letter said that those initiatives were “in conflict with agency policy and priorities.”

An advocate for deafblind students said he was happy to see the funding restored but called the department’s decision-making “amateurish” and disruptive to students and families. “It is mean-spirited to do this to families and kids and school systems at the beginning of the year when all of these things should be so smooth,” said Maurice Belote, co-chair of the National DeafBlind Coalition, which advocates for legislation that supports deafblind children and young adults.

Grants to the four agencies total about $1 million a year. The department started funding state-level programs to help deafblind students more than 40 years ago in response to the rubella epidemic in the late 1960s. Nationally, there are about 10,000 children and young adults, from infants to 21-year-olds, who are deafblind and more than 1,000 in the eight affected states, according to the National Center on Deafblindness.

While the population is small, it is among the most complex to serve; educators rely on the deafblindness programs for support and training.

On the Front Line of the Fluoride Wars, Debate Over Drinking Water Treatment Turns Raucous

by Anna Clark

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

On the far east side of Michigan, the future of fluoride in drinking water — long an ordinary practice for preventing tooth decay — has suddenly provoked passionate debate.

Public meetings in St. Clair County, about an hour northeast of Detroit, have filled with people weighing in. One man waved his Fixodent denture cream before the county commissioners, suggesting that his own experience showed what would happen if local communities stopped treatment.

“I am an unfluoridated child,” he declared, “with a set of uppers and lowers.”

Another man, speaking to the county’s Advisory Board of Health, said that personal responsibility should be factored into the conversation. “I think there are some 3 Musketeer bars, Snicker bars that should be accounted for. Some Coca-Colas.”

And a young man used his time in the public comments to address not just fluoridation, but the county medical director who’s trying to get rid of it. He accused him of grandstanding to land a job with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. health and human services secretary, by making moves that “lowered the quality of life for underserved people.”

The raucous arguments were spurred by a three-page memo sent in June to the Advisory Health Board by Dr. Remington Nevin, the medical director of St. Clair County’s Health Department. It urges the department to take steps to “prohibit the addition of fluoride” to public water systems because, he wrote in bold print, the additive is “a plausible developmental neurotoxicant” — a claim that runs counter to the assessment of many leading experts and health agencies, which have long celebrated fluoridation as a public health triumph.

Nevin recommended fluoride restrictions that would apply to any system located in the county and serving county residents. Potentially, that could include the Great Lakes Water Authority, which provides water to nearly 40% of the state’s population.

Drinking water fluoridation, which was pioneered in Michigan in 1945, led to a massive drop in tooth decay. Even with the rise of fluoride in toothpaste and other products, it’s credited with a 25% decrease in cavities. But skeptics increasingly hold sway in government, as ProPublica recently reported. Those opponents include Kennedy, the nation’s top health official, who has called fluoride “industrial waste.”

Now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency are reviewing their approaches to fluoride in drinking water, and Utah and Florida became the first states to ban fluoridation.

Local communities, though, are on the front lines of the fluoride wars in most states, typically deciding whether or not to continue fluoridating their drinking water by council vote or community referendum. The public conversation in St. Clair County offers a vivid example of how contentious the issue can become. Advocates from well beyond its borders are getting involved, saying that what happens in the county has implications for the entire state.

Home to about 160,000 residents at the base of Michigan’s Thumb, St. Clair County shares a watery border with Canada. Some 67% of its voters chose President Donald Trump in the 2024 election. (Kennedy got under 1% of the vote.) About 110,000 residents receive fluoridated drinking water, according to the state’s environmental agency, while an additional 6,510 are served by water supplies with naturally occurring fluoride.

In his memo this summer, Nevin, who is a physician epidemiologist, cited a state-of-the-science report from the National Toxicology Program last year that described an association between higher levels of fluoride exposure and lower IQs in children. (The NTP is an interagency program within the Department of Health and Human Services that’s focused on toxicology research.)

Nevin also referenced a court decision in a case filed against the EPA by groups opposed to fluoridation, where a district judge relied, in part, on the NTP report in ruling that fluoride presented an “unreasonable risk.” Even as it appeals the decision, the EPA said its review of new science on fluoride in drinking water “is being done in coordination with Secretary Kennedy and HHS.”

The NTP report, though, is contested and based on limited studies involving fluoride levels that are more than twice the amount recommended by the federal government. Its own abstract says there isn’t enough information to link lower fluoride exposure with children’s IQ.

Nevin’s memo said that the EPA may take months or years to act on fluoride, but that didn’t mean local officials had to wait. “Across the Michigan Thumb, several townships have expressed a desire for similar measures,” he wrote, “and within St. Clair County, I have received a number of resident concerns related to this issue.” He recommended new regulations that would prohibit the addition of “any form of fluoride” to public water systems in the county that serve residents.

In Michigan, each community decides for itself if it will maintain fluoride in its drinking water system. But in an email to ProPublica, Nevin laid out a process where the St. Clair County Board of Commissioners could approve regulations that, in the name of public health, restrict the ability of suppliers to use the additive — in effect, enacting sweeping change throughout the region.

“Just as items manufactured in California are often subject to more stringent California environmental and health regulations, even if the majority are sold outside the state; so too could drinking water produced in St. Clair County be subject to more stringent county regulations, even if the majority is exported to other counties,” he wrote.

Whether or not this applies to any future fluoride regulations depends on the language that is adopted and approved, he added.

The state Department of Health and Human Services says it knows of no local health departments that have attempted such restrictions. In response to ProPublica’s queries, the Great Lakes Water Authority shared a May statement about fluoride, which says that the agency is required by its owner, the city of Detroit, to fluoridate its water supply. The current dosage is well below the maximum established by the Safe Drinking Water Act and the EPA, the statement said, and is in line with the recommended target for oral health benefits.

The water authority, which serves southeast Michigan, didn’t address the St. Clair County proposal. And it’s unclear whether the push for broad county regulations will gain traction.

As medical director, Nevin has an influential voice with county officials and shares guidance with Liz King, the county’s health officer-director. King, however, expressed reservations about Nevin’s proposal at a July meeting of the Advisory Health Board, according to the minutes.

In a statement to ProPublica, King said: “I do not support county-wide mandates to remove fluoride or actions that override the authority of local jurisdictions, unless there is an emergent or urgent public health need.”

Nevin was new to Michigan when he joined the Health Department in his part-time position about two years ago. He soon established that he would be an active force. He describes it in an email to ProPublica as “counter-activism,” adding: “I am largely working to counter the radical agendas of many past and current state public health officials.”

At the January meeting of the Advisory Health Board, Nevin provided members with a 2022 book by Kennedy — “A Letter to Liberals: Censorship and COVID: An Attack on Science and American Ideals” — that’s critical of the Democratic Party and government restrictions enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic. (To the notion that he wants to work for Kennedy, Nevin told ProPublica that it’s “baseless conjecture” and that he’s happy in St. Clair County.)

Less than a year into his tenure as HHS secretary, Kennedy’s approach was challenged by six former surgeons general who served under both Republicans and Democrats. In a recent op-ed, they said that Kennedy is “endangering the health of the nation.” His agency criticized their track records in office when contacted by ProPublica about the op-ed, saying they failed to improve public health.

Nevin has moved to make vaccine exemptions easier to get, saying in an April memo that it would “improve the public’s trust in public health.” Those efforts helped earn him a tribute signed by 10 Republican state legislators, which also highlights his fluoride recommendations. Nevin also successfully pushed for the department to wind down services at school health clinics, arguing, in part, that providing direct primary care isn’t a core function of public health.

Supporters point to his training in the military and at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to a medical degree, his CV lists a master’s degree and doctorate in public health. On his website, Nevin also highlights his ability to serve as an expert witness and consultant in legal cases that involve adverse effects from certain antimalarial drugs.

Nevin told ProPublica that past experience taught him that it can take years for neurotoxic effects of certain substances to be recognized. “I have every confidence that, in due course, fluoride will also be looked upon as a neurotoxicant that has no place being ingested,” he wrote in an email.

He added that the response he’s received to his proposal from the community “has been overwhelmingly positive.”

But there’s been strong pushback. Dr. Randa Jundi-Samman, a recently retired dentist in St. Clair County, was one of the health professionals speaking in support of fluoridation at public meetings. She told ProPublica that dropping fluoridation would be a serious hit to community health.

“You’d 100% get more decay, especially in children in low-income communities that don’t get the chance to go to the dentist every six months,” Jundi-Samman said. “We certainly will see that. We already see it in people who don’t have fluoride in their water.”

Dr. Mert Aksu, president of the Michigan Oral Health Coalition’s board and dean of the University of Detroit Mercy’s dental school, said he’s hustling up to the public meetings in St. Clair County because it’s the duty of professionals “to make sure that the decisions that are being made within our communities are being made based upon scientific merit.”

Speaking broadly about the influence now wielded by fluoride skeptics, Aksu said, “We have opened ourselves up to opportunities from misinformed people who want to use this issue for political purposes.”

At an August meeting of the county commissioners, Kimberly Raleigh, interim executive director of the Michigan Oral Health Coalition, read a letter in support of fluoridation that was signed by the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, the Michigan Dental Association, the Indiana Dental Association, the Pennsylvania Coalition for Oral Health and dozens of others.

Nevin said in an email that the dental community “must recognize that community water fluoridation can no longer be relied upon to mask the dental problems created by our neglect of poor dietary choices.”

He argues that he has science on his side. “Scientific merit favors a recommendation to prohibit fluoride,” he wrote to ProPublica. “I have every confidence this will become much clearer in the coming months, as further federal guidance is inevitably released.”

Nevin’s recommendation is before the Advisory Health Board, which also was provided a fact sheet on fluoridation from the Health Department, submitted with Nevin’s approval. If the board endorses his proposal, King may then decide whether to propose regulations, which the Board of Commissioners would then weigh, according to the Health Department. Nevin estimated that the process could take six to 12 months.

Fluoride was on the agenda for the Advisory Health Board’s September meeting, which ended early because the members failed to reach a quorum. Nevin told ProPublica that he expects it to be discussed at this week’s meeting, and that he will present additional information then.

Meanwhile, Nevin has already influenced one of the county’s townships, Kimball, which receives treated water from Port Huron, the seat of St. Clair County.

At an August meeting, where Nevin spoke to the Board of Trustees, Kimball Township unanimously passed a resolution calling for Port Huron to discontinue fluoridation and direct any funds saved to support access to topical dental fluoride treatments.

Port Huron’s city manager declined to comment for this story, saying the township has not presented the city with any resolution or request. Nevin said in an email to ProPublica that he is “attempting to address every municipality in the county” with similar testimony.

After voting on the measure, one Kimball trustee made a point to show support for Nevin, saying “we’re blessed to have him making decisions.”

Nevin, he said, has had to overcome resistance from staff “pushing hard to make his life rather uncomfortable.”

“They’re not used to leadership,” the trustee said. “They’re not used to boldness. They’re not used to maybe some male energy that’s necessary to get things done.”

“I Don’t Want to Be Here Anymore”: They Tried to Self-Deport, Then Got Stranded in Trump’s America

by Melissa Sanchez and Mariam Elba

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ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

She desperately wanted to get out of the country.

It was mid-May and Pérez, a Venezuelan mother of two, couldn’t survive on her own in Chicago anymore. She’d been relying on charity for food and shelter ever since her partner had been detained by immigration authorities after a traffic stop earlier in the year.

Pérez, 25, thought it’d be safer to return to Venezuela with her children than to stay in the U.S. Her request for asylum was still open and she had a permit to work legally, but so did a lot of other Venezuelans getting picked up on the streets and taken into custody. Authorities were detaining immigrants regardless of whether they’d followed the rules.

She had also seen how President Donald Trump singled out her countrymen, calling them gang members and terrorists, even sending hundreds to a foreign prison. She was terrified of getting detained, deported and, worst of all, separated from her young daughter and son. They were the reason the family had come to the U.S.

Then she heard about Trump’s offer of a safe and dignified way out.

“We are making it as easy as possible for illegal aliens to leave America,” the president said in a video on social media in May announcing the launch of Project Homecoming.

He spoke about a phone app where “illegals can book a free flight to any foreign country.” And he dangled other incentives: Eligible immigrants wouldn’t be barred from returning legally to the U.S. someday, and they’d even get a $1,000 “exit bonus.” Believing the president’s words, Pérez downloaded the CBP Home app and registered to return to Venezuela with her children.

Months passed. Her partner was deported. In July, Pérez said, she got a call from someone in the CBP Home program telling her she’d be on a flight out of the country in mid-August. She began packing.

But as the departure date neared and the plane tickets hadn’t arrived, Pérez got nervous. Again and again, she called the toll-free number she’d been given. Finally, somebody called back to say there might be a delay obtaining the documents she’d need to travel to Venezuela.

Then there was silence. No further information, no plane tickets. Pérez registered on the app again in August, then a third time in September, as immigration arrests ramped up in Chicago.

Today, Pérez feels trapped in a country that doesn’t want her. She’s afraid of leaving her apartment, afraid that she will be detained and that her children will be taken away from her. “I feel so scared, always looking around in every direction,” she said. “I was trying to leave voluntarily, like the president said.”

The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is having the intended effect of terrifying people into trying to leave. There have been some 25,000 departures of immigrants from all countries via CBP Home, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security data obtained by ProPublica.

The data indicates that of those 25,000 people, a little more than half of them returned home with DHS assistance; nearly all the others who left the U.S. ended up returning on their own.

And it’s not just CBP Home. Applications for voluntary departures — an alternative to deportation granted to some immigrants who leave at their own expense — have skyrocketed to levels not seen since at least 2000, reaching more than 34,000 since Trump’s second administration began, immigration court data shows. (The number is higher than in years past, but nowhere near the number of immigrants the administration has deported this year.)

But for many recent arrivals from Venezuela — arguably the community most targeted by the Trump administration, and whose country is now bracing for the possibility of a U.S. invasion — leaving has not been as simple as the president has made it sound.

ProPublica spoke with more than a dozen Venezuelans who said they wanted to take the U.S. government’s offer of a safe and easy return. They signed up months ago on the CBP Home app and were given departure dates. But after those dates came and went, these immigrants said they feel betrayed by what the president told them.

Part of the problem is tied to the lack of diplomatic relations between Washington and Caracas. There are no consular services for Venezuelans in the U.S. Many of the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who migrated to the U.S. in recent years seeking asylum or other humanitarian relief entered without valid passports, as Pérez did. But to get on a plane for Venezuela, they’re being told they’ll need a special travel document known as a “salvoconducto,” or “safe passage,” from their government.

And relations between the two countries are getting worse. The Trump administration has pushed for regime change in Venezuela, sent warships to the Caribbean and, in recent weeks, blew up four Venezuelan boats it claimed were transporting drugs to the U.S. Bracing for an invasion, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has said he’s ready to declare a state of emergency to protect his country, which could make it harder for Venezuelans abroad to return home.

The Venezuelans who want to leave the U.S. described how CBP Home representatives told them that their lack of passports wouldn’t be a problem and that the U.S. government would help them obtain the travel documents they needed. Now they are being told that they’re on their own — if they get any response at all.

The Trump administration was aware of the potential challenges from the start. In his May proclamation, the president directed the State and Homeland Security departments to “take all appropriate actions to enable the rapid departure of illegal aliens from the United States who currently lack a valid travel document from their countries of citizenship or nationality.”

In a statement, a DHS spokesperson said the agency is working with the State Department “to acquire travel documents for those who lack safe passage. So far thousands of Venezuelans have already self-departed using CBP Home.” The State Department referred questions to DHS.

The internal DHS records obtained by ProPublica show nearly 3,700 departures of Venezuelans via CBP Home through late September. It’s unclear how many Venezuelans have applied. The DHS spokesperson said the agency could not confirm the numbers and would not say whether the program is meeting projections. (A congressional committee has directed DHS to include information about CBP Home departures in monthly reports the agency previously published, but has not published in this administration.)

An estimated 10,200 Venezuelans were deported between February and early October, according to deportation flight data tracked by the nonprofit Human Rights First’s ICE Flight Monitor.

Many of the Venezuelans interviewed by ProPublica are mothers of young children who say they decided to take the president’s offer after their work permits expired, their temporary protected status was canceled or their spouses were deported. Few are willing to return by land because of the dangers posed by cartel violence and kidnappings in Mexico — dangers many of them experienced when they migrated here.

Nearly all of them, like Pérez, asked not to be identified by their full names because they’re afraid of bringing unwanted attention to themselves and of the potential consequences of such attention. Interviews with Venezuelan immigrants were conducted in Spanish.

Before their departure dates came and went, they had made preparations to leave — turning over the keys to their apartments, pulling their children from school, shipping their belongings to Venezuela. And they have sunk deeper into poverty as the weeks and months pass.

In Los Angeles, a family of four slept in their tiny Toyota Echo for weeks to save on rent as they waited for their departure date. They sold the car and other belongings to pay for bus tickets back the way they’d come. Nearly two months after their return to Venezuela, they said they’re still waiting for the exit bonuses they’d hoped would help them start over.

In Youngstown, Pennsylvania, a mother of two said she didn’t enroll her 8-year-old son in school this fall because she assumed they would be gone by now. She recently moved into a friend’s apartment in New York City and plans to turn herself in to immigration authorities and ask to be deported.

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” the woman said, between sobs. “What am I supposed to do?”

Several immigration attorneys and advocates told ProPublica that they don’t trust the CBP Home app or the Trump administration’s promises to help immigrants self-deport. The National Immigration Law Center recently published a guide explaining some of the potential risks of using the app, such as leaving the country without closing an immigration court case and becoming ineligible for a future visa. Some lawyers said they discourage clients from using the app at all.

Ruben Garcia, director of Annunciation House, a nonprofit in El Paso that supports migrants and refugees, said in the current climate, he understands why some people might consider the administration’s offer to leave. But, he said, the offer has to be backed by action.

“If you’re going to say you’re going to do this,” Garcia added, “then you damn well better make sure that it’s truthful and that it works.”

CBP Home replaced an earlier app that the Biden administration had promoted to try to bring order to the soaring numbers of migrants attempting to enter the country. Pérez and other asylum-seekers used that earlier version, CBP One, to make appointments to approach the border. Trump, who campaigned on the promise of mass deportations, ended that option on his first day back in the White House.

In March, he reintroduced the app with the new name and function, allowing immigrants to alert the government of their intention to self-deport. It was part of a $200 million advertising blitz meant to encourage immigrants to “Stay Out and Leave Now.” Two months later, Trump unveiled Project Homecoming and the added incentives of free flights and exit payments. The administration moved State Department funds meant to aid refugees resettling in the U.S. to DHS to help pay for the flights and stipends, according to federal records and news reports.

DHS officials have mentioned the app in dozens of press releases about policy changes and enforcement operations. For example, in the September announcement that DHS was ending temporary protected status for Venezuelans, officials also encouraged Venezuelans to leave via CBP Home. And immigrants who show up for their hearings at immigration court see posters taped on the walls about the benefits they could get if they “self-deport using CBP Home instead of being deported by ICE.”

Emily and Deybis downloaded the app in June, when it seemed as if their life in the U.S. was collapsing. They said they used the earlier CBP One app to approach the border with their two children in January 2024 and were allowed into the country with protections that were supposed to last two years. They settled in Dallas, applied for asylum and got work permits; Deybis found a job in a hotel laundry and Emily at a Chick-fil-A. Then, this spring, the Trump administration ended protections for immigrants like them and canceled their work permits.

They lost their jobs and could no longer afford their rent. On the app’s sky-blue home screen, they saw a drawing of a smiling man and woman holding hands with a child. “Let us help you easily leave the country,” another screen told them in Spanish. They agreed to share their phone’s geolocation, entered personal information and uploaded selfies.

They received an automated email from “Project Homecoming Support” explaining that they would be contacted soon by someone from a toll-free number who would help coordinate their travel. Within weeks, they got a call from an operator at that number who said she worked on behalf of DHS.

Emily said she made clear the family didn’t have Venezuelan passports but was told that wouldn’t be a problem; the U.S. government would procure any necessary documents for them. They said the operator gave them an Aug. 1 departure date and told them to expect their plane tickets by email.

Emily and Deybis sold their car and moved with their children to Columbus, Ohio, where Deybis’ nephew let them stay in his unfinished basement apartment until their departure. The plane tickets never came.

Then the nephew was detained in a traffic stop and deported. Panicked, Emily and Deybis said they called the toll-free number again and again, leaving messages that went unanswered. Emily submitted a new application and sent more emails.

In mid-September, they got an email from the “CBP Home team” telling them to contact the Venezuelan embassy in Mexico to get travel documents on their own.

“We are working very hard on your case,” the email assured.

When they called the embassy, though, the number was busy. They found travel agencies that offer to procure travel documents at a cost but said they were told the Venezuelan government requires an arrival date and proof that plane tickets have been purchased. Emily and Deybis can’t afford them.

“Thank you so much for your patience and we understand your frustration,” they heard back in another email. “Wait for new instructions from DHS.”

As they wait, they worry about how they’ll survive when winter comes. Most days, Deybis visits local food pantries and looks for discarded items in alleys and on street corners that they can resell. A few weeks ago, they sold their daughter’s bed to help pay the rent.

“We’d rather be in Venezuela with our family than suffer here,” he said.

Pérez said her daughter was the family’s main motivation to come; the girl had been born with a heart defect and needed surgery they could not find in Venezuela, where hospitals operate through power outages and have limited capacity for advanced surgeries, not to mention supplies.

“We didn’t come for the American dream, or for a house, or for some life of luxury,” said Pérez. “What we wanted is for our daughter to live.”

She and her partner made the trek to the U.S. in 2023, with her daughter, then 6, and their 4-year-old son. Pérez thought they did it “the right away” by waiting in Mexico for weeks until they got an appointment to approach the border via CBP One. After they were processed, the family headed to Chicago, a city they had heard was a sanctuary for immigrants. At first they took shelter inside a police station, as hundreds of new immigrant families were doing at the time. Pérez said medical workers who visited the station learned about her daughter’s condition and connected the family to a hospital charity care program. The following spring, the frail little girl with dark brown eyes got the operation she needed.

In late 2024, the family moved to South Florida, where Pérez’s partner found work rebuilding homes damaged by hurricanes. Then in February, he was arrested for driving without a license or registration. He spent about two months in jail before he was transferred into immigration custody.

Pérez didn’t feel safe in Florida anymore. She returned to Chicago with her children.

But as the months pass without an answer from the CBP Home program, Chicago doesn’t feel safe, either. This fall, the Trump administration zeroed in on the city for immigration enforcement, sending in the U.S. Border Patrol. Pérez recently downloaded another app that tells her whether there’ve been sightings of federal immigration agents nearby, and she watches videos of other immigrants getting arrested. One day in September, a federal agent shot and killed an immigrant in a nearby suburb. Pérez wonders if she might die, too.

On a sunny September afternoon, Pérez peered down the street outside her children’s school, scanning for suspicious vehicles. Her daughter, who is now 8, bounded down the steps first, wearing a pink bow and a broad smile. Her son, now 6, in a Spiderman shirt and a blue cast from a playground accident, appeared next.

They share their mother’s anxiety. On their walk home, Pérez’s daughter leaned over her brother and chided him for speaking Spanish in public. The girl said her teacher had warned her that federal agents might be listening.

It reminded Perez that she now needs to leave the U.S. for the same reason she came: her children. She plans to register yet again on the CBP Home app.

Jeff Ernsthausen contributed data analysis.

Elon Musk’s Boring Co. Accused of Nearly 800 Environmental Violations on Las Vegas Project

by Anjeanette Damon, ProPublica, and Dayvid Figler, City Cast Las Vegas

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Nevada state regulators have accused Elon Musk’s Boring Co. of violating environmental regulations nearly 800 times in the last two years as it digs a sprawling tunnel network beneath Las Vegas for its Tesla-powered “people mover.” The company’s alleged violations include starting to dig without approval, releasing untreated water onto city streets and spilling muck from its trucks, according to a new document obtained by City Cast Las Vegas and ProPublica.

The Sept. 22 cease-and-desist letter from the state Bureau of Water Pollution Control alleged repeated violations of a settlement agreement that the company had entered into after being fined five years ago for discharging groundwater into storm drains without a permit. That agreement, signed by a Boring executive in 2022, was intended to compel the company to comply with state water pollution laws.

Instead, state inspectors documented nearly 100 alleged new violations of the agreement. The letter also accuses the company of failing to hire an independent environmental manager to regularly inspect its construction sites. State regulators counted 689 missed inspections.

The Boring Co. is disputing the violation letter, a state spokesperson said.

The Nevada Division of Environmental Protection could have fined the company more than $3 million under the 2022 agreement, which allowed for daily penalties to be assessed. But regulators knocked down the total penalty to $242,800. For example, the bulk of the total possible fine was linked to the alleged missed inspections, but the agency chose to levy just a $10,000 penalty for each of the company’s 11 permits.

“Given the extraordinary number of violations, NDEP has decided to exercise its discretion to reduce the penalty to two $5,000 violations per permit, which it believes offers a reasonable penalty that will still serve to deter future non-compliance conduct,” regulators wrote in the letter.

Payment of the penalty isn’t required until after the dispute resolution process is complete, a state spokesperson said. In the letter, the agency reminded the company that it “reserves the right to direct TBC to cease and desist construction activities” under the agreement.

In the past, Musk has espoused paying penalties rather than waiting for approvals as a way of doing business.

​​“Environmental regulations are, in my view, largely terrible,” he said at an event with the libertarian Cato Institute last year. “You have to get permission in advance, as opposed to, say, paying a penalty if you do something wrong, which I think would be much more effective.”

Neither Musk nor Boring responded to requests for comment for this story.

The Sept. 22 letter documents the latest in a string of alleged violations of state and local regulations by The Boring Co. since it began construction in 2019 of the Loop project, which uses driver-operated Teslas to move people through the tunnels. The project, initially a 0.8-mile underground route connecting the sections of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority campus to each other, has grown to a planned 68 miles of tunnels and 104 stations across the Las Vegas Valley. It’s carried out in partnership with the LVCVA, the tourism board best known for the “What Happens Here, Stays Here” slogan.

Boring uses a machine known as Prufrock to dig the 12-foot-diameter tunnels, applying chemical accelerants as part of the process. For each foot the company bores, it removes about 6 cubic yards of soil along with any groundwater, according to a company document prepared for state environmental officials.

Because it is privately funded and receives no federal money, the project is exempt from many exhaustive governmental vetting and environmental analysis requirements. But it is required to obtain state permits to ensure the waste does not contaminate the environment or local water sources.

A January story by ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas documented how the company worked to escape county and state oversight requirements by arguing its project didn’t fit under existing regulations and promising to hold itself accountable through independent audits — all while being cited for permitting and water pollution violations in 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023. Last year, the company successfully lobbied to be exempted from holding a county “amusement and transportation system” permit, arguing instead for an oversight plan that removed multiple layers of inspection.

Workers have complained of chemical burns from the waste material generated by the tunneling process, and firefighters must decontaminate their equipment after conducting rescues from the project sites. The company was fined more than $112,000 by Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in late 2023 after workers complained of “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and burns. The Boring Co. has contested the violations. Just last month, a construction worker suffered a “crush injury” after being pinned between two 4,000-foot pipes, according to police records. Firefighters used a crane to extract him from the tunnel opening.

After ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas published their January story, both the CEO and the chairman of the LVCVA board criticized the reporting, arguing the project is well-regulated. As an example, LVCVA CEO Steve Hill cited the delayed opening of a Loop station by local officials who were concerned that fire safety requirements weren’t adequate. Board chair Jim Gibson, who is also a Clark County commissioner, agreed the project is appropriately regulated.

“We wouldn’t have given approvals if we determined things weren’t the way they ought to be and what it needs to be for public safety reasons,” Gibson said, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal. “Our sense is we’ve done what we need to do to protect the public.”

Asked for a response to the new proposed fines, an LVCVA spokesperson said, “We won’t be participating in this story.”

The repeated allegations that the company is violating regulations — including the bespoke regulatory arrangement agreed to by the company — indicates that officials aren’t keeping the public safe, said Ben Leffel, an assistant public policy professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“Not if they’re recommitting almost the exact violation,” Leffel said.

Leffel questioned whether a $250,000 penalty would be significant enough to change operations at The Boring Co., which was valued at $7 billion in 2023. Studies show that fines that don’t put a significant dent in a company’s profit don’t deter companies from future violations, Leffel said.

A state spokesperson disagreed that regulators aren’t keeping the public safe and said the agency believes its penalties will deter “future non-compliance.”

“NDEP is actively monitoring and inspecting the projects,” the spokesperson said.