by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica, and Karim Hajj, special to ProPublica,

The white supremacist forces arrayed in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend — the largest gathering of its sort in at least a generation — represented a new incarnation of the white supremacy movement. Old-guard groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations and the Nazi skinheads, which had long stood at the center of racist politics in America, were largely absent.

A.C. Thompson is covering the rise in hate crimes in America as part of our Documenting Hate project. If you've witnessed or been the victim of a hate crime or bias incident — in Charlottesville or elsewhere — tell us your story.

Instead, the ranks of the young men who drove to Charlottesville with clubs, shields, pepper spray and guns included many college-educated people who have left the political mainstream in favor of extremist ideologies over the past few years. A large number have adopted a very clean cut, frat-boyish look designed to appeal to the average white guy in a way that KKK robes or skinhead regalia never could. Interviews show that at least some of these leaders have spent time in the U.S. armed forces.

Many belong to new organizations like Vanguard America, Identity Evropa, the Traditionalist Workers Party and True Cascadia, which have seen their numbers expand dramatically in the past year. Most of these groups view themselves as part of a broader “alt-right” movement that represents the extreme edge of right-wing politics in the U.S.

These organizations exhibited unprecedented organization and tactical savvy. Hundreds of racist activists converged on a park on Friday night, striding through the darkness in groups of five to 20 people. A handful of leaders with headsets and handheld radios gave orders as a pickup truck full of torches pulled up nearby. Within minutes, their numbers had swelled well into the hundreds. They quickly and efficiently formed a lengthy procession and begun marching, torches alight, through the campus of the University of Virginia.

Despite intense interest from the media, police and local anti-racists, the white supremacists kept the location of their intimidating nighttime march secret until the last moment.

The next day, the far-right forces — likely numbering between 1,000 and 1,500 — marched to Emancipation Park. Once again, they arrived in small blocs under military-style command. The racist groups were at least as organized and disciplined as the police, who appeared to have no clear plan for what to do when the violence escalated. The racist groups stood their ground at the park and were not dislodged for many hours.

For many of them, this will be seen as victory. “Every rally we’re going to be more organized, we’re going to have more people, and it’s going to be harder and harder for them to shut us down,” said a spokesman for Vanguard America, a fascist group, who gave his name as “Thomas.” “White people are pretty good at getting organized.”

And though police arrested James Fields Jr., a 20-year-old Ohio man, for allegedly driving a Dodge Charger into a crowd of anti-racist protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and wounding many others, the white supremacists generally avoided arrests.

They also outmaneuvered their anti-racist opponents. On Saturday, a multifaith group met at the historic First Baptist Church for a sunrise prayer ceremony featuring academic Cornel West and pastor Traci Blackmon. The anti-racists, many of them clergy members, walked quietly to Emancipation Park, where they were vastly outnumbered by the white supremacists.

Later, a band of more aggressive counter-protesters showed up at the park, chanting “Appalachia coming at ya. Nazi punks we’re gonna smash ya!” These militant “antifa,” or antifascists, were also repelled by the white supremacists.

Given the scale of the protests, the far-right groups suffered few injuries. That was particularly notable given the fact that multiple people near the protests were armed. Throughout the weekend, right-wing and left-wing militias equipped with assault rifles, pistols and body armor patrolled the streets of Charlottesville. (Virginia is an “open carry” state, so gun owners are legally allowed to tote around firearms.)

Police Stood By As Mayhem Mounted in Charlottesville

State police and National Guardsmen watched passively for hours as self-proclaimed Nazis engaged in street battles with counter-protesters. Read the story.

Many of the armed men viewed their role as maintaining a modicum of order. A “Three Percenter” militia out of New York state posted itself near Emancipation Park with the intention of keeping anti-racists from disrupting the rally. The group says it disapproves of racism but is dedicated to defending the free speech rights of all.

Blocks away, Redneck Revolt, a leftist militia from North Carolina, watched over the perimeter of a park where anti-racists had gathered, committed to preventing violent attacks by the white supremacist groups.

The presence of heavily armed citizens may have played a role in the decision of authorities to largely stay out of the violent skirmishes between the white supremacists and their opponents.

Those who actually marched included many new to the right-wing cause. The victory of Donald Trump in last year’s presidential election has energized a whole wave of young people who were previously apathetic or apolitical, rally organizer Eli Mosley told ProPublica. The president has served as “megaphone” for far-right ideas, he said.

Mosley and his comrades are seeking to draw in as many of these newly politicized young people as possible. “We’re winning,” he said. “We’re targeting the youth and making a movement that appeals to the youth.”

Some of those who’ve gravitated to the extreme right milieu are former liberals — like Mosley’s fellow rally organizer Jason Kessler — and supporters of Bernie Sanders. Many are ex-Libertarians.

“I was a libertarian,” said Mosley, as white supremacists chanted “Whose streets? Our streets!” in the background. “I looked around and noticed that most Libertarians were white men. I decided that the left was winning with identity politics, so I wanted to play identity politics too. I’m fascinated by leftist tactics, I read Saul Alinsky, Martin Luther King … This is our ’60s movement.”

by Derek Kravitz

Like many news organizations, ProPublica has been pushing to increase its own diversity and that of the journalism community overall. As part of that effort, we created the Emerging Reporters Program, giving young journalists of color mentoring and stipends to support their burgeoning careers.

The grant-supported program is now in its third year. Emerging Reporters have gone on to work at The New Yorker, MSNBC, ProPublica and other newsrooms.

We’re very excited to announce our Emerging Reporters for the 2017-18 academic year. They were selected by ProPublica staffers from a pool of 275 applicants from across the country. The recipients are:

Kiara Alfonseca (@kiaraalfonseca) is a senior at The College of Brockport, where she studies digital journalism, and was the editor-in-chief of her school newspaper, The Stylus. This summer, she was awarded a fellowship with the Knight CUNYJ Diversity Initiative and worked with ProPublica as part of our Documenting Hate project. Alfonseca has also produced work for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ student multimedia project and is a freelance contributor to the Rochester City Newspaper. Alfonseca is interested in covering politics and the American prison system. She is from upstate New York.

Natalie Escobar (@_NatalieEscobar) is a senior at Northwestern University, where she majors in journalism and Latino Studies. She has also been managing editor, features editor and and a staff writer for her school’s quarterly magazine, North by Northwestern. She has interned for The Bump with the American Society of Magazine Editors’ internship program, produced stories for WBEZ’s StoryCorps and was an education reporter for the Medill News Service. Her work has been featured in Chicago Magazine, U.S. News & World Report, the New York Daily News and UPI. Escobar is interested in covering education and race in the Chicagoland area. She is from San Francisco.

Miela Fetaw (@mielafetaw) is a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she studies journalism and global studies. Last year, she worked at WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee as a digital investigative intern and, in May, traveled to Japan as a Roy H. Howard National Reporting Fellow. Fetaw’s work has been featured in the Huffington Post and she has won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and the Wisconsin College Media Association. Fetaw is interested in covering social issues, immigration and education. She was born and raised in Italy while her family is from Eritrea.

Ahmed Jallow (@AhmedJallow) is a senior at Brooklyn College and received an associate in arts degree from Borough of Manhattan Community College in 2016. He is a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle, where he covers local and federal courts, and works for both of his college's student newspapers. This past spring, Jallow worked as a court reporter for the Mellon Transfer Student Research Program, which provides court reporting for community newspapers. He was also club president and editor of Ourwords.info, a journal at Borough of Manhattan Community College. Jallow is from the Gambia and lives in the Bronx.

Andrea Salcedo (@salcedonews) is a senior at Columbia College in Chicago, where she majors in multimedia journalism, and was the campus editor for the school’s newspaper, The Columbia Chronicle. This year, she won first place for in-depth reporting from the Illinois College Press Association. Salcedo has interned with the Chicago Sun-Times, CNN en Español and Chicago’s City Bureau. She won a Columbia Journalism School fellowship to attend the Investigative Reporters & Editors conference in Phoenix last year. Salcedo is interested in covering criminal justice, immigration and policing issues. She is from Panama.

by Topher Sanders

The defendants were booked, photographed, fingerprinted and then led into Court 1A in the county courthouse in Nashville. There was no judge. Prosecutors handling the misdemeanor cases invited the accused who were interested in pleading guilty to step forward and finalized plea deals for suspended sentences and an array of fines. There were no defense lawyers, nor were any of the defendants advised they were entitled to one.

Later that day in September 2016, a group of five defendants was called up by a local prosecutor and offered the previously arranged plea deals, some of which might have resulted in days behind bars. One defendant asked to see a judge. The prosecutor said that was not possible, and that her only choice at that moment was to plead guilty, or to plead not guilty and go to trial. The defendant could only speak to the judge, the prosecutor said, if she rejected the plea offer. Again, none of the defendants was told they had the right to see a lawyer before entering any plea.

The scenes in Nashville’s Court 1A last year are included in an American Bar Association report examining what the organization sees as one of the most routine constitutional violations taking place in U.S. courts every day: the failure to notify indigent defendants facing misdemeanor charges that can carry jail time that they are entitled to a lawyer. The report, done by the association’s section on civil rights and social justice, was approved and released by the ABA’s board Friday afternoon.

The report’s authors declined to comment on the ABA effort, saying that the document speaks for itself.

“Volunteer lawyers repeatedly observed both judges and prosecutors violate indigent defendants’ right to counsel under Tennessee law,” the report states.

Nashville District Attorney Glenn Funk did not reply to an inquiry sent to his office seeking comment on the report.

The ABA report said the lack of counsel for defendants facing misdemeanor charges punishable with time behind bars is “an extremely serious and pervasive problem that can no longer be ignored or tolerated.”

The report points to a number of studies in recent years that had begun to better document the problem, including work the ABA had done in several states in 2006. “There is a shocking disconnect between the system of justice envisioned by the Supreme Court’s right-to-counsel decisions and what actually occurs in many of this nation’s misdemeanor courts,” it says.

The report cites two Supreme Court decisions in establishing that many of those charged with misdemeanors are entitled to a lawyer. A 1972 case said that such lawyers were required even in misdemeanor cases, absent a “valid waiver of counsel” by the defendant. Thirty years later, the report stated, the court made clear that defendants being offered suspended sentences — deals that spare defendants immediate imprisonment so long as they meet certain conditions — were also due representation by a lawyer.

In Nashville, the ABA had volunteer lawyers spend Sept. 12, 2016, in Davidson County General Sessions Court. The ABA described the effort as the launch of a national project to “review practices in misdemeanor courts in other states throughout the country.” In Tennessee, there are state provisions that make explicit the right to a lawyer, even for those facing misdemeanor charges.

The defendants in the courtrooms monitored by the ABA were typically facing minor drug charges or driving with suspended licenses, offenses that could result in jail time. The report describes an assembly-line atmosphere, done almost entirely without the presence of defense lawyers.

When a judge did turn up in Court 1A, she merely confirmed with the court clerk that plea deals had been signed, according to the report.

“The judge did not inquire whether the defendants understood the plea agreement or its consequences; did not inform defendants of their right to counsel and to a trial; and did not ask if defendants were waiving any of their rights,” the report states. “After accepting the pleas, the judge announced that she would return to the bench after the clerk had seven more pleas prepared. During the morning’s court session, this process was repeated several times.”

Joseph Ozment, president of the Tennessee Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said the prosecutors are not looking out for the defendant’s rights. Ozment also blamed the judges overseeing the cases.

“I think it’s an ethical conflict for the district attorney, I think they’re putting themselves in a position of representing a defendant when they start advising them of rights,” he said. “The trouble is that the judges let this practice go on. There’s a judge in that courtroom that can say, ‘No, I’m not allowing you to do this.’ Why the judges are allowing this is more troubling than the fact that the district attorney is doing it.”

Ozment said judges may allow the practice to lower their caseload and to dispose of cases quickly.

“I think it’s a situation where a judge is more concerned with the number of cases in his courtroom than making sure that the prosecutor is doing their job and the defendant’s rights are protected.”

Presiding Judge Gale Robinson in Nashville did not respond to a request for comment sent to him Friday through the state’s Administrative Office of the Courts.

The report also states that the ABA’s observers did not see the prosecutor inform defendants that there is a waiver process if they couldn’t afford to pay fees or fines.

The ABA lawyers spoke in detail with the woman who asked to see the judge and rejected a plea deal.

“She was a single black woman, age 37, with three children, ages 14, 10, and 8,” the report states. “Her disabled grandmother also lived with her. She worked two jobs to take care of her family and brought home just under $1200 monthly. After paying rent of $715, she had very little left to meet everyone’s needs. She reported having been to Court 1A five times in the past two years, facing charges of driving on a suspended license. Each time, her experience was the same. She was assessed a fine she could not afford and, for this reason, she was unable to get her license reinstated.”

A court bailiff overheard the ABA lawyers talking with the defendant. The bailiff then informed the defendant that she could go to the clerk’s office on a different floor of the courthouse and ask for a waiver that might lower the amount of the fine. The defendant told the ABA lawyers that during her previous appearances in Nashville’s courts, she was never told about the form even after telling the court she couldn’t pay the fines.

Several ABA observers then went to the clerk’s office to obtain about a dozen of the forms to make them available in Court 1A.

“The clerk replied she was only permitted to hand out one copy, and people who needed them had to request them from her directly,” the report states. “When the observers asked how defendants were supposed to know that these forms existed, she replied they would have to know they existed in order to request them.”

Nashville’s Clerk of Courts, Howard Gentry, did not respond to an inquiry for comment on the report’s findings.

by Andrew Revkin

Earlier this month, someone involved in the government’s latest report on climate change provided The New York Times with a copy of the version submitted to the Trump administration for final approval. The main intent of the leak, according to several people tracking the report, was to complicate any attempt to suppress the study or water down its findings.

Publication of the document inflamed an already-fraught debate about climate change. Administration officials and Republican lawmakers accused the leaker and journalists of manufacturing a dispute. They said the report, which was required by law, was moving through a normal process of White House review.

The report was submitted in late June and the Trump administration has broad authority to review its findings. Any one of a number of government agencies can block its release, which is ultimately subject to presidential review.

Some of the scientists involved in preparing the document expressed concern that it might never see the light of day. Katharine Hayhoe, a lead author of the report and director of Texas Tech University’s Climate Science Center, said the motivation of its 50-plus authors — a mix of government and academic researchers — was to convey to the public and government officials the scope of a building crisis.

“As a climate scientist, I feel communicating this science is a moral responsibility,” she said, noting that the contributors from academia were working without pay and taking away time from their teaching and scholarships. “We are the physicians of the planet,” she added. “Climate change poses risks to people and our economy.”

Several people involved with the study said the heat drawn by the early disclosure of the document might well have the opposite of its intended effect. They said there are signs that the Trump administration would subject the draft climate report to a “red team” vetting process in which a group of scientists would be invited to vigorously question its premises.

Government officials in intelligence and national security have long used the “red team” approach to stress test policy and intelligence conclusions about issues like Russian military strength. Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, has called publicly for a “red team” review of the government’s position on climate science.

Sobering Science

In many ways, the 669-page “Climate Science Special Report” is utterly unremarkable. It is a review of existing science that concludes human activities are largely responsible for the warming of the planet. Worsening climatic and coastal impacts are almost inevitable unless the world’s industrial nations significantly reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

Its contents came as no surprise to foes or supporters of polices aimed at cutting climate-warming emissions. Earlier drafts, with the same basic conclusions as those in the submitted document, had been publicly posted and in wide review since January.

What makes the report significant now is the challenge it poses to a White House that has been moving aggressively to reverse the Obama administration’s policies and rules on climate change. So far, the Trump administration has begun withdrawing the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Agreement, cut relevant environmental agency budgets and removed from some government websites language describing the risks of unabated global warming.

The science report, due out in final form late in the year, is actually just one component of a much bigger, and congressionally mandated, document, the Fourth National Climate Assessment, scheduled for publication in late 2018.

A 1990 law has required such assessments every four years by an office — the U.S. Global Change Research Program — created in 1989 by Republican President George H.W. Bush to coordinate research on climate change and other global environmental issues across more than a dozen government agencies.

There have been tussles over these assessments from the start. In the final years of the Clinton administration, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which advocates for limited regulation and is heavily supported by industry groups, filed a legal challenge to aspects of the climate assessment process. The George W. Bush administration was accused by whistleblowers of blocking federal agencies from citing the 2000 report, which had been prepared under the Clinton administration.

That climate assessment projected temperatures in the U.S. would rise “more rapidly in the next one hundred years than in the last 10,000 years” and described “widespread water concerns,” but said agriculture could likely adapt while coastal regions faced rising danger with rising seas.

An “interim” version of the second climate assessment was published by the Bush administration in May 2008, but only after pressure from a critical Government Accountability Office report requested by Senators John McCain and John Kerry, and a successful lawsuit filed by environmental groups to force action.

It’s notable that the three full assessments produced so far — in 2000, 2009 and 2014 — were all published under Democratic administrations. More than a few analysts and experts involved in this arena suspect the next assessment will not appear before a Democrat wins the presidency.

Despite the requirements of the 1990 law, the White House has substantial power to derail such assessments, said Nicky Sundt, who managed communications for the global change program office through most of the two terms of George W. Bush. The law, for instance, doesn’t specify the scope or nature of the periodic assessments, said Sundt, who is now a senior fellow for climate at the Government Accountability Project, which in 2005 released documents showing that a political appointee had edited a different government climate report to soften its findings.

The climate science report at the center of the current dispute is being managed by a subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council, a body established in 1993 by President Bill Clinton through an executive order to coordinate science policy.

That body, in theory, is chaired by the president or a designated proxy, Sundt said. The subcommittee managing the report, she said, operates by consensus, with anyone from a host of agencies able to block approval. “That opens up the possibility of all sorts of delays and changes,” she said.

And the president has the final say on what goes forward.

Another issue at the moment, she said, is simply transparency, describing the administration’s actions so far on this report as “troubled and opaque.”

Trump administration officials declined to comment on the climate science report as long as it is in draft form.

In an interview last week with a morning talk show on WBAP radio in Dallas-Fort Worth, Pruitt criticized efforts to publicize the draft findings and described next steps.

“This is a report that’s issued every four years — it’s just an assessment,” he said. “We’re going to review it like all the other twelve agencies and evaluate the merits and demerits and methodology and efficacy of the report,” he said, adding, “Science should not be politicized. Science is not something that should be just thrown about to try to dictate policy in Washington, D.C.”

In the interview, Pruitt appeared to offer conflicting signals on the climate issue. He hailed “what we’ve achieved in our country in reducing our CO2 footprint.” Then, seconds later, he questioned the science that has identified greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels as the prime driver of global warming.

Red Team, Blue Team

Trump administration officials focused on climate remain in close touch with groups challenging global warming science and determined to undo climate polices adopted by President Obama. According to both the Washington Examiner and the news section of the journal Nature, the administration has been weighing lists of skeptical climate scientists provided by the Heartland Institute, an industry-backed group that has for years run conferences aiming to cast doubt on climate change research.

In a blog post in late June, Patrick J. Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute, a think tank that advocates for reducing government regulation, argued that the government’s climate assessments were driven by a mix of politics and self-interest.

He pointed to the website of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which described the Third National Assessment as “a key deliverable in President Obama’s Climate Action Plan’.” He added this quip: “No politics there, just science (sarc).” Then he asserted that hundreds of government officials and academic researchers make a living from the perennial reviews and research budgets on climate change. “It has always been in their interest to portray global warming as alarming, and therefore in need of even more federal research dollars,” Michaels wrote.

His post laid out several options for Trump, including replicating the Bush-era delays. He added, “If there is going to be a 2018 version, it had better be at least a ‘red team/blue team report.’”

The national assessment process has other influential critics, including Steven E. Koonin, who for two years was undersecretary for science in the Department of Energy in Barack Obama’s second term. Koonin now directs the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University and has periodically criticized what he sees as oversimplifications of climate findings.

An op-ed article by Koonin in The Wall Street Journal in April was the inspiration for the plan by EPA’s Pruitt, first reported in late June by ClimateWire, to develop an adversarial “red team — blue team” exercise to probe climate change conclusions.

In a phone interview last week, Koonin said government reports like the national climate assessments could benefit from this kind of scrutiny, no matter who is in office, to separate spin from substance.

He said issues can arise as authors choose which papers to include or exclude, and even in phrasing, especially in the summaries most people pay attention to. “You can look at the same data and say ‘we have low confidence hurricanes are increasing’ or you can say ‘we have high confidence hurricanes are not increasing,” he said. “I would like to have that discussion.”

This proposal has been widely pilloried by scientists, including John P. Holdren, who was science adviser to Barack Obama through his two terms. In a recent Boston Globe op-ed, Holdren compared the “red team” notion to a “kangaroo court.”

Koonin said he was not calling for a reassessment of scientific findings that were published by reputable scientific journals. “I don’t think this is the kind of review that should be applied to the original scientific literature,” he said. “We have peer review for that. It’s not perfect tool, but it works.”

He said he’s spoken about participating in such an exercise with Pruitt and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry (who has endorsed the idea).

Asked about the potential for politicization, he said: “I would not become engaged in this myself unless I could do so with integrity, thoroughness and transparency. But if I can do that and it aligns with the administration’s plans, that’s fine.”

Can Climate Science Survive the Political Climate?

Prediction is inadvisable. But there still is a chance the report could survive relatively unscathed, according to interviews with a range of people involved with the process, or closely tracking it.

For one thing, while the report reaches conclusions at odds with the views of Scott Pruitt and others in the administration, it also contains long sections on the scientifically established uncertainties that surround critical questions. Given the longstanding and bipartisan Washington tradition of highlighting findings that suit some agenda, there’s plenty for everyone.

Here’s a look at the clear and murky.

Drafted and reviewed by dozens of scientists within and outside government and endorsed earlier this year by the independent National Academy of Sciences, the report details findings drawn from a host of studies that are as close to certainties as science can produce.

One example is a section on human-driven trends in extreme heat and rainfall. It includes these points:

“The frequency and intensity of extreme temperature events are virtually certain to increase in the future as global temperature increases (high confidence). Extreme precipitation events will very likely continue to increase in frequency and intensity throughout most of the world (high confidence).”

Many findings directly contradict assertions of top administration officials. Here’s what the draft says about evidence for a human role in recent warming:

“[I]t is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation ... Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are primarily responsible for the observed climate changes in the industrial era.”

In an appearance in March on CNBC, Pruitt emphatically disagreed with that assertion.

“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So no, I would not agree that it's a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don't know that yet ... We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis."

The report also lays out in detail sources of uncertainty around some of the most critical questions for the intended audience: institutions and individuals in the U.S., from the local to national scale, charged with protecting coasts, cities, croplands and other areas at risk from rising seas and disrupted weather patterns.

After noting three different sources of uncertainty about the pace of warming in the 21^st century, the report says that changes in precipitation — often the critical interface between climate and human welfare — are even harder to predict:

“Due to the greater level of complexity associated with modeling precipitation, uncertainty tends to dominate in precipitation projections throughout the entire century, affecting both the magnitude and sometimes (depending on location) the sign of the projected change in precipitation.”

In a section on how the frequency of hurricanes and cyclones is likely to change, the report cites what’s been called a “hurricane drought” — a remarkable gap, “unprecedented in the historical records dating back to the mid-19^th century” — in the U.S. being hit by storms category 3 or higher.

“In this case the assessment reaches conclusions inconvenient for political advocates on both sides — but that is how science works,” said Roger A. Pielke, Jr., a political science professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who’s been writing on the evolution of the global change research office since its early days and has frequently been called on by Republicans in Congress to testify about climate policy.

He said concerns about possible suppression were “misplaced,” noting the science report is being produced under procedures laid out in the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which includes transparency provisions that make it difficult to disrupt.

“As we've seen, the report couldn't be suppressed even if they wanted to,” Pielke said. “It has been public, it is public, it will continue to be public. There are plenty of things to be concerned about — this report not seeing the light of day or somehow being reclassified is not one of those things.”

The best defense of the climate report’s integrity going forward may simply be how it reflects the scientific process itself, said David Hawkins, who directs the climate program at the Natural Resources Defense Council and worked at the EPA during the Carter administration.

“Thank goodness we have science-based institutions and dedicated professionals who work there,” he said. “Absent a dark ages, science is relentless. Trump may be able to sit on a report that the government is required to issue but he can't issue a report with alternate science — at least not one signed by credentialed scientists.”

For her part, the report author Katharine Hayhoe has been busy on Twitter trying to cut through the noise:

Our 600 page climate report in one tweet:
It's real
It's us
It's serious
And the window of time to prevent dangerous impacts is closing fast

— Katharine Hayhoe (@KHayhoe) August 11, 2017

by Ryan Gabrielson

For most of Joe Arpaio’s two-plus decades as Maricopa County sheriff, he directed operations from the top floor of a downtown Phoenix tower, worlds away from the jails overseen by rank and-file deputies. The executive offices wrapped around an expansive conference room, where I spent weeks in early 2008 with banker boxes full of arrest records, and hanging out with Arpaio himself, a politician who built his career on bashing immigrants long before the rise of Donald Trump.

Back then, I was working for the East Valley Tribune, then a daily newspaper in the Phoenix area. I had filed a public records request for all documents from deputies’ immigration operations. Teamed with Paul Giblin, a fellow Tribune reporter, we were trying to figure out how the sheriff was enforcing immigration laws, and what effect their monomaniacal focus was having on regular police work — like solving crimes. Arpaio had long before achieved national notoriety for making prisoners wear pink underwear and housing them in an outdoor tent city so hot that the inmates’ shoes melted.

The sheriff’s office had spent the previous year carrying out a constitutionally dubious dragnet search for undocumented immigrants. Patrol deputies became expert at inventing pretexts for stopping the “load cars” that ferried immigrants through the county to points across the nation. Sheriffs descended on neighborhoods where day laborers waited for people willing to pay for their work. Voters repeatedly re-elected Arpaio as he carried out his pledge to transform the sheriff’s office into “a full-fledged anti-illegal immigration agency.”

The final chapter of this story is playing out now on the national stage.

Last month, federal Judge Susan Bolton found Arpaio guilty of criminal contempt of court. In December 2011, another federal judge ordered the sheriff’s office to stop detaining people based solely on their immigration status. The agency ignored the judge’s ruling and went right on targeting immigrants. Arpaio, who lost his bid for a seventh term as sheriff in November, testified that he had no idea his deputies were blatantly violating the order. Judge Bolton decided he was not telling the truth. As she concluded in her written opinion, Arpaio had demonstrated a “flagrant disregard” for the court order.

Arpaio, 85, is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 5, with a maximum potential penalty of six months in prison. That is the plan, unless President Donald Trump intervenes.

On Sunday, as much of the nation fixated on the events in Charlottesville, the president told Fox News that he is “seriously considering” issuing a pardon to Arpaio. The former sheriff campaigned for Trump throughout 2016, shares his views on immigration and, in the past, was a supporter of Trump’s efforts to raise doubts about former President Obama’s birth certificate.

Trump and Arpaio share more than one trait. They both rose to national prominence as showmen who cannily worked the press to their advantage. Over time, their media relationships eventually mutated into more combative interactions with parts of the media, and both Trump and Arpaio took to engaging in periodic press-bashing. But all those years ago, Arpaio did not treat me as an enemy.

After submitting the records request on Dec. 31, 2007, I braced for the kind of belligerent rejection local reporters had often received from the sheriff’s office, and the months of legal struggle to come. Instead, Arpaio’s public affairs team invited us to come by and handed over thousands of pages of unredacted records. They were pleased the press wanted to write in detail about how many undocumented immigrants the agency was arresting.

As we worked our way through the files over the succeeding weeks, Arpaio would pop into the conference room each day, sometimes to say hello. Just as often, he came to hang out. To banter. To try out the wording of press statements before releasing them to the rest of the media. One day, he asked us how we’d respond if he announced something like: “illegal immigrants drive violent crime.” In our conversations, Arpaio would switch from relaxed to fiery and combative — his press conference persona — in an instant. We countered with questions of our own. It was a surprisingly candid and collegial conversation. Though Arpaio publicly raged against the press, he very much loved being covered by the media (especially on television), and he was also fond of spending time with journalists. At least when he wasn’t having them arrested. (But that’s another story.)

Arpaio was puzzled by our insistence that we review every single page of every arrest report. “Can’t we just summarize this for you?” He asked. No, not on this, I said, explaining that we were building a database of the agency’s immigration enforcement. Arpaio shrugged, “OK.”

We were puzzled, too. In moments alone, Giblin and I would turn to each other and wonder aloud, “Why are they letting us see all this?” The documents showed the operations were hugely expensive and relied on practices that seemed obviously unconstitutional. After months of more arduous reporting, we would find that the sheriff’s office had stopped investigating sex crimes, depleted its patrol division and nearly bankrupted itself in taking on immigration enforcement.

But those consequences seemed of little consequence. Arresting undocumented immigrants was the point, of course, but even more essential was press coverage of his deputies arresting undocumented immigrants.

First elected in 1992 as a tough-on-crime reformer, Arpaio built his reputation on disregard for inmates. Faced with overcrowded cells, he erected the infamous “tent city,” an outdoor jail that held the convicts in U.S. Army tents from the Korean War. During Arizona summers, temperatures sweltered well above 110 degrees in the tents. Inmates were caught stealing underwear, so Arpaio had all jail underwear dyed pink in the belief that would end the black-market for briefs. Or that’s what he told the press, which produced scores of stories about the sheriff and his endeavors.

He’d been uninterested in undocumented immigrants until 2006, when he seized on rising public anger over the issue, both locally and nationally. Once Arpaio was in the battle, he was all-in. Collateral damage accumulated quickly. By 2008, numerous U.S. citizens had been wrongly arrested by Maricopa County deputies, and several filed a federal lawsuit accusing the sheriff’s office of racial profiling.

The agency lost that case four years ago, but its remnants continue to imperil Arpaio today.

In December 2011, as the civil suit over racial profiling played out, Judge G. Murray Snow prohibited the sheriff’s office “from detaining any person based only on the knowledge or reasonable belief” that the person is in the country illegally. The direction was simple: no more local enforcement of federal immigration laws, no arrests unless deputies have evidence of a crime other than immigration.

The agency simply ignored Snow’s ruling. Over the next 18 months, deputies detained at least 171 people without criminal charges and turned them over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to its own internal reports. Arpaio did not deny this occurred but pleaded ignorance, saying he was uninvolved with day-to-day operations.

In an interview with Fox News over the weekend, the former sheriff said: “I would accept the pardon because I am 100 percent not guilty.”

That’s not precisely accurate. Records of his subsequent trial show that in the months after Judge Snow’s order, Arpaio implied or explicitly said during 10 different television interviews that the agency was violating it. Further, the sheriff’s office issued six news releases saying much the same.

However, the president’s justification for an Arpaio pardon does not rest on his innocence on the charge of disregarding the courts. “Is there anyone in local law enforcement who has done more to crack down on illegal immigration than Sheriff Joe?” Trump told Fox News. “He has protected people from crimes and saved lives. He doesn’t deserve to be treated this way.”

Trump’s assertion is at odds with our reporting. In the shift to full-time immigration enforcement, Giblin and I found that the sheriff’s police work faltered across the board in its mission to protect the citizens of Maricopa County. Detectives shelved dozens of sex crime cases without investigating them. By Arpaio’s own admission, the number of uninvestigated sex crime cases eventually swelled to more than 400. Many of the victims were children.

Arpaio did apologize years later for failing to pursue suspected sex criminals. But he has remained largely defiant, and consistently on the record about his defiance. The former sheriff summed up many observers’ feelings in an interview for “The Joe Show,” a documentary on Arpaio’s tenure.

“It’s amazing what I say, and what I do, and what I get away with,” Arpaio told the filmmakers. “It’s amazing.”

Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin were awarded a 2009 Pulitzer Prize for revealing how Arpaio’s “focus on immigration enforcement endangered investigation of violent crime and other aspects of public safety.”

by Michael Grabell, ProPublica, and Howard Berkes, NPR,

This story was co-published with NPR.

Leer en español.

At age 31, Nixon Arias cut a profile similar to many unauthorized immigrants in the United States. A native of Honduras, he’d been in the country for more than a decade and had worked off and on for a landscaping company for nine years. The money he earned went to building a future for his family in Pensacola, Florida. His Facebook page was filled with photos of fishing and other moments with his three boys, ages 3, 7 and 8.

But in November 2013, that life began to unravel.

The previous year, Arias had been mowing the median of Highway 59 just over the Alabama line when his riding lawnmower hit a hole, throwing him into the air. He slammed back in his seat, landing hard on his lower back.

Arias received pain medication, physical therapy and steroid injections through his employer’s workers’ compensation insurance. But the pain in his back made even walking or sitting a struggle. So his doctor recommended an expensive surgery to implant a device that sends electrical pulses to the spinal cord to relieve chronic pain. Six days after that appointment, the insurance company suddenly discovered that Arias had been using a deceased man’s Social Security number and rejected not only the surgery, but all of his past and future care.

Desperate, Arias hired an attorney to help him pursue the injury benefits that Florida law says all employees, including unauthorized immigrants, are entitled to receive. Then one morning after he dropped two of his boys off at school, Arias was pulled over and arrested, while his toddler watched from his car seat.

Arias was charged with using a false Social Security number to get a job and to file for workers’ comp. The state insurance fraud unit had been tipped off by a private investigator hired by his employer’s insurance company.

With his back still in pain from three herniated or damaged discs, Arias spent a year and a half in jail and immigration detention before he was deported.

However people feel about immigration, judges and lawmakers nationwide have long acknowledged that the employment of unauthorized workers is a reality of the American economy. From nailing shingles on roofs to cleaning hotel rooms, some 8 million immigrants work with false or no papers nationwide, and studies show they’re more likely to get hurt or killed on the job than other workers. So over the years, nearly all 50 states, including Florida, have given these workers the right to receive workers’ comp.

But in 2003, Florida’s lawmakers added a catch, making it a crime to file a workers’ comp claim using false identification. Since then, insurers have avoided paying for injured immigrant workers’ lost wages and medical care by repeatedly turning them in to the state.

Workers like Arias have been charged with felony workers’ comp fraud even though their injuries are real and happened on the job. And in a challenging twist of logic, immigrants can be charged with workers’ comp fraud even if they’ve never been injured or filed a claim because legislators also made it illegal to use a fake ID to get a job. In many cases, the state’s insurance fraud unit has conducted unusual sweeps of worksites, arresting a dozen employees for workers’ comp fraud after merely checking their Social Security numbers.

What’s quietly been happening to workers in Florida, unnoticed even by immigrant advocates, could be a harbinger of the future as immigration enforcement expands under President Donald Trump.

One of Trump’s first executive orders broadened Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s priorities to include not just those convicted of or charged with a crime, but any immigrant suspected of one. The order also targets anyone who has “engaged in fraud or willful misrepresentation in connection with any official matter or application before a governmental agency.” That language could sweep in countless injured unauthorized workers because state workers’ comp bureaus and medical facilities typically request Social Security numbers as part of the claims process.

In the last few months, a Massachusetts construction worker who fractured his femur when he fell from a ladder was detained by ICE shortly after meeting with his boss to discuss getting help for his injury. In Ohio, Republican lawmakers pushed a bill that would have barred undocumented immigrants from getting workers’ comp. It passed the state’s House of Representatives before stalling in the Senate in June.

To assess the impact of Florida’s law on undocumented workers, ProPublica and NPR analyzed 14 years of state insurance fraud data and thousands of pages of court records. We found nearly 800 cases statewide in which employees were arrested under the law, including at least 130 injured workers. Another 125 workers were arrested after a workplace injury prompted the state to check the personnel records of other employees. Insurers have used the law to deny workers benefits after a litany of serious workplace injuries, from falls off roofs to severe electric shocks. A house painter was rejected after she was impaled on a wooden stake.

Flagged by insurers or their private detectives, state fraud investigators have arrested injured workers at doctors’ appointments and at depositions in their workers’ comp cases. Some were taken into custody with their arms still in slings. At least 1 in 4 of those arrested were subsequently detained by ICE or deported.

State officials defended their enforcement, noting that the workers, injured or not, violated the law and could have caused financial harm if the Social Security numbers they were using belonged to someone else. Moreover, the law requires insurers to report any worker suspected of fraud.

“We don’t have the authority or the responsibility to go out and start analyzing the intent of an insurance company or anybody else when they submit a complaint to us,” said Simon Blank, director of the Florida insurance fraud unit. “It would be unfortunate,” he said, if insurers turned in injured workers “just to do away with claims.”

Blank insisted that his investigators’ efforts have nothing to do with immigration. But ProPublica and NPR’s review found that more than 99 percent of the workers arrested under the statute were Hispanic immigrants working with false papers.

While Florida’s statute is unique, insurers, hardline conservatives and some large employers have been battling across the country for the past 15 years to deny injury benefits to unauthorized immigrants, with occasional success. In a little-noticed ruling last fall, an international human rights commission criticized the United States for violating the rights of unauthorized immigrants, including a Pennsylvania apple picker who was forced to settle his case for a fraction of the cost of his injury and a Kansas painter who was unable to get the cast removed from his broken hand until he was deported to Mexico.

In Florida, cases against such workers have become standard practice for a group of closely affiliated insurers and employers. The private investigative firm they employ has created a wall of shame, posting the arrests it’s been involved in on its website. Critics say the arrangement encourages employers to hire unauthorized immigrants, knowing they won’t have to pay for their injuries if they get hurt on the job.

“It’s infuriating to think that when workers are hurt in the United States, they’re essentially discarded,” said David Michaels, the most recent head of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. “If employers know that workers are too afraid to apply for workers’ compensation, what’s the incentive to work safely?”

The law’s real-life ramifications came as a surprise to one of the lawyers who helped draft it and who had no idea it had been used to charge hundreds of workers who’d never been hurt on the job.

“How is there insurance fraud if there’s no comp claim?” asked Mary Ann Stiles, a longtime business lobbyist and attorney for insurers. “That would not be what anybody intended it to be.”

In Arias’ case, records show he never wrote the false Social Security number on any of the various forms related to his claim. It was printed automatically by the insurance carrier, using information from his employer. But that didn’t stop the state attorney from charging him with 42 counts of insurance fraud — one for every form the number appeared on.

As part of the prosecution, investigators demanded Arias pay back $38,490.51 to Normandy Harbor Insurance for the medical care and benefits checks he’d already received for his injury. The insurer declined to comment. Back in Honduras, Arias, who struggles with chronic back pain, has been unable to find more than odd jobs. And he hasn’t seen his three U.S.-born sons in more than two years.

The whole time in detention, “I was always asking, ‘Why? What’s the reason I’m here? I haven’t done anything, I haven’t stolen anything, I haven’t killed anyone,’” Arias said by phone from his rural village in the state of Copán. “I was just working for my kids.”

The website of Command Investigations, located just outside Orlando, boasts of its success in hunting down workers’ comp fraud, posting like trophies a gallery of mugshots of mostly Hispanic men and women. But most of those pictured weren’t nabbed jet-skiing with a fake knee injury. They are legitimately injured workers who Command investigators caught using false Social Security numbers.

Command, which tipped the state off to Arias, opened up shop in 2012 and quickly rose to prominence in Florida by catering to the lucrative employee leasing industry. Unlike temp agencies, which find workers and task them to businesses, employee leasing companies promise to lower businesses’ overhead by hiring their employees on paper and then leasing them back. The basic premise is that by pooling the risk of several small businesses, leasing companies can bargain for better insurance rates. Such a setup is especially attractive to mom-and-pop firms in dangerous industries, such as construction.

One of Command’s first big clients was Lion Insurance, whose affiliate SouthEast Personnel Leasing serves as the employer of record for more than 200,000 employees nationwide. According to its website, SouthEast generates $2.3 billion in annual revenue — about as much as clothing retailer J. Crew or the restaurant chain Red Lobster.

Since 2013, nearly 75 percent of the injured immigrants arrested in Florida for using false IDs were turned in by Command — and half worked for SouthEast, ProPublica and NPR found. SouthEast has had 43 injured workers arrested for using false Social Security numbers — more than any other company.

One reason: SouthEast, as well as its insurance carrier, Lion, and its claims processor, Packard Claims, are all owned by the same person. The unusual arrangement gives the company more control over injury claims and a consistency other firms specializing in high-risk industries can’t provide. But critics say it benefits SouthEast in more pernicious ways: Knowing that Lion and Packard can deny the claims of unauthorized workers allows SouthEast to offer discounts to contractors that other leasing firms can’t.

“They sign up these companies knowing full well that 95 percent of the employees are immigrant workers,” said Cora Cisneros Molloy, who recently began representing injured workers after two decades defending employers and insurers. “Only after an accident occurred do they determine they’re going to do an investigation and check that Social Security number.”

Controlling the empire from a six-story office building surrounded by palm trees in Holiday, Florida, is John Porreca, 68, who grew up in Philadelphia and worked in the leasing business before buying SouthEast with his wife in 1995. Despite owning one of the largest private companies in Florida, Porreca has managed to stay out of the public eye, showing up in the local press only rarely, such as when he donated the money for a baseball field for disabled children or bought a $4 million beachfront mansion, the size of which rankled neighbors.

Porreca didn’t respond to multiple messages left at his office or home over the course of a month. In an email, Brian Evans, an attorney for SouthEast, said Porreca declined to comment other than to say that SouthEast “strictly adheres” to the law and is not responsible for what happened to its workers, even though the company’s investigators reported them to the state.

Command’s president Steve Cassell also declined interview requests, citing confidentiality agreements with his clients.

Bram Gechtman, a Miami attorney who has represented several injured SouthEast workers, said the sheer number of cases in which Lion and Packard discovered workers’ false IDs only after they were injured raises the question of why SouthEast doesn’t do more to screen its hires.

“If I had a situation where I had all these people defrauding my company over and over and over again, allegedly, I would do something to try to stop it,” he said, “unless there was another reason why I didn’t want it to stop.”

Command and SouthEast have recently expanded to other states. Last year, a woman in Georgia was arrested for identity theft after a cart ran over her foot at a meatpacking plant and Command turned her in to the state workers’ comp bureau. In California, two staffing agencies sued SouthEast, saying its claims processor routinely denied workers’ comp claims based on immigration status, leading to litigation that increased the cost of the claims.

For workers, welcomed without question until they get hurt, getting caught in Command and SouthEast’s dragnet can upend otherwise quiet lives. Berneth Javier Castro originally came to the United States on a tourist visa in 2005 searching for the woman he’d loved and lost during the war in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

Unable to find her and facing debts back home for his house and his daughter’s school, Castro, now 52, overstayed his visa and found work at a St. Augustine roofing company in 2007. Initially, he was paid in cash under the table. But after a few months, the company said he needed a Social Security number to continue working. So he bought one. It was the only way he could get work, he said.

In 2011, Castro finally reconnected with Lucía Escobar using modern technology — he found her on Facebook. Escobar, 48, who had received asylum and is now a U.S. citizen, was going through a divorce. They began talking every day and planned to be together once the divorce was final.

Like many unauthorized workers, Castro feared he’d be deported if he reported an injury. So when he sliced his pinkie on some copper sheeting and got nine stitches, he stayed quiet and kept working. But a few months later, when he wrenched his back passing a load of tiles to a coworker on a roof, the company sent him to a clinic.

There, a company representative filled out the form since it was in English, Castro said. He didn’t recall the Social Security number he’d used, so the representative got it from the company and put it on the form.

The clinic gave Castro some pills for the pain. But when he returned for the follow-up appointment, he was told there was a problem with his Social Security number. Castro never returned and treated his back with heating pads and pain relief balms. He figured that was the end of it and continued working for the company for nearly a year.

Then in November 2013, state investigators turned up at his home and arrested him for insurance fraud. He had been turned in by a Command investigator working for Lion.

The workers’ comp fraud charges were eventually dropped, but Castro pleaded no contest to fraudulently using someone else’s identity. He spent five months in jail and was facing deportation before a judge granted him a voluntary departure to Nicaragua.

“The fake number, I understood because I needed it to work, but I didn’t understand the fraud,” Castro said by phone from Managua. “I’m not an irrational man. I’m not a criminal. So I didn’t understand where I might have committed fraud. It didn’t make sense to me. I never filled out a document asking for anything looking for compensation.”

Escobar sensed something was wrong when she suddenly stopped hearing from him. Then his phone was disconnected. “Every day, I went on Facebook, hoping and writing to him,” she said.

Months later, when he finally called her from Nicaragua, she was at once relieved and despondent. In 2015, after her divorce was final, she flew to Nicaragua and married him. But they still live separately, Castro in Nicaragua and Escobar outside Miami, where she cares for her grandson. They are applying for Castro to return, but the conviction could stand in his way.

“It’s sad because when you get married, you want to be with your husband,” Escobar said. “We waited for so long to be together.”

Over the years, numerous courts have upheld the rights of unauthorized workers to receive compensation for workplace injuries, the minimum wage and protection from retaliation for joining unions. The rights stem from their status as employees regardless of their status as immigrants.

A Florida appeals court, for example, ruled in 1982 that “an alien illegally in this country” is entitled to workers’ comp benefits.

That presumption was thrown into doubt in 2002 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a group of undocumented plastics workers fired for union activities weren’t entitled to back pay because of their immigration status. Insurers and large employers immediately flooded the courts with petitions designed to claw back labor protections for unauthorized immigrants. Leading the fight in Florida were employee leasing firms.

The petitioners argued that undocumented immigrants weren’t entitled to workers’ comp since their employment was obtained illegally. Lawmakers in several states, from Colorado to North Carolina, introduced bills to block claims by unauthorized workers.

As states courts and legislatures rejected that argument, insurers began pushing to deny immigrants disability benefits, arguing that once their unauthorized status was known, they couldn’t return, like other workers, to less intensive jobs. That reasoning succeeded in Michigan and Pennsylvania, but not in Delaware and Tennessee.

In the last few years, employers and insurers have begun using a new tactic, arguing that they should only be responsible for paying lost wages based on what the immigrant would have made in their home country. In Nebraska, for example, meatpacker Cargill tried to cut off benefits to Odilon Visoso, who was injured when a 200-pound piece of beef fell on his head, saying it was too difficult to determine what he could earn in Chilpancingo, Mexico, a crime-ridden city controlled by drug cartels near his rural, mountainous village. Nebraska’s Supreme Court told the company to use Nebraska wages.

Florida’s 2003 law was part of a sweeping overhaul aimed at lowering costs for employers. According to a state Senate review, the division of insurance fraud had pushed for the provision, arguing that “many times illegal aliens are in league with unethical doctors and lawyers who bilk the workers’ compensation system.” It was easier to prove that immigrants had lied about their identities, the agency said, than to prove their injuries were fabricated.

In recent interviews, however, representatives from the state fraud unit and insurance industry couldn’t identify a single case where immigrants had worked with doctors and lawyers to defraud workers’ comp. Instead, they noted that false Social Security numbers impede insurers’ ability to investigate claims. In addition, they said, those claims could prevent the people whose identity was stolen from getting benefits if they are injured in the future.

Stiles, the attorney who was a key architect of the law, said the state’s construction industry was rife with fraud at the time and there was a lot of concern about illegal immigration. She said even immigrants who are “truly injured” should be denied benefits if they’re using illegal documents for their claim and “they shouldn’t be here in the first place.”

“I think we’re a nation of laws and we ought to be able to enforce those laws,” she said. “And if the federal government won’t do it, sometimes the state has to help itself.”

Within months of the provision passing, though, the Senate’s Banking and Insurance Committee recommended reconsideration, raising concerns that legitimately injured workers could be disqualified. But that advice was never heeded. The first criminal cases under the law showed up in 2006. The law netted laborers, farmworkers, roofers and landscapers. Several, like Arias, were hurt while working on public projects — renovating schools or pouring concrete at the zoo. But ProPublica and NPR also found arrested workers who’d been injured at McDonald’s and Best Western and turned in by major insurers like Travelers, The Hartford and Zurich.

In one case, state investigators found that more than 100 workers were all using a Social Security number belonging to a 10-year-old girl.

In another in 2014, an attorney for an injured worker complained to the state that a fruit-packing company frequently used immigration status as leverage in settlements. Instead of going after the company, investigators raided the plant and arrested 106 immigrants, including the injured man’s wife.

One of SouthEast’s first cases involved a hotel housekeeper at the Comfort Suites in Vero Beach. Yuliana Rocha Zamarripa was cleaning a hotel room in 2010 when she slipped on a bathroom floor and slammed her knee on the bathtub, leaving her with pain and swelling so severe she was unable to walk.

Lion sent her to a doctor, but quickly denied her claim based on a false Social Security number.

Rocha’s mother had brought her to the United States from Mexico when she was 13, and when she turned 17, her father bought her the fake ID so she could work.

With few options, Rocha, now 32, settled her workers’ comp case for less than $6,000 plus attorney fees. But she never got the medical care she needed. The week before she was to receive the check, she was arrested while making breakfast for her 4-year-old son.

Rocha spent the next year cycling through jail and immigration detention, separated from her three children. She couldn’t sleep, worrying what would happen to them if she were deported.

“I said the Lord’s Prayer all the time, and I would end by asking, ‘God, give me a chance to return to my children. Don’t let anything bad happen to them,’” she said. “I had a feeling that something was not right.”

Rocha’s instincts were correct. While she was in jail, the father of her children started sexually assaulting their 10-year-old daughter, according to his arrest warrant. “I was left shattered,” Rocha said tearfully, “because I didn’t know what was happening.”

With the help of an attorney, Rocha pleaded to a lesser charge — “perjury not in an official proceeding” — and was finally released. Because of what happened to Rocha’s daughter, the attorney was able to get Rocha’s deportation canceled and help her obtain a green card.

Rocha eventually received her settlement but had to spend all of it securing her release and dealing with immigration. She now walks with a limp because her injury didn’t heal correctly.

“I think it’s an injustice what happened to me,” she said. “All because I fell, I slipped.”

The sting had been meticulously planned for weeks. The day before, detectives had scoped out the site — a two-story office building resembling a Spanish colonial mansion near downtown Fort Myers. Before the arrest, they tucked out of sight to surveil the building’s back entrance from across the street, according to the detective’s case report.

The time and manpower wasn’t to nab a gang member or drug dealer, but a coordinated effort with Command to snare a 27-year-old roofer who was at a court reporter’s office to testify in a deposition for his workers’ comp case. A year earlier in 2014, Erik Martinez was working on a roof when a nail ricocheted and hit him in the left eye. He was seeking medical care and lost wages, but like many construction workers, he was using a false Social Security number.

Though it was ostensibly a Florida Department of Financial Services operation, a state detective had worked closely with an attorney for Lion on a plan to alert officers in the final minutes of the deposition. In between questions, the attorney emailed the detective, at one point providing a description of Martinez’s clothing.

“We moved our position to the back parking lot,” the detective wrote in his report, “where we awaited word that the deposition was nearing an end.” Upon receiving confirmation, the detectives moved in, arresting Martinez as he exited the office.

Despite the extensive effort, the state attorney declined to prosecute. But the detective’s narrative reveals a larger story: In most of the injury cases reviewed by ProPublica and NPR, state fraud detectives were handed a packet from private investigators with nearly all the information needed to make an arrest.

During an hourlong interview in Tallahassee, Simon Blank, who heads the department’s Division of Investigative and Forensic Services, said his detectives conduct their own investigations and make their own decisions. Arrests at depositions, he said, only occur when they have a hard time locating somebody.

“The thing that you need to keep mind is these people are committing identity theft,” Blank said. “They’re taking somebody else’s Social Security number or somebody else’s personal information to obtain the work.”

While Blank repeatedly expressed compassion for immigrant workers who are legitimately injured, he noted that people whose Social Security numbers are used could face problems with their credit or getting medical care if a claim that wasn’t theirs showed up in their records.

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The widow of the Mississippi man whose Social Security number Arias was using, Carolyn Lasseter, said it hadn’t affected her, but she doesn’t “feel sorry for people that are over here illegally.” When she bought a house after her husband’s death, the bank informed her that a different man had used his number to take out, and pay on, a loan, but it was easily fixed.

Blank’s office has been accused by some attorneys of unconstitutionally using the workers’ comp law to engage in immigration enforcement. “The real intent behind what they’re doing is to regulate immigration,” said Florida immigration attorney Jimmy Benincasa, “because they don’t feel the federal government is doing enough.”

He and others point to a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that shot down a series of Arizona immigration statutes, including one that made it a crime for unauthorized immigrants to apply for, solicit or perform work.

“Congress decided it would be inappropriate to impose criminal penalties on aliens who seek or engage in unauthorized employment,” the court wrote. “It follows that a state law to the contrary is an obstacle to the regulatory system Congress chose.”

The court noted that while federal law makes it a crime to obtain employment through fraudulent means, the forms and documents that workers submit to get jobs can only be used for federal prosecution — not for state enforcement.

“Our agency is not in the business of going after illegal people,” Blank said. “There’s quite a lot of other circumstances why people use fake names and IDs and Social Security numbers aside from immigration. You have people who might have other legal problems. You have people who are wanting to stay off the books for specific reasons, whether its divorces or liens put against them.”

Among the nearly 800 cases that ProPublica and NPR identified, only five fit the reasons Blank cited. Blank seemed unaware that earlier this year, his own office’s annual report noted that “nearly 100 percent” of the suspects investigated under the statute were undocumented workers.

“It appears that it’s being applied in a discriminatory fashion,” said Dennis Burke, the former U.S. attorney in Arizona who challenged that state’s immigration statutes. “How do you justify your enforcement being 99 percent Latino surnames?”

Burke predicted Florida would have a tough time defending the law if it’s ever heard on constitutional grounds. After the Arizona ruling in 2012, one attorney challenged the Florida statute’s constitutionality, but both Florida and U.S. supreme courts declined to take the appeal. Unlike Arizona’s law, the statute doesn’t mention immigrants specifically. But Burke said the enforcement data and the stated intent to target immigrant fraud rings are problematic.

Told of what had happened to some of the arrested workers, Blank said he felt for those people but reiterated his agency’s obligation to protect the workers’ comp system.

“I guess that is a question that our legislature should maybe look into,” he said. “What is the balance between the harm and the benefit that’s being accomplished?”

Juvenal Dominguez Quino worries what will happen to his 8-year-old son with special needs if he gets deported. Dominguez, 43, has lived in the United States for 19 years. But his life was thrown into uncertainty in 2014 when a construction trench he was working in collapsed, burying him in dirt and causing him to sprain his knee.

A month later, Command turned him in to state investigators after he provided a false Social Security number to an insurance adjuster. Dominguez said he told the adjuster he didn’t have papers and had made the number up in order to work — details that by themselves wouldn’t preclude him from receiving workers’ comp. But Dominguez said the adjuster insisted she needed the number to pay him benefits. Sunz Insurance and North American Risk Services, who handled the claim, declined to comment.

Dominguez was arrested in January 2015 as he was getting his son ready for school.

“My son was watching” from a window, he said, choking up. “He saw when they put the handcuffs on me.”

At the time, Dominguez still couldn’t bend his knee, so he had to sit with his legs extended across the backseat of the police car.

Dominguez pleaded no contest, and the judge sentenced him to two years probation and ordered him to pay back nearly $19,000 in restitution to the insurance company. He was detained by ICE and put into deportation proceedings.

Michael DiGiacomo, owner of Platinum Construction, which employed Dominguez, was surprised to hear what had become of him. DiGiacomo said Dominguez was a reliable worker, and he didn’t know his documents were fake. After Dominguez got hurt, he said, his injury was in the hands of the leasing company and their insurer.

“It really sucks for him because, you know, you come and you want to work; it sucks to have to deal with that after you got hurt,” he said. “They should have at least paid for his medical bills since he was hurt on the job.”

Dominguez’s attorney has argued for a judge to cancel his deportation because of the harmful effect it would have on his U.S.-born son. His attorney is hopeful he will get a visa to stay.

Even if he does, the insurance company scored a victory — it got Dominguez and his medical costs to go away. “I didn’t want to do any more of anything,” he said of his physical therapy. “I didn’t want to claim anything else. I just wanted to live with it because I knew that it would only bring me more problems.”

Nixon Arias’ attorney Brian Carter said what the state and insurance companies are doing amounts to entrapment and ethnic profiling.

“Nobody looks at whether or not the Social Security number is valid for an individual named Tom Smith,” he said. “The insurance companies are using this little issue over a Social Security number to avoid any financial responsibility, and in my opinion, ethical responsibility to take care of these individuals.”

In the end, turning in Arias didn’t get the insurer off the hook. Because the state attorney offered a plea deal, Normandy would’ve had to convince a workers’ comp judge that Arias had not only used a fake Social Security number but that he had done so to obtain benefits. If it couldn’t, it would have had to pay for medical treatment and lost wages potentially totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars, Carter said. So with Arias in Honduras, Normandy offered $49,000 plus attorney’s fees.

Sent back to a country he hadn’t lived in for 15 years, Arias felt he had no choice but to take the offer. “I arrived empty-handed,” he said. “I didn’t have means to put a roof over my head or feed myself or buy medications.”

Despite having the settlement money, Arias said he doesn’t trust the doctors in Honduras to perform a delicate back surgery. “Here, they’re more likely to send you to the cemetery,” he said. He hopes the United States might allow him to reenter for humanitarian reasons, just to let him get the operation — and perhaps see his kids.

Research contributed by Meg Anderson and Graham Bishai of NPR and Sarah Betancourt of ProPublica. Translation services contributed by Donatella Ungredda.

Do you have information about how immigrant workers are being treated in the age of Trump? Contact Michael at michael.grabell@propublica.org.

Por Michael Grabell, ProPublica, y Howard Berkes, NPR,

Este artículo fue publicado junto con NPR.

Read in English.

A la edad de 31 años, Nixon Arias tenía un perfil parecido a muchos migrantes indocumentados en los Estados Unidos. Oriundo de Honduras, había estado en el país durante más de una década y había trabajado intermitentemente para una empresa de jardinería durante nueve años. El dinero que ganaba era para construir un futuro para su familia en Pensacola, Florida. Sus páginas de Facebook estaban llenas de fotos de excursiones de pesca y otros momentos con sus tres hijos de 3, 7 y 8 años.

Pero en noviembre de 2013, esa vida empezó a deshilacharse.

El año anterior, Arias había estado cortando la hierba de la franja divisoria de la Highway 59 (carretera 59) justo al otro lado de la línea divisoria estatal con Alabama cuando su tractor chocó con un agujero, lanzándole en el aire. Cayó violentamente sobre su asiento, recibiendo un duro impacto en la parte inferior de su espalda.

Arias recibió medicamentos para el dolor, terapia física e inyecciones de esteroides a través del seguro de compensación laboral de su empleador. Pero el dolor en su espalda convertía incluso el acto de caminar o de sentarse en una lucha. Así que su médico recomendó una costosa cirugía para implantar un aparato que manda impulsos eléctricos a su medula espinal para aliviar el dolor crónico. Seis días después de aquella cita médica, la aseguradora descubrió de repente que Arias había estado usando el número de seguridad social de un hombre muerto, y rechazó no solo la cirugía, sino toda su atención médica anterior y futura.

Desesperado, Arias contrató a un abogado para que le ayudara a solicitar los beneficios para lesionados que la ley de Florida dice que todo empleado, incluidos inmigrantes indocumentados, tienen derecho a recibir. Entonces, una mañana después de dejar a dos de sus hijos en el colegio, Arias fue detenido en su auto mientras su niño pequeño miraba desde el asiento infantil.

Arias fue acusado de usar un numero de seguridad social falso para conseguir un empleo y pedir compensación laboral. La unidad estatal de fraude de seguros había recibido una pista de un investigador privado contratado por la aseguradora del empleador de Arias.

Con su espalda todavía dolorida por tres discos herniados o dañados, Arias permaneció un año y medio en la cárcel y en un centro de detención para migrantes antes de ser deportado.

Independientemente de cómo la gente opine sobre la inmigración, hace mucho tiempo que jueces y legisladores en toda la nación han reconocido que el empleo de trabajadores no autorizados es una realidad de la economía estadounidense. Desde martillar las tablillas de los tejados a limpiar cuartos de hotel, alrededor de 8 millones de inmigrantes en el país trabajan sin papeles o con papeles falsos, y los estudios académicos muestran que son más propensos a sufrir lesiones o morir en el trabajo que otros trabajadores. Como resultado, a través de los años casi todos los cincuenta estados, incluida Florida, han dado a estos obreros el derecho a recibir compensación laboral.

Pero en 2003, los legisladores de Florida crearon una trampa, introduciendo como delito el acto de solicitar compensación laboral usando identificación falsa. Desde entonces, las aseguradoras han evitado pagar por la pérdida de salario y la atención medica denunciando repetidamente a los trabajadores inmigrantes lesionados a las autoridades estatales.

Trabajadores como Arias han sido acusados del crimen de fraude al sistema de compensación laboral, aunque sus lesiones son reales y ocurrieron durante el trabajo. Y en un embrolloso giro de lógica, se puede acusar a inmigrantes por fraude de compensación laboral aunque nunca hayan estado lesionados ni hayan reclamado beneficios, porque los legisladores también hicieron ilegal el uso de un documento de identidad falso para conseguir un empleo. En muchos casos, la unidad estatal de fraude de seguros ha llevado a cabo redadas inusuales en lugares de empleo, deteniendo a una docena de empleados por fraude al sistema de compensación laboral después de tan solo examinar sus números de seguridad social.

Lo que ha estado pasando silenciosamente a los trabajadores en Florida, sin llamar la atención ni siquiera de activistas para los derechos de los inmigrantes, puede ser un presagio del futuro con la entrada en vigor de la expansión de vigilancia de la inmigración bajo el Presidente Donald Trump.

Una de las primeras órdenes ejecutivas de Trump amplió las prioridades de Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, el servicio de vigilancia de inmigración y aduanas) para incluir no solo a los inmigrantes condenados o acusados de un delito, sino cualquiera bajo sospecha de haber cometido un delito. La orden también aplica cualquier persona “que haya cometido fraude o descripción intencionalmente engañosa ante una agencia gubernamental.” Este lenguaje podría arrastrar a un número sin fin de trabajadores lesionados e indocumentados porque las agencias estatales de compensación laboral y los centros médicos normalmente piden los números de seguridad social como parte del proceso de reclamación de beneficios.

En los últimos meses, un trabajador de construcción en Massachusetts quien se fracturó el fémur al caerse de una escalera fue detenido por el ICE justo después de reunirse con su jefe para pedir ayuda por su lesión. En Ohio, legisladores republicanos impulsaron un proyecto de ley que hubiera prohibido a los trabajadores indocumentados recibir compensación laboral. Fue aprobada por la casa de representantes del estado antes de ser frenada en el senado en junio.

Para evaluar el impacto de la ley de Florida sobre los trabajadores indocumentados, Propublica y NPR analizaron datos de fraude de seguros en el estado y miles de páginas de archivos judiciales representando un periodo de 14 años. Encontramos casi 800 casos en todo el estado en que los empleados fueron arrestados bajo la ley en cuestión, incluidos al menos 130 trabajadores lesionados. Otros 125 trabajadores fueron arrestados después de que la lesión de un obrero en su sitio de trabajo impulsó el estado a verificar los archivos de plantilla de otros empleados. Las aseguradoras han utilizado la ley para negarle beneficios a trabajadores después de una letanía de lesiones laborales serias, desde caídas de tejados a fuertes descargas eléctricas. Una pintora de casas fue rechazada después de ser atravesada por una estaca de madera.

Alertados por aseguradoras o sus detectives privados, investigadores estatales de fraude han detenido a empleados lesionados durante sus citas médicas y mientras prestaban declaración en sus casos de compensación laboral. Algunos fueron detenidos con sus brazos todavía en cabestrillos. Al menos uno de cada cuatro de los detenidos fueron subsecuentemente detenidos por el ICE y deportados.

Los funcionarios estatales defendieron sus tareas de vigilancia, señalando que los trabajadores, lesionados o no, violaron la ley y podían haber causado daños financieros si los números de seguridad social que estaban usando pertenecían a otra persona. Además, la ley obliga a las aseguradoras a denunciar a cualquier trabajador sospechado de fraude.

“No tenemos la autoridad ni la responsabilidad de salir y empezar a analizar la motivación de una aseguradora o de cualquier otro cuando nos entregan una denuncia,” dijo Simon Blank, director de la unidad de fraude de seguros de Florida. “Sería desafortunado,” dijo, si las aseguradoras denunciaran a trabajadores lesionados “solo para deshacerse de las demandas.”

Blank insistió en que los esfuerzos de sus investigadores no tienen nada que ver con la inmigración. Pero el análisis de ProPublica y NPR determinó que más del 99 por ciento de los trabajadores detenidos bajo la ley fueron inmigrantes hispanos trabajando con papeles falsos.

Si bien la legislación de Florida es singular, las aseguradoras, conservadores de línea dura y algunos grandes empleadores han estado luchando en todo el país durante los últimos 15 años para negar compensación por lesiones a inmigrantes indocumentados, con éxito ocasional. En un dictamen que recibió poca atención el otoño pasado, una comisión internacional de derechos humanos criticó a los Estados Unidos por violar los derechos de inmigrantes no autorizados, incluidos un recolector de manzanas en Pennsylvania que fue forzado a aceptar un acuerdo de su caso que representaba una fracción de los costos de su lesión, y un pintor de Kansas quien no pudo conseguir que le sacaran el molde de yeso de su mano fracturada hasta ser deportado a México.

En Florida, casos contra este tipo de trabajadores se han convertido en política habitual para un grupo de aseguradoras y empleadores cercanamente afiliados. La empresa de investigación privada que emplean ha creado un “muro de la vergüenza,” subiendo a su sitio de internet las detenciones en que ha estado involucrada. Los críticos dicen que esta alianza alienta a los empleadores a contratar inmigrantes no autorizados, sabiendo que no tendrán que pagar por sus lesiones si se hacen daño en el trabajo.

“Enfurece pensar que cuando los trabajadores se hacen daño en Estados Unidos, son básicamente desechados,” dijo David Michaels, el más reciente jefe de la Occupational Health and Safety Administration (administración federal de seguridad y salud laboral.) “¿Si los empleadores saben que los obreros tienen demasiado miedo para solicitar compensación laboral, cuál es el incentivo para trabajar de forma segura?”

Las repercusiones de la ley en la vida real sorprendieron a uno de los abogados quien ayudó a redactarla y que no tenía ni idea de que había sido usada para acusar a cientos de trabajadores que nunca habían sufrido lesiones en el trabajo.

“¿Cómo puede haber fraude de seguros si no hay una demanda de compensación?” preguntó Mary Ann Stiles, una veterana representante de empresarios y abogada de defensa en casos de compensación laboral. “Esto no es lo que quienquiera pretendía que fuera.”

En el caso de Arias, los archivos muestran que nunca escribió el número de seguridad social falso en ninguna de los varios formularios relacionados con su demanda. Fue impreso automáticamente por la aseguradora, usando información de su empleador. Pero eso no impidió al fiscal del estado de acusarle de 42 delitos de fraude de seguros — uno por cada formulario en que apareció el número.

Como parte de la acusación penal, investigadores exigieron que Arias devolviera $38,490.51 a Normandy Harbor Insurance para la atención médica y los cheques de compensación que ya había recibido por su lesión. La aseguradora se negó a hacer comentarios sobre el asunto. De vuelta en Honduras, Arias, quien padece todavía de dolor crónico de espalda, no ha podido encontrar más que trabajos esporádicos. Y no ha visto a sus tres hijos nacidos en los Estados Unidos en más de dos años.

Todo el tiempo en detención “siempre estaba preguntando, ‘¿Por qué estaba allá? Me preguntaba ¿por qué razón? No he hecho nada. No he robado. No he matado,” dijo Arias por teléfono desde su pueblo rural en el estado de Copán. “Solo estaba haciendo mi trabajo- por mis hijos.”

El sitio web de Command Investigations, ubicado muy cerca de Orlando, se jacta de su éxito en dar caza al fraude de compensación laboral, mostrando una galería poco halagadora de fotos policiales de hombres y mujeres, en su mayoría hispanos, como si fueran trofeos. Pero la mayoría no fueron pillados haciendo motociclismo acuático mientras fingían lesiones de rodilla. Son trabajadores que sufrieron lesiones legítimas a quienes investigadores de Command cazaron usando números falsos de seguridad social.

Command, que delató a Arias al estado, abrió sus puertas en 2012 y se destacó rápidamente en Florida ofreciendo sus servicios a la lucrativa industria de arrendamiento de empleados. A diferencia de las agencias temporales, que encuentran trabajadores y los ofrecen a empresas, las empresas de arrendamiento de empleados prometen bajar los gastos de las compañías por un sistema de contratar a los empleados en teoría, y después alquilarles a los empleadores. El planteo básico es que, compartiendo el riesgo de varias empresas pequeñas, las empresas de arrendamiento de empleados pueden negociar mejores tasas de seguros. Este arreglo es especialmente atractivo para empresas familiares en industrias peligrosas, como la construcción

Uno de los primeros grandes clientes de Command fue Lion Insurance, cuya afiliada, SouthEast Personnel Leasing, que ejerce como el empleador formal de más de 200,000 empleados en toda la nación. Según su sitio en Internet, SouthEast genera $2.3 mil millones en ganancias anuales – más o menos los mismos ingresos que la empresa de ropa J. Crew o la cadena de restaurantes Red Lobster.

Desde 2013, casi el 75 por ciento de los inmigrantes detenidos en Florida por usar tarjetas de identificación falsas fueron delatados por Command – y la mitad trabajaba para SouthEast, según determinaron ProPublica y NPR. SouthEast ha tenido 43 trabajadores lesionados detenidos por usar números de seguridad social falsos – más que cualquier otra empresa.

Una razón: SouthEast, así como su aseguradora, Lion, y su procesador de demandas, Packard Claims, son todas propiedad de la misma persona. Este arreglo inusual da a la empresa más control sobre las demandas por lesiones y una consistencia que no pueden proveer otras empresas especializadas en industrias de alto riesgo. Pero los críticos dicen que beneficia a SouthEast en más formas perniciosas: Saber que Lion y Packard pueden rechazar las demandas de trabajadores no autorizados permite a SouthEast ofrecer descuentos a sus clientes que no son posibles para las otras empresas de arrendamiento de empleados.

“Contratan a estas empresas sabiendo perfectamente que el 95 por ciento de los empleados son trabajadores inmigrantes,” dijo Cora Cisneros Molloy, quien recientemente empezó a representar a trabajadores lesionados después de dos décadas defendiendo a empleadores y aseguradoras. “Solo después de que sucede un accidente determinan que van a hacer una investigación y verificar el número de seguridad social.”

El que controla este imperio desde un edificio de seis plantas rodeado de palmeras en Holiday, Florida, es John Porecca, 68, quien creció en Philadelphia y trabajó en la industria del arrendamiento antes de comprar SouthEast con su esposa en 1995. A pesar de ser el dueño de una de las empresas privadas más grandes de Florida, Porreca ha logrado mantenerse fura del ojo público, apareciendo solo rara vez en la prensa local, como cuando donó dinero para un campo de béisbol para niños minusválidos o compró una mansión en la playa por $4 millones cuyo tamaño molestó a los vecinos.

Porreca no respondió a múltiples mensajes dejados en su oficina o en su casa durante un mes. En un correo electrónico, Brian Evans, un abogado de SouthEast, dijo que Porreca declinaba hacer comentarios excepto decir que SouthEast se “adhiere estrictamente” a la ley y no es responsable por lo que suceda a sus trabajadores, aunque los investigadores de la compañía les delataron al gobierno del estado.

El presidente de Command, Steve Cassell, también declinó solicitudes para una entrevista, alegando acuerdos de confidencialidad con sus clientes.

Bram Gechtman, un abogado de Miami quien ha representado a varios trabajadores lesionados de SouthEast, dijo que el número impresionante de casos en que Lion y Packard han descubierto los documentos de identificación falsos de trabajadores solo después de que se lesionaran exige preguntar porque SouthEast no hace más para filtrar a sus contratados.

“Si yo tuviera una situación en la que tenía a toda esta gente defraudando a mi compañía una y otra y otra vez, supuestamente, haría algo para intentar frenarlo,” dijo, “al menos que hubiera otra razón por la que yo no quisiera que parara.”

Command y SouthEast se han expandido recientemente a otros estados. El año pasado, una mujer en Georgia fue detenida por robo de identidad después de que un carrito atropelló su pie en una planta de envasado de carne y Command la entregó a la oficina de compensación laboral del estado. En California, dos agencias de empleo demandaron a SouthEast, alegando que su procesador de demandas rutinariamente rechazaba las reclamaciones de compensación de trabajadores basándose en su estatus migratorio, fomentando litigios que aumentaron el costo de las demandas.

Para los trabajadores, aceptados sin preguntas hasta que se lesionan, ser atrapados en la red de Command y Southeast, puede volcar unas vidas que habían sido tranquilas. Berneth Javier Castro vino originalmente a los Estados Unidos con un visado de turista en 2005 buscando a la mujer que había querido y perdido durante la guerra en Nicaragua en los años 80.

Incapaz de encontrarla y enfrentando deudas en su país por su casa y la escuela de su hija, Castro, quien ahora tiene 52 años, se quedó después del vencimiento de su visado y encontró trabajo en una empresa de arreglos de tejados en St. Augustine en 2007. Inicialmente, le pagaban en efectivo bajo la mesa. Pero después de unos meses, la empresa dijo que le hacía falta una tarjeta de seguridad social para seguir trabajando. Así que compró una. “Era la única forma como podía conseguir trabajo,” dijo.

En 2011, Castro reconectó finalmente con Lucía Escobar usando tecnología moderna — la encontró en Facebook. Escobar, 48, quien había recibido asilo político y es ahora una ciudadana de Estados Unidos, se estaba divorciando. Empezaron a hablar todos los días y planificaron juntarse una vez que el divorcio fuera definitivo.

Como muchos trabajadores no autorizados, Castro temía ser deportado si informaba que había sufrido una lesión. Así que cuando se cortó el dedo meñique con unas chapas de cobre y recibió nueve puntos de sutura, se quedó callado y siguió trabajando. Pero unos meses después, cuando se torció la espalda pasando una carga de baldosas a un compañero sobre un tejado, la compañía le mandó a una clínica.

Allí, un representante de la compañía rellenó el formulario porque estaba escrito en inglés, dijo Castro. Como no se acordaba del número de seguridad social que había usado, el representante lo consiguió de la empresa y lo puso en el formulario.

La clínica le dio a Castro unas pastillas para el dolor. Pero cuando volvió para una cita de seguimiento, le dijeron que había un problema con su número de seguridad social. Castro nunca volvió y trató su espalda con almohadillas térmicas y bálsamos para aliviar el dolor. Dio el asunto por zanjado y continuó trabajando para la compañía durante casi un año.

Entonces en noviembre de 2013, investigadores estatales se presentaron en su casa y lo detuvieron por fraude de seguros. Había sido delatado por un investigador de Command que estaba trabajando para Lion.

La denuncia por fraude de compensación laboral finalmente fue retirada, pero Castro aceptó una acusación por utilizar fraudulentamente la identidad de otra persona. Pasó cinco meses en la cárcel y estaba enfrentando una posible deportación cuando un juez le aprobó una salida voluntaria a Nicaragua.

“Lo del número falso lo entendí pero necesitaba trabajar, pero lo otro no lo entendí, porque de donde iba yo a cometer un fraude,” dijo Castro por teléfono desde Managua. “No soy tan irracional como para no entender eso. No soy un criminal. Entonces no entendía dónde podría haber cometido fraude. Yo no pedí nada de eso. Yo nunca ni aun rellené un documento reclamando compensación por algo.”

Escobar sospechó que algo estaba mal cuando de repente no tuvo más noticias de él. Entonces el teléfono de él fue desconectado. “Todos los días yo entraba en Facebook, esperando y le escribía,” dijo.

Meses después, cuando finalmente él la llamó desde Nicaragua, ella estaba aliviada y abatida a la vez. En 2015 después de que su divorcio fue definitivo, voló a Nicaragua y se casó con él. Pero todavía viven separados, Castro en Nicaragua y Escobar en las afueras de Miami, donde cuida a su nieto. Están solicitando para el retorno de Castro, pero la condena podría ser un obstáculo.

“Es triste, porque cuando uno se casa, uno quiere estar con su esposo,” dijo Escobar. “y nosotros esperamos mucho tiempo para estar juntos.”

A través de los años, muchos tribunales han ratificado los derechos de los trabajadores no autorizados a recibir compensación por lesiones en el lugar de trabajo, al sueldo mínimo, y a ser protegidos contra represalias por unirse a un sindicato. Estos derechos se derivan de su estatus como empleados sin importar su estatus como inmigrantes.

Una corte de apelaciones de Florida, por ejemplo, dictaminó en 1982 que “un extranjero ilegalmente en este país” tenía derecho a beneficios de compensación laboral.

Se arrojó duda sobre esta presunción en 2002 cuando la Corte Suprema de Estados Unidos emitió un fallo diciendo que un grupo de trabajadores indocumentados en una empresa de plásticos que habían sido despedidos por actividad sindical no tenían derecho a pagos atrasados por su estatus migratorio. Las aseguradoras y los grandes empleadores inmediatamente inundaron los tribunales con solicitudes diseñadas para arrancar protecciones laborales de los inmigrantes no autorizados. Las empresas de arrendamiento de empleados encabezaron la lucha en Florida.

Los demandantes argumentaron que los inmigrantes indocumentados no tenían derecho a compensación laboral porque su empleo había sido obtenido ilegalmente. Legisladores en varios estados, desde Colorado a North Carolina, presentaron proyectos de ley para bloquear las demandas de trabajadores no autorizados.

Cuando los tribunales y las legislaturas estatales empezaron a rechazar este argumento, las aseguradoras empezaron a presionar para denegar compensación por discapacidad a inmigrantes, argumentando que una vez que su estatus de indocumentados era conocido, no podían volver, como otros trabajadores, a trabajos menos intensivos. Este razonamiento tuvo éxito en Michigan y Pennsylvania, pero no en Delaware y Tennessee.

En los últimos años, los empleadores y las aseguradoras han empezado a utilizar una nueva táctica, argumentando que solo tendrían que tener responsabilidad para pagar la pérdida de salario basándose en lo que el inmigrante hubiera ganado en su país de origen. En Nebraska, por ejemplo, la envasadora de carne Cargill intentó cortar los beneficios a Odilón Visoso, que se lesionó cuando un trozo de carne de res de 200 libras cayó encima de su cabeza, diciendo que era demasiado difícil determinar lo que podía ganar en Chilpancingo, México, una ciudad azotada por el crimen y controlada por los carteles de la droga cerca de su pueblo rural en las montañas. La Corte Suprema de Nebraska dijo a la empresa que usara los sueldos de Nebraska.

La ley de Florida de 2003 fue parte de una revisión profunda con el fin de bajar gastos para los empleadores. Según un análisis del senado estatal, la división de fraude de seguros había presionado para la disposición, argumentando que “muchas veces los extranjeros ilegales están aliados con médicos poco éticos y abogados que defraudan el sistema de compensación laboral.” Era más fácil demostrar que los inmigrantes habían mentido sobre sus identidades, dijo la agencia, que probar que sus lesiones eran falsas.

En entrevistas recientes, sin embargo, representantes de la unidad estatal de fraude y de la industria de seguros no pudieron identificar ni un solo caso en que inmigrantes hubieran conspirado con médicos y abogados para defraudar al sistema de compensación laboral. En vez de eso, notaron que los números de seguridad social falsos dañan la capacidad de las aseguradoras de investigar las demandas. Además, dijeron, estas demandas podrían impedir a la gente cuyas identidades fueron robadas recibir beneficios si sufren lesiones en el futuro.

Stiles, la abogada que fue clave en el diseño de la ley, dijo que la industria de la construcción del estado estaba permeada por fraude en aquella época, y que había mucha preocupación con la inmigración ilegal. Dijo que hasta a los inmigrantes que están “realmente lesionados” tendría que denegárseles la compensación si están usando documentos ilegales para su demanda y “que no deberían que estar aquí para empezar.”

“Creo que somos una nación de leyes y que deberíamos poder aplicar esas leyes,” dijo. “Y si el gobierno federal no lo va hacer, algunas veces el estado se tiene que ayudar a sí mismo.”

Meses después de que la ley fuera aprobada, sin embargo, el comité de las industrias bancarias y de seguros del senado recomendó reconsiderarla, expresando preocupación por la posibilidad de que trabajadores con lesiones legítimas pudieran ser descalificados. Pero estos consejos nunca fueron tenidos en cuenta. Los primeros casos penales bajo la ley aparecieron en 2006. La ley atrapó a obreros, jornaleros agrícolas, techadores y jardineros. Algunos, como Arias, se lesionaron mientras trabajaban en proyectos públicos – renovar escuelas o poner concreto en el zoológico. Pero ProPublica y NPR también encontraron trabajadores detenidos que habían sido lesionados en McDonald’s y Best Western y delatados por grandes compañías de seguros como Travelers, The Hartford y Zurich.

En un caso, investigadores estatales descubrieron que más de 100 trabajadores estaban todos usando un número de seguridad social que pertenecía a una niña de 10 años.

En otro en 2014, el abogado de un trabajador lesionado se quejó al estado de que una empresa envasadora de frutas frecuentemente usaba el estatus migratorio como elemento de presión en los acuerdos legales. En vez de sancionar a la empresa, los investigadores hicieron una redada en la planta y detuvieron a 106 inmigrantes, incluida la esposa del hombre lesionado.

Uno de los primeros casos de SouthEast involucraba a una limpiadora de hotel en el Comfort Suites de Vero Beach. Yuliana Rocha Zamarripa estaba limpiando un cuarto de hotel en 2010 cuando resbaló sobre el suelo del baño y golpeó su rodilla contra la bañera, dejándola con un dolor y una inflamación tan intensos que no era capaz de caminar.

Lion la mandó a un médico, pero rechazó rápidamente su demanda, basándose en un número de seguridad social falso.

La madre de Rocha la había traído a Estados Unidos desde Mexico cuando tenía 13 años, y cuando cumplió 17 su padre le compró el documento de identidad falso para que pudiera trabajar.

Con pocas opciones, Rocha, quien ahora tiene 32, llegó a un acuerdo en su caso de compensación laboral por menos de $6,000 más gastos de abogados. Pero nunca recibió la atención medica que necesitaba. La semana anterior a la que tenía que recibir el cheque, fue detenida mientras preparaba el desayuno para su hijo de 4 años.

Rocha pasó el siguiente año rotando entre la cárcel y el centro de detención del servicio de inmigración, separada de sus tres hijos. No podía dormir por la preocupación de que les pasaría a ellos si fuera deportada.

“Yo todo el tiempo hacía la oración de Padre Nuestro, y al final yo pedía, Padre Mío dame una oportunidad de regresar con mis hijos. No permitas que les pase nada malo,” dijo. “Yo tenía el presentimiento de algo.”

Los instintos de Rocha eran acertados. Mientras estaba en la cárcel, el padre de sus hijos empezó a abusar sexualmente de su hija de 10 años, según su orden de arresto. “Yo me quedaba, pues, destrozada,” dijo Rocha en lágrimas, “porque no sabía que pasaba.”

Con la ayuda de un abogado, Rocha se declaró culpable de un cargo menor — perjurio fuera de un procedimiento oficial — y fue finalmente liberada. A causa de lo que le pasó a su hija, su abogado logró cancelar la deportación de Rocha y ayudarle a conseguir una tarjeta verde.

Rocha recibió finalmente el monto del acuerdo laboral pero tuvo que gastarlo todo en solicitar su liberación y tratar con el servicio de inmigración. Ahora cojea porque su lesión no se curó correctamente.

“Pienso que es una injusticia lo que me pasó,” dijo. “solo porque me caí, me resbalé.”

La operación encubierta había sido meticulosamente planificada durante semanas. El día anterior, los detectives habían investigado el lugar – una oficina de dos pisos que parece una mansión colonial española cerca del centro de Fort Myers. Antes de la detención, se escondieron para vigilar la puerta trasera del edificio desde el otro lado de la calle, según el reporte del caso del detective.

El tiempo y los recursos humanos no eran para agarrar a un pandillero o a un narcotraficante, era un operativo coordinado con Command para atrapar a un techador de 26 años que estaba en la oficina de un taquígrafo del tribunal para prestar declaración en una deposición para su caso de compensación laboral. Un año antes, en 2014, Erik Martínez estaba trabajando sobre un tejado cuando un clavo rebotó y le pegó en el ojo izquierdo. Estaba solicitando atención médica y salario no percibido, pero, como muchos obreros de la construcción, estaba usando un número de seguridad social falso.

Aunque era ostensiblemente un operativo del Departamento de Servicios Financieros de Florida, un detective estatal había trabajado estrechamente con un abogado de Lion en un plan para alertar a los agentes en los minutos finales de la declaración. Entre preguntas, el abogado mandaba correos electrónicos al detective, en un momento dado proporcionando una descripción de la ropa de Martínez.

“Cambiamos nuestra posición al estacionamiento de atrás,” escribió el detective en su informe, “donde esperamos el aviso de que la deposición estaba acercándose a su fin.” Al recibir confirmación, los detectives entraron en acción, deteniendo a Martínez mientras salía de la oficina.

A pesar del esfuerzo exhaustivo, el procurador del estado decidió no poner cargos penales. Pero la narrativa escrita por el detective revela una historia más grande: en la mayoría de los casos de lesiones analizados por ProPublica y NPR, los detectives de la unidad estatal de fraude recibieron un paquete de los investigadores privados que contenía casi toda la información que hacía falta para hacer un arresto.

Durante una entrevista de una hora en Tallahassee, Simon Blank, quien lidera la División de Servicios Investigativos y Forenses del departamento, dijo que sus detectives dirigen sus propias investigaciones y toman sus propias decisiones. Los arrestos en declaraciones, dijo, solo ocurren cuando tienen dificultades en localizar a alguien.

“La cosa que tienes que tener en cuenta es que esta gente está cometiendo robo de identidad,” dijo Blank. “Están arrebatando el número de seguridad social de alguien o la información personal de alguien para obtener trabajo.”

Aunque Blank expresó repetidamente su compasión por los trabajadores inmigrantes que sufren lesiones legítimas, notó que la gente cuyos números de seguridad social están siendo usados podrían enfrentar problemas con su situación de crédito o consiguiendo atención medica si una demanda que no es suya aparece en su historial.

Vendidos por Piezas

Una de las empresas más peligrosas en los Estados Unidos se aprovechó de trabajadores inmigrantes. Después, cuando se hicieron daño o se resistieron, la empresa utilizó las leyes americanas contra ellos. Leer en Español.

La viuda de un hombre de Mississippi cuyo número de seguridad social Arias estaba usando, Carolyn Lasseter, dijo que no le había afectado, pero que no “siente pena por la gente que están por aquí ilegalmente.” Cuando compró una casa después de la muerte de su marido, el banco le informó que otro hombre había usado su número para sacar, y pagar, un préstamo, pero el asunto fue arreglado fácilmente.

La oficina de Blank ha sido acusada por algunos abogados de violar la Constitución al utilizar la ley de compensación laboral para perseguir delitos de inmigración. “La intención verdadera detrás de lo que están haciendo es regular la inmigración,” dijo Jimmy Benincasa, un abogado de inmigración de Florida, “porque no creen que el gobierno federal este haciendo lo suficiente.”

Él y otros señalan un fallo de la Corte Suprema de Estados Unidos de 2012 que derribó una serie de leyes de inmigración de Arizona, incluyendo una que penalizaba como delito el intento de inmigrantes no autorizados de buscar, solicitar o desempeñar un trabajo.

“El Congreso decidió que sería inapropiado imponer sanciones criminales contra extranjeros que buscan o realizan trabajo no autorizado,” la corte escribió. “Por consecuencia, una ley estatal que va en el sentido contrario es un obstáculo al sistema regulatorio escogido por el Congreso.”

La corte notó que mientras la ley federal designa como delito obtener empleo a través de métodos fraudulentos, los formularios y documentos que los trabajadores entregan para conseguir empleos solo se pueden usar para acusaciones federales – no para vigilancia de la ley a nivel estatal.

“Nuestra agencia no está en el negocio de perseguir a gente ilegal,” dijo Blank. “Hay bastantes otras circunstancias por las que la gente usa nombres e identificaciones y números de seguridad falsos aparte de inmigración. Tienes a gente que puede tener otros problemas legales. Tienes a gente que podría tener otros problemas legales. Tienes gente que quiere quedar fuera de los registros para razones específicas, ya sea divorcios o retenciones por deudas.”

Entre los casi 800 casos que ProPublica y NPR identificaron, solo cinco se ajustaban a las razones que Blank citó. Blank no parecía estar al tanto de que un informe anual de su propia oficina este año notó que “casi el 100 por ciento” de los sospechosos investigados bajo la ley eran trabajadores indocumentados.

“Parece que se está aplicando en una forma discriminatoria,” dijo Dennis Burke, el ex fiscal federal de Arizona que impugnó las leyes de inmigración de aquel estado. “¿Cómo justificas que tus órdenes de ejecución tienen un 99 por ciento de apellidos latinos?”

Burke pronosticó que será difícil para Florida defender la ley si en algún momento se cuestiona por razones constitucionales. Después del fallo de Arizona en 2012, un abogado impugnó la constitucionalidad de la legislación de Florida, pero las cortes supremas de Florida y Estados Unidos no aceptaron revisar la apelación. A diferencia de la ley de Arizona, la ley de Florida no menciona específicamente a los inmigrantes. Pero Burke dijo que los datos de sanciones penales y la intención fijada de perseguir a redes de inmigrantes defraudadores son problemáticos.

Puesto al tanto de lo que le había pasado a algunos de los trabajadores detenidos, Blank dijo que sentía pena por esta gente pero reiteró que la obligación de su agencia es proteger el sistema de compensación laboral.

“Supongo que es una pregunta que nuestra legislatura tal vez tendría que examinar,” dijo. “¿Cuál es el balance entre el daño y el beneficio que está siendo realizado?”

Juvenal Domínguez Quino está preocupado por lo que pasará a su hijo de 8 años con necesidades especiales si le deportan. Domínguez, 43, ha vivido en los Estados Unidos durante 19 años. Pero su vida cayó en la incertidumbre en 2014 cuando una trinchera de construcción en que estaba trabajando colapsó, enterrándole en tierra y causándole un esguince de rodilla.

Un mes después, Command le delató a investigadores estatales después de que otorgó un número falso de seguridad social a un perito de seguros. Domínguez dijo que explicó al perito que no tenía papeles e inventó el número para trabajar — detalles que por sí solos no le iban a excluir de recibir compensación laboral. Pero Domínguez dijo que el perito insistió que necesitaba el numero para pagarle sus beneficios. Sunz Insurance y North American Risk Services, que tramitaron la demanda, se negaron a comentar.

Domínguez fue detenido en enero de 2015 mientras preparaba a su hijo para el colegio.

“Mi niño estaba viendo” desde una ventana, dijo con un sollozo. “Él vio cuando me agarraron.”

En aquella época, Domínguez todavía no podía doblar su rodilla, así que tuvo que sentarse con sus piernas extendidas sobre el asiento trasero del vehículo de la policia.

Domínguez aceptó la acusación, y el juez impuso una sentencia de dos años bajo supervisión judicial y le ordenó que pagara casi $19,000 en restitución a la aseguradora. Fue detenido por el ICE y puesto en proceso para deportación.

Michael DiGiacomo, el dueño de Platinum Construction, que empleaba a Domínguez, se sorprendió al escuchar lo que le había pasado. DiGiacomo dijo que Domínguez era un trabajador fiable, y que no sabía que sus documentos eran falsos. Después de que Domínguez se hizo daño, dijo, su lesión estaba en manos de la empresa de arrendamiento y la aseguradora de esta.

“Realmente da bronca por él porque, sabes, vienes y quieres trabajar; da bronca tener que lidiar con eso después de hacerte daño,” dijo. “Al menos tendrían que pagar sus facturas médicas porque se lesionó en el trabajo.”

El abogado de Domínguez ha solicitado a un juez cancelar su deportación por el impacto dañino que iba a tener en su hijo nacido en los Estados Unidos. Su abogado tiene esperanza de que conseguirá un visado para quedarse.

Aunque lo logre, la aseguradora se anotó una victoria — consiguió deshacerse de Domínguez y sus gastos médicos. “No quería hacer nada más de nada,” dijo de su terapia física. “No quería reclamar nada más. Quería vivir con ello nomás porque sabía que solo me iba a traer más problemas.”

El abogado de Arias, Brian Carter, dijo que lo que están haciendo el estado y las aseguradoras es inducción y discriminación por etnia.

“Nadie verifica si el número de seguridad social es válido para un individuo que se llama Tom Smith,” dijo. “Las aseguradoras están utilizando ese pequeño asunto de un número de seguridad social para evitar cualquier responsabilidad financiera, y en mi opinión, ética para cuidar a estos individuos.”

Al final, delatar a Arias no fue suficiente para que la aseguradora pudiera zafarse. Como el fiscal estatal ofreció un acuerdo judicial, Normandy tendría que haber convencido a un juez de compensación laboral que Arias no solo había usado un número de seguridad social falso, sino que lo había hecho para obtener beneficios. De no conseguirlo, la empresa tendría que haber pagado por atención médica y pérdida de salario que potencialmente sumarían cientos de miles de dólares, dijo Carter. Con Arias en Honduras, Normandy ofreció $49,000 más gastos de abogado.

Devuelto a un país donde no había vivido por 15 años, Arias sintió que no tenía opción más que aceptar la oferta. “Llegué con mis manos vacías,” dijo. “Sin cobijo, con nada para comprar medicamentos, ni siquiera para comer.”

A pesar de tener el dinero del acuerdo, Arias dijo que no se fía de los médicos en Honduras para hacer una cirugía de espalda delicada. “Aquí más rápido lo llevan a uno al cementerio,” dijo. Espera que Estados Unidos pueda permitirle volver por razones humanitarias, solo para permitirle tener la operación – y quizás ver a sus niños.

Meg Anderson y Graham Bishai de NPR y Sarah Betancourt de ProPublica contribuyeron con trabajo de investigación. Donatella Ungredda contribuyó servicios de traducción.

Traducción al español por Carmen Méndez.

¿Tiene usted información sobre cómo se trata a los trabajadores inmigrantes en la época de Trump? Contacte con Michael en michael.grabell@propublica.org.

by Ken Schwencke

This story has been updated.

In a surprise move, the web services company Cloudflare has ended its relationship with The Daily Stormer, taking the leading neo-Nazi site off the internet for the second time this week.

Cloudflare protects websites against common forms of attack, including denial of service, which is known as DDOS.

“I have effectively been banned by ICANN and the monopolistic anti-ddosing service Cloudflare,” wrote Andrew Anglin, who runs the site. ICANN is the acronym for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, an international technical body that runs the Domain Name System, a critical piece of the internet’s traffic flow that links domain names with server addresses.

“Cloudflare just folded on us. Into new territory,” wrote Andrew Auernheimer, the architect of the site. According to both Auernheimer and a former Cloudflare employee, The Daily Stormer relied on the company’s services to stay online.

Cloudflare’s decision to drop the neo-Nazi site comes at a time when tech companies are under intense pressure to curtail white supremacist activity. ProPublica has previously written about the company’s willingness to provide services to the white supremacist site.

Anglin and Auernheimer’s comments were made on an obscure social media service called Gab. The Daily Stormer’s Twitter accounts have been suspended.

ProPublica has reached out to The Daily Stormer. We’ve also attempted to reach Cloudflare representatives using multiple email addresses and phone numbers. So far, we have received no response.

Queries to Cloudflare’s domain system, which routes domain names like “dailystormer.com” to their locations on the web, returned a “REFUSED” response, which indicates the service no longer claims responsibility for the domain.

Cloudflare joins a long list of services from which the site has been banned. PayPal, GoDaddy, Google and Twitter have all previously suspended The Daily Stormer in one way or another. Many did so after the site posted a story mocking the appearance of Heather Heyer, the young woman killed after a white supremacist in Charlottesville drove a car into a crowd of counter-protesters.

It is unusual for Cloudflare to ban a controversial customer. In the past, the service has defended providing services to websites that espouse racist ideologies.

“A website is speech. It is not a bomb,” Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a 2013 blog post defending his company’s stance. “There is no imminent danger it creates and no provider has an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about the theoretically harmful nature of speech a site may contain.”

In an interview in May, Prince told ProPublica that his company wouldn’t bar customers without a court order, or unless they proved to be a technical threat.

“Whenever you have a private organization which is making what are essentially law enforcement decisions, that is a risk to due process. And I think due process is important,” Prince said in the interview.

It is unclear why Cloudflare chose now to cut off service to the site. Stormfront, one of the oldest white supremacist sites, is still online and using Cloudflare services. The same is true for The Right Stuff, a newer site that hosts an anti-Semitic podcast.

The reaction from those on the far right was swift.

“This is fucking serious. 8/12 changed everything,” tweeted Pax Dickinson, a lead technical voice for the far right, referencing the Charlottesville rally.

Update, Aug. 16, 2017: Gizmodo has published an internal email in which Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince explains why the company terminated service: “the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes and I’d had enough.”

by Alec MacGillis

We were all in the dark, on the edge of the wooded park known as Wyman Dell, opposite the Baltimore Museum of Art. It was 2 a.m. Wednesday, and despite the presence of a couple of dozen workers in hardhats, a huge crane, a flatbed truck and a couple of other pieces of heavy machinery, the work site, surrounded by police tape, was remarkably still.

All of us — the workers, the cops, the mayor, scattered reporters and onlookers — watched the focus of the work, an imposing sculpture of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, each on his horse. The crane lowered a big harness dangling from a red metal hook. One worker clambered up on a ladder to fit the harness around the prodigious girth of the generals’ steeds. There was much adjustment and anticipation.

Suddenly, with a lurch, up Lee and Jackson went, wrenched loose from the stone base where they had rested for nearly 70 years. They dangled a bit and then came the big swing up into the trees, making their horses look like nothing so much like flying twin Pegasuses with warriors mounted on their backs. And then they dropped to the ground, where, off of their stone base and in the shadow of the trees, the generals really did look awfully life-like, as if they might still be trotting across the battlefield at Chancellorsville.

This was what a stealth operation against one of the darkest legacies of American history looked like.

The fate of the double-equestrian statue had been in question for more than two years, ever since a white supremacist shot to death nine black churchgoers in a Charleston, South Carolina, church. It set off a citywide debate over four Baltimore monuments to the Southern cause in the Civil War. Then the deadly violence in Charlottesville last weekend, perpetrated by white supremacists trying to preserve a statue of Lee, galvanized the Baltimore City Council, which after a vigorous debate in open session voted unanimously on Monday to proceed with the removal.

The post-Charleston debate in Baltimore had been quite open, complete with letters to the editor, a task force and commission report, which had recommended the removal of the two most prominent of the four monuments.

But the actual removal was anything but public, which was a telling sign of what extraordinary divisions still linger from a war that concluded at Appomattox more than 150 years ago.

And yes, those divisions linger even in a city that was, technically, on the Union side in the Civil War. If anything, the complexities of war’s legacies in Baltimore demonstrate just how deeply those legacies are woven into the fabric of the country as a whole, and not only in the Deep South.

Why Baltimore?

Some historical context is in order. Maryland was still a slave-holding state at the outset of the Civil War, but Baltimore itself had, by virtue of being an industrial city that had grown up around mills and shipbuilding, relied far less on slavery than the plantations in the southern and eastern reaches of the state, a difference which had long caused friction between the upstart city and the plantation owners who dominated state government.

What slavery did exist in the city often took on an idiosyncratic nature, a fact that Frederick Douglass commented on when he arrived there from Maryland’s Eastern Shore — slaves in Baltimore were often held on a term basis resembling indentured servitude, or “worked out” to shipyards by owners who, in some cases, would let the slave keep some of his wages to save up toward purchasing freedom. By 1860, Baltimore had the largest concentration of freed blacks of any city — in the 1860 census, more than 90 percent of blacks counted in the city were free.

Regardless of its relative lack of reliance on slavery compared with cities further south, though, the city was, by 1860, starkly divided between unionists and secessionists; many of its merchant elite hailed from further south and entertained romantic sympathies for their home region. Politically, the city was so dominated by conservative Democrats (“Copperheads”) that Abraham Lincoln got fewer than 1,000 votes there in the 1860 election. The Baltimore Sun called his election an “offensive triumph,” labeled him an “exclusively sectional candidate” and warned that he would “rule with authority over the people of the sovereign states, who reject his principles and avowed policy as in direct conflict with their constitutional rights, their institutions, their interests, their equality in general confederacy, their honor, dignity and self-respect.” Not for nothing was Lincoln slipped secretly through Baltimore under the guard of Pinkerton detectives en route to Washington.

The rumblings of war greatly heightened the city’s internal tensions. When Lincoln called in April 1861 for 75,000 troops to protect Washington, a regiment from Massachusetts and unarmed volunteers from Pennsylvania were met with fierce resistance as they tried to transfer from one train station to another in Baltimore. Violence flared and, by day’s end, about a half-dozen soldiers and dozen local resisters were dead — that April 19 riot was, by some reckonings, the first blood of the Civil War. Maryland’s pro-slavery governor moved to destroy rail bridges into the city to bar further troops, but Lincoln trumped him by ordering that troops from then on bypass Baltimore by ship.

The state remained in the Union, but barely. Secessionist leaders pushed for a convention to vote on the matter, but there were by that point so many federal forces in Annapolis and Baltimore that the convention had to be held in Frederick, to the west, in relatively pro-Union territory. The vote failed, and on the train back east, federal forces arrested some pro-secession delegates, helping set in motion the debate over Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus. Baltimore’s mayor and police commissioners were also jailed. To further make his point, Lincoln famously had the cannons on Federal Hill, which protected Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, turned inward onto the restive city.

By some estimates, as many as 30,000 Maryland men are estimated to have fought for the Confederacy — though in making the case for the removal of two of the statues last year, the city’s task force on the issue asserted that those serving in the Union Army from the city had outnumbered those heading South by a 2-1 ratio. Regardless, the most consequential Confederate sympathizer lurking in the city was not a rebel soldier in arms but a native of nearby Harford County, John Wilkes Booth.

The tensions outlived the war. When Confederate soldiers returned home to the city, Unionists argued for their expulsion. Meanwhile, the city swelled with African Americans liberated from the plantations of Southern Maryland and points south, to the consternation of city leaders. “History furnishes … no record of a successful intermingling between the great divisions of mankind,” warned the Sun in 1865. Two decades later, the paper argued that the best solution would be to “let the colored people dissipate away.” But they did not: By 1890, 67,000 of the city’s 440,000 residents were black. By 1940, after the first wave of the Great Migration, Baltimore had the highest proportion of blacks of the country’s 10 biggest cities — a fifth of the city, 168,000 people. The mobilization for World War II brought tens of thousands more.

Documenting Hate

Hate crimes and bias incidents are a national problem, but there’s no reliable data on their nature or prevalence. We’re collecting reports to create a national database for use by journalists and civil-rights organizations. See the project.

Throughout these post-Civil War decades, the ghosts of the war lingered in the city, and concrete evidence for this were the monuments erected by wealthy Southern-sympathizers as they sought to rebrand the Lost Cause away from the defense of slavery and toward the defense of state’s rights. A statue of Roger Taney, the Supreme Court justice who authored the Dred Scott decision, went up in Annapolis in the 1870s; a replica eventually ended up in the heart of Baltimore’s elegant Mount Vernon Square, not far from the column that is the Washington Monument.

But the monument building far outlived the last Confederate widows: The biggest of them all was the double-equestrian sculpture of Lee and Jackson, and it was not commissioned until the 1920s and not completed (by a female sculptor, Laura Gardin Fraser, on a base designed by noted architect John Russell Pope) until 1948. It was hardly an accident that this giant piece (the first double-equestrian sculpture in the U.S.) was being constructed as Baltimore’s growing black population was forcing the issue around the city’s profound segregation, which was exacerbated by redlining and explicitly racist city ordinances and was already, by the 1940s, taking the next ugly turn toward panic-selling, block-busting and rampant white flight.

And the war did not just live on in the monuments. One year after the Lee-Jackson sculpture was completed, in 1949, Matthew Crenson moved into his family’s new home, near Chinquapin Park in the northeast part of the city. He recalls that the other boys in the neighborhood immediately demanded that he reveal his rooting sympathies — and it had nothing to do with sports.

“I was asked to declare if I was Union or Confederate,” he told me. “And when we’d divided up, we’d throw rocks at each other. So it was still alive then.”

The Final Decision

By the late 1980s, Baltimore was majority-black and had elected the first of several black mayors. Today, it is more than 60 percent African American and, in presidential elections, it votes overwhelmingly Democratic. Yet the monuments had remained — even as the Lee-Jackson one became, over time, a favorite meeting point of the Sons of the Confederacy.

Crenson, who recently retired from a career of teaching political science at Johns Hopkins and is about to publish a major work on Baltimore’s political history, sees the endurance of the monuments as a sign of one of Baltimore’s starkest characteristics: its avoidance of difficult conversations about race. Baltimoreans are fixated on race, but, he says, have generally preferred to keep the discussion private, under wraps — more so than is the case in, say, Chicago.

Of course, that discussion was thrown into the open in the spring of 2015 with the death of Freddie Gray from injuries sustained while in police custody, and the protests and unrest that followed, which have, in turn, been followed by a devastating, unprecedented spike in the city’s already high rate of gun violence. Then, in June 2015, came the Charleston church shooting by a young Confederate sympathizer. Community leaders and activists in Baltimore joined their counterparts elsewhere in calling for the statues’ removal. Then-Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake appointed the task force, which recommended that Taney and Lee-Jackson come down, and the matter was left to the next mayor, Catherine Pugh, to resolve.

Pugh has been preoccupied with other matters, notably the ever-spiraling homicide rate. Until this week — with the deadly violence in Charlottesville and the strikingly ambiguous response from President Donald Trump. “This is a debate that has now been forced into Baltimore from other parts of the country,” says Crenson. “The pattern of Baltimore from very early was not to talk about race and slavery but to equivocate about it.”

The dispatch with which the council and then the mayor acted this week has caused wry amazement in a city accustomed to much slower response on everything from the homicide rate (it has taken Pugh months to develop a comprehensive plan to address the violence) to a faulty sewage system to the construction of bike lanes. But the city was facing the real prospect of strife over the monuments — an activist group was organizing to topple them, and it was not hard to imagine that virulent defenders would arrive en masse, as happened in Charlottesville.

Early Wednesday morning, as we watched the statues being lifted, in a final indignity, onto a humble flatbed truck, the few onlookers who remained cheered. One lone agitated opponent, a local man who had come to watch with his wife, loudly insisted that the money to do the work would have been better spent on other things in a city overwhelmed by crime, drugs and lackluster schools.

The generals sat forlornly on the trucks for quite some time. A few fits and starts by the truck, and then, right around 4 a.m., they finally pulled away, southbound along Art Museum Drive toward Howard Street, to a location and fate that the city declined to disclose.

The mayor, looking on in blue jeans, said nothing before getting back in her black SUV to be driven home. But a few hours later, she had this to say to the Sun: “We moved quickly and quietly. There was enough grandstanding, enough speeches being made. Get it done. It’s done. They needed to come down. My concern is for the safety and security of our people. We moved as quickly as we could. … I did not want to endanger people in my own city.”

A few hours earlier, after the monument was driven off and the cops were gone, a few activists had clambered up onto the base for a victory pose. They were amused to find three small St. Jude medallions — St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. “That’s some 1948 moss,” one activist said, looking at the green scrub where the generals had stood.

But the moment had an anticlimactic feel. Maybe because the activists were hoping to topple the monument on their own. Maybe because the tragedy in Charlottesville still hung in the air, alongside the growing bewilderment of the Trump presidency. Maybe because they knew the city still faced so many, less easily solvable ills. Or maybe because the monument’s removal was so very long overdue that the accomplishment of that act was, after all, a hard thing to celebrate.

For more coverage, check out ProPublica’s project on Documenting Hate.

by Nina Martin, ProPublica, and Renee Montagne, NPR,

This story was co-published with NPR.

In recent months, mothers who nearly died in the hours and days after giving birth have repeatedly told ProPublica and NPR that their doctors and nurses were often slow to recognize the warning signs that their bodies weren’t healing properly. Now, an eye-opening new study substantiates some of these concerns.

The nationwide survey of 372 postpartum nurses, published Tuesday in the MCN/American Journal of Maternal/Child Nursing, found that many of them were ill-informed about the dangers new mothers face. Needing more education themselves, they were unable to fulfill their critical role of educating moms about symptoms like painful swelling, headaches, heavy bleeding and breathing problems that could indicate potentially life-threatening complications.

By failing to alert new mothers to such risks, the peer-reviewed study found, nurses may be missing an opportunity to help reduce the maternal mortality rate in the U.S., the highest among affluent nations. An estimated 700 to 900 women die in the U.S. every year from pregnancy- and childbirth-related causes and 65,000 nearly die, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The rates are highest for black mothers and women in rural areas. In a recent CDC Foundation analysis of data from four states, nearly 60 percent of maternal deaths were preventable.

Forty-six percent of nurses who responded to the survey were unaware that maternal mortality has risen in the U.S. in recent years, and 19 percent thought maternal deaths had actually declined. “If [nurses] aren't aware that there's been a rise in maternal mortality, then it makes it less urgent to explain to women what the warning signs are,” said study co-author Debra Bingham, who heads the Institute for Perinatal Quality Improvement and teaches at the University of Maryland School of Nursing.

Only 12 percent of the respondents knew that the majority of maternal deaths occur in the days and weeks after delivery. Only 24 percent correctly identified heart-related problems as the leading cause of maternal death in the U.S. In fact, cardiovascular disease and heart failure — which, according to recent data, account for more than a quarter of maternal deaths in this country — were "the area that the nurses felt the least confident in teaching about," says Patricia Suplee, an associate professor at the Rutgers University School of Nursing in Camden, New Jersey, and the lead researcher on the study.

Nurses also said they spent very little time instructing new moms about worrisome symptoms — usually 10 minutes or less. Many of the nurses said they were only likely to discuss warning signs of such life-threatening conditions as preeclampsia (pregnancy-related high blood pressure), blood clots in the lungs, or heart problems “if relevant” — even though, as the study noted, “it is impossible to accurately predict which women will suffer from a post-birth complication.”

The post-delivery education provided by nurses is particularly important because, once a mother leaves the hospital, she typically doesn’t see her own doctor for another four to six weeks. Up to 40 percent of new moms — overwhelmed with caring for an infant, and often lacking in maternity leave, child care, transportation and other kinds of support — never go back for their follow-up appointments at all.

Figuring out the best way to instruct new mothers is all the more crucial, the survey noted, because the first days after giving birth are “exhausting, emotionally charged, and physiologically draining” — hardly an ideal learning environment. But like so many other important aspects of maternal health care, postpartum education has been poorly studied, Bingham said.

The Last Person You’d Expect to Die in Childbirth

The U.S. has the worst rate of maternal deaths in the developed world, and 60 percent are preventable. The death of a neonatal nurse illustrates a profound disparity: The health care system focuses on babies but often ignores their mothers. Read the story.

Help Us Investigate Pregnancy Complications in the U.S.

ProPublica and NPR need your help understanding why so many American women die and nearly die because of pregnancy and childbirth. Share your story.

The respondents, of whom nearly one-third had master's or doctorate degrees, were members of the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses, the leading professional organization for nurses specializing in maternal and infant care. AWHONN began looking at the education issue in 2014, when Bingham was the association’s vice president of nursing research and education. “We had to start really from the ground up, because we didn't know exactly what women were being taught,” she said.

In focus groups conducted in New Jersey and Georgia, two states with especially high rates of maternal mortality, researchers discovered that postpartum nurses spent most of their time educating moms about how to care for their new babies, not themselves. The information mothers did receive about their own health risks was wildly inconsistent, and sometimes incorrect, Bingham said. The written materials women took home often weren’t much better.

Some nurses were uncomfortable discussing the possibility that complications could be life-threatening. “We had some nurses come out and say, ‘Well you know what, I don't want to scare the woman. This is supposed to be a happy time. I don't want to seem like all I want to talk about is death,’” Bingham said.

But the researchers also found that nurses could be quickly educated with short, targeted information. Using insights from the focus groups, an expert panel developed two standardized tools — a checklist and script that nurses could follow when instructing new mothers and a one-page handout of post-birth warning signs that mothers could refer to after they returned home, with clear-cut instructions for when to see a doctor or call 911. Those tools were tested in four hospitals in 2015. “Very quickly we started hearing from the nurses that women were coming back to the hospital with the handout, saying, ‘I have this symptom,’” Bingham said.

One of them was a Georgia mom named Sarah Duckett, who had just given birth to her second child. A week later, she recognized the warning signs of what turned out to be a blood clot in her lung — an often fatal postpartum complication. “Those were anecdotes, but they were very powerful anecdotes,” Bingham said. “I’ve led multiple projects over the years and rarely do I get such immediate feedback that something is working.”

The shortcomings documented by the national survey could foster wider use of these tools, suggested Mary-Ann Etiebet, executive director of Merck for Mothers, which funded the study as part of a 10-year, $500 million initiative to improve maternal health around the world. “Something as simple as creating educational and training programs for nurses … can have a real impact,” she said.

by Lylla Younes

Data from a civil rights group shows that reports of hate incidents involving American mosques jumped sharply in 2015 and has remained at the same rate since — about once every three days.

by Pitch Interactive

This page lists media reports, collected by Google News, about hate crimes and bias incidents.

by Rachel Glickhouse

When news of violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville spread across the U.S., many responded with disbelief, insisting that such abhorrent behavior and views were un-American.

“The poison spewed by Nazis, white supremacists, and the KKK is not who we are as a country,” tweeted Sally Yates, former deputy U.S. attorney general.

But our work on ProPublica’s Documenting Hate project shows that instances of hate are actually all too common. Everyday people — not just avowed “white nationalists” — intimidate, harass, humiliate and even harm their fellow Americans because of the color of their skin, how they worship or who they love. We’ve been tracking hate incidents across the country, collecting data from police reports, civil rights groups and the public.

Documenting Hate News Index

This page lists media reports, collected by Google News, about hate crimes and bias incidents. View the index.

We worked with the Google News Lab and a data visualization studio called Pitch Interactive to build a web app that makes it easy to search news stories about hate crimes and bias incidents, and to find and track specific subjects.

Today, we’re making the app public. The Documenting Hate News Index is updated every day. You can use it to search and filter by keyword and date range to see what hate incidents have been reported in local and national news outlets.

It’s by no means a complete accounting of all hate in America. It includes only incidents reported by a news outlet indexed by Google News. And in addition to cataloging violence, harassment and vandalism, the project includes stories about hate crimes legislation and programs designed to combat hate in local communities.

Hate Crime Index is a daily snapshot of incidents that we hope will shed more light on an urgent problem facing America.

Here’s just a sampling of incidents from the past month:

On Aug. 5, a device was thrown through the window of a Bloomington, Minnesota, mosque, causing an explosion in the imam’s office. No one was injured. The FBI is investigating the attack as a possible hate crime.

Police arrested a North Carolina man accused of hanging a noose from a tree in his neighbor’s yard, as well as putting up signs with racial epithets. He was later charged with ethnic intimidation.

In Irvine, California, a man was charged with a hate crime after he made religious slurs against two women, one of whom was wearing a hijab, and threw coins at them.

Two men beat up a transgender woman in Staten Island, New York, while yelling anti-gay epithets. They were charged with a hate crime.

In New Jersey, a group of bikers harassed an Indian-American family and punched the father in the face, telling him to “go back to your country.” Police initially investigated the incident as “racially motivated,” but later said the confrontation stemmed from a road rage incident. No suspects have been arrested so far.

A Waco, Texas, black Baptist church was vandalized with a swastika and the words “Satan” and “Trump.”

In Long Island, New York, a Muslim family received several threatening messages, including “The KKK is coming for you.”

And in Lake Worth, Florida, a man shot two people, killing one, after yelling “I hate you damned gays, I’m going to kill you all here.” The suspect was charged with first-degree murder; the Palm Beach State Attorney’s Office told the Sun Sentinel it’s too early to determine a hate crimes charge.

In Colorado Springs, residents held a “love lives here” rally in the wake of two hate vandalism incidents.

For more details, check out ProPublica’s Documenting Hate project.

If you’ve witnessed or been the victim of hate, we want to hear your story. Fill out our incident form.

by Robert Faturechi

Even before the demonstration in Virginia began last weekend, the police there knew they weren’t going to be able to handle what was coming.

Charlottesville police officers, including Sgt. Jake Via of the investigations bureau, had been contacting organizers and scanning social media to figure out how many demonstrators were headed their way and whether they would be armed.

“The number each group was saying was just building and building,” Via said. “We saw it coming. ... Looking at this, I said, ‘This is going to be bad.’”

The protesters’ numbers were too large and the downtown park too small. City officials tried to get the demonstration moved to another, more spacious location, but lost in court after the rally’s organizer, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, alleged his freedom of speech was being infringed.

The protests, of course, ended tragically. Local law enforcement was widely blamed for losing control of the event and standing back even as people were attacked.

Via maintains that nothing the police did could have stopped the violence between the two sides. “No hours and hours and hours or even months of planning is going to stop the radicals from both sides wanting to go at it,” he said.

With more demonstrations planned in cities across the country, ProPublica interviewed law enforcement experts in the United States and Europe to ask what more can be done to prevent bloodshed at protests where people are spoiling for a fight. The consensus was that additional steps can be taken.

But many of the tactics come at a price. Some could be viewed as impinging on civil liberties and the constitutionally enshrined rights to free assembly and protest. Others require funding and coordination that is difficult to achieve within the fragmented framework of American policing. A few are as simple as strategically placed blockades that keep the two sides separate. Here are some of the top approaches and how they might — or might not — be deployed in the U.S.

Drones, Anti-Mask Laws and Open-Carry Restrictions

Local police forces will increasingly institutionalize the use of drones at mass demonstrations. That’s the prediction of Brian Levin, a criminal justice professor at California State University, San Bernardino. Cameras in the air with real-time feeds transmitted to officers on the ground would allow police to cover more terrain and in some cases, identify potential conflicts before they erupt.

“Demonstrations spread, and these violent confrontations can take place in disparate areas,” said Levin. “It’s like when a hammer hits mercury.”

Drones can also be safer than helicopters. In Charlottesville, a helicopter monitoring the demonstration went down, killing two state troopers aboard.

But police drone use has been met with opposition from civil liberties groups. Drones donated to the Los Angeles Police Department have gone unused for years amid privacy concerns. Activists have argued that access to the devices, which make surveillance cheaper and more efficient, will lead police to more routinely surveil private citizens.

Earlier this month, LA’s police commission gathered to discuss relaunching the program only to be met by chanting activists who shut down the conversation twice. Similar stories have played out in Seattle and elsewhere.

Another tool cities and states (including Virginia) have used is anti-mask laws, which bar groups of people from disguising themselves in public. Violent demonstrators will sometimes arrive in ski masks or scarves wrapped around their faces. New York City has a ban, with exceptions including for Halloween. So does Alabama, a rule it instituted in 1949 to unmask the Ku Klux Klan. A similar restriction in California, though, was struck down after Iranian Americans hoping to safely (and non-violently) protest the post-revolutionary regime back home sued on First Amendment grounds.

Police Stood By As Mayhem Mounted in Charlottesville

State police and National Guardsmen watched passively for hours as self-proclaimed Nazis engaged in street battles with counter-protesters. Read the story.

Another challenge in Charlottesville was the number of demonstrators who came with guns, and were allowed to do so lawfully, because of Virginia’s open-carry laws.

Even in states with such statutes, the authorities have some options. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley’s law school, said the Supreme Court has upheld the right to have guns at home, but not necessarily in public. “Think of curfews. The government has the ability to take steps to protect public safety,” Chemerinsky said. “The more evidence there is that it’s a threat to public safety, the more sympathetic the courts would be.”

The evidence could consist of past rallies that broke out into violence, or intelligence that an armed group is planning to employ force in the future.

Still, attempts to temporarily restrict gun rights have floundered in the past. Before the most recent Republican National Convention in Cleveland, the head of Cleveland’s largest police union and others called for the state’s open-carry laws to be tightened during the convention. Gov. John Kasich refused, saying “Ohio governors do not have the power to arbitrarily suspend federal and state constitutional rights.”

A more radical approach comes from Philip Zelikow, a history professor at the University of Virginia and former executive director of the 9/11 Commission. In 1981, he worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights nonprofit, to ask a federal judge to shut down a group called the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which was showing up armed and in Army-style clothing on the Texas Gulf Coast to harass Vietnamese fishermen.

With the support of the Texas attorney general, Zelikow and his team invoked a 19th-century law that forbids “military companies” not authorized by the governor. They argued that the Klan qualified because it was not government-regulated but had “command structure, training and discipline so as to function as a combat or combat support unit.” The lawyers prevailed, and the Klan was forced to leave its weapons at home.

A similar argument also succeeded soon after in North Carolina, and Zelikow said groups like those in Charlottesville that are mixing weaponry and political activism could be subject to similar legal challenges. “These problems haven’t come up much in recent decades,” Zelikow said. “The issue subsided and memory fades but here we are again.”

Most states have restrictions on private military-like groups. Zelikow was contacted by lawyers from Oklahoma this week, asking if their state had such a law on the books. “It took me about five minutes to find,” he said. Zelikow is now trying to form a team of lawyers to bring a case in Virginia.

Looking Abroad

Thousands of people, divided into two opposing sides, squaring off in public. Some come armed, looking to damage property and wreak havoc. Many filter in from out of town, complicating efforts by police to negotiate peace in advance.

It’s a scenario European authorities know well, though with a different kind of group: soccer hooligans.

Maria Haberfeld, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and a former supervisor in the Israel National Police, said cops in the Netherlands use a “situation-oriented” model to keep violent rival soccer fans under control.

That framework trains officers in perceptual skills, helping them develop the emotional intelligence to read members of crowds and make sound judgments about which situations are truly dangerous. Officers are put through simulations in which they can achieve positive, nonfatal outcomes. Trainings are handled in groups, not individually, so that in the field, officers are less likely to misinterpret any of their colleagues’ motions or actions.

“European police forces are light years ahead of us in terms of training.” Haberfeld said. “It’s not something you can train police officers to do in half an hour. It’s a serious commitment.”

Reaching that level of training may not be feasible in the U.S., where local municipalities set their own academy protocols. (And demonstrations are less frequent than soccer matches.) The training in the U.S. typically lasts just a few months, compared to the couple of years that European police cadets get.

In Germany, police forces commonly have specialized units assigned to each side of a potentially violent protest. Officers meet with the groups’ leaders in advance and discuss plans for the protest in detail, including symbols that are forbidden for display by the government.

Protest leaders can be denied permits to demonstrate because of criminal records, forcing them to turn leadership of the event over to another member of the group. They’re also asked to assign deputies from within their organization who can help the group’s leader keep things under control. Those assistants also have their records vetted by the police before being approved.

Once at the event, the specialized police units show up in distinctive yellow vests, and without riot gear, so they can mix in with the demonstrators less threateningly. When officers see someone with a banned weapon, they sometimes will only film the demonstrator and make an arrest later.

“It is important for us, is not to have a negative solidarity spillover effect. ... If we disarm a person or act against a small group of potentially violent protestors, other people around solidarize with them against the police,” said Elke Heilig, head of the anti-conflict team in Pforzheim, Germany. “This leads towards escalation.”

Keeping Peaceful Protesters Away

Social media gives hate groups a new megaphone for getting the word out about their rallies, opening up communication with many previously fragmented niche groups and helping lead to larger gatherings, experts said. A big crowd is inherently harder to police, but what makes the scenario even more vexing for law enforcement is that they’re now dealing with not just one or two groups, but many, along with unaffiliated individuals.

“People are coming in from disparate places and disparate groups who don’t answer to any single authority. A Klan leader can tell his folks to stand down,” said Levin, a former NYPD officer. “Social media has been a magnet not only for haters but for unstable haters.”

Some municipalities are responding by using social media tools to dissuade some activists from showing up. City officials in Berkeley, California, have experimented with discouraging peaceful protesters from attending demonstrations they expect to be violent.

In March, fights broke out between supporters and opponents of the president at a demonstration near the Berkeley campus. Some of the unruly counter-protesters were believed to be affiliated with black bloc, an anarchist group whose members are known to wear black and mask their faces. Mayhem ensued. In one case, a man wearing a “Trump is My President” shirt had his face bloodied.

“There are people who come intent on committing violence and they look for ways to subvert whatever you set up,” said city spokesman Matthai Chakko. “There are people who use peaceful protesters as shields. They blend into crowds after they commit their acts.”

In April, before another planned demonstration, the city launched a messaging campaign suggesting peaceful protesters keep their distance. “Consider whether the approach others advertise is the style and venue for you,” one alert read, warning of violent protesters. “Reaching out to organizations or individuals in need is an alternative to conflict. When people at an event act in a way that compromises your values and goals, separate yourself.”

The number of peaceful protesters dropped significantly, Chakko said, and the city is taking a similar approach with an unpermitted, white nationalist demonstration expected later this month. The alert the city sent out Wednesday was direct: “The best response for those seeking to safeguard our community is to stay away.”


Barriers and Chain-Link Fences

Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor who has worked on police reform efforts in Los Angeles, said the most fundamental strategy for dueling demonstrations is keeping the two sides separate, with physical obstacles and police in between. “Create a human barrier so the flash points are reduced as quickly as possible,” she said.


Law enforcement will sometimes quarantine protesting hate groups inside concentric chain link fences, creating a large empty space between opposing groups. Those entering the inner ring are sent through metal detectors.

A New Generation of White Supremacists Emerges in Charlottesville

A group that included many people who were college-educated or ex-military displayed effective planning. “White people are pretty good at getting organized,” said one. Read the story.

At an anti-Sharia protest in San Bernardino, California earlier this year, the two groups were kept on opposite sides of the street, with horse-mounted cops there to prevent protesters from crossing over.

The lack of space to separate the factions was a widely noted problem in Charlottesville. The massive demonstration was allowed to take place inside a small downtown park, making it more difficult for police to insert themselves and separate the two sides. “The two groups are both trying to occupy the same area and this doesn’t give police a lot of maneuverability,” said John Kleinig, professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. 


Demonstrators ended up spilling out beyond the park, and one counter-protester was killed when an Ohio man allegedly plowed his car into a crowd a few blocks away from the park. 


Demonstrations can in some ways be easier to control in concentrated urban areas, where police use tall buildings with little or no space in between them as barriers. And smaller city police forces generally have less training in large crowd control.

“I’m former NYPD,” Levin said. “We had grid patterns and streets we could block off, put a wedge in when we had an unruly crowds. ... You have people hemmed in by structures and street grid patterns. In smaller places, people can spread out in all different directions.”



Since the weekend, amid criticism of their handling of the demonstration, Charlottesville Police Chief Al Thomas acknowledged that crowd’s spread led to problems.

“We had to actually send out forces to multiple locations to deal with a number of disturbances,” he said. “It was certainly a challenge. We were spread thin once the groups dispersed.”

Special correspondent Pia Dangelmayer in Germany contributed to this story.

by Ken Schwencke

The neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer was back online Friday with help from a small company whose founder said he wanted to defend free speech and raise the commercial profile of his new venture.

The Daily Stormer was dumped by several internet service providers this week after it posted a story mocking the appearance of Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old woman killed on Saturday in Charlottesville. By mid-week, it was accessible only through what is known as the dark web, a corner of the internet that is not easily accessible to ordinary users.

Nick Lim, the 20-year-old founder of the company BitMitigate, said he offered his services to Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin because he believes in free speech, but also to get the word out about his company, which protects websites from so-called denial of services attacks that overwhelm internet servers. 

“People should be given the right to express their ideas,” he said, adding: “I thought it would really get my service out there.”

According to Lim, he was monitoring news reports and learned that services like Cloudflare, along with GoDaddy and Google, had dropped The Daily Stormer after an outcry from activists. He thought their actions violated Anglin’s rights to free speech and reached out to The Daily Stormer to offer help.

Lim, whose domain bitmitigate.com was registered in March, said he was small compared to giants like Cloudflare, and also wanted to create publicity for his company. “This whole thing is really entertaining,” he said. 

When asked if he knew what The Daily Stormer was, Lim said he hadn’t really looked into it. When a ProPublica reporter described the site’s ideology and its history of trolling its critics, Lim said it sounded stupid. He then took a look himself at what The Daily Stormer had posted today, and he was even more dismissive. “I think there’s a lot of stupid ideas here,’’ he said. “But frankly it’s not my decision or something I really want to get involved in.”

Lim said that while he was not part of the fringe right, he did not not want to either condemn or endorse the views of his clients.

Asked if he would consider dropping a client for any reason, he said he would do so if the actual site harmed people in some way. Lim said he would not drop a client for ideology, content or calls to harrass specific people. He criticized Cloudflare, the web security company, for dropping The Daily Stormer as a client.

“It’s actually quite ironic the decision made by Cloudflare. It’s not like they really care about the people they protect — they protect several ISIS websites,” he said. A representative from Cloudflare did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Lim doesn’t take money from Anglin, or from any site he protects with his services. He admitted he was losing money, but hopes his other service, protecting servers for video games like Minecraft, will make up for it.

Late night on Thursday, and into the early hours of Friday, Lim tweeted his disdain for the left and his concern that free speech was being eroded.

“People think they are doing good by silencing white supremacists but in reality they are chipping away at constitutional rights,” he said in one tweet, adding later, “Is the left evil or just stupidevil?”

by Alec MacGillis

Maryland’s two U.S. senators and four of its U.S. House representatives, all Democrats, sent a letter today to the large real-estate company owned by the family of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, demanding information about the company’s management of 17 apartment complexes it owns in the state.

The letter to Kushner Companies came in response to a May 23 article co-published by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine investigating management practices at the rental complexes, most of which are in the suburbs of Baltimore, as well as an article this week in The Baltimore Sun that revealed additional details.

The original story described the highly aggressive legal tactics that Kushner Companies has used to pursue tenants who owed back rent or had left their leases early — even tenants who left the complexes well before the company bought them in 2012 and the years following. In many of the hundreds of cases brought by the company, it pursued tenants in court for years, with late fees and court fees expanding the claims to amounts far above what was initially owed.

The article reported several instances in which the company sought payment even when tenants were able to provide proof that they had followed the terms of the lease. The article also described the shoddy upkeep of many of the complexes’ roughly 9,000 units, where problems such as ceiling leaks, mice and mold are rampant.

The Sun article this week reported that in 105 instances, the company went so far as to seek the civil arrests of tenants who failed to appear in court to address allegations of unpaid debt — more than any other landlord in the state over the same period. Court records show that 20 former Kushner tenants were in fact detained, the paper reported. The paper also disclosed just how dependent the company’s complexes are on federal housing vouchers for rental revenue. While many of the complexes’ tenants pay their own rent, the paper determined that at three of the complexes alone, the company has received $6.1 million in federal rental subsidies since Jan. 1, 2015.

In their letter, Maryland Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Ben Cardin and the four congressmen — Elijah Cummings (the ranking Democratic on the House Government Oversight Committee), Dutch Ruppersberger, John Sarbanes and Anthony Brown — note that the company’s reliance on subsidies from the Housing Choice program (Section 8) obliges it to follow Department of Housing and Urban Development rules. Under Housing Choice, each “dwelling unit must pass the program’s housing quality standards and be maintained up to those standards as long as the owner receives housing assistance payments.” The rules specify that each “dwelling unit and its equipment must be in sanitary condition” and “must be free of vermin and rodent infestation.”

“If [the news reports] are accurate,” the six members of Congress wrote, “they raise very serious and troubling concerns about whether Kushner Companies and its subsidiaries are complying with HUD’s housing quality standards to ensure the safety and health of their own tenants.” The letter also cites from ProPublica’s report that the complexes require tenants to go to a Walmart or Ace Cash Express outlet every month if they want to pay their rent by money order, a process that comes with an extra fee.

The letter asks the company to turn over by Sept. 8 copies of any housing assistance contracts it holds with HUD or any public housing authority in the state; the standard lease agreements for all its complexes in the state; all notifications from HUD, public housing authorities, inspection companies or local jurisdictions identifying defects in the complexes in the past three years; all complaints from residents about maintenance and repair issues over the past three years; any notifications about elevated blood lead levels affecting any tenants; and any agreements with vendors regarding the fees that residents get charged to pay their rent by money order.

The letter also seeks information regarding the role played by Jared Kushner, who was instrumental in purchasing the complexes but stepped down as the company’s CEO when he took on his senior role in the White House. Kushner retains his ownership stake in the partnerships that hold the complexes, and has, according to the White House, recused himself from any discussions around Section 8, which is targeted for cuts in Trump’s proposed budget.

The letter seeks all communications between the company and the White House, “including but not limited to communications regarding the management and resolution of Jared Kushner’s conflicts of interest,” all documents describing the company’s policies to manage conflicts of interest involving Kushner, and all communications between him and the company since the inauguration.

In a written statement, the company did not say whether it would provide the requested materials.

“We are in compliance with the requirements of the Federal Housing Choice Program,” said its general counsel, Emily Wolf. “We exercise our legal rights under the relevant provisions of Maryland law only as a last resort after all other reasonable attempts to collect rent payments are unsuccessful.”

Do you have access to information about the Trump family’s business dealings that should be public? Email alec.macgillis@propublica.org, or here’s how to send tips and documents to ProPublica securely.

For more coverage, read ProPublica's previous reporting on the Trump administration.

By Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Madeleine Varner and Lauren Kirchner,

Because of its “extreme hostility toward Muslims,” the website Jihadwatch.org is considered an active hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. The views of the site’s director, Robert Spencer, on Islam led the British Home Office to ban him from entering the country in 2013.

But its designation as a hate site hasn’t stopped tech companies — including PayPal, Amazon and Newsmax — from maintaining partnerships with Jihad Watch that help to sustain it financially. PayPal facilitates donations to the site. Newsmax — the online news network run by President Donald Trump’s close friend Chris Ruddy — pays Jihad Watch in return for users clicking on its headlines. Until recently, Amazon allowed Jihad Watch to participate in a program that promised a cut of any book sales that the site generated. All three companies have policies that say they don’t do business with hate groups.

Jihad Watch is one of many sites that monetize their extremist views through relationships with technology companies. ProPublica surveyed the most visited websites of groups designated as extremist by either the SPLC or the Anti-Defamation League. We found that more than half of them — 39 out of 69 — made money from ads, donations or other revenue streams facilitated by technology companies. At least 10 tech companies played a role directly or indirectly in supporting these sites.

Traditionally, tech companies have justified such relationships by contending that it’s not their role to censor the Internet or to discourage legitimate political expression. Also, their management wasn’t necessarily aware that they were doing business with hate sites because tech services tend to be automated and based on algorithms tied to demographics.

In the wake of last week’s violent protest by alt-right groups in Charlottesville, more tech companies have disavowed relationships with extremist groups. During just the last week, six of the sites on our list were shut down. Even the web services company Cloudflare, which had long defended its laissez-faire approach to political expression, finally ended its relationship with the neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer last week.

“I can’t recall a time where the tech industry was so in step in their response to hate on their platforms,” said Oren Segal, director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism. “Stopping financial support to hate sites seems like a win-win for everyone.”

But ProPublica’s findings indicate that some tech companies with anti-hate policies may have failed to establish the monitoring processes needed to weed out hate sites. PayPal, the payment processor, has a policy against working with sites that use its service for “the promotion of hate, violence, [or] racial intolerance.” Yet it was by far the top tech provider to the hate sites with donation links on 23 sites, or about one-third of those surveyed by ProPublica. PayPal did not respond to an inquiry from ProPublica.

After Charlottesville, PayPal stopped accepting payments or donations for several high-profile white nationalist groups that participated in the march. It posted a statement that it would remain “vigilant on hate, violence & intolerance.” It addresses each case individually, and “strives to navigate the balance between freedom of expression” and the “limiting and closing” of hate sites, it said.

After being contacted by ProPublica, Newsmax said it was unaware that the three sites that it had relationships with were considered hateful. “We will review the content of these sites and make any necessary changes after that review,” said Andy Brown, chief operating officer of Newsmax.

Amazon spokeswoman Angie Newman said the company had previously removed Jihad Watch and three other sites identified by ProPublica from its program sharing revenue for book sales, which is called Amazon Associates. When ProPublica pointed out that the sites still carried working links to the program, she said that it was their responsibility to remove the code. “They are no longer paid as an Associate regardless of what links are on their site once we remove them from the Associates Program,” she said.

Where to set the boundaries between hate speech and legitimate advocacy for perspectives on the edge of the political spectrum, and who should set them, are complex and difficult questions. Like other media outlets, we relied in part on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s public list of “Active Hate Groups 2016.” This list is controversial in some circles, with critics questioning whether the SPLC is too quick to brand organizations on the right as hate groups.

Still, the center does provide detailed explanations for many of its designations. For instance, the SPLC documents its decision to include the Family Research Council by citing the evangelical lobbying group’s promotion of discredited science and unsubstantiated attacks on gay and lesbian people. We also consulted a list from ADL, which is not public and that was provided to us for research purposes. See our methodology here.

The sites that we identified from the ADL and SPLC lists vehemently denied that they are hate sites.

“It is not hateful, racist or extremist to oppose jihad terror,” said Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch. He added that the true extremism was displayed by groups that seek to censor the Internet and that by asking questions about the tech platforms on his site, we were “aiding and abetting a quintessentially fascist enterprise.”

Spencer made these comments in response to questions emailed by ProPublica reporter Lauren Kirchner. Afterwards, Spencer posted an item on Jihad Watch alleging that “leftist ‘journalist’” Kirchner had threatened the site. He also posted Kirchner’s photo and email address, as well as his correspondence with her. After being contacted by ProPublica, another anti-Islam activist, Pamela Geller, also posted an attack on Kirchner, calling her a “senior reporting troll.” Like Spencer, Geller was banned by the British Home Office; her eponymous site is on the SPLC and ADL lists.

Donations — and the ability to accept them online through PayPal and similar companies — are a lifeline for sites like Jihad Watch. In 2015, the nonprofit website disclosed that three quarters of its roughly $100,000 in revenues came from donations, according to publicly available tax records.

In recent weeks, PayPal has been working to shut down donations to extremist sites. This week, it pulled the plug on VDARE.com, an anti-immigration website designated as “white nationalist” by the SPLC and as a hate site by the ADL. VDARE, which denies being white nationalist, immediately switched to its backup system, Stripe.

Stripe, a private company recently described by Bloomberg Businessweek as a $9 billion startup, is unusual in not having a policy against working with hate sites. It does, however, prohibit financial transactions that support drugs, pornography and “psychic services.” Stripe provided donation links for 10 sites, second only to PayPal on our list. Stripe did not respond to a request for comment.

VDARE editor Peter Brimelow declared on his site that the PayPal shutdown was likely part of a purge by the “authoritarian Communist Left to punish anyone who disagrees with their anti-American violence against patriotic people.” He urged his readers to donate through other channels such as Bitcoins. “We need your help desperately,” he wrote. “We must have the resources to defend ourselves and our people.”

In 2015, VDARE received nearly all of its revenue — $267,038 out of total $293,663 — from donations, according to publicly available tax return forms that the Internal Revenue Service requires nonprofits to disclose.

Brimelow did not respond to our questions, instead characterizing ProPublica as the “Totalitarian Left.”

Some sites also supplement their donations with revenue from online advertising. For instance, SonsofLibertyMedia.com, which is on the SPLC list, generated about 10 percent of its revenue — $37,828 — from advertising in 2015, according to its tax documents.

The site, which describes itself as promoting a “Judeo-Christian ethic,” and recently posted an article declaring that a black activist protesting Confederate statues needed “a serious beat down,” does not appear to attract advertisers directly.

Instead, Sons of Liberty benefits from a type of ad-piggybacking arrangement that is becoming more common in the tech industry. The website runs sponsored news articles from a company called Taboola, which shares ad revenues with it. Known for being at the forefront of “click-bait,” Taboola places links on websites to articles about celebrities and popular culture.

Taboola’s policy prohibits working with sites that have “politically religious agendas” or use hate speech. “We strive to ensure the safety of our network but from time to time, unfortunately, mistakes can happen,” said Taboola spokeswoman Dana Miller. “We will ask our Content Policy group to review this site again and take action if needed.” 

Sons of Liberty founder Bradlee Dean said that he forwarded our questions to his attorney. The lawyer did not respond.

Hate sites can initiate relationships with tech companies with little scrutiny.

Any website can fill out an online form asking to join, for instance, Amazon’s network, and often can get approved instantly. Once a website has joined a tech network, it can quickly start earning money through advertising, donations, or content farms such as Taboola that share ad revenues with websites that distribute their articles.

Some companies, such as Newsmax, say that joining their ad network requires explicit prior approval.

But, according to a former Newsmax employee, the only criterion for this approval was whether traffic to the site reached a minimum threshold. There was no content review. Salespeople were told to be aggressive in signing up publishing partners.

“We’d put our news feed on anybody’s page, anyone who was willing to listen,” he said, “it’s about email addresses, it's about marketing, they don’t care about ultra conservative or left wing.”

Dylan Roof frequented a website described by the SPLC as “white nationalist.” He said in a manifesto posted online that finding the website was a turning point in his life. He went on to murder nine African-American churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. That year, USA Today found Newsmax ads on the site.

They no longer appear there.

by Kiara Alfonseca,

For several months this spring, St. Olaf College, a private school of some 3,000 students in Northfield, Minnesota, was convulsed by a series of hate incidents. More than half a dozen racist notes were found across campus, including one slipped into a student’s book bag that said, “Go back to Africa.” Then, in late April, an African-American senior reported finding a typed threat on her car’s windshield only weeks before she was due to graduate.

“I am so glad that you are leaving soon,” the message read. “One less nigger that this school has to deal with. You have spoken up too much. You will change nothing. Shut up or I will shut you up.”

Hundreds of students protested. Classes were canceled for a day in an effort to organize discussions around race and diversity at the school. And the young woman who had found the latest note spoke out, telling students: “I think the big message is we shouldn’t let this happen again. The administration needs to do something that stops it indefinitely.”

Within 48 hours, the note left on the windshield was determined by school officials to have been fabricated, and St. Olaf was wracked once more, portrayed by some as the source of a hoax meant to advance a liberal agenda. “Another Day, Another Fake Hate Crime,” read a post on the conservative news outlet The Daily Caller. Other right-leaning outlets voiced similar views.

Today the nation’s attention is justly focused on the fatal violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the disturbing ripples that continue to emanate from the chaos there last weekend. In that context, the events at St. Olaf would be easy to ignore. But they provide a subtle yet telling prism through which to view the nation’s continuing struggles with race and hate.

The consequences from the events at St. Olaf are hard to quantify. But what’s clear is that the phony claim has overshadowed the other incidents — eight in all — all of which appear to have been bona fide hate messages. They remain the subject of an investigation, according to Northfield Police Chief Monte Nelson, with no hint that his officers are close to finding a culprit. The police do not regard the senior behind the ninth note as a suspect in the other cases.

Meanwhile, the fear spawned by the racist notes has combined with anger and disquiet over the hoax to leave a toxic cloud of uncertainty and distrust. “A few” prospective students withdrew their decisions to attend this fall, with parents saying they were too afraid or confused to come, according to Bruce King, assistant to the president for institutional diversity at St. Olaf. (During the fact-checking for this article, the school back-pedaled, asserting it has not seen “any indicators in our enrollment, advancement or retention data to indicate that the events in the spring negatively impacted our progress.”)

Many students remain aggrieved — despite winning a promise by the administration to increase minority admissions and to focus more on race in its education. That lingering anger, fueled by a sense that their grievances are viewed as dubious, suggests it will be difficult to restore a sense of tranquility.

Expressions of hate have been a topic of acute concern over the past year, stoked first by the often poisonous presidential campaign and most recently by the events in Charlottesville. Like many issues today, it is polarized, with opponents disagreeing on basic facts — and some even questioning the existence of such crimes.

An adviser to President Donald Trump recently launched a broad assault on the credibility of many hate crimes. When asked why Trump has not condemned the bombing of a mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota — about 30 miles from St. Olaf — the adviser, Sebastian Gorka, told MSNBC it was possible the bombing was a “fake hate crime.”

“We’ve had a series of crimes committed, alleged hate crimes, by right-wing individuals in the last six months that turned out to actually have been propagated by the left,” Gorka said. “When people fake hate crimes in the last six months with some regularity, it’s wise to find out what exactly is going on before you make statements, when they could turn out to be not who you are expecting.”

Documenting Hate News Index

This page lists media reports, collected by Google News, about hate crimes and bias incidents. View the index.

One such hoax occurred in December when an 18-year-old Muslim woman reported being attacked by a group of men on a New York subway who called her a terrorist and tried to yank off her hijab. She later recanted and told police she had invented the story because she was having trouble with her family. In another episode around that time, swastikas and the words “HEIL TRUMP” written on a church in Bean Blossom, Indiana, were discovered to have been spray-painted by the organist of the church.

Fake hate crimes have a huge impact despite their rarity, said Ryan Lenz, senior investigative writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Project. “There aren’t many people claiming fake hate crimes, but when they do, they make massive headlines,” he said. It takes just one fake report, Lenz said, “to undermine the legitimacy of other hate crimes.” An examination of what occurred at St. Olaf shows how that can happen.

Founded in 1874, St. Olaf is a liberal arts college located in Northfield, Minnesota, population 20,000. It’s a woodsy spot — between the campus and other college properties, St. Olaf has about 1,000 acres of forest and agricultural land — about 40 miles south of Minneapolis. Northfield is also home to Carleton College.

St. Olaf was established by Norwegian immigrants as a Lutheran institution and even today students are required to take a class on Christian theology. Alcohol is prohibited on campus. (Its best-known attendee was a fictional character who lasted a mere two weeks: Jay Gatsby.) The school boasts that students come from all 50 states and 80 foreign countries.

With 79.5 percent of its U.S. students identifying themselves as white, St. Olaf is actually more diverse than its home state, which is 85 percent white. Indeed, “multicultural” categories at St. Olaf have increased noticeably in recent years, growing from 14.8 percent in the fall of 2012, to 19.5 percent last fall. But even as Asian-American and Hispanic attendance has steadily risen, the percentage of African-American students has remained largely flat, around 2.2 percent. (African Americans make up 6 percent of Minnesota’s population.)

St. Olaf is the sort of place where people leave doors unlocked, which is part of its appeal, according to King, the school diversity administrator. A sense of safety and trust is palpable on campus, with students often leaving laptops, backpacks and other belongings unattended on tables in the cafeteria.

But the normally placid campus was torn during the presidential campaign. Students held anti-Trump rallies and vigils. Some Republican undergrads said they felt threatened by the atmosphere.

“Things were pretty tense because of the election,” said Emma Whitford, a St. Olaf student and executive editor of the school’s newspaper.

Against that charged backdrop, the first racist note was found in a custodial closet of a resident hall on Oct. 4. A slur was scribbled on the closet’s white board. Three days later, another slur was dropped into a comment box at an event called “Ask a Muslim Anything.”

More incidents followed in February, March and April. Each of the notes was handwritten, and expressed hatred but did not make threats.

St. Olaf did not report these occurrences to the police, and instead conducted its own investigation. The school hired a handwriting expert, reviewed security footage and interviewed students. (St. Olaf did not announce any findings and, after the alleged hoax, stepped aside in favor of the police.)

After each incident, small protests would pop up and people would rally. Some students said they felt suffocated and some began having anxiety attacks.

One group tried to channel the racist episodes into something positive. They formed the Collective for Change on The Hill (“the Hill” is the slang name for the college). Its goal was to create a long-term solution to the issue of race at St. Olaf and ease concerns for people of color.

Still, tensions would tend to subside as weeks passed after each episode.

Then came April 29. Samantha Wells, a student from Champaign, Illinois, posted on social media what she said she had found on her car windshield.

Two days later, hundreds flooded throughout the student commons and cafeteria to demonstrate against racism. All classes were canceled on May 1 as students and faculty alike joined in daylong sit-ins in support of Wells and the other victims. The Collective for Change on the Hill presented the administration with a list of demands. “I’m so thankful for everybody here who has supported me through these last few days,” Wells said at one rally.

But school officials had doubts almost immediately. For starters, the note that Wells made public didn’t resemble the others in that it was typewritten rather than handwritten. And suspicions mounted when Wells declined to file a police report.

At the time, she explained her choice this way, according to a police case file obtained by ProPublica: “I have decided that I am not going to be filing a report. I am graduating in 19 days and then leaving for Germany in June. I would rather not spend the end of my college career and my last month and a half in the U.S. worrying about an investigation.”

On May 10, the school announced that Wells had confessed that the note was a hoax. Reached via Facebook Messenger, Wells responded, “I am not allowed to speak on this story.” She declined to discuss specifics of the episode, but responded to a few questions about her experience as a St. Olaf student.

Wells described herself as currently in a state of academic limbo: She asserted that she graduated but didn’t attend the ceremony. Wells said St. Olaf will not issue her a diploma until next year. (St. Olaf’s administration would not comment about Wells’ case, beyond noting that she had been disciplined by the college in an unspecified manner.)

“Oh, and I got a few people telling me to kill myself, so that was fun, too,” Wells said in her exchange of messages with ProPublica.

Wells described a subtle but discernible experience of being an outsider as one of the few African Americans, which she said exacted an emotional toll. White students would seek her out, she said, as a kind of handy interpreter of racially sensitive material and interactions, a role she found “tiring.” As Wells puts it, “I felt safe but uncomfortable.”

It was that feeling, not unique to Wells, intensified by the anger of the presidential campaign, that exploded when the racist notes were discovered — only to be swept aside when the fake note seemingly undercut the legitimacy of the grievances.

Indeed, the atmosphere of distrust has extended in more than one direction: A handful of students deny that a hoax occurred. Said Alhouseini, a student activist, asserted that the school administration is using claims of a spurious note to hide, or raise doubts about, the other racist episodes. He accused some media organizations of being too eager to embrace the hoax angle without reporting thoroughly. “The question remains,” Alhouseini said, “if you’re focusing on that one incident or the three prominent ones that sparked a movement and making the claim of it being a hoax, where does that leave the rest of the attacks?”

Of course, time spent debating whether an event occurred will not be time spent addressing an underlying condition. “We did take a bit of a hit to the momentum of the movement when it comes to crowd/schoolwide support,” wrote Krysta Wetzel, a member of the Collective for Change on the Hill in an email to ProPublica. “[But] we still have another student whose car has been targeted. We still have a student who has received notes in her book bag. We still have alumni testimony that speak to the same issues we are experiencing now.”

Police chief Nelson said Wells’ note “distracted the college from some other things it was investigating that were legitimate concerns. What concerns me is that it pulled away from their investigation. It makes it harder to find the truth.”

King and other officials at St. Olaf aren’t waiting for the results of the police investigation. They say they remain committed to improving conditions. For her part, Wetzel, the student activist, vowed to continue her campaign when the school year begins, and the events of Charlottesville seem likely to keep race and hate in the forefront of students’ consciousness.

In May the school agreed to a list of demands it negotiated with the Collective to foster a more inclusive environment. The school has pledged to increase the “recruitment and retention of Indigenous, Black/African-American, Latino-American, Asian-American, Multiracial, and Non-American faculty and staff members,” according to the agreement. The school also agreed to adapt its general education requirements to include more study of class, gender, race and identity.

Creating a sense of inclusion won’t be easy, King acknowledged. “I think if you look past [the Collective’s] demands, if you look past the notes, if you look past the back and forth, how do you take a place like St. Olaf or the United States of America and create it so everyone feels like a part of it?” he said. “That’s our challenge.”

by Hannah Birch

In March, we published what we’re doing in 2017 to foster diversity, both at ProPublica and within investigative journalism.

In support of those goals, we’re pleased to announce that we’ll be continuing the popular Diversity Mentorship Program at the Online News Association conference in Washington, D.C., in October. We want to make it easier for journalists from underrepresented communities to connect with people at the top of the field. Part of how we do that is this event, now in its third year, which pairs people seeking mentors with senior journalists from around the world.

We’ll host a hot breakfast at ONA for 50 people on Oct. 6, from 8-9:30 a.m. We stick to a 2:1 ratio of mentors to mentees for this event, which means we’ll accept about 33 mentees.

Anyone from an underrepresented group — including people of color, women, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities — is welcome to apply. We’re only considering applicants who are attending ONA and who will be available the morning of Friday, Oct. 6. You can apply via this form.

Mentors for this event will be managing editors, executive editors and other leading professionals in the industry. We do our best to pair people with mentors based on the issues that interest them.

You’ll have time during the breakfast to talk with your mentor, as well as other mentors and mentees. The hope is that these relationships will endure well beyond this event.

The deadline to apply for the Diversity Mentorship Program is Friday, Sept. 1. We’ll let you know if you’ve been matched with a mentor by Wednesday, Sept. 20. We’ll do our best to match everyone with a mentor, but bear in mind that space is limited.

Special thanks to News Republic for sponsoring the Diversity Mentorship Program with us. Their financial support makes this event possible.

Questions? Address them to Hannah Birch at diversity@propublica.org. You can also read more about steps we’re taking to increase diversity at ProPublica and in journalism in general.

by Alec MacGillis

This story was co-published with New York magazine.

In mid-May, Steve Preston, who served as the secretary of housing and urban development in the final two years of the George W. Bush administration, organized a dinner at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, D.C., for the new chief of that department, Ben Carson, and five other former secretaries whose joint tenure stretched all the way back to Gerald Ford. It was an event with no recent precedent within the department, and it had the distinct feel of an intervention.

HUD has long been something of an overlooked stepchild within the federal government. Founded in 1965 in a burst of Great Society resolve to confront the “urban crisis,” it has seen its manpower slide by more than half since the Reagan Revolution. (The HUD headquarters is now so eerily underpopulated that it can’t even support a cafeteria; it sits vacant on the first floor.) But HUD still serves a function that millions of low-income Americans depend on — it funds 3,300 public-housing authorities with 1.2 million units and also the Section 8 rental-voucher program, which serves more than 2 million families; it has subsidized tens of millions of mortgages via the Federal Housing Administration; and, through various block grants, it funds an array of community uplift initiatives. It is the Ur-government agency, quietly seeking to address social problems in struggling areas that the private sector can’t or won’t solve, a mission that has become especially pressing amid a growing housing affordability crisis in many major cities.

Despite its Democratic roots, Republican administrations have historically assumed stewardship over HUD with varying degrees of enthusiasm — among the department’s more notable secretaries were Republicans George Romney and Jack Kemp, the idiosyncratic champion of supply-side economics and inner-city renewal.

Now, however, HUD faced an existential crisis. The new president’s then-chief strategist, Steve Bannon, had called in February for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” It was not hard to guess that, for a White House that swept to power on a wave of racially tinged rural resentment and anti-welfare sentiment, high on the demolition list might be a department with “urban” in its name. The administration’s preliminary budget outline had already signaled deep cuts for HUD. And Donald Trump had chosen to lead the department someone with zero experience in government or social policy — the nominee whose unsuitability most mirrored Trump’s lack of preparation to run the country.

This prospect was causing alarm even among HUD’s former Republican leaders. At the Metropolitan Club, George W. Bush’s second secretary, Alphonso Jackson, warned Carson against cutting further into HUD’s manpower. (Many regional offices have shuttered in recent years.) Carla Hills, who ran the department under President Ford, put in a plug for the Community Development Block Grant program, noting that Ford had created it in 1974 precisely in order to give local governments more leeway over how to spend federal assistance.

The tone was collegial, built on the hopeful assumption that Carson wanted to do right by the department. “We were trying to be supportive,” Henry Cisneros, from the Clinton administration, told me. But it was hard for the ex-secretaries to get a read on Carson’s plans, not least because the whisper-voiced retired pediatric neurosurgeon was being overshadowed by an eighth person at the table: his wife, Candy. An energetic former real-estate agent who is an accomplished violinist and has co-authored four books with her husband, she had been spending far more time inside the department’s headquarters at L’Enfant Plaza than anyone could recall a secretary’s spouse doing in the past, only one of many oddities that HUD employees were encountering in the Trump era. She’d even taken the mic before Carson made his introductory speech to the department. “We’re really excited about working with — ” She broke off, as if detecting the puzzlement of the audience. “Well, he’s really.”

The story of the Trump administration has been dominated by the Russia investigations, the Obamacare repeal morass, and cataclysmic internecine warfare. But there is a whole other side to Trump’s takeover of Washington: What happens to the government itself, and all it is tasked with doing, when it is placed under the command of the Chaos President? HUD has emerged as the perfect distillation of the right’s antipathy to governing. If the great radical conservative dream was, in Grover Norquist’s famous words, to “drown government in a bathtub,” then this was what the final gasps of one department might look like.

Nov. 9 brought open weeping in the halls of HUD headquarters, a Brutalist arc at L’Enfant Plaza that resembles a giant concrete honeycomb. Washington was Hillary country, but HUD employees had particular cause for agita. For years, the department had suffered low morale, and there was the perception, not entirely unjustified, that it was prone to episodes of self-dealing and corruption — most recently under Jackson, who was scrutinized for awarding HUD projects to companies run by his friends. But the department had experienced a rejuvenation in the Obama era, with morale rebounding under the leadership of his first secretary, Shaun Donovan, an ambitious, politically savvy housing administrator from New York. While it faced postrecession budget austerity — with its ranks dropping well below 8,000, from more than 16,000 decades earlier — the department made homelessness reduction a priority. Under Donovan’s successor, Julián Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio, HUD embarked on a major initiative to address residential segregation by requiring cities and suburbs to do more to live up to the edicts of the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Before the election, Hillary Clinton’s campaign sent over a large team of policy experts to study up on HUD and prepare to take the baton on these efforts. The Trump campaign sent one person. “And everyone was joking, ‘Well, he’ll be gone on November 9,’” one staffer told me.

So the stricken employees were slightly relieved when Trump’s operation announced a five-person “landing team” for HUD that included Jimmy Kemp, son of Jack. “There may be hope for us after all,” a veteran staffer in one local HUD office told his colleagues. The semblance of normalcy was short-lived. In late November, word got out that Trump’s choice to run HUD was Carson. To Twitter wags, the selection was comical in its stereotyping: Of course Trump would assign the only African American in his Cabinet to the “urban” department. But to many HUD employees, the selection of so ill-qualified a leader felt like an insult. “People feel disrespected. They see Carson and think, I’ve been in housing policy for 20 or 30 years, and if I walked away, I would never expect to get hired as a nurse,” said one staffer at a branch office, who, like most employees I spoke with, requested anonymity to guard against retribution.

Carson himself had some qualms about running HUD. His close friend Armstrong Williams, a conservative commentator who was exposed for receiving payments from George W. Bush’s administration to tout Bush’s education policies on air, told The Hill in November that Carson had reservations about such a job. “Dr. Carson feels he has no government experience; he’s never run a federal agency,” Williams said. “The last thing he would want to do was take a position that could cripple the presidency.” Williams later said his remark had been misconstrued, but Shermichael Singleton, a young political operative who worked for Williams and became a top aide on Carson’s campaign, told me that Carson’s ambivalence was real. Trump’s offer, Singleton said, had provoked deep questions for Carson about his life’s purpose. “It was, ‘Should I do this? What does it all mean?’”

In the end, Singleton said, Carson accepted out of a sense of duty that came from having risen to success from humble origins: raised by a single mother, a housekeeper, in Detroit. “He’s someone born in an environment where the odds were clearly stacked against him, and he believes by personal experience that he could do a lot of good for others.” Kemp agreed. Carson accepted, he said, “because he wanted to do something about poverty.” If anything, Kemp said, Carson felt more suited to the HUD job than he would to a health policy one. “Being surgeon general or secretary of [health and human services], I don’t think he was fully equipped to do that, having been a neurosurgeon,” Kemp said. In other words, Carson knew how little he knew about health policy, an awareness he lacked when it came to social policy. “He thought with HUD, ‘It’s so clear that our approach to poverty has not been completely successful and we can do better, and I think I have some ideas that can be applied,’” Kemp said.

Underlying this rationale were two related convictions. One was the standard conservative bias against expertise and bureaucracy, according to which experts lacked the “common sense” that an outsider from the private sector could provide — a conviction shared, of course, by the man who nominated Carson for the job. The other was a more particular conviction that he, Carson, possessed extra doses of such common sense by virtue of his biography.

First, though, Carson had to survive his confirmation hearing. The prepping was intense. His top handler was Scott Keller, a longtime lobbyist who had served as chief of staff under Jackson and, in that role, become embroiled in the contracting scandals. Keller’s pupil was attentive, and his performance at the January hearing before the Senate Banking Committee was judged a relative success by the press, punctuated by Carson’s disarming remark that the panel’s top Democrat, Sherrod Brown, reminded him of Columbo. Carson’s family and closest aides took him to the Monocle, the lobbyist hangout on the Hill, to celebrate.

As Carson awaited confirmation, though, a leadership cadre was already entrenching itself in the administrative offices on the 10th floor of HUD. The five-person landing team had given way in January to a larger “beachhead” team. This was a more eyebrow-raising group. Its few alums from past GOP administrations were outnumbered by Trump loyalists such as Barbara Gruson, a Manhattan real-estate broker who’d worked for the campaign; Victoria Barton, the campaign’s “student and millennial outreach coordinator”; and Lynne Patton, who had worked for the Trumps as an event planner.

The most influential of the new bunch, it would quickly emerge, was Maren Kasper. Little-known in housing policy circles, and in her mid-30s, Kasper arrived from the Bay Area startup Roofstock, which linked investors with rental properties available for purchase. It partnered with lenders including Colony American Finance, a company founded by Tom Barrack, the close Trump associate. This link to Trump, combined with Kasper’s background in one sliver of the housing realm, was enough to win her a place as one of the minders appointed by the White House to keep an eye on each government department, a powerful role without precedent in prior administrations.

Kasper, the holder of an MBA from NYU’s Stern School of Business, took her new management role seriously, asserting herself as the final arbiter in the absence of a confirmed secretary. This led to friction both with career housing policy experts and with Carson loyalists, notably Singleton, who had also been hired on. At meetings, Singleton said, Kasper was often “misrepresenting” herself as standing in for Carson. “I made it clear, ‘You don’t speak for Dr. Carson.’ She said, ‘Well, the White House …’” To which Singleton said he responded, “I get what the White House has selected, and I respect that, but he’s the secretary and you need to make sure you understand that.”

That friction lasted only so long. In mid-February, an administration “background check” on beachhead team hires turned up an op-ed critical of Trump that Singleton had written for The Hill before the election. Security personnel came to notify him that it was time to go.

On March 6, Carson arrived for his first day of work at headquarters. In introductory remarks to assembled employees, after he’d gotten the mic back from his wife, he surprised many by asking them to raise their hands and “take the niceness pledge.”

He also went on a riff about immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, capped by this: “That’s what America is about, a land of dreams and opportunity. There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder, for less. But they, too, had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”

The assembled employees stifled their reaction to this jarringly upbeat characterization of chattel slavery. But in HUD’s Baltimore satellite, where many in the heavily African-American office were watching the speech on an online feed at their desks, the gasps were audible.

Carson’s arrival brought with it a reckoning for career employees: Yes, this person was really in charge. They responded in strikingly different ways. The most progressive-minded were thrown into a sense of crisis: whether to hightail it to avoid whatever radical shifts or indignities were in the offing, or to stay put for the sake of the department’s programs and the millions of people they served.

Then there were the opportunists, those who saw in the vacuum in the upper ranks, where it was taking unusually long to appoint political deputies, the chance to claim higher stations than career employees would typically be able to attain. “There were a couple people in some meetings who were bending over to ingratiate themselves” with the transition team, said Harriet Tregoning, a top Obama appointee in HUD’s Community Planning and Development division, who left in January. “For some, it might be their political leaning. For some, it might be an attempt to gain influence. I saw it happening even while the Obama people were still in the building.”

Finally, there were the clock-punching lifers, the “Weebies” (“We be here before you got here, and we be here after you’re gone”), who recognized a chance to start mailing it in. “It’s ‘I can now meet people for a drink at five,’” said Tregoning. Or, as a supervisor in one branch office put it: “As a bureaucrat, HUD’s an easier place to work if Republicans are in charge. They don’t think it’s an important department, they don’t have ideas, they don’t put in changes.” Left unsaid: that such complacency was an unwitting affirmation of the conservative critique of time-serving bureaucrats.

To the extent that the new leadership was providing any guidance at all, it was often actively discouraging initiative on the part of employees. Shortly after the inauguration, a directive came down requiring employees to get 10th-floor approval for any contacts outside the building — professional conferences, or even just meetings with other departments. Ann Marie Oliva, a highly regarded HUD veteran who’d been hired during the George W. Bush administration and was in charge of homeless and HIV programs, was barred from attending a big annual conference on housing and homelessness in Ohio because, she inferred, some of the other speakers there leaned left.

The department leadership was also actively slowing down new initiatives simply by taking a very long time to give the necessary supervisory approvals for the development of surveys or program guidance. In some cases, this appeared to be the result of mere negligence and delay. In other cases, it appeared more willful. For one thing, there was the leadership’s strong hang-up about all matters transgender-related. The 10th floor ordered the removal of online training materials meant, in part, to help homeless shelters make sure they were providing equal access to transgender people. It also pulled back a survey regarding projects in Cincinnati and Houston to reduce LGBT homelessness. And it forced its Policy Development and Research division to dissociate itself from a major study it had funded on housing discrimination against gay, lesbian and transgender people — the study ended up being released in late June under the aegis of the Urban Institute instead.

More upsetting for many ambitious civil servants than the scattered nays coming from the 10th floor, though, was the lack of direction, period. Virtually all the top political jobs below Carson remained vacant. Carson himself was barely to be seen — he never made the walk-through of the building customary of past new secretaries. “It was just nothing,” said one career employee. “I’ve never been so bored in my life. No agenda, nothing to move forward or push back against. Just nothing.”

On May 2, I went to the Watergate to see Carson address an assemblage of the American Land Title Association, title attorneys in town for a regular lobbying visit to buttress the crucial support that HUD and others in Washington provide to the American home-buying machine. I was hoping the speech would give me a better sense of what Carson had in mind for the department, which had been hard to elucidate in his few public appearances. Up to that point, he’d made only a few headlines — for getting caught in a broken elevator at a housing project in Miami; for declaring, on a later visit to Ohio, that public housing should not be too luxurious, a concern that the elevator snafu had apparently not allayed. This comment had drawn mockery but genuinely reflected his long-standing outlook on the safety net: grudging acceptance of its necessity only for those at their most desperate moments, a phase of dependency that must be as brief as absolutely possible. This philosophy was frequently intertwined with allusions to the Creator — so frequently that supervisors at one HUD division sent down word to employees that, yes, their new boss was going to talk a lot about God and they’d probably better just get used to it.

But Carson’s address to the lawyers offered little further clarity on his agenda. He opened with a neurosurgery joke. He touched on his vague proposal for “vision centers” where inner-city kids could come to learn about careers. He repeated one of his favorite mantras, that the government needs to make sure people don’t get unduly reliant on federal assistance, because “everybody is either going to be part of the engine or part of the load.” And then, in the heart of the speech, where a Cabinet secretary would normally get down to programmatic brass tacks, came this meandering riff:

“You know, governments that look out for property rights also tend to look out for other rights. You know, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of all the things that make America America. So it is absolutely foundational to our success … On Sunday, I was talking to a large group of children about what’s happening with rights in our country. These are kids who had all won a Carson Scholar [an award of $1,000 that Carson has sponsored since 1994], which you have to have at least a 3.75 grade-point average on a 4.0 scale and show that you care about other people, and I said you’re going to be the leaders of our nation and will help to determine which pathway we go down, a pathway where we actually care about those around us and we use our intellect to improve the quality of life for everyone, or the pathway where we say, “I don’t want to hear you if you don’t believe what I believe, I want to shut you down, you don’t have any rights.” This is a serious business right now where we are, that juncture in our country that will determine what happens to all of us as time goes on. But the whole housing concern is something that concerns us all.”

A few weeks later, it became clear that the “housing concern” perhaps did not concern everyone when the White House released its budget proposal for HUD. After word emerged in early March that the White House was considering cutting as much as $6 billion from the department, Carson had sent a rare email to HUD employees assuring them that this was just a preliminary figure. But as it turned out, Carson, as a relative political outsider lacking strong connections to the administration, was out of the loop: The final proposal crafted by Trump budget director Mick Mulvaney called for cutting closer to $7 billion, 15 percent of its total budget. Participants in the Section 8 voucher program would need to pay at least 17 percent more of their income toward rent, and there’d likely be a couple hundred thousand fewer vouchers nationwide (and 13,000 fewer in New York City). Capital funding for public housing would be slashed by a whopping 68 percent — this, after years of cuts that, in New York alone, had left public-housing projects with rampant mold, broken elevators and faulty boilers.

“By the time I left, almost 90 percent of our budget was to help people stay in their homes,” Shaun Donovan told me. “So when you have a 15 percent cut to that budget, by definition you’re going to be throwing people out of their homes. You’re literally taking vouchers away from families, you’re literally shutting down public housing, because it can’t be maintained anymore.”

The Trump cuts would mean that several programs would be eliminated entirely, including the home program, which offers seed money for affordable housing initiatives, and the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program that Carla Hills, Ford’s HUD secretary, had praised to Carson at the dinner. In New York, CDBG helped pay for, among many things, housing-code enforcement, the 311 system and homeless shelters for veterans. But the grants were also relied on in struggling small towns, where they paid for sidewalks, sewer upgrades and community centers. In Glouster, Ohio, a tiny coal town that went for Trump by a single vote after going for Obama two to one in 2012, officials were counting on the grants to replace a bridge so weak that the school bus couldn’t cross it, forcing kids from one part of town to cluster along a busy road for pickup.

“Without those funds, it would just cripple this area,” said Nathan Simons, who administers the grants for the surrounding region. HUD, for all its shrinking stature and insecurity complex, has over time worked its way into the fabric of ailing communities throughout the country, a role that has grown only larger as so much of Middle America has suffered decline, and as the capacity of so many state and local governments has withered amid dwindling tax bases and civic disengagement. On my travels through the Midwest I’ve seen how many federally subsidized housing complexes there are on the edges of small towns and cities, places very far from the Bronx or the South Side of Chicago. People living in these places rely on a functioning, minimally competent HUD no less than do the Section 8 voucher recipients in Jared Kushner’s low-income complexes in Baltimore. In an age of ever-widening income inequality, the Great Society department actually plays an even more vital role than when it was conceived.

But if Carson was troubled by the disembowelment of his department, he showed no sign of it. Even before the final numbers were out, he had assured housing advocates that cuts would be made up for by money dedicated to housing in the big infrastructure bill Trump was promising — a notion that his fellow Republican Kemp, among others, found far-fetched. “I’m not sure he understood how that would work,” Kemp told me. “He was probably repeating what had been told to him.” Then, a day after the budget was released, Carson downplayed the importance of programs for the poor in a radio interview with Armstrong Williams, saying that poverty was largely a “state of mind.” This, more than anything, seemed to be a crystallization of the Carson philosophy of HUD: that privation would be solved by the power of positive thinking, that his own extraordinary rise was scalable and could be replicated millions of times over.

Two weeks later, Carson went to Capitol Hill to testify on the budget proposal before congressional panels that would have the final say on the numbers. With Kasper perched over his shoulder, he told both the Senate and House committees that they shouldn’t get overly hung up on the cuts. “We must look for human solutions, not just policies and programs,” he said. “Our programs must reach out and so must our hearts.” The budget, he added, would “help more eligible Americans achieve freedom from regulations and bureaucracy and the ability to govern themselves.”

Members of both parties on the panels seemed dubious. Even conservative Republicans challenged the elimination of CDBG and dismissed Carson’s repeated claim that those and other cuts would be made up for with “public-private partnerships,” noting that such partnerships depended on exactly the public seed money that the budget was jettisoning.

Carson remained unruffled. The cuts were made necessary by the “atmosphere of constraint” created by a “new paradigm that’s been forced on us,” he said, presumably referring to the desire for tax cuts for the wealthy and an even larger military. “The problem that faces us now as a nation will only be exacerbated if we don’t deal with them in what appears to be a harsh manner,” he told the Senate panel. “We have to stop the bleeding to get the healing.”

As I watched the hearings, it occurred to me that Carson was the perfect HUD secretary for Donald Trump, the real-estate-developer president who appears to care little for public housing. He offered a gently smiling refutation to accusations from any corner that the department’s evisceration would have grave consequences. After all, Ben Carson had made it from Detroit to Johns Hopkins without housing assistance, a point of pride in his family. Not to mention that Carson’s very identity — theoretically — helped inoculate the administration against charges of prejudice. (Just last week, Carson said, in the wake of racially tinged violence in Charlottesville, that the controversy over Trump’s support of white supremacists there was “blown out of proportion” and echoed the president’s “both sides” language when referring to “hatred and bigotry.”)

Even better, Carson could be trusted not to resist Mick Mulvaney’s budget designs. At one moment in the Senate hearing, Carson noted that Congress’s recent spending package for the current year had given the department more than it had been expecting. “I’m always happy to take money,” he said, smiling. Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the committee’s top Democrat, was unamused. “You have to ask for it first,” he said.

Over at headquarters, the department remained rudderless. By June, there was still no one nominated to run the major parts of HUD, including the Federal Housing Administration and core divisions such as Housing, Policy Development and Research, Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, and Public and Indian Housing, not to mention a swath of jobs just below that level. (Across the administration, Trump had by the end of June sent barely more than 100 names to the Senate for confirmation, fewer than half as many as Obama had by that point in 2009.) Even the stern hand of Kasper was gone — she had been moved to a perch at Ginnie Mae, the arm of HUD that provides liquidity to federal home ownership programs.

The rank and file (whose department book club reading for the summer was “The Employee’s Survival Guide to Change”) took comfort that the two senior nominations that had been announced, for deputy secretary and the head of the Community Planning and Development division, were conventionally qualified. But appointments further down the ranks were alarming.

There was the administrator for the Southwest region: the mayor of Irving, Texas, Beth Van Duyne, who had gained notoriety by warning against the gathering threat of Sharia. She had asked the Texas Homeland Security Forum to help investigate the legality of an Islamic tribunal in North Texas and had taken to Glenn Beck’s talk show to defend the arrest of the Muslim boy who’d brought a homemade clock to school. There was the conservative commentator John Gibbs, who was hired as a “special assistant” in Community Planning and Development. Sample headlines from his columns in The Federalist: “Voter Fraud Is Real. Here’s the Proof”; “If He Really Wants to Help Blacks, Colin Kaepernick Needs to Put Up or Shut Up.”

Then there was Christopher Bourne, the retired Marine Corps colonel who’d served as the policy director of Carson’s presidential campaign. He suddenly showed up as a “senior policy adviser” in Policy Development and Research. “We don’t know what his job is, and as far as I know, he doesn’t know what his job is,” said one of his new colleagues.

In the context of such hires, it did not stun many HUD employees as much as it did the broader public when news broke of the selection of Lynne Patton, the Trumps’ event planner (whom tabloids gleefully referred to as a wedding planner, for her unofficial advisory role on Eric Trump’s nuptials), as regional administrator for New York and New Jersey. It had been plain to see that Patton had been striving to prove that she was no mere hanger-on. She had been visiting senior career staff for a crash course on housing policy. She had helped organize Carson’s listening tour trips, for which her event planning background had prepared her well. And she eagerly tweeted out defenses of him — “Let’s be clear: You can make life too comfortable for anyone — rich or poor — when you do, it’s a disservice,” she declared after his comments on cushy public housing.

Yes, she would now be the chief liaison from HUD headquarters to a region with the largest concentration of subsidized housing in the country — including the huge Starrett City complex in Brooklyn co-owned by Trump — a job once held by Bill de Blasio. (“Normally, these positions go to people who know what they’re doing,” said one longtime staffer at headquarters.) And yes, she would, just a few weeks later, respond to liberal criticism of the department’s decision to approve Westchester County’s long-litigated desegregation plan with a tweet that ended with the words “P.S. I’m black.”

But there were many other things for career employees to worry about that weren’t getting as much attention. Such as what Carson had in mind with the vague “incentivized family formation” push (which falls under the community building part of HUD’s antipoverty mission) that his team had included in a briefing for Hill staffers.

Also worrisome was what the new leadership might do with major Obama-era initiatives, like its desegregation initiative, which, in a 2015 rule called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, required local jurisdictions to come up with ways to reduce segregation or risk losing HUD funding. Carson had written an op-ed against this during the campaign, calling it a “mandated social engineering scheme” and comparing it to a “failed socialist experiment,” and Republicans in Congress were dying to kill it, but so far, the department was still going through the motions with it.

Then there was the mystery of why Carson’s family was taking such a visible role in the department. There was the omnipresent Mrs. Carson. Even more striking, however, had been the active role of the secretary’s second-oldest son. Ben Carson Jr., who goes by B.J. and co-founded an investment firm in Columbia, Maryland, that specializes in infrastructure, health care and workforce development, was showing up on email chains within the department and appearing often at headquarters. One day, he was seen leaving the 10th-floor office of David Eagles, the new COO, who was crafting a HUD reorganization to accompany the cuts.

And finally, there was the beginning of what appeared likely to be a stream of committed career employees quitting. Ann Marie Oliva, the anti-homelessness director, had met with mistrust from the 10th floor, and she was startled when she wasn’t asked to offer input for a speech Carson was giving on homeless veterans. She gave notice in late May, prompting calls from both parties on the Hill saying how sorry they were to see her go. “It is sad,” she told me, “because it’s not partisan and it could’ve been different from the beginning.”

In early July, Ben Carson went on the next leg of his listening tour: Baltimore. I was expecting the department to make a big deal of his return to his longtime home city. But instead, after the poor press coverage from the previous rounds of community outreach, the itinerary for the first day was kept private.

I managed to get my hands on the schedule and tagged along with a photographer. This did not please Carson’s entourage, which included, among others, a high-strung advance man in a bow tie, several security officers, Candy Carson, Ben Jr. and even his wife. When we arrived at the café where Carson and his family were having lunch with the mayor of Baltimore, Bow Tie arranged to have the Carsons rush out through the kitchen area to a back alley to avoid us. When, at the next stop, I was accidentally allowed into a meeting that Carson was holding at the city’s housing authority, Bow Tie leaped across the room to eject me. By the next stop, at a tour of the redevelopment near Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the federal agents guarding Carson took my picture as I stood on the sidewalk chatting with a neighbor. By the last stop, dinner with Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan at a deluxe waterfront restaurant opened by Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank, I was unsurprised when a Carson aide went to the maître d’ to report my presence at the bar. This was Trumpian anti-press spirit taken to a new level: protectiveness of a government executive to the point of seeking invisibility.

The day had had its awkward moments. In his visit to the Baltimore HUD office, Carson caused friction with his suggestion that staff needed to work harder, comparing the federal work ethic unfavorably with the long hours he put in as a surgeon. Employees were also struck by how he kept seeming to look to his wife for cues as he spoke. At a later meeting with public health officials and researchers, which his wife, son and daughter-in-law also attended, he kicked things off 15 minutes early and referred to those who arrived on time as being late. He demurred when asked by the city’s former Health Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein if he’d commit the department to an ambitious reduction in child lead poisoning, saying something to the effect that he needed to be careful about setting big goals because he “worked for a guy who, if you don’t meet your goals, he’ll so skewer you.”

The next morning, Carson held photo ops at two homes that had undergone HUD-funded lead abatement. At the first home, he looked confused when workers explained that one of their first steps had been to make sure the home’s doors closed properly in the door jambs. “What does that have to do with lead?” asked the nation’s secretary of housing. The workers explained that a key to reducing lead paint flaking was to reduce the friction involved in opening and closing windows and doors. A moment later, a deputy housing commissioner noted that the work had been made possible in part by Community Development Block Grants, which Trump’s HUD budget eliminated.

Ben Carson Jr. resurfaced at the second day’s other open event, a visit to a health fair in East Baltimore. I watched with some amazement as the younger Carson, clad in tinted aviator shades, circulated among those seeking his father’s attention. At one point, Carson Jr. was approached by two entrepreneurs he knew who were hoping to pitch HUD on a proposal to use public housing as the site to pilot their for-profit venture replacing cash bail with the relinquishing of guns. Carson Jr. heard them out and then said, “Have you talked to Dad?” He then led them over to a clutch of Carson’s HUD aides to make introductions.

A moment later, I asked Carson Jr. why he was taking such an active role on the Baltimore trip. “With anything where we can be helpful, if Dad asks us to come along and help out, we’ll always do that. We’re here to offer support, whatever we can do,” he said. I asked about all the time he was spending at HUD headquarters. “If you’re a concerned citizen and you’re not spending time in D.C. trying to actually make sure the right things are happening, then you probably could do more,” he said. “You should have access to your public officials, and if that’s not allowed, then there’s a big problem with how the representatives are handling their relationship with citizens.” (Never mind that in this case, the “public official” was his own father.)

Later, I asked Ben Carson for a comment on his son’s role. “Ben Carson Jr. has visited me, but he has no role at the department,” he said through a spokesman. It was hard to know what to make of it all. On the one hand, it bore obvious similarities to the proliferation of Trumps and Kushners inside the White House, with all their attendant business conflicts.

But it was also possible that Ben Jr., and his mom, were so often at his father’s side for just the reason Ben Jr. claimed, to provide support. Because it was not hard to see why Carson would feel insecurity. He had been chosen for a job he had few qualifications for by a man who had few obvious qualifications for his own job, and he was now being left to his own devices to defend the dismantling of the department he was supposed to run, with an underpopulated corps of deputies at his side. (Even by mid-August, the Office of Public and Indian Housing, which spends tens of billions per year, did not have any senior political leadership whatsoever.) It was as if the White House were ensuring that whatever mere starvation failed to accomplish at HUD, indifference and mismanagement would finish.

The day before, as I waited outside the school building where Carson was meeting with the public health experts, a young mother, Danielle Jackson, had come along with her three young daughters. She asked me what was going on inside, and I told her. She said she herself had been on the waiting list for a Section 8 voucher for three years, and she seemed to take the fact that the famous Baltimore doctor was now running HUD as an omen. “I hope something good happens,” she said brightly.

Her optimism was shared by Carson himself. When I asked him at a brief press conference behind one of the lead-abated homes the next morning how things were going so far for him at HUD, running a big federal department with no prior experience in government, he shrugged. “It’s actually a challenge to inject common sense and logic into bureaucracy, there’s no question about that,” he said. “But it’s coming along quite nicely.”

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For more coverage, read ProPublica’s previous reporting on the Trump administration.