by Aliyya Swaby, ProPublica, and Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio

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

A Chattanooga, Tennessee, public charter school has agreed to pay the family of an 11-year-old boy $100,000 to settle a federal lawsuit claiming that it wrongfully reported the student to police for an alleged threat of mass violence.

The incident happened at the beginning of the school year when Junior, who is autistic, overheard two students talking. (We are using a nickname to protect his privacy.) As Junior later described it, one asked if the other was going to shoot up the school tomorrow. Junior looked at the other student, who seemed like he was going to say yes, and answered yes for him. Students then reported that Junior had threatened to shoot up the school.

Administrators said he could return to school the next day, but hours later, a sheriff’s deputy tracked him down at a family birthday dinner and handcuffed him in the restaurant parking lot.

ProPublica and WPLN News wrote about the case last October as part of a larger investigation into a new law in Tennessee making threats of mass violence at school a felony.

According to the settlement, Chattanooga Preparatory School also agreed to implement training on how to handle threats of mass violence at school, including reporting only “valid” threats to police and differentiating between “clearly innocuous statements” and “imminent” violence.

A federal judge will hold a final hearing on the settlement on July 1. According to the family’s lawyer, this is the first known monetary settlement in a case challenging this law. Chattanooga Prep did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the news organizations.

Junior’s mother, Torri, said the settlement is “bittersweet.” He still gets fearful when he sees police cars, reminded of the evening he was taken to juvenile detention. We are only using Torri’s first name at her request, to prevent her son from being identifiable. His case was dismissed in juvenile court in December.

But Torri said she is happy that employees at the school will get training on how to do better in the future.

Junior with his mother, Torri (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)

“I don’t want anyone — any child, anyone, any parent — to go through it or witness it,” she said. “Other kids will be more protected if they are ever put in that situation.”

Junior’s lawyers argued in the lawsuit that the school was at fault for reporting him to police as though he had made a valid threat, while knowing he had not. “Instead of reporting only valid threats of mass violence to police, Chattanooga Prep reports all threats to law enforcement regardless of validity,” an amended version of the lawsuit against the school reads. The school did not file a response to the legal complaint.

During the last legislative session, advocates for children with disabilities testified about problems with the law — but lawmakers did not alter the existing statute. Instead they added another similar statute to the books, which could open the door for children to be charged with harsher penalties.

The family’s lawyer, Justin Gilbert, said he hopes this settlement will force lawmakers to pay attention and make necessary changes to the law.

“Monetary figures — for better or for worse — can be a driver for policy change, and sometimes legislators can react to that, school districts can react to that,” Gilbert said. “Then that results in a deeper look at the settlement terms and what kind of training is necessary to hopefully prevent these kids from being arrested and expelled unnecessarily.”

by Hannah Allam

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

Under the watchful gaze of security guards, dozens of people streamed through metal detectors to enter Temple Israel one evening this month for a town hall meeting on hate crimes and domestic terrorism.

The cavernous synagogue outside of Detroit, one of several houses of worship along a suburban strip nicknamed “God Row,” was on high alert. Police cars formed a zigzag in the driveway. Only registered guests were admitted; no purses or backpacks were allowed. Attendees had been informed of the location just 48 hours in advance.

The intense security brought to life the threat picture described onstage by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, the recipient of vicious backlash as a gay Jewish Democrat who has led high-profile prosecutions of far-right militants, including the kidnapping plot targeting the governor. Nessel spoke as a slideshow detailed her office’s hate crimes unit, the first of its kind in the nation. She paused at a bullet point about working “with federal and local law enforcement partners.”

“The federal part, not so much anymore, sadly,” she said, adding that the wording should now mention only state and county partners, with help from Washington “TBD.”

“The federal government used to prioritize domestic terrorism, and now it’s like domestic terrorism just went away overnight,” Nessel told the audience. “I don’t think that we’re going to get much in the way of cooperation anymore.”

“The federal government used to prioritize domestic terrorism, and now it’s like domestic terrorism just went away overnight,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said at the hate crimes and extremism town hall at Temple Israel. (Brittany Greeson for ProPublica)

Across the country, other state-level security officials and violence prevention advocates have reached the same conclusion. In interviews with ProPublica, they described the federal government as retreating from the fight against extremist violence, which for years the FBI has deemed the most lethal and active domestic concern. States say they are now largely on their own to confront the kind of hate-fueled threats that had turned Temple Israel into a fortress.

The White House is redirecting counterterrorism personnel and funds toward President Donald Trump’s sweeping deportation campaign, saying the southern border is the greatest domestic security threat facing the country. Millions in budget cuts have gutted terrorism-related law enforcement training and shut down studies tracking the frequency of attacks. Trump and his deputies have signaled that the Justice Department’s focus on violent extremism is over, starting with the president’s clemency order for militants charged in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

On the ground, security officials and extremism researchers say, federal coordination for preventing terrorism and targeted violence is gone, leading to a state-level scramble to preserve efforts no longer supported by Washington, including hate-crime reporting hotlines and help with identifying threatening behavior to thwart violence.

This year, ProPublica has detailed how federal anti-extremism funding has helped local communities avert tragedy. In Texas, a rabbi credited training for his actions ending a hostage-taking standoff. In Massachusetts, specialists work with hospitals to identify young patients exhibiting disturbing behavior. In California, training helped thwart a potential school shooting.

Absent federal direction, the fight against violent extremism falls to a hodgepodge of state efforts, some of them robust and others fledgling. The result is a patchwork approach that counterterrorism experts say leaves many areas uncovered. Even in blue states where more political will exists, funding and programs are increasingly scarce.

“We are now going to ask every local community to try to stand up its own effort without any type of guidance,” said Sharon Gilmartin, executive director of Safe States Alliance, an anti-violence advocacy group that works with state health departments.

Federal agencies have pushed back on the idea of a retreat from violent extremism, noting swift responses in recent domestic terrorism investigations such as an arson attack on Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in April and a car bombing this month outside a fertility clinic in California. FBI officials say they’re also investigating an attack that killed two Israeli Embassy staff members outside a Jewish museum in Washington in a likely “act of targeted violence.”

Federal officials say training and intelligence-sharing systems are in place to help state and local law enforcement “to identify and respond to hate-motivated threats, such as those targeting minority communities.”

The Justice Department “is focused on prosecuting criminals, getting illegal drugs off the streets, and protecting all Americans from violent crime,” said a spokesperson. “Discretionary funds that are not aligned with the administration’s priorities are subject to review and reallocation.” The DOJ is open to appeals, the spokesperson said, and to restoring funding “as appropriate.”

In an email response to questions about specific cuts to counterterrorism work, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Trump is keeping promises to safeguard the nation, “whether it be maximizing the use of Federal resources to improve training or establishing task forces to advance Federal and local coordination.”

Michigan, long a hotbed of anti-government militia activity, was an early adopter of strategies to fight domestic extremism, making it a target of conservative pundits who accuse the state of criminalizing right-wing organizing. An anti-Muslim group is challenging the constitutionality of Nessel’s hate crimes unit in a federal suit that has dragged on for years.

In late December, after a protracted political battle, Michigan adopted a new hate crime statute that expands an old law with additions such as protections for LGBTQ+ communities and people with disabilities. Right-wing figures lobbed threatening slurs at the author, state Rep. Noah Arbit, a gay Jewish Democrat who spoke alongside Nessel at Temple Israel, which is in his district and where he celebrated his bar mitzvah.

Arbit acknowledged that his story of a hard-fought legislative triumph is dampened by the Trump administration’s backsliding. In this political climate, Arbit told the audience, “it is hard not to feel like we’re getting further and further away” from progress against hate-fueled violence.

The politicians were joined onstage by Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who leads the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab at American University and is working with several states to update their strategies. She called Michigan a model.

“The federal government is gone on this issue,” Miller-Idriss told the crowd. “The future right now is in the states.”

Michigan state Rep. Noah Arbit, center, speaks alongside Nessel, left, and extremism scholar Cynthia Miller-Idriss during the town hall at Temple Israel. (Brittany Greeson for ProPublica) “The Only Diner in Town”

Some 2,000 miles away in Washington state, this month’s meeting of the Domestic Extremism and Mass Violence Task Force featured a special guest: Bill Braniff, a recent casualty of the Trump administration’s about-face on counterterrorism.

Braniff spent the last two years leading the federal government’s main office dedicated to preventing “terrorism and targeted violence,” a term encompassing hate-fueled attacks, school shootings and political violence. Housed in the Department of Homeland Security, the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships treated these acts as a pressing public health concern.

Part of Braniff’s job was overseeing a network of regional coordinators who helped state and local advocates connect with federal resources. Advocates credit federal efforts with averting attacks through funds that supported, for example, training that led a student to report a gun in a classmate’s backpack or programs that help families intervene before radicalization turns to violence.

Another project helped states develop their own prevention strategies tailored to local sensibilities; some focus on education and training, others on beefing up enforcement and intelligence sharing. By early this year, eight states had adopted strategies, eight others were in the drafting stage and 26 more had expressed interest.

Speaking via teleconference to the Seattle-based task force, Braniff said the office is now “being dismantled.” He resigned in March, when the Trump administration slashed 20% of his staff, froze much of the work and signaled deeper cuts were coming.

“The approach that we adopted and evangelized over the last two years has proven to be really effective at decreasing harm and violence,” Braniff told the task force. “I’m personally committed to keeping it going in Washington state and in the rest of the nation.”

A Homeland Security spokesperson did not address questions about the cuts but said in an email that “any suggestion that DHS is stepping away from addressing hate crimes or domestic terrorism is simply false.”

Since leaving government, Braniff has joined Miller-Idriss at the extremism research lab, where they and others aspire to build a national network that preserves an effort once led by federal coordinators. The freezing of prevention efforts, economic uncertainty and polarizing rhetoric in the run-up to the midterm elections create “a pressure cooker,” Braniff said.

Similar discussions are occurring in more than a dozen states, including Maryland, Illinois, California, New York, Minnesota and Colorado, according to interviews with organizers and recordings of the meetings. Overnight, grassroots efforts that once complemented federal work have taken on outsized urgency.

“When you’re the only diner in town, the food is much more needed,” said Brian Levin, a veteran extremism scholar who leads California’s Commission on the State of Hate.

Levin, speaking in a personal capacity and not for the state panel, said commissioners are “pedaling as fast as we can” to fill the gaps. Levin has tracked hate crimes since 1986 and this month released updated research showing incidents nationally hovering near record highs, with sharp increases last year in anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim targeting.

The commission also unveiled results of a study conducted jointly with the state Civil Rights Department and UCLA researchers showing that more than half a million Californians — about 1.6% of the population — said they had experienced hate that was potentially criminal in nature, such as assault or property damage, in the last year.

Prevention workers say that’s the kind of data they can no longer rely on the federal government to track.

“For a commission like ours, it makes our particular mission no longer a luxury,” Levin said.

Hurdles Loom

Some state-level advocates wonder how effectively they can push back on hate when Trump and his allies have normalized dehumanizing language about marginalized groups. Trump and senior figures have invoked a conspiracy theory imagining the engineered “replacement” of white Americans, as the president refers to immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the country.

Trump uses the “terrorist” label primarily for his political targets, lumping together leftist activists, drug cartels and student protesters. In March, he suggested that recent attacks on Tesla vehicles by “terrorists” have been more harmful than the storming of the Capitol.

“The actions of this administration foment hate,” Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, a Democrat, told a meeting last month of the state’s Commission on Hate Crime Response and Prevention. “I can’t say that it is solely responsible for hate activity, but it certainly seems to lift the lid and almost encourages this activity.”

A White House spokesperson rejected claims that the Trump administration fuels hate, saying the allegations come from “hoaxes perpetrated by left-wing organizations.”

Another hurdle is getting buy-in from red states, where many politicians have espoused the view that hate crimes and domestic terrorism concerns are exaggerated by liberals to police conservative thought. The starkest example is the embrace of a revisionist telling of the Capitol riots that plays down the violence that Biden-era Justice Department officials labeled as domestic terrorism.

The next year, citing First Amendment concerns, Republicans opposed a domestic terrorism-focused bill introduced after a mass shooting targeting Black people in Buffalo, N.Y.

The leader of one large prevention-focused nonprofit that has worked with Democratic and Republican administrations, speaking on condition of anonymity because of political sensitivities, said it’s important not to write off red states. Some Republican governors have adopted strategies after devastating attacks in their states.

A white supremacist’s rampage through a Walmart in El Paso in 2019 — the deadliest attack targeting Latinos in modern U.S. history — prompted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to create a domestic terrorism task force. And in 2020, responding to a string of high-profile attacks including the Parkland high school mass shooting, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis released a targeted violence prevention strategy.

The pitch is key, the nonprofit director said. Republican officials are more likely to be swayed by efforts focused on “violence prevention” than on combating extremist ideologies. “Use the language and the framing that works in the context you’re working in,” the advocate said.

Still, gaps will remain in areas such as hate crime reporting, services for victims of violence and training to help the FBI keep up with the latest threats, said Miller-Idriss, the American University scholar.

“What feels awful about it is that there’s just entire states and communities who are completely left out and where people are going to end up being more vulnerable,” she said.

Cautionary Tale From Michigan

On a summer night in 1982, Vincent Chin was enjoying his bachelor party when two white auto workers at a nightclub outside of Detroit targeted him for what was then called “Japan bashing,” hate speech stemming from anger over Japanese car companies edging out American competitors.

The men, apparently assuming the Chinese-born Chin was Japanese, taunted him with racist slurs in a confrontation that spiraled into a vicious attack outside the club. The men beat 27-year-old Chin with a baseball bat, cracking his skull. He died of his injuries four days later and was buried the day after his scheduled wedding date.

Vincent Chin (Bettmann/Getty Images)

Asian Americans’ outrage over a judge’s leniency in the case — the assailants received $3,000 fines and no jail time — sparked a surge of activism seeking tougher hate crime laws nationwide.

In Michigan, Chin’s killing inspired the 1988 Ethnic Intimidation Act, which was sponsored by a Jewish state lawmaker, David Honigman from West Bloomfield Township. More than three decades later, Arbit — the Jewish lawmaker representing the same district — led the campaign to update the statute with legislation he introduced in 2023 and finally saw adopted in December.

“It felt like kismet,” Arbit told ProPublica in an interview a few days after the event at Temple Israel. “This is the legacy of my community.”

But there’s a notable difference. Honigman was a Republican. Arbit is a Democrat.

“It’s sort of telling,” Arbit said, “that in 1988 this was a Republican-sponsored bill and then in 2023 it only passed with three Republican votes.”

Some Republicans argued that the bill infringes on the First Amendment with “content-based speech regulation.” One conservative state lawmaker told a right-wing cable show that the goal is “to advance the radical transgender agenda.”

Arbit said it took “sheer brute force” to enact new hate crimes laws in this hyperpartisan era. He said state officials entering the fray should be prepared for social media attacks, doxing and death threats.

In the summer of 2023, Arbit was waylaid by a right-wing campaign that reduced his detailed proposal to “the pronoun bill” by spreading the debunked idea it would criminalize misgendering someone. Local outlets fact-checked the false claims and Arbit made some 50 press appearances correcting the portrayal — but they were drowned out, he said, by a “disinformation storm” that spread quickly via right-wing outlets such as Breitbart and Fox News. The bill languished for more than a year before he could revive it.

In December 2024, the legislation passed the Michigan House 57-52, with a single Republican vote. By contrast, Arbit said, the bill was endorsed by an association representing all 83 county prosecutors, the majority of them Republicans. Those who see the effects up close, he said, are less likely to view violent extremism through a partisan lens.

“These are real security threats,” Arbit said. “Shouldn’t we want a society in which you’re not allowed to target a group of people for violence?”

by Emily Schwing, KYUK

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

This story is not subject to our Creative Commons license.

NEWTOK, Alaska — A jumble of shipping containers hold all that remains of the demolished public school in Newtok, Alaska, where on a recent visit, a few stray dogs and a lone ermine prowled among the ruins.

Late last year, the final residents of this sinking village near the Bering Sea left behind the waterlogged tundra of their former home, part of a fraught, federally funded effort to resettle communities threatened by climate change.

Nearly 300 people from Newtok have moved 9 miles across the Ninglick River to a new village known as Mertarvik. But much of the infrastructure there is already failing. Residents lack running water, use 5-gallon buckets as toilets and must contend with intermittent electricity and deteriorating homes that expose them to the region’s fierce weather.

Newtok’s relocation was supposed to provide a model for dozens of Alaskan communities that will need to move in the coming decades. Instead, those who’ve worked on the effort say what happened in Newtok demonstrates the federal government’s failure to oversee the complex project and understand communities’ unique cultural needs. And it highlights how ill-prepared the United States is to respond to the way climate change is making some places uninhabitable, according to an investigation by The Washington Post, ProPublica and KYUK radio in Bethel, Alaska.

Dozens of grants from at least seven federal agencies have helped pay for the relocation, which began in 2019 and is expected to cost more than $150 million. But while the federal government supplied taxpayer dollars, it left most of the responsibility to the tiny Newtok Village Council. The federally recognized tribal government lacked the expertise to manage the project and has faced high turnover and internal political conflict, according to tribal records and interviews with more than 70 residents as well as dozens of current and former members of the seven-person village council.

Faith Carl, 7, checks on plants on the windowsill at the home of Frieda and Phillip Carl, her grandparents. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Federal auditors have warned for years that climate relocation projects need a lead agency to coordinate assistance and reduce the burden on local communities. The Biden administration tried to address those concerns by creating an interagency task force led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Interior Department. The task force’s report in December also called for more coordination and guidance across the federal government as well as long-term funding for relocations.

But the Trump administration has removed the group’s report from FEMA’s website and, as part of its withdrawal of climate funding, frozen millions in federal aid that was supposed to pay for housing construction in Mertarvik this summer. The administration did not respond to a request for comment.

“We’re physically seeing the impacts of a changing climate on these communities,” said Don Antrobus, a climate adaptation consultant for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. “And the fact that we don’t have a government framework for dealing with these issues is not just an Alaska problem, it’s a national problem.”

Newtok’s relocation follows the resettlement of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, where land vanished under rising sea levels. Both relocations have been labeled as “blueprints” for the federal government’s response to climate change. Both have been mired in complicated and disjointed funding systems and accusations that the government neglected traditional knowledge.

For centuries, the area’s Indigenous Yup’ik residents lived a nomadic subsistence lifestyle, timing their seasonal movements with the arrival of migratory birds in spring, fish in summer and the ripening of berries in early fall. But that changed in the 1950s after a barge, loaded with construction materials to build a school, got stuck near present-day Newtok and couldn’t navigate farther upriver. So the Bureau of Indian Affairs built the school there.

At the time, elders knew the location wasn’t fit for permanent settlement because the low-lying ground would shift as the permafrost froze and thawed seasonally, said Andy Patrick, 77, one of two residents who remember life in the old village before Newtok.

“My grandma used to tell me, ‘It’s going to start wobbling,’” he said. But they moved because the BIA required their children to attend its school.

First image: Tiny homes in Mertarvik, Alaska. Second image: Connor Queenie watches television in the home of Andy Patrick, a Mertarvik elder. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Born and raised in Newtok, Jack Charlie was relieved when he moved into a modest brown house in Mertarvik in 2022. His old plywood home in Newtok was moldy and sinking into the tundra as the permafrost that supported the land thawed.

But within months, the light fixtures in his new house filled with water from condensation, and gaps formed where the walls met the ceiling in his bedroom. Charlie started stuffing toilet paper into the cracks to keep out the persistent coastal winds.

“Once I found it was leaking and cold air drifting in, I said: ‘Hell! What kind of house did they build?’” he said.

An aerial view of Mertarvik (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Charlie is one of multiple residents who complained about problems with their newly built houses. When KYUK asked for inspection reports, the tribe and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said they didn’t have any. In the absence of an official inspection, KYUK hired a professional with expertise in cold climate housing to examine seven of the 46 homes in Mertarvik, which were built by three different contractors.

According to the inspection performed last year, Charlie’s home is among 17 houses, built by one contractor, that are rapidly deteriorating because they were designed and constructed the same way. The foundations are not salvageable, and the buildings do not meet minimum code requirements, said the inspector, Emmett Leffel, an energy auditor and building analyst in Alaska.

“This is some of the worst new construction I’ve ever seen, and the impact is so quickly realized because of the coastal climate,” Leffel said in an interview.

His inspection report concluded: “The totality of the work needed to correct these conditions and issues may cost substantially more than the original construction.”

There are other problems beyond housing. The BIA committed more than $6 million for roads but failed to coordinate with other agencies to install water pipes underneath, according to a former project manager, the tribal health consortium and the Denali Commission, an independent federal agency tasked with providing critical infrastructure support to Alaska’s most remote communities. As a result, none of the houses in Mertarvik has a flush toilet or shower. Residents go to the town’s small well to fill jugs for household use.

As more people have moved to Mertarvik, the town’s power plant hasn’t kept up with electricity demand, leaving residents without heat or power in the winter, said Calvin Tom, the tribal administrator. And a wastewater system that handles sewage from the school, health clinic and a dormitory for construction workers has been overwhelmed for more than a year, he said. Last spring, sewage backed up into the school’s basement.

The BIA, the largest funder of the relocation that helped plan the community, did not agree to an interview request. The agency said in an email that it’s working closely with the Newtok Village Council and that the council has established a plan to repair the homes. The tribe’s attorney, Matt Mead, said, “NVC does have a repair plan and is seeking funding from multiple sources to allow for implementation of the plan.”

That was news to council secretary Della Carl and council member Francis Tom, whose home has some of the worst problems. Both said they knew of no such plan, and Mead declined to provide one. Four other council members (one seat is vacant) declined to comment or didn’t return calls or emails. Mead said the plan to fix the houses needs to be better communicated to council members and residents. He said the tribe disagrees that the homes are deteriorating and declined to comment about its management of the project.

Francis Tom lives in one of the homes built by LeMay Engineering & Consulting. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Patrick LeMay, the Anchorage-based contractor whose company was hired by the tribe to build Charlie’s and 16 other deteriorating houses, was fired last year because of the construction and design problems, according to tribal council members. LeMay didn’t respond to questions or comment on Leffel’s report other than to say, “I do not work for Newtok any longer.”

Greg Stuckey, administrator for HUD’s Office of Native American Programs in Anchorage, said the agency is not required to inspect the LeMay houses because the grant went directly to the tribal government. Federal law allows tribes to administer government programs themselves to recognize their independence and cultural needs.

“So they can’t say it’s the federal government,” Stuckey said, “because they chose this.”

Mead said the Newtok Village Council didn’t dispute that.

The Government Accountability Office, however, has repeatedly recommended that federal agencies provide more technical assistance to small tribes in climate relocations.

“When you have 20 or 30 different programs that can all interact together and they all have different rules,” said Anna Maria Ortiz, the GAO’s director of natural resources and environment, “that’s going to cost more in the long run and can be nearly impossible for some villages.”

In 1996, after decades fighting erosion from storms and the deteriorating permafrost, the Newtok tribe began negotiating with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to exchange land for the relocation. Congress approved the trade in 2003. For the next two decades, the tribe worked with federal and state agencies to plan the new community at Mertarvik. Storm damage shut down the public school for good last year, and the Newtok Village Council voted to finish the evacuation.

First image: The former Bureau of Indian Affairs school in Newtok. Second image: The school in Mertarvik is still under construction with a projected finish date of fall 2026. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

Dozens of remote communities in Alaska face similar threats from climate change, according to a 2019 report by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The issues affecting such communities are well understood in Arctic regions around the world, but policymakers aren’t heeding warnings from relocation experts, said Andrea Marta Knudsen, a relocation and disaster recovery specialist in the Iceland prime minister’s office.

“It’s not like this is a new thing or hasn’t been researched,” she said. “The government should maybe say: ‘Oh wow, we’re dealing with a disaster or relocation. Who knows this? Let’s have a team of experts working with the government on this.’”

Over the years, several government bodies tried to coordinate efforts in Newtok. At first, Alaska’s commerce department formed the Newtok Planning Group to coordinate assistance for the relocation. But in 2013, the group’s work stalled because the BIA paused its funding for the tribe after a political dispute resulted in two competing tribal governments. The planning group has met only three times since 2019.

The Denali Commission took on project management responsibilities in 2016 but ceded control to the BIA three years ago after the agency announced a $25 million grant funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

This inconsistent oversight and coordination has significantly affected the quality of housing, according to experts who have worked on the relocation.

Walter Tom and Dionne Kilongak harvest a ring seal and walrus while their 2-year-old son plays with their dog, Pobby. Tom and his family live in a tiny home in Mertarvik that is intended to be temporary. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

The first two housing projects in Mertarvik received high ratings from Leffel, the inspector hired by KYUK. The Alaska-based nonprofit Cold Climate Housing Research Center designed 14 homes to maximize energy efficiency and withstand the harsh weather. The houses also provide space for residents to cut fish, dress moose and host large family gatherings — activities integral to the Yup’ik lifestyle. An additional 15 houses were built by a regional housing authority that has decades of experience on Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

Charlie’s home and 16 others were part of a third round of houses, designed and built by LeMay Engineering & Consulting. At various times, LeMay was also employed by the tribe in other roles, including tribal administrator and relocation coordinator. Representing the tribe while simultaneously earning money from it could create a potential conflict of interest, said Ted Waters, an attorney who specializes in federal grants administration.

According to Leffel’s inspection, the foundations of Charlie’s home and the others designed and built by LeMay “do not meet minimum code requirements for corrosion resistance, adequate supports” or “structural integrity requirements.” Two years of fuel usage data provided by the tribe shows residents in the LeMay houses pay more than twice as much for energy each year compared with the other two housing projects.

Francis Tom, the council member, said outside entities like LeMay and federal agencies often ignored his community’s needs. “They don’t know. They weren’t born here,” he said. “They don’t spend enough time here.”

First image: The Carls’ home has mold, leaks and other structural issues. Second image: Photographs of life in Newtok adorn their refrigerator. (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

A year before Leffel examined the houses, a group of BIA officials took a tour and saw the water pooling in light fixtures and moisture damage in several of the LeMay homes, council members said. It’s unclear what they did with that information. The BIA said its staff has made three trips to Mertarvik since, and the tribe’s attorney said multiple homes were inspected by independent engineers this past year, something both council members Carl and Tom disputed. Charlie and nearly a dozen other residents said no one other than Leffel had been inside their homes to inspect them. The attorney declined to provide copies of any inspections.

HUD was also made aware of problems after a 2022 report submitted by the tribe showed occupancy numbers that exceeded the agency’s overcrowding standards.

In addition to the problems with the LeMay homes, several other residents said they’re facing similar issues with some of the temporary tiny homes that were shipped in by barge in the fall because of the urgent need to move. Rosemary John’s was among the last families to relocate. John, who grew up in Newtok and raised her six kids there, said the move has been agonizing. Seven people are now living in her house. This winter, John posted a video to social media that showed water running down a wall and pooling on the floor.

Next door, in Dionne Kilongak’s temporary house, the windowsills are already covered in mold. She works at her kitchen table every day while her children, ages 2 and 4, scurry up and down the narrow hallway. She said winds bring water into her house.

“I think these aren’t for Alaska,” she said.

With no solution in sight, Charlie has tried to make his house feel more homey. Tired of white paint that did nothing to hide the water damage, he found scrap paneling from one of the housing authority’s projects and fastened it to his walls.

Like most people in these houses, he said he hopes they’ll be fixed, but he’s unsure where to turn.

“I have no idea who’s gonna be responsible for these homes,” he said.

A home in Mertarvik at night (Ash Adams for The Washington Post)

by Rob Davis

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

When police used stun batons to hit garment workers seeking a $14 monthly raise from a Nike factory in Cambodia in 2013, reportedly leading one pregnant woman to miscarry, Nike said it was “deeply concerned.”

The following year, when Cambodian police opened fire and killed four garment workers during widespread demonstrations over low wages, Nike and other brands sent the government a letter expressing “grave concern.”

In 2018, after the government curbed union rights, Nike and other brands again protested, this time in a meeting with government officials. An industry representative described the companies in a news release as “increasingly concerned.”

A year later, another letter: “We are concerned.”

Despite the varying shades of corporate concern, Cambodia continued descending deeper into authoritarian governance, and the size of Nike’s contract workforce there kept going up.

While Nike has been shrinking its footprint in China, its presence in Cambodia has grown, from about 16,000 factory workers in May 2013, to nearly 35,000 in 2019, to more than 57,000 as of March. Today, Cambodia is the athletic apparel giant’s third-largest supplier of garments other than shoes, nearly overtaking its clothing production in China.

Other Western brands have also continued expanding in Cambodia. The country’s garment exports climbed from $4.9 billion in 2013 to $9.3 billion in 2022, according to World Bank data.

Along the way, labor leaders have been jailed; opposing politicians have gone into exile and been arrested or killed; journalists have been locked up and killed; and independent media outlets have been shuttered by the government.

Sabrina Manufacturing workers gather at their union headquarters in Phnom Penh while protesting for higher wages at the Nike supplier in 2013. (Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

The curbs on unions and free speech are in tension with Nike’s code of conduct, which recognizes workers’ rights to join trade unions and participate in union activities without interference. In countries that restrict union rights, Nike says factories must have an effective grievance process that allows employees to voice concerns over working conditions without fear of retaliation.

Nike’s continued growth in Cambodia underscores the level of political and labor repression the company has been willing to tolerate in countries that provide inexpensive labor — letters of concern notwithstanding.

“A lot of brands have been signing letters for years as a substitute for real pressure, real change,” said Jason Judd, executive director of Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute.

Brands increasing their orders from Cambodia while raising concerns about labor rights are “obviously mixed messages,” Judd said. “And one message, the purchase order, has a lot more weight than the other. Until those are credibly threatened, the government has no reason to act.”

Khun Tharo, program manager at the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, was targeted last year after his organization published a report identifying gaps in factory oversight. The government began auditing the legal aid group; Khun faced a criminal complaint that he said his lawyer had been unable to see.

Khun Tharo (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

Khun told ProPublica that brands often speak up about worker rights because of prodding by civil society groups or the ire voiced by trading partners.

For Nike and other brands, “it’s about protecting their market and accessibility and also credibility. That’s all,” Khun said. Without pressure on brands to take action, he said, “they will not do it. They will just start to ignore it.”

Nike did not respond directly to written questions from ProPublica about its expansion in Cambodia amid the country’s intensifying political repression. Instead, it said in a statement: “We continue to engage with suppliers, industry organizations and other global stakeholders to develop broad-based approaches to help mitigate longer-term impacts.”

Labor rights are tenuous in Cambodia. The U.S. State Department said in a 2023 human rights report that “significant and systematic restrictions on workers’ freedom of association” exist in Cambodia and that the government “failed to effectively enforce laws that protected union and labor rights.” Human Rights Watch said in a 2022 report that the government’s repression of independent unions had only intensified after the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Former Khmer Rouge battalion commander Hun Sen led Cambodia from 1985 until handing control to his son, Hun Manet, in 2023. Hun Sen was brazen in his public dismissals of threats from the West over its assault on labor rights and civil society, said Carlyle Thayer, emeritus professor of politics at Australia’s University of New South Wales, Canberra. The threats included warnings from Europe, U.S. lawmakers and international clothing brands.

The Cambodian government yielded just enough to avoid the full force of economic sanctions, Thayer said.

He pointed to an episode in which the European Commission threatened to end tariff exemptions for Cambodian exports over concerns about human rights and labor abuses. Hun Sen directed the country’s courts to quickly decide cases pending against union officials, Thayer said, leading to suspended sentences for some and dropped charges for others.Instead of following through on its threat, the European Commission imposed a scaled-down set of trade restrictions.

Brands, including Nike, have had some influence. After workers were killed while protesting for higher wages in 2014, brands supported increasing the minimum wage. The Cambodian government eventually established a process to annually negotiate wage increases.

A spokesperson for Cambodia’s Ministry of Labor and Vocational Training said the incidents that led foreign brands to raise concerns with the government were “old,” misleading and had been politicized. The spokesperson did not respond to subsequent questions after a reporter noted that the most recent incident happened within the last year.

Ken Loo, a spokesperson for the Cambodian garment industry’s trade association, said thousands of unions are registered in the country. “I do not agree with your presumption that there is a repressive environment here in Cambodia,” he said. “Individual incidents do not make up the whole story.”

Many of Cambodia’s unions are government-aligned groups that Human Rights Watch has called “instant noodle” unions because they take less time to make than a cup of noodles. Independent unions have long been under assault there, according to American, European and other labor rights observers.

Yang Sophorn, president of the independent Cambodian Alliance of Trade Unions, was threatened in a July 2020 letter from the country’s labor ministry after joining workers who protested outside a garment factory, Violet Apparel. The factory had closed suddenly during the pandemic.

The former Nike supplier went on to become the subject of a long-standing dispute between labor advocates and Nike over wages that workers said they were still owed. Ramatex, Violet Apparel’s parent company, did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment. Nike has said publicly it’s found no evidence to support the allegations.

Yang Sophorn (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

In its 2020 letter, the government told Yang that she was breaking the law by inciting workers and pressuring the closed factory to pay its employees. The letter said the labor ministry might dissolve her independent union, which represents more than 5,000 workers who make clothes in Nike factories. (The Cambodian labor ministry did not respond to ProPublica's request for comment about the letter.)

The labor leader had already received a suspended criminal sentence. The government said she instigated protests over wages, which occurred in 2013 and 2014. That conviction was eventually vacated in what Human Rights Watch said was an effort to placate European officials threatening Cambodia’s trade access.

Yang told ProPublica she was not scared by the Cambodian government’s threats against her and her union. “If they still want to dissolve it,” she said of the union, “let it be.”

Yang said she welcomes investments by Nike and other brands because they provide more jobs for people in her country. But she said workers need good wages, the right to assemble and protections when factories close without paying them. “If they just come to exploit our workers, I don’t want them,” she said.

Nike has prided itself on the story of its turnaround since co-founder Phil Knight acknowledged in 1998 that its products had become “synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse.”

One former senior Nike executive, who requested anonymity so they could speak freely about their former employer, said the company had expanded in Cambodia to help diversify its supply chain. The executive said Nike and other brands’ presence had benefited workers in Cambodia and other countries where it manufactures.

“Nike has clearly stated that the rule of law and respect for labor rights are significant factors in where the company decides to place orders,” the executive said.

But, the person said, “Are things imperfect, and are there a lot of screwups? Absolutely. Are we concerned when Vietnam or Cambodia takes steps backward? Of course.”

After Nike last year underwent $2 billion in cost cutting that disproportionately targeted its sustainability staff, including people working on foreign factory oversight, the former executive said they worried that Nike’s cuts had affected the company’s ability to engage with its stakeholders in the countries where its factories operate.

Nike was silent last year when Cambodian authorities cracked down on the Center for Alliance of Labor and Human Rights, the legal aid group. The government launched what was described as a “national security audit” of the organization, also known as CENTRAL, after it reported on oversight gaps by a United Nations-backed factory watchdog.

Two industry groups, one of which counts Nike as a participant, wrote to the government on July 12 saying they had “serious concerns” that the audit’s only purpose was retaliation, condemning it “in the strongest possible terms.”

Nineteen major clothing companies — from Adidas to VF Corp., owner of the North Face brand — followed up Sept. 10 with a joint letter protesting Cambodia’s assault on the group, also saying they had “serious concerns.” Nike did not sign that letter.

“A vibrant civil society, guaranteed in part by freedom of speech, is a key part of what makes Cambodia an important sourcing partner for the apparel and footwear industry,” the companies said.

Nike did not explain why it was not a signatory when asked by ProPublica.

Bryony Lau, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said with the steady deterioration in workers’ rights in Cambodia and President Donald Trump’s cuts to U.S. foreign aid, Western apparel companies have an imperative to speak up in Cambodia.

“Nike and other brands sourcing from Cambodia have an interest in ensuring that organizations like CENTRAL continue to exist and can speak about labor rights issues,” Lau said.

Khun, the CENTRAL staffer, said he knew the Nike employee who focused on corporate social responsibility in Cambodia, but he said she left the company within the last year. Khun said he didn’t know whether anyone had replaced her. (She did not respond to ProPublica, and Nike did not respond to questions about her departure.)

CENTRAL this year faced a new government problem. When Trump began to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development in January, CENTRAL and two other groups received notice that they were losing $1.5 million in funding promised for a project intended to document human rights violations and counter Cambodia’s repression.

Less than two months later, the Trump administration attempted to gut Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, some of the only news sources available in Cambodia’s native language that reported on the country’s authoritarian turn. Former Prime Minister Hun Sen praised Trump’s “courage,” posting an image from 2017 of the two men shaking hands and smiling.

Trump was giving a thumbs up.

After Donald Trump attempted in 2025 to gut federally funded agencies that published news about Cambodia’s political repression, Hun Sen, Cambodia’s longtime leader, shared photos of himself meeting the U.S. president in 2017. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Keat Soriththeavy and Ouch Sony contributed reporting and translation.

by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards

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

Illinois legislators on Wednesday passed a law to explicitly prevent police from ticketing and fining students for minor misbehavior at school, ending a practice that harmed students across the state.

The new law would apply to all public schools, including charters. It will require school districts, beginning in the 2027-28 school year, to report to the state how often they involve police in student matters each year and to separate the data by race, gender and disability. The state will be required to make the data public.

The legislation comes three years after a ProPublica and Chicago Tribune investigation, “The Price Kids Pay,” revealed that even though Illinois law bans school officials from fining students directly, districts skirted the law by calling on police to issue citations for violating local ordinances.

“The Price Kids Pay” found that thousands of Illinois students had been ticketed in recent years for adolescent behavior once handled by the principal’s office — things like littering, making loud noises, swearing, fighting or vaping in the bathroom. It also found that Black students were twice as likely to be ticketed at school than their white peers.

From the House floor, Rep. La Shawn Ford, a Democrat from Chicago, thanked the news organizations for exposing the practice and told legislators that the goal of the bill “is to make sure if there is a violation of school code, the school should use their discipline policies” rather than disciplining students through police-issued tickets.

State Sen. Karina Villa, a Democrat from suburban West Chicago and a sponsor of the measure, said in a statement that ticketing students failed to address the reasons for misbehavior. “This bill will once and for all prohibit monetary fines as a form of discipline for Illinois students,” she said.

The legislation also would prevent police from issuing tickets to students for behavior on school transportation or during school-related events or activities.

The Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police opposed the legislation. The group said in a statement that while school-based officers should not be responsible for disciplining students, they should have the option to issue citations for criminal conduct as one of a “variety of resolutions.” The group said it’s concerned that not having the option to issue tickets could lead to students facing arrest and criminal charges instead.

The legislation passed the House 69-44. It passed in the Senate last month 37-17 and now heads to Gov. JB Pritzker, who previously has spoken out against ticketing students at school. A spokesperson said Wednesday night that he “was supportive of this initiative” and plans to review the bill.

The legislation makes clear that police can arrest students for crimes or violence they commit, but that they cannot ticket students for violating local ordinances prohibiting a range of minor infractions.

That distinction was not clear in previous versions of the legislation, which led to concern that schools would not be able to involve police in serious matters — and was a key reason legislation on ticketing foundered in previous legislative sessions. Students also may still be ordered to pay for lost, stolen or damaged property.

“This bill helps create an environment where students can learn from their mistakes without being unnecessarily funneled into the justice system,” said Aimee Galvin, government affairs director with Stand for Children, one of the groups that advocated for banning municipal tickets as school-based discipline.

The news investigation detailed how students were doubly penalized: when they were punished in school, with detention or a suspension, and then when they were ticketed by police for minor misbehavior. The investigation also revealed how, to resolve the tickets, children were thrown into a legal process designed for adults. Illinois law permits fines of up to $750 for municipal ordinance violations; it’s difficult to fight the charges, and students and families can be sent to collections if they don’t pay.

After the investigation was published, some school districts stopped asking police to ticket students. But the practice has continued in many other districts.

The legislation also adds regulations for districts that hire school-based police officers, known as school resource officers. Starting next year, districts with school resource officers must enter into agreements with local police to lay out the roles and responsibilities of officers on campus. The agreements will need to specify that officers are prohibited from issuing citations on school property and that they must be trained in working with students with disabilities. The agreements also must outline a process for data collection and reporting. School personnel also would be prohibited from referring truant students to police to be ticketed as punishment.

Before the new legislation, there had been some piecemeal changes and efforts at reform. A state attorney general investigation into a large suburban Chicago district confirmed that school administrators were exploiting a loophole in state law when they asked police to issue tickets to students. The district denied wrongdoing, but that investigation found the district broke the law and that the practice disproportionately affected Black and Latino students. The state’s top legal authority declared the practice illegal and said it should stop.

by Brett Murphy and Anna Maria Barry-Jester

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

American diplomats in at least two countries have recently delivered internal reports to Washington that reflect a grim new reality taking hold abroad: The Trump administration’s sudden withdrawal of foreign aid is bringing about the violence and chaos that many had warned would come.

The vacuum left after the U.S. abandoned its humanitarian commitments has destabilized some of the most fragile locations in the world and thrown refugee camps further into unrest, according to State Department correspondence and notes obtained by ProPublica.

The assessments are not just predictions about the future but detailed accounts of what has already occurred, making them among the first such reports from inside the Trump administration to surface publicly — though experts suspect they will not be the last. The diplomats warned in their correspondence that stopping aid may undermine efforts to combat terrorism.

In the southeastern African country of Malawi, U.S. funding cuts to the United Nations’ World Food Programme have “yielded a sharp increase in criminality, sexual violence, and instances of human trafficking” within a large refugee camp, U.S. embassy officials told the State Department in late April. The world’s largest humanitarian food provider, the WFP projects a 40% decrease in funding compared to last year and has been forced to reduce food rations in Malawi’s sprawling Dzaleka refugee camp by a third.

To the north, the U.S. embassy in Kenya reported that news of funding cuts to refugee camps’ food programs led to violent demonstrations, according to a previously unreported cable from early May. During one protest, police responded with gunfire and wounded four people. Refugees have also died at food distribution centers, the officials wrote in the cable, including a pregnant woman who died under a stampede. Aid workers said they expected more people to get hurt “as vulnerable households become increasingly desperate.”

“It is devastating, but it’s not surprising,” Eric Schwartz, a former State Department assistant secretary and member of the National Security Council during Democratic administrations, told ProPublica. “It’s all what people in the national security community have predicted.”

“I struggle for adjectives to adequately describe the horror that this administration has visited on the world,” Schwartz added. “It keeps me up at night.”

In response to a detailed list of questions, a State Department spokesperson said in an email: “It is grossly misleading to blame unrest and violence around the world on America. No one can reasonably expect the United States to be equipped to feed every person on earth or be responsible for providing medication for every living human.”

The spokesperson also said that “an overwhelming majority” of the WFP programs that the Trump administration inherited, including those in Malawi and Kenya, are still active.

But the U.S. funds the WFP on a yearly basis. For 2025, the Trump administration so far hasn’t approved any money in either country, forcing the organization to drastically slash food programs.

In Kenya, for example, the WFP will cut its rations in June down to 28% — or less than 600 calories a day per person — a low never seen before, the WFP’s Kenya country director Lauren Landis told ProPublica. The WFP’s standard minimum for adults is 2,100 calories per day.

“We are living off the fumes of what was delivered in late 2024 or early 2025,” Landis said. On a recent visit to a facility treating malnourished children younger than 5, she said she saw kids who were “walking skeletons like I haven’t seen in a decade.”

Since taking office, President Donald Trump has pledged to restore safety and security around the world. At the same time, his administration, working alongside Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, swiftly dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, canceling thousands of government-funded foreign aid programs they considered wasteful. More than 80% of USAID’s operations were terminated, which crippled lifesaving humanitarian efforts around the world.

Musk, who did not respond to a request for comment, has said that DOGE’s cuts to humanitarian aid have targeted fraudulent payments to organizations but are not contributing to widespread deaths. “Show us any evidence whatsoever that that is true,” he said recently. “It’s false.”

For decades, American administrations run by both parties saw humanitarian diplomacy, or “soft power,” as a cost-effective measure to help stabilize volatile but strategically important regions and provide basic needs for people who might otherwise turn to international adversaries. Those investments, experts say, help prevent regional conflict and war that may embroil the U.S. “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition,” Jim Mattis, who was defense secretary during Trump’s first administration, told Congress in 2013 when he led U.S. Central Command.

Food insecurity has long been closely linked with regional turmoil. But despite promises from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that lifesaving operations would continue amid widespread cuts to foreign aid, the Trump administration has terminated funding to WFP for several countries. Nearly 50% of the WFP’s budget came from the U.S. in 2024.

Since February, U.S. officials throughout the developing world have issued urgent warnings forecasting that the Trump administration’s decision to suddenly cut off help to desperate populations could exacerbate humanitarian crises and threaten U.S. national security interests, records show. In one cable, diplomats in the Middle East communicated concerns that stopping aid could empower groups like the Taliban and undermine efforts to address terrorism, the narcotics trade and illegal immigration. The shift may also “significantly de-stabilize the transitioning” region and “only serve to benefit ISIS’ standing,” officials warned in other correspondence. “It could put US troops in the region at risk.”

Embassies in Africa have delivered similar messages. “We are deeply concerned that suddenly discontinuing all USAID counter terrorism-focused stabilization and humanitarian programs in Somalia … will immediately and negatively affect U.S. national security interests,” the U.S. embassy in Mogadishu, Somalia, wrote in February. USAID’s role in helping the military prevent newly liberated territory — “purchased at a high cost of blood and treasure” — from getting back into the hands of terrorists “is indisputable, and irreplaceable,” the officials added.

The embassy in Nigeria described how stop-work orders had caused lapses in oversight that put U.S. resources at risk of being diverted to criminal or terrorist groups. (A February whistleblower complaint alleged USAID-purchased computers were stolen from health centers there.) And U.S. officials said the Kenyan government “faces an impending humanitarian crisis for over 730,000 refugees” without additional resources, as local officials struggle to confront al-Shabaab, a major terrorist threat in the region, while also maintaining security inside the country’s refugee camps.

In early April, Jeremy Lewin — an attorney in his late 20s with no prior government experience who is currently in charge of the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance and running USAID operations — ordered the end of WFP grants altogether in more than a dozen countries. (Amid outcry, he later reinstated a few of them.) The State Department spokesperson said the agency was responding on Lewin’s behalf.

In Kenya, the WFP expects a malnutrition crisis after rations are cut to a fourth of the standard minimum, Landis said. She is also concerned about the security of her staff, who already travel with police escorts, given the likelihood that there will be more protests and that al-Shabaab might make further incursions into the camps.

In order for the U.S. to deliver its usual food aid to Kenya by the end of the year, it needed to be put on a boat already, Landis said. That has not happened.

A nurse evaluates a child for malnourishment at a WFP-supported health clinic in Turkana County, Kenya, in April 2025. (Courtesy of World Food Program/Kevin Gitonga)

In recent days, South Sudanese refugees in Ethiopia have begged a visiting government delegation from the U.S. not to cut food rations any further, according to a cable documenting the visit. Aid workers in another group of camps in North Africa reported that they expect to run out of funding by the end of May for a program that fights malnutrition for 8,600 pregnant and nursing mothers.

Despite being one of the poorest countries in the world, Malawi has been a relative beacon of stability in a region that’s seen numerous civil wars and unrest in recent decades. Yet in early March, officials there warned Washington counterparts that cuts to the more than $300 million USAID planned to provide to the country in aid a year would dramatically increase “the effects of the worsening economy already in motion.”

At the time, 10 employees from a USAID-funded nonprofit had recently shown up unannounced at USAID’s offices in the capital Lilongwe asking for their unpaid wages after the U.S. froze funding. The group left without incident, and it’s unclear if they were paid, but officials reported that they expected countries around the world would face similar issues and were closely monitoring for “increased risks to the safety and security of Embassy personnel.” (Former employees at another nonprofit in a nearby country also raided their organization “out of desperation for not being paid,” according to State Department records.)

An hour’s drive from the nation’s capital, Dzaleka is a former prison that was transformed into a refugee camp in the 1990s to house people fleeing war in neighboring Mozambique. In the decades since, it has ballooned, filling with people running from conflicts in Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. The camp, which was built to hold around 10,000, is now home to more than 55,000 people.

A woman goes door to door selling secondhand clothes in the Dzaleka refugee camp. (African Media Online/Alamy Stock)

Iradukunda Devota, a refugee from Burundi, came to Malawi when she was 3 and has lived at Dzaleka for 23 years. She now works for Inua Advocacy, which provides legal services and advocates on behalf of refugees in the camp. She said tension is high amid rumors that food and other aid will be cut further. Since 2023, the Malawi government has prohibited refugees from living or working outside the camp, and there has already been an increase in crime and substance abuse after food was cut earlier this year. “This is happening because people are hungry,” Devota told ProPublica. “They have nowhere to turn to.”

Now, the Malawi government is likely to close its borders to refugees in response to the funding crisis and congestion in Dzaleka, the WFP’s country representative told the State Department, according to agency records.

Diplomats continue to warn the Trump administration of even worse to come. The WFP expects to suspend food assistance in Dzaleka entirely in July.

“The WFP anticipates violent protests,” the embassy told State Department officials, “which could potentially embroil host communities and refugees, and targeting of UN and WFP offices when the pipeline eventually breaks.”

ProPublica plans to continue covering USAID, the State Department and the consequences of ending U.S. foreign aid. We want to hear from you. Reach out via Signal to reporters Brett Murphy at +1 508-523-5195 and Anna Maria Barry-Jester at +1 408-504-8131.

ProPublica

ProPublica announced Wednesday it’s joining a cross-industry effort to explore how artificial intelligence technologies can responsibly contribute to the work of investigative journalism. As part of the program, ProPublica will hire an engineer for the two-year fellowship. The program is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and will include four other newsrooms: The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, The Baltimore Banner and Arizona State University’s NEWSWELL.

At ProPublica, the engineer will explore how machine learning might help its award-winning engagement reporting group, which powers many of our most ambitious, crowdsourced investigations. From callouts and tip lines to citizen-fueled science, these reporters gather leads and evidence from communities around the country. We’re eager to explore how large language models can help us evaluate, categorize and route incoming tips more efficiently — ensuring they reach the right journalist, faster.

“We believe these technologies have the potential to help our journalists and our readers find needles in the haystack,” said Ben Werdmuller, senior director of technology. “We’re excited to explore what’s possible in ways that align with our values and standards.”

As part of the program, the participating news organizations will work collaboratively with one another and the broader news industry to share what they learn, product developments, case studies and technical information needed to help replicate their work in other newsrooms.

The goal of the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship is to help local news publishers leverage new AI technology to build sustainable businesses. The program launched in October 2024 with $10 million in support from OpenAI and Microsoft — each awarding $2.5 million in direct funding and $2.5 million in software and enterprise credits.

“The Lenfest Institute is proud to partner with OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the AI Collaborative and Fellowship program. The five publishers joining the program are leaders in the field, and we look forward to sharing what they learn with the rest of the industry,” said Lenfest Institute Executive Director and CEO Jim Friedlich. “Together with Open AI and Microsoft, the Institute is committed to exploring ethical uses of AI to advance sustainable solutions for local news.”

About ProPublica ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. With a team of more than 150 dedicated journalists, ProPublica covers a range of topics, focusing on stories with the potential to spur real-world impact. Its reporting has contributed to the passage of new laws; reversals of harmful policies and practices; and accountability for leaders at local, state and national levels. Since it began publishing in 2008, ProPublica has received eight Pulitzer Prizes, five Peabody Awards, eight Emmy Awards and 16 George Polk Awards.

About The Lenfest Institute for Journalism  The Lenfest Institute creates solutions for the next era of local news by investing in sustainable business models at the intersection of local journalism and community in Philadelphia and nationwide. 

by Mary Hudetz

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

As he has promoted the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, has lamented the toll that processed foods have taken on the health of Americans, in particular Native Americans.

Prepackaged foods have “mass poisoned” tribal communities, he said last month when he met with tribal leaders and visited a Native American health clinic in Arizona.

Weeks later, in testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, he said processed foods had resulted in a “genocide” among Native Americans, who disproportionately live in places where there are few or no grocery stores.

“One of my big priorities will be getting good food — high-quality food, traditional foods — onto the reservation because processed foods for American Indians is poison,” Kennedy told the committee. Healthy food is key to combating the high rates of chronic disease in tribal communities, he said.

Yet even as the president tasks Kennedy’s agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture with improving healthy eating programs, the USDA has terminated the very program that dozens of tribal food banks say has helped them provide fresh, locally produced food that is important to their traditions and cultures.

That program — the USDA’s Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement program — began under President Joe Biden in late 2021 as a response to challenges accessing food that were magnified by the pandemic. Its goal was to boost purchases from local farmers and ranchers, and the funding went to hundreds of food banks across the country, including 90 focused on serving tribes.

In March, the Trump administration decided the program did not align with its priorities. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins defended the cut of a half-billion dollars by calling the program a remnant of the COVID era.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in a statement, a USDA spokesperson said the department continues to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars through more than a dozen other nutrition programs that help families meet their nutrition needs. For tribal communities, the spokesperson said, that includes the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations for low-income households.

When that program started in the 1970s, it offered processed foods colloquially known as “commodities.” Over the years, the government has added salmon, frozen chicken, produce and other more nutritious options for tribes to include in recipients’ monthly food packages. But few tribes who participate in the Food Distribution Program can purchase food directly from farmers and ranchers, as they were able to do with the now-canceled grant program. Instead, most choose from the USDA’s list of approved and available foods.

Kelli Case, an attorney for the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative at the University of Arkansas, said the program cut by the Trump administration was widely considered an overwhelming success because tribes selected foods based on their nutritional needs and “what people actually want to eat.”

“Having the opportunity to tailor a program makes a huge difference,” she said.

On reservations, the problems addressed by the now-canceled program had been an issue for generations, perpetuated by a string of federal policies, Case added. The pandemic merely “highlighted and exacerbated those issues,” she said.

For instance: In the 1800s, tribes in the West began losing access to traditional food sources — such as berries, salmon and bison — even though treaties promised tribes the right to hunt and fish. Some were removed from their homelands.

The federal government instead provided tribal members with food rations — flour, lard, sugar, coffee and other staples. At the same time, the forcible removal of Native children to boarding schools upended families’ ability to pass along knowledge about the foods they hunted and harvested.

The now-canceled grants helped fill a void, tribes said.

First image: Jason Belcourt, the Chippewa-Cree Tribe’s sustainability coordinator. Second image: Two of the tribe’s bison bulls at the Buffalo Child Ranch. (Aaron Agosto for ProPublica)

On the Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation, in an especially remote stretch of Montana, Jason Belcourt said he believed the Chippewa-Cree Tribe was finally getting closer to providing nutritious, local food to every tribal member in need. He expects the tribe’s USDA funding for local food purchases to run out within weeks.

The funding — $400,000 in the past several years — helped the tribe buy beef and produce from local ranchers and farmers. The money supplied roughly 250 households on a reservation where the nearest supermarket is about 20 miles away.

“We wanted to make sure that we didn’t turn away anybody,” Belcourt said. “There are families that go without meals; there are kids that go without meals.”

The tribe also used the money to help harvest bison from the tribe’s herd, which Belcourt said has “done wonders, not only in terms of the food value.” The harvests became community events where younger tribal members learned how their ancestors butchered and used the buffalo. A sense of tribal identity was being restored, he said.

“There’s a lot of cultural sharing. There’s a lot of remembrance from the old timers of what their grandparents told them and how to use the buffalo,” Belcourt said. “And, believe it or not, there’s some healing that’s going on.”

The harvests will continue, Belcourt said. But it’s unclear how he will make up for the loss of $150,000 in funding that the USDA previously awarded the tribe for local food purchases over the next year.

Other tribes are similarly concerned about the future.

The Walker River Paiute in Nevada was the first to receive one of the grants to source local food, including $249,091 in 2022. The community, 115 miles southeast of Reno, used most of the money on locally sourced produce and eggs, according to the USDA. Of the reservation’s 830 residents, both Native American and not, 40% had received food purchased using the grant, according to the tribe.

“I truly believe no one knows the needs of our tribal citizens better than the tribe,” Amber Torres, then the tribe’s chairman, said in a news release.

In late March, a dozen nonprofits that advocate for Native Americans sent a letter to USDA Secretary Rollins, urging her to reinstate the “critical” program as a step toward respecting the sovereign status of tribes. At a recent meeting with USDA officials, tribal leaders again emphasized that they want a say over the food distributed on their reservations.

First image: A community garden run by the Help Lodge to foster food sovereignty and sustainability on the Rocky Boy's Reservation. Second image: Empty planter shelves in an unused greenhouse at the Help Lodge. Funding cuts have made it difficult to maintain a full staff. (Aaron Agosto for ProPublica)

Tribal communities still have access to the handful of federal food programs. However, last year, the Government Accountability Office, the watchdog arm of Congress, found that some posed barriers to people’s ability to get the food they want or need.

For example, individuals who accept the commodity program’s offerings cannot also receive assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps. As a result, a household’s needs can go unmet. Sometimes SNAP offers essential cooking ingredients — oil, seasoning or yeast — that the commodity program may not provide, according to the study.

(The local food program was not included in the GAO report.)

On the Fort Belknap Reservation in Montana, the USDA’s local food program had become a reliable fixture, especially since the federal commodity program was paused there, said Tescha Hawley, who is Gros Ventre, or Aaniiih, and a social worker on the reservation. Structural problems had shuttered the building where the commodity program food was warehoused.

A nonprofit Hawley founded, Day Eagle Hope Project, helped her tribe secure $2 million from the USDA to buy fresh local food and process bison meat from its herd. Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribal members who are capable of gathering wild, nutrient-rich berries exchange them for payment through the grant. She distributed the food first from a shipping container on her property and later a community center.

Over the past few years, the tribe and her nonprofit have distributed thousands of pounds of food. She anticipates the money that remains from past grant funding cycles will run out this winter. For people who can get to a grocery store, up to 45 miles away from some of the reservation’s communities, many will have to make SNAP benefits stretch at a time when food prices are rising.

“So that means even less food for the month,” Hawley said. “People will go without.”

Belcourt said he has begun seeking other grants, and a tribal staffer makes runs to collect food donations in Havre, more than 20 miles away, and Great Falls, about 90 miles away.

“We don't have a Plan B,” Belcourt said of the abruptly canceled grant. “Given the short notice, it’s tough to find a funder in that timeframe.”

by Aliyya Swaby

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

The day after a teenager opened fire in a Nashville high school cafeteria early this year, officials in the district scrambled to investigate potential threats across their schools. Rumors flew that the shooter, who killed a student before turning the gun on himself, had accomplices at large.

At DuPont Tyler Middle School, the assistant principal’s most urgent concern was a 12-year-old boy. James, a seventh grader with a small voice and mop of brown hair, had posted a concerning screenshot on Instagram that morning, Jan. 23. He was arrested at school hours later and charged with making a threat of mass violence.

The assistant principal had to complete a detailed investigation called a threat assessment, as required by Tennessee law. First, she and other school employees had to figure out whether James’ threat was valid. Then, they had to determine what actions to take to help a potentially troubled child and protect other students.

Threat assessments are not public, but the district gave ProPublica a copy of James’ with his father’s permission. School officials did not carry out the threat assessment properly, according to experts who reviewed it at ProPublica’s request. Instead, the school expelled James without investigating further and skipped crucial steps that would help him or protect others. (We are using the child’s middle name to protect his privacy.)

The way school officials handled James’ case also exposes glaring contradictions in two recent Tennessee laws that aim to criminalize school threats and require schools to expel students who make them — with minimal recourse, transparency or accountability.

One obvious issue in the threat assessment, according to the experts, appeared on Page 20. That page features a checklist of options for how the school could address its concerns about James, including advising his parents to secure guns in their home and ensuring he has access to counseling.

Schools should take steps like these even when a student is expelled, according to John Van Dreal, a former school administrator who has spent decades helping schools improve their violence prevention strategies. Officials at James’ school opted for none of the options they could have taken. Instead, the assistant principal wrote under the list in blue pen, “student was expelled.”

“That’s actually about the most dangerous thing you can do for the student,” Van Dreal said, “and honestly for the community.”

Van Dreal’s name appears in tiny print at the bottom of each page of James’ threat assessment, because he helped the school district set up its current process. After ProPublica shared details about James’ case, Van Dreal said, “What I’m hearing is probably more training and more examples are needed.”

One page of the threat assessment form, created by John Van Dreal, used in James’ case (Obtained by ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

Nashville’s school district does not collect data on how many threat assessments it does or how many result in expulsions, according to spokesperson Sean Braisted. “The goal is always to ensure the safety and well-being of all students while addressing incidents appropriately,” Braisted wrote. He later declined to answer questions ProPublica asked about James’ case, although James’ father signed a privacy waiver allowing the school to do so.

Tennessee schools must submit data to the state on how effective their threat assessments are — but the state does not release that information to the public. School districts are required to get training on threat assessments, but lawyers and parents say they often carry them out inconsistently and use varying definitions for what makes a threat valid.

Two recent contradictory Tennessee laws make it even harder to handle student threats. One mandates a felony charge for anyone who makes a “threat of mass violence” at school, without requiring police to investigate intent or credibility. The other requires schools to determine that a threat of mass violence is “valid” before expelling a student for at least a year.

James’ alleged threat was a screenshot of a text exchange. One person said they would “shoot up” a Nashville school and asked if the other would attack a different school. “Yea,” the other person replied. “I got some other people for other schools.” The FBI flagged the post for school officials and police. James told school officials that he reposted the screenshot from the Instagram page of a Spanish-language news site.

The Tennessean published a story in April detailing James’ arrest and overnight stay in juvenile detention. The story, and the ones ProPublica and WPLN published last year on other arrests, shows how quickly police move to take youth into custody.

Schools in Tennessee are supposed to follow a higher standard than police when it comes to investigating threats of mass violence: They’re supposed to determine whether a threat is valid. For instance, in Hamilton County, a few hours southeast of Nashville, school officials chose not to expel two students even after police arrested them for threats of mass violence, ProPublica and WPLN previously reported.

Yet when James’ father appealed his son’s expulsion at a March school district hearing, the assistant principal said repeatedly that James had to be expelled simply because he’d been arrested. “We did not investigate further,” she said. James’ father shared an audio recording of the hearing with ProPublica.

James, who turned 13 in February, is small for his age, still awaiting the teenage growth spurt of his three older brothers. At the hearing, his voice was soft but assured as he explained what happened. He said he understands why he shouldn’t have posted the screenshot. But he said he wanted to warn others and feel “heroic.”

Melissa Nelson, a national school safety consultant based in Pennsylvania who trains school employees on managing threats, reviewed James’ threat assessment at ProPublica’s request and concluded that “this is gross mismanagement of a case.”

“This tool has not been used as intended,” she said. “They didn’t do a behavior threat assessment. They filled out some paperwork.”

After the police took James away, assistant principal Angela Post convened a team of school employees to decide whether to expel him. They used a threat assessment form that Van Dreal had developed, one of the most commonly used across the country, to guide them on how to respond.

According to Van Dreal, Metro Nashville Public Schools is in an early phase of using the form, and its staff have flown to Oregon at least once to learn from his consulting group.

Van Dreal tells school officials to use the threat assessment to collect information about a student in trouble and address behavior that could signal future violence. If school officials worried that James was planning an act of violence, they should have pursued some of the many options outlined in the threat assessment to get him help and protect the school from harm.

Instead, they chose none of those options.

Experts said that is one of the biggest mistakes school officials make. “Even if a child is expelled, what I always train is: Out of sight, out of mind doesn’t help,” Nelson said. “Expelling a child doesn’t deescalate the situation or move them off the pathway of violence. A lot of times, it makes it worse.”

School officials also failed to seek out more information that could have helped them figure out whether the threat was valid. Post checked a box acknowledging that she hadn’t notified James’ parents of the threat assessment. She wrote beside it, as an explanation, “student was arrested and expelled.” On a line asking whether James had access to weapons, Post wrote that the threat assessment team did not know.

Interviewing parents is a crucial part of the process, said Rob Moore, a Tennessee psychologist who has helped schools conduct threat assessments for more than two decades. “When you sit in that room with those parents and you collect data from them, you really get a sense of things that teachers would never know, that the administrators would never know.”

Although school officials did not opt to investigate further or to monitor James, the threat assessment indicated they had concerns he may pose a threat. In response to a question about whether James’ caregivers, peers or staff were concerned about his potential for acting out aggressively, Post checked yes and wrote, “He has little to no supervision in discipline structures at home but might think he could get away with it.”

And although James told school administrators he was not a participant in the text thread he shared on Instagram, Post wrote that he had indicated a plan and intention to harm others. “See attached image. Shows location, intent to harm, targets and date,” she wrote, referencing a screenshot of James’ Instagram post. She also wrote that he had a motive: “The post indicated that he was being made fun of. See attached image.”

The threat assessment included questionnaires from James’ teachers; three out of four said they did not have concerns about potential aggression. One teacher, who taught James social studies, cited his disciplinary history: using racial slurs, fighting another student and “researching racially motivated things” on the school computer. “Dad seemed disengaged in conference & somewhat unaware of the child’s school or social or personal issues,” she wrote.

James’ dad and stepmom did not know that the threat assessment accused them of lax supervision at home. That’s because they didn’t even know the threat assessment existed until ProPublica told them about it, more than a week after it took place.

Upon reading the document, their first emotion, after shock, was anger. They said they hadn’t known about the incident with the racial slur, and it was not directly referenced in a copy of James’ disciplinary history. But they felt upset at the insinuation that they had not been involved in James’ life. “We’ve been asking for help, for grades, tutoring,” his dad, Kyle Caldwell, said. “And we really didn’t get any.”

James relaxes at home with his dad, Kyle Caldwell, and the family dog. James was put on court supervision following his arrest. (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)

James said that in early September, his social studies teacher taught the class about World War II. He said the teacher didn’t answer enough of his questions, so he started searching online. The school flagged that he had looked up swastikas. “I didn’t know much about it,” he said. “That’s why I searched it.”

As part of his discipline, the school prohibited him from using its computers. His stepmother, Breanne Metz, shared emails she sent to James’ teachers explaining she and Caldwell were worried about his grades and wanted to help him catch up.

James had been struggling with his parents’ contentious divorce; after his mom lost custody of him, he hadn’t been able to see her in months. Worried, his dad and stepmom arranged for him to see a school counselor. James said the counselor tried to connect with him through their mutual love of video games over about five sessions, which was nice, though “it didn’t really help.” Post wrote in the threat assessment that James had “disclosed confidential information to the school counselor that would support a feeling of being overwhelmed or distraught.”

Then James lost his best friend: Lieutenant Dan, a three-legged pitbull-lab mix named after a character from the movie “Forrest Gump.” Dan joined the family when he and James were both 1, and he died of cancer last November. As James describes it, he was at capacity with the emotions he was dealing with, and his dog’s death was the tipping point. “When someone you love or something you love for your whole life passes away, you can’t hold it,” he said. He sat in class feeling sad and exhausted.

Records show school staff talked with James’ parents about his attendance at school and he was disciplined for not complying with an unspecified request. Then in mid-December, he began a fight with another student, who had been “horseplaying” with him “off and on” and went too far, according to the school report. The following month, he was arrested and expelled.

In the days after the arrest, Caldwell considered hiring a lawyer. Reading the threat assessment “added the urgency” for him to finally make the call. “The puzzle pieces weren’t coming together in their story,” he said. “It really looked like they were going to try to be sweeping their stuff under the rug.”

In mid-March, James sat at the oval table in the district conference room next to his father and across from assistant principal Post. He wore a gray vest over his T-shirt in preparation for an appeal hearing that would determine whether he would be allowed back in school. It had been nearly two months since he had set foot on district property.

Caldwell brought his private lawyer, a rare resource for a school hearing. He showed up that morning nervous but eager to make his case directly to school administrators. The public rarely gets insight into what happens at a school appeal hearing, but Caldwell shared an audio recording with ProPublica.

Post started by reading aloud the social media post that landed James in trouble, stumbling over the shorthand and unfamiliar internet slang. Then, it was James’ turn to speak for himself.

Lisa Currie, the school district’s director of discipline, asked him to explain why he had reposted the screenshot of the texts. “You do understand that once you reposted them from somewhere else, it gave the appearance that this was a conversation that you were having?” she said.

“I just wanted to let people know, feel heroic,” James said. “I didn’t want more people to get hurt.”

James enjoys building and painting the model F-15E fighter jet his dad bought him. (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)

Over the next 40 minutes, Caldwell’s lawyer questioned Post about the process the school used to determine whether James should be expelled. When he pressed her for direct responses, Post repeatedly said that law enforcement and not the school held the primary responsibility for investigating the threat. Although the law requires schools to use a threat assessment to determine if the threat is “valid,” Post and her team based the expulsion entirely on the police’s arrest.

Once local police take over a case, she said, “then it’s not really our investigation anymore.”

“Was it your assessment at the time that he wrote this statement, like physically typed it out on a computer and posted it?” the lawyer asked.

“We did not make that determination,” Post said.

She said school staff did not look deeply through James’ disciplinary history as part of the threat assessment. “That’s not necessarily the purpose of the threat assessment,” she told the lawyer. Because James had been expelled and arrested, “there would not be a reason to be concerned about the return of a student.”

Currie indicated that Post’s approach was supported by district leaders. “The purpose of the threat assessment is to determine appropriate supports and interventions around the students while they’re in the building,” she said. Post and Currie did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment or to written questions.

Post told the lawyer she couldn’t remember whether school staff investigated the origin of the original threat.

“So if there was an actual threat made and somebody else authored this threat, then we don’t know who that is. Would that be a fair statement?” the lawyer asked.

“That is possible,” Post responded. She said James didn’t initially say that he had shared the post to warn others and it wasn’t her place to decide whether he intended to make a threat. “I don’t want to think, ‘Oh, he’s not going to do that.’ And then something just like the previous day happened,” she said, referring to the Antioch High School shooting. Once James was arrested, “it’s in MNPD’s hands,” Post said, referring to the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department.

The lawyer asked Post to explain whether the threat assessment could ever have changed school officials’ decision to expel James: What if school officials found out that the threat was not valid? “Had y’all come on information that he had not written these texts,” he asked, “would it have changed the punishment?”

“We would have had to let our [school resource officer] know and they would have had to go through the MNPD channels,” she said.

“You did not at that time know whether he wrote those text messages or not?” the lawyer asked again.

“Correct,” Post said.

Then, it was Caldwell’s turn to speak. He criticized the school’s decision to leave him out of the initial disciplinary process. He would have explained to James why he should go through “appropriate channels” to report a threat instead of posting it on Instagram. “As a dad,” he said, “there was a teachable parent moment that I didn’t get to have.”

As the hearing came to a close, Currie told Caldwell to expect a decision soon.

The arrest and expulsion cleaved James’ life in two. He now begins many sentences with the phrase “before everything happened.” Before everything happened, he would ride his bike with his brothers and friends to explore the forested land and abandoned houses in the surrounding neighborhoods. They found all sorts of strange garbage: a fire engine’s license plate, wooden pictures of “demonic rituals,” a dentist chair adorned with rusty handcuffs.

James looks for four-leaf clovers in his backyard. (Andrea Morales for ProPublica)

He was able to come home from his night in detention in exchange for agreeing to pretrial diversion with six months of court supervision, a common outcome for students charged with threats of mass violence. While under supervision, he wasn’t allowed to use the computer or phone unsupervised by an adult and was mostly restricted to the streets around his house. “It’s a big neighborhood, but once you get used to it, it’s small,” he said.

The court recently lifted his supervision, earlier than expected. Because he had completed the terms of pretrial diversion, his case was dismissed.

His parents declined Metro Nashville Public Schools’ offer to enroll him in the local alternative school, which primarily serves kids with disciplinary issues who were suspended or expelled from their original schools. Instead, they enrolled him at an online public charter school; he starts in the fall.

As James waited to hear the result of the expulsion hearing, he followed the schedule his dad and stepmom created for him — less a rigorous academic curriculum than a routine to keep him occupied while his stepmom takes calls in her home office. He gets most excited about the hands-on activities, like building and painting the model F-15E fighter jet his dad bought him online.

One night in early April, tornadoes touched down just outside Nashville. James, his five siblings, and two dogs huddled with Caldwell and Metz in the windowless laundry room; the kids wore helmets in case of falling debris. When they got up the next morning, groggy but unharmed, Caldwell checked the mailbox: A letter from the school district was inside.

District officials had reviewed the information from the hearing and determined that “there was not a due process violation of MNPS’ expulsion process.” James was still expelled. Caldwell had prepared his son for this outcome so that he wouldn’t be devastated. James would later joke that the storm had delivered the bad news.

The letter gave the family the option to escalate the appeal through the district process. But the odds of winning and the costs of retaining the lawyer made the effort feel futile. The more the family fought back, the more anxious the 13-year-old felt about his future. Would he feel even worse if they lost again? Would people start to think of him as a bad kid?

That afternoon, talking with his dad about the letter, James quietly considered these questions. Then he went outside to watch the storm clouds.

Paige Pfleger of WPLN contributed reporting.

by Nicole Santa Cruz

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

When a homeless man questioned the Phoenix police’s authority to stop him in February 2020, an officer grabbed him and knelt on his neck while another officer shocked him with a Taser. Another unhoused man said officers threw away his belongings, telling him, “You guys are trash and this is trash.” Other people experiencing homelessness were regularly cited and arrested by the city’s officers during early morning hours for “conduct that is plainly not a crime.”

Those were among the abuses alleged by the Department of Justice last June, following a nearly three-year investigation into the city of Phoenix and its police department. The investigation marked the first time the DOJ had found a pattern of violations against homeless people, including that officers and other city employees illegally threw away their belongings.

In addition, DOJ investigators found that officers disproportionately cited and arrested people experiencing homelessness. They comprised 37% of all Phoenix Police Department arrests from 2016 to 2022, though homeless people account for less than 1% of the population. Investigators said many of those stops, citations and arrests were unconstitutional.

The wide-ranging probe also found officers used excessive force, discriminated against people of color, retaliated against protesters and violated the rights of people with behavioral health disabilities — similar issues to those the DOJ has documented in troubled law enforcement agencies in other cities.

But federal officials announced Wednesday that they had abandoned efforts to compel the city and police to address those issues. The DOJ closed its investigations and retracted findings of constitutional violations in Phoenix and five other jurisdictions, including Trenton, New Jersey. Beyond that, the Department of Justice said it was dismissing Biden-era lawsuits against several other police departments, including in Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed by police five years ago.

The DOJ said requiring the cities to enter consent decrees, which are intended to ensure reforms are enacted, would have “imposed years of micromanagement of local police departments by federal courts and expensive independent monitors, and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of compliance costs, without a legally or factually adequate basis for doing so.”

The city of Phoenix said in a statement that it has “tirelessly focused on enhancing policy, training and accountability measures to ensure the best public safety for everyone who lives, works and plays in Phoenix.” In recent years, the city has enacted policy changes including employee training and the implementation of body-worn cameras.

Legal experts told ProPublica the wrongdoing the DOJ uncovered in Phoenix should be corrected — even though city officials will be under less pressure to act.

“It is a very real shame and a disservice to the residents of these communities to end the work, to stand down and unwind the investigations and to purport to retract the findings,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

The report’s retraction, along with last year’s Supreme Court decision allowing cities to arrest and cite people for sleeping outside even when they have nowhere else to go, could further embolden cities and police departments to marginalize homeless people, said Brook Hill, senior counsel with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a legal advocacy group that focuses on racial justice issues. “They will feel like they have a license to do the sweeps and to otherwise make life in public view uncomfortable for unhoused people,” he said.

Indeed, just last week California Gov. Gavin Newsom urged all local governments in that state to “use their authority affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court” to address encampments.

After the DOJ began the Phoenix investigation in August 2021, Fund for Empowerment, an Arizona advocacy group for homeless people, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona sued the city and police department to stop what attorneys called “unconstitutional raids” on unsheltered people. Its lawsuit accused the city of failing to provide housing and instead turning to encampment removals to clear sidewalks and other areas. “The City has made its message to unhoused individuals clear: engaging in sleep and other essential life activities on the city’s public grounds will lead to detention, arrest, displacement, and the loss of the individual’s personal effects,” the Fund for Empowerment alleged in court documents.

Nearly a month later, a judge issued an injunction preventing the city from enforcing its camping ban against people who can’t find shelter, as well as from seizing and throwing away people’s belongings. The lawsuit is ongoing.

The DOJ’s June 2024 report stated that even after the injunction and new city policies were in place, city officials continued to arrest people for camping and to destroy people’s belongings without notice or the opportunity to reclaim them.

ProPublica, as part of its investigation into cities’ handling of homeless people’s possessions, found that Phoenix rarely stored property seized from encampments. From May 2023 to 2024, the city responded to 4,900 reports from the public involving encampments, according to its records. The city said workers, trained to assess which items are property and which are trash, found items that could be stored at only 405 of the locations it visited. Not all of those belongings required storage because people may have removed them between a report of an encampment and the city’s arrival. The city stored belongings 69 times.

In January 2024, the city issued its own report in anticipation of the DOJ’s allegations. The city said it found nothing to support accusations that police “interfered with the possessions of people experiencing homelessness.” Phoenix officials also said in the report that although the city and police department “welcome additional insights” from the DOJ, they were unwilling to be subjected to a consent decree, a binding plan in which an appointed monitor oversees implementation of reforms.

Attorneys and advocates said that the DOJ’s decision has no bearing on lawsuits filed by private attorneys alleging civil rights violations, including against people who are homeless. The ACLU this week also launched a seven-state effort to file records requests to hold police departments accountable, it said.

Elizabeth Venable, lead community organizer with the Fund for Empowerment, who also helped the DOJ connect with the unhoused community in Phoenix, said she viewed the federal findings as a victory for unhoused people. Despite the retraction by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Venable said, the report still has weight.

“No matter what Pam Bondi says, people are not going to forget it, especially people who learned about something that they were horrified by,” she said.