by J. David McSwane

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

In February 2020, President Donald Trump’s first education secretary issued a memo to employees emphasizing the department’s policy “to ensure that diversity, inclusiveness, and respect are integral parts of our day-to-day management and work.”

“Diversity and inclusion are the cornerstone of high organizational performance,” Betsy DeVos continued, adding that all people were welcome in the Department of Education. The memo ended with a call for employees to “actively embrace” principles of diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.

As part of that push, Quay Crowner was among the top education officials who enrolled in the “diversity change agent program.” Crowner thought little of it at the time. She had over two decades filled director-level human resources roles at several federal agencies, including the IRS and Government Accountability Office, and she’d participated in seminars on leadership and workplace discrimination. But five years later, as Trump entered office a second time, his administration’s tune on DEI had changed. Crowner was abruptly placed on leave under Trump’s executive order to dismantle DEI programs across the federal government.

As a longtime manager familiar with federal hiring and firing policies, Crowner, 55, believed she knew what it looked like to be unfairly targeted. Her current job as the director of outreach, impact and engagement at the Education Department was not connected to diversity initiatives. She said the only part of her responsibilities that could have been considered DEI was that her team guided students who’d had trouble navigating financial assistance applications; while most people who seek federal student aid are from disadvantaged backgrounds, her office was a resource for any and all and had no diversity mandate. She was not involved with hiring and retention efforts.

More troubling, she said, was that she was the only person on her team who had been let go, and her bosses refused to answer her questions about her dismissal. When she and colleagues from different departments began comparing notes, they found they had one thing in common. They had all attended the training encouraged under DeVos. They also noticed something else: Most of them were Black women.

“We are still just in utter shock that the public service we took an oath to complete … has fallen apart,” said Crowner, whose bills related to an injury and health issues are likely to mount as she loses her federal health care coverage.

“We never imagined that this would be something that would happen to us.”

Her experience is part of a largely untold story unfolding as Trump dismantles civil rights and inclusion programs across government: Many of those being forced out, like Crowner, are Black women who spent decades building a career of government service, only to see those careers shattered in a sudden purge.

ProPublica interviewed Crowner and two other career civil servants, all Black women, who are among the hundreds of fired federal employees represented in a legal action brought against the Trump administration. Filed in March with the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board by legal teams including the Washington branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, the case contends the administration violated the First Amendment rights of employees by targeting them for holding views perceived as contrary to the Trump 2.0 doctrine.

What has received less attention is the suit’s claim that the administration also violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They claim the DEI purge disproportionately affected those who aren’t white men.

Hard numbers documenting the demographics of those forced out by Trump are hard to attain. The Trump administration has provided little information on those being fired, and a revolving door of firings and reinstatements in some departments makes capturing formal figures even more challenging.

But a broad assessment of Trump’s firings by ProPublica and other media shows the agencies with the most diverse staffs are often the hardest hit. Before the firings, the Education Department’s staff was majority nonwhite, with Black women making up about 28% of workers, the most recent federal data shows. According to a New York Times tracker of the firings, that department has seen a reduction of about 46% of its staff. The staff of the U.S. Agency for International Development was majority women and nearly 40% racial and ethnic minorities before Trump all but eliminated it.

Meanwhile, at the Department of Justice, where white personnel make up two-thirds of the workforce, most of it men, staff has been cut just 1%, according to the most recently available federal data and the Times tracker. The Department of Energy, more than 70% white, saw a reduction of about 13%.

Lawyers representing federal employees whose careers and families have been uprooted cite anecdotal evidence of disparate impact, a key ingredient in many successful civil rights claims.

“We have observed approximately 90% of the workers targeted for terminations due to a perceived association with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are women or nonbinary,” said Kelly Dermody, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, who have asked an administrative law judge to approve class-action status for the fired employees.

Nearly 80% of potential case plaintiffs are nonwhite, she said; most of that cohort are Black women.

A spokesperson for the White House declined to comment. The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Since reentering office, Trump has made clear his feelings about diversity programs, referring to them in an executive order as “Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.”

Disparate Impact?

Ronicsa Chambers graduated from Florida A&M University, a historically black college, in 1990. Afterward, she got an MBA from Johns Hopkins University and landed a finance job with U.S. Airways, where she fell in love with aviation.

In 2005, she left the private sector to work in finance for the Federal Aviation Administration. She worked her way up the chain and, by 2019, helped create a program to address a lack of diversity in the agency by gaining the interest of graduates from historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs.

In 2022, Chambers was named Air Traffic Manager of the Year. “I didn’t even know that non-air traffic controllers could get that award, and I was so proud,” she said. As titles in government do, hers changed in December 2024 as her team’s mission expanded to help FAA employees with issues such as providing accommodations so people with disabilities could do their jobs.

Then this January, she felt as though she’d been hit “in the face with a brick.” She was told on a video conference call that her FAA career was over. Though her work had involved DEI in the past, it was no longer in her title or her job description, and she said no one had asked her what her job entailed before she was removed.

She said she began moving through stages of grief but keeps coming back to anger because her team members — five Black women and one white man with a disability — were told they would be reassigned. She says they never were.

“As far as we know, we’re the only ones still on administrative leave,” she said, referring to those removed as part of Trump’s DEI executive order.

Ronicsa Chambers said she was told she and her team members would be reassigned after being let go from their jobs at the Federal Aviation Administration. They never were. (Schaun Champion for ProPublica)

It’s unclear if the FAA, whose workforce was largely spared due to recent airline safety concerns, has fired or even fired and rehired people in departments outside of Chambers’ team. A spokesperson for the FAA did not respond to requests for comment.

The FAA has long been criticized for its lack of diversity. According to the most recent federal data, the agency was composed of 57% white men compared with 4.4% Black women.

Scott Michelman, an ACLU of DC attorney working on the complaint against the Trump administration, said Chambers’ case underscores how mass firings aimed at people who had even a peripheral connection to a DEI program, past or present, “harms the American people.”

“It takes dedicated, experienced, award-winning civil servants out of their job, their expertise, the place where we as the public want them and need them so that our government works for us,” he said. “This is a lose-lose.”

Key to their case is the argument that minority workers were disparately impacted, a long-held civil rights theory at which Trump has taken direct aim. In April, Trump issued an executive order to broadly eliminate that doctrine from civil rights enforcement, one of many steps he’s taken to reverse the traditional role of the federal government in protecting individuals from issues such as housing and employment discrimination.

For instance, the Trump administration gutted the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which was tasked with ensuring equal treatment for students regardless of gender and race, and instead focused that office at targeting transgender athletes and their schools.

Lawyers and former employees say focusing on people who may have had some DEI training or job duties would cause greater harm to nonwhite employees. And historically, the federal government has been a prominent force in upward mobility.

“For a segment of Black America, the federal government has been crucial to stepping up,” said Marcus Casey, an economist and associate professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. The opening of federal work following the Civil Rights Movement provided an alternative to manual labor, teaching or ministerial work in the form of white-collar jobs and skills training that many took into private sector jobs.

Today, Black people make up about 18.6% of the federal workforce, larger than their percentage in the overall U.S. workforce, 12.8%, according to the Pew Research Center.

“So, you think about HBCU graduates, like Howard University, a lot of these people tell us the same story: ‘This is where I started. This is where I got my first internship,’” Casey said.

Upward Mobility

Sherrell Pyatt’s family story is quintessentially American.

Her great-grandfather served in the Vietnam War and, on his return, took a job in the U.S. Postal Service, a key employer in the story of upward mobility for middle-class Black families. His granddaughter, Pyatt’s mother, also found a career at the Postal Service. So, even though she would attain more education than the previous three generations, it seemed fitting that eventually Pyatt would find herself at the Postal Service.

Pyatt grew up in the Bronx, New York City’s poorest borough, but tested well enough to attend a private school. She became the first of her family to get a degree, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she worked to pay tuition. She got a master’s degree and worked at a nonprofit before landing a job in 2014 with the Postal Service, shaping policy as a government relations specialist.

While at USPS, she coordinated with Customs and Border Protection to stop drug shipments through the mail. That experience, as well as her fluency in Spanish, led her to a similar role at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. While there, she was involved in immigrant removal operations as part of Trump’s first-term “zero tolerance” clampdown on border crossings. She next transferred to CBP, where she helped investigate deaths of migrants in federal custody and rampant racism in a Facebook group of Border Patrol agents.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, both of her parents fell ill, and she moved to an Atlanta suburb to care for them. To make the move work, she transitioned to a job at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where she worked as a supply chain analyst, ensuring that equipment such as medical masks made their way to U.S. hospitals. In early 2024, she moved yet again, to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which investigates allegations of rights abuses lodged by both immigrants and U.S. citizens.

Sherrell Pyatt had more than a decade’s worth of experience working for the federal government before her dismissal. (Rita Harper for ProPublica)

“My team was almost exclusively African Americans, and I think it’s just because of the experience of Black people in this country,” Pyatt said. “We seem to be more likely to go into those types of roles — one, because we have experience, and two, because of the passion to make a difference.”

In March, the Trump administration fired nearly all 150 employees in that office, including Pyatt. A DHS spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about her firing.

“I think it was an easy target to get rid of people of color and people who fight for people of color,” Pyatt said. “It’s absolutely a way to attack people of color, people who are differently abled, people who don’t agree with what this administration is.”

Pyatt’s sudden loss of a career wrought instant consequences for her family. She was the primary breadwinner, but now her husband, who works for the Postal Service, provides the only income. They worry they won’t be able to make the mortgage payments on their home for the long run. Their three daughters, all middle school age, may no longer be able to attend their private Christian school or play softball.

Career federal employees like Pyatt are supposed to be able to petition for a transfer or receive preference in hiring at other agencies. Despite having worked for the federal government for more than a decade, at five agencies, including four Homeland Security posts, Pyatt says she’s faced nothing but silence.

“So it’s little things like that that this administration is doing that makes it really feel like they’re targeting people like me, people who love the country, come from a family that has served the country for generations, did what we were supposed to do,” Pyatt said through tears. “And it just doesn’t matter.”

by Matt Krupnick for ProPublica

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

The Trump administration has proposed cutting funding for tribal colleges and universities by nearly 90%, a move that would likely shut down most or all of the institutions created to serve students disadvantaged by the nation’s historic mistreatment of Indigenous communities.

The proposal is included in the budget request from the Department of the Interior to Congress, which was released publicly on Monday. The document mentions only the two federally controlled tribal colleges — Haskell Indian Nations University and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute — but notes the request for postsecondary programs will drop from more than $182 million this year to just over $22 million for 2026.

If Congress supports the administration’s proposal, it would devastate the nation’s 37 tribal colleges and universities, said Ahniwake Rose, president and CEO of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which represents the colleges in Washington, D.C.

“The numbers that are being proposed would close the tribal colleges,” Rose told ProPublica. “They would not be able to sustain.”

ProPublica found last year that Congress was underfunding tribal colleges by a quarter-billion dollars per year. The Bureau of Indian Education, tasked with requesting funding for the institutions, had never asked lawmakers to fully fund the institutions at the levels called for in the law, ProPublica found.

But rather than remedy the problem, the Trump administration’s budget would devastate the colleges, tribal education leaders said.

The Bureau of Indian Education, which administers federal funding for tribal colleges, and the Department of the Interior, the bureau’s parent agency, declined to answer questions.

Rose said she and other college leaders had not been warned of the proposed cuts nor consulted during the budgeting process. Federal officials had not reached out to the colleges by the end of the day Monday.

The proposal comes as the Trump administration has outlined a host of funding cuts related to the federal government’s trust and treaty obligations to tribes. The Coalition for Tribal Sovereignty said last month that the administration’s proposed discretionary spending for the benefit of Native Americans would fall to its lowest point in more than 15 years, which it viewed as “an effort to permanently impact trust and treaty obligations to Tribal Nations.”

Congress passed legislation in 1978 committing to fund the tribal college system and promising inflation-adjusted appropriations based on the number of students enrolled in federally recognized tribes. But those appropriations have consistently lagged far behind inflation.

The colleges have managed, despite the meager funds, to preserve Indigenous languages, conduct high-level research and train local residents in nursing, meat processing and other professions and trades. But with virtually no money available for infrastructure or construction, the schools have been forced to navigate broken water pipes, sewage leaks, crumbling roofs and other problems that have compounded the financial shortcomings.

Tribal college leaders said they were stunned by the proposed cuts to their already insufficient funding and had more questions than answers.

“I’m shivering in my boots,” said Manoj Patil, president of Little Priest Tribal College in Nebraska. “This would basically be a knife in the chest. It’s a dagger, and I don’t know how we can survive these types of cuts.”

Congress will have the final say on the budget, noted Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, the ranking Democrat on the House Subcommittee on Indian and Insular Affairs, whose New Mexico district includes three tribal colleges. Tribal colleges “are lifelines in Indian Country,” Leger Fernández said in a statement. “They provide higher education rooted in language, culture and community. These cuts would rob Native students of opportunity and violate our trust responsibilities.”

Other members of the House and Senate Indian Affairs committees did not immediately respond to questions from ProPublica. The White House also did not respond to a request for more information.

Monday’s budget release was the latest in a string of bad financial news for tribal colleges since President Donald Trump began his second term. The administration suspended Department of Agriculture grants that funded scholarships and research, and tribal college presidents spent the past week trying to fend off deep cuts to the Pell Grant program for low-income students. The vast majority of tribal college students rely on Pell funding to attend school.

Tribal colleges contend their funding is protected by treaties and the federal trust responsibility, a legal obligation requiring the United States to protect Indigenous education, resources, rights and assets. And they note that the institutions are economic engines in some of North America’s poorest areas, providing jobs, training and social services in often remote locations.

“It doesn’t make sense for them to (approve the cuts) when they’re relying on us to train the workforce,” said Dawn Frank, president of Oglala Lakota College in South Dakota. “We’re really relying on our senators and representatives to live up to their treaty and trust obligation.”

But others noted they have spent years meeting with federal representatives to emphasize the importance of tribal colleges to their communities and have been disappointed by the chronic underfunding.

“It is a bit disheartening to feel like our voice is not being heard,” said Chris Caldwell, president of College of Menominee Nation in Wisconsin. “They don’t hear our message.”

by Alec MacGillis

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

It’s a tough time for the rank-and-file tech worker or computer science graduate looking for a job. The Silicon Valley giants have laid off tens of thousands in the past couple years. The longstanding threat of offshoring persists, while the new threat of AI looms.

There is seemingly one reason for hope, which you won’t find in popular hiring websites like Indeed.com or ZipRecruiter. It’s exclusively in the help-wanted classifieds in printed newspapers. Every Sunday, metropolitan newspapers across the country are full of listings for tech jobs, with posted salaries sometimes exceeding $150,000. If you’ve got tech skills, it seems, employers are crying out for you, week after week.

One day this spring, I decided to test this premise. I set out with the classified pages from the most recent Sunday edition of The Washington Post, which were laden with tech job offerings in the suburbs of Northern Virginia and Montgomery County, Maryland.

First, I drove to the address given for one of the employers, Sapphire Software Solutions, whose ad said it was looking for someone to “gather and analyze data and business requirements to facilitate various scrum ceremonies for multiple business systems and processes.” I arrived at an office building in Ashburn, Virginia, near Dulles International Airport. But the receptionist in the appointed suite looked confused when I asked for Sapphire.

“This is virtual office,” she said, in a heavy Eastern European accent. “We have many kinds of virtual offices.” She gestured at a long filing-cabinet drawer that was open behind her, full of folders. “You must mail to them.”

From there, I drove 2 miles to another company advertising for help, Optimum Systems, whose address turned out to be an office park full of dental practices. But the office door said nothing about Optimum, instead carrying a sign for an accountant and a different tech firm. It was dark and empty.

And from there, I drove 6 miles to a company called Softrams, which was advertising for a “Full Stack Developer.” I walked into an office in a building that also housed a driving school. The reception area was empty. I called hello, and a woman appeared. I told her I was a reporter wanting to learn more about the listing. She was surprised and asked if she could read the ad in my hand. “I’ll check with the team and get back to you,” she said.

A few days later, after similarly mysterious visits to other offices, I reached the woman, Praveena Divi, on the phone. “This ad is for a PERM filing,” she said. “A filing for a green card.”

To anybody familiar with the PERM system, those words meant the ad was not really intended to find applicants. I had entered one of the most overlooked yet consequential corners of the United States immigration system: the process by which employers sponsor tech workers with temporary H-1B visas as a first step to getting them the green card that entitles them to permanent residency in the U.S. It is a process that nearly everyone involved admits is nonsensical, highly vulnerable to abuse, as well as a contributor to inequities among domestic and foreign tech workers.

Yet the system has endured for decades, largely out of public view. There is occasional debate over the roughly 120,000 workers from overseas who are awarded H-1B visas every year for temporary high-skilled employment. Last December, a tiff erupted between billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, on the one side, and MAGA champions including Steve Bannon, over the formers’ claims that H-1B workers are needed because the homegrown tech workforce is inadequate. But almost as quickly as it started, the spat vanished from the news.

There is even less attention given to what happens with these foreign workers — three quarters of whom are now from India — when many decide they want to stay beyond the six-year maximum allowed for an H-1B recipient (a three-year term can be renewed once). To qualify for a green card, workers must get their employers to sponsor them via the Permanent Labor Certification process, aka PERM. And to do that, employers must demonstrate that they made a sincere effort to find someone else — a U.S. citizen or permanent resident — to do the job instead.

What’s striking about this requirement is that, as a result of choices made by legislators 35 years ago, the effort to find a citizen is not expected at the front end, when employers are considering hiring workers from abroad. At that point, employers simply enter the lottery for H-1Bs, and if they get one, they can use it.

Only once a company has employed someone for five or six years and become committed to helping that person stay in the country permanently must the company show that it is trying to find someone else. It’s no surprise that the efforts at this point can be less than sincere.

This is where the newspaper ads come in. Under U.S. Department of Labor rules dating back to the era before the worldwide web, employers must post the job for which PERM certification is being sought for 30 days with a state workforce agency and in two successive Sunday newspapers in the job’s location.

This makes for a highly ironic juxtaposition: pages of print ads paid for by tech employers, many of them the same Silicon Valley giants that have helped eviscerate newspaper classifieds and drive down print newspaper circulation to the point that it can be hard even to find a place to buy a paper in many communities.

These columns of ads that are not really looking for applicants underscore the challenges facing American tech workers and the striking disparities in the current immigration landscape. While restaurants, meatpackers and countless other businesses now risk having workers targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, tech employers have largely escaped Trump administration scrutiny for their use of foreign labor. Among the companies sponsoring many H-1B employees for green cards every year are ones aligned with President Donald Trump, such as Oracle, Palantir and Musk’s Tesla.

But the PERM system also takes a toll on its supposed beneficiaries, the temporary employees seeking permanent residency. Even after their PERM applications are approved, they must typically wait more than 10 years before getting a green card, a long wait even by the standards of the U.S. immigration system. In the interim, it can be hard for them to leave their sponsoring employers, which exposes them to overwork at jobs that often pay less than what their American counterparts receive.

Whichever way you look at it, said Ronil Hira, a Howard University political science professor and research associate at the Economic Policy institute, the PERM process is crying out for reform. As he put it, “Everyone in the industry knows it’s a joke.”

Divi, the manager at Softrams, was quite forthcoming about how PERM works at the 450-person company, whose largest client is the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and which was bought last year by another company, Tria. She told me that Softrams had 69 employees on H-1B visas, had never hired another applicant during the PERM process and had received zero applicants from the latest ads.

I had a much harder time getting through to Sapphire Software Solutions, the company with the mail-drop in Ashburn, whose website states that it’s “a leading provider of IT staffing solutions and services since 2011” and that it also has offices in the Northern California town of Dublin, plus Hyderabad, India. The company’s phone directory offers options for, among others, “recruiting” and “immigration.” When I chose the latter, I reached a man who sounded surprised by the call and said, “Give me some time.” I never heard back from him, so I called back days later and pushed the option for “recruiting.” This time, the person who answered hung up on me. Finally, I picked the option for human resources and reached a woman who told me to send an email. I did, and never heard back.

Fortunately, one can learn a lot about the PERM process from Department of Labor records, which list all of the roughly 90,000 PERM applications submitted every year. The 2024 list shows Sapphire with 51 applications — a striking number for a company that gives its size as 252 employees. The jobs include computer systems analysts offered $96,158, software developers offered $100,240 and web developers offered $128,731. All of the applications were approved by the government, as is true of virtually all applications under the PERM process.

The federal listings don’t list the names of the employees whom the companies are sponsoring for PERM certification, but they do show their nationalities and where they received their degrees. All but one of Sapphire’s 51 were from India; their degrees came from a mix of American institutions (among them the University of South Florida and University of Michigan-Flint) and Indian ones (among them Visvesvaraya Technological University and Periyar University.)

All of the Sapphire applications were advertised in The Washington Post. And all list the same immigration attorney, Soo Park in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I called and asked her about the company’s applications. Sapphire, she said, is “just one of the companies I do.” I inquired about the PERM process, and she demurred, telling me to ask AI instead.

I encountered similar resistance and intrigue when I made the rounds in a different metro area with a burgeoning tech sector: Columbus, Ohio. Here also, several of the job listings in The Columbus Dispatch led to empty or abandoned offices or to buildings that were mail-drops for dozens of companies.

When I sought out Vizion Technologies, which had listed three jobs, I found a single-story office park in Dublin, a suburb of Columbus. Vizion’s office, adjacent to that of a cleaning company, was empty, save for a Keurig machine and some magazines. I called the company’s number and asked the man who answered about the listings. “This is a PERM ad,” he said freely. But, he said, he would consider other applicants. Had any come across the transom? I asked. No, he said. “But you never know.”

After an unilluminating visit to another company, I headed to EDI-Matrix, which had advertised for software programmers. At the company’s small office, I met John Sheppard, a manager. He said the owner, Shafiullah Syed, was for the time being in India, where a quarter of the company’s 40 employees were based, and where 20 of the Ohio-based staff was from. The company, founded in 2008, provides tech support for state government and private-sector clients.

Were the ads in the Dispatch for PERM applicants? I asked. “Probably,” Sheppard said. “Our owner is a big believer in trying to find ways to help people.”

The story of how the PERM system — the full name is Program Electronic Review Management — came to be is a decadeslong tale of, depending on your perspective, misguided assumptions or self-interested machinations. Since the middle of the 20th century, temporary guest-worker programs had been on a separate track from employment-based permanent residency programs. It was difficult for guest workers to apply for permanent residency, a process that had long required employers to prove that they couldn’t find an American worker for the role.

But those separate tracks converged with the 1990 Immigration Act. Bruce Morrison, who helped draft the law as a Connecticut Democrat serving as chair of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship, told me that the law’s goal was to constrict the use of temporary labor from abroad.

Previously, employers had been able to hire unlimited numbers of temporary skilled workers under vague language about “distinguished merit and ability.” The 1990 law created a new H-1B category that required a bachelor’s degree, established a cap of 65,000 visas per year and set a minimum wage level. Still, it spared employers from having to prove they couldn’t find U.S. workers for the job in question, on the logic that these were just temps filling a short-term role.

The hope, Morrison said, was to encourage employers to bring in skilled workers via the permanent residency pathway, on the theory that immigrants with green cards would, by being on stronger footing, be less likely to undercut wages for Americans than guest workers did.

Things worked out much differently. The law passed on the cusp of the Internet era as the job market was pushing toward shorter-term employment, especially in the tech world. A rapidly growing middle class in Asia was producing millions of tech workers eager to work in the U.S., especially English-speaking Indians.

And, crucially, the law allowed H-1B holders to apply for permanent residency.

Within just a few years, three-quarters of those applying for employer-based permanent residency were people who were already working for the employer in question, mostly on H-1Bs. Thus was created the backward situation of employers having to prove that they were looking for qualified applicants for a role that they had already filled with the person they were sponsoring. Their recruitment efforts were “perfunctory at best and a sham at worst,” wrote the Department of Labor’s office of inspector general in a scathing 1996 report.

The report found that there had been more than 136,000 applicants for 18,011 PERM openings that it examined, but that only 104 people were hired via advertisements — less than 1% — and those hirings were almost accidental. (The companies kept the foreign workers they were sponsoring, but came across a tiny smattering of qualified Americans, whom they also hired.) “The system is seriously flawed,” the report stated. “The programs are being manipulated and abused.”

In the years that followed, the demand for H-1B visas surged, due partly to the demand for Indian tech workers to assist with the Y2K threat and to the tech-bubble burst prompting companies to seek lower-wage workers. Under pressure from the tech industry, the government raised the cap for several years, as high as 195,000 visas annually, between 2001 and 2003.

This exacerbated a bottleneck already in the making: Tens of thousands of H-1B holders, many from India, were now seeking permanent residency as their visas neared expiration, but under the law, no single nationality could receive more than 7% of the 140,000 employment-based green cards awarded in a given year. Workers who had been approved for permanent residency could remain on extended H-1Bs while they waited for their green card, but this was an unstable limbo that further swelled the ranks of H-1Bs.

In 2005, the Department of Labor tried to address at least one part of the pipeline, the delays in approving employees for permanent residency. It introduced the new PERM process, which allowed employers simply to attest that the position in question was open to U.S. workers, that any who applied were rejected for job-related reasons and that the offered pay was at least the prevailing wage for that role. Employers also had to submit a report describing the recruitment steps taken and the number of U.S. applicants rejected. It was at this point that the print advertising requirement was clarified as two successive Sunday newspapers.

It became quickly apparent how easy it was for employers to game the system. Many advertised completely different positions in the newspaper ads compared to their own websites. Some directed applicants to send resumes to the company’s immigration lawyers rather than to human resources.

A viral video captured the absurdity. At a 2007 panel discussion, an immigration lawyer, Lawrence Lebowitz, laid out the mission in startlingly candid terms: “Our goal here of course is to meet the requirements, No. 1, but also do so as inexpensively as possible, keeping in mind our goal. And our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker. In a sense, that sounds funny, but it’s what we’re trying to do here.”

The video caused a flurry of outrage, yet the system has survived to this day, largely unchanged, protected by congressional dysfunction and the interests that are served by the status quo, the tech industry and the immigration law bar.

Advocacy groups representing American tech workers have attacked the system repeatedly, challenging the notion that H-1Bs are bringing in the world’s “best and brightest” by pointing out that the program makes no attempt to identify exceptional talent beyond requiring a bachelor’s degree, relying instead on a lottery to award the visas. The real appeal of H-1Bs for employers, worker advocates say, is that they can pay their holders an average of 10% to 20% less, as several studies have found to be the case, which has helped suppress tech wages more broadly.

Yet the advocacy groups have struggled to mobilize sustained opposition. There was talk during the Obama administration of reforming PERM, but it fizzled amid the failure of broader immigration reform during his second term.

In 2020, the Department of Labor’s inspector general issued another critical report, calling attention to PERM’s vulnerability to abuse. It noted that when the department did full audit reviews of applications, which it did for 16% of them, it wound up rejecting a fifth of them, far more than the mere 3% that were rejected during the standard review. That suggested that many faulty applications were slipping through. “The PERM program relentlessly has employers not complying with the qualifying criteria,” it concluded.

As for the newspaper ad requirement, the report noted with understatement, “Available data indicates newspapers are becoming a less effective means of notifying potential applicants in the U.S. about job opportunities. … U.S. workers are likely to be unaware of these employment opportunities due to the obsolete methods required.”

Since that report, there have been two notable bids for accountability. In December 2020, the Department of Justice filed suit against Facebook, alleging that the company was discriminating against U.S. citizens by routinely reserving jobs for PERM applicants. In a settlement nearly a year later, Facebook, which had denied any discrimination, agreed to pay a civil penalty of $4.75 million, pay up to $9.5 million to eligible victims of the alleged discrimination and conduct more expansive recruitment for slots in PERM applications.

In 2023, the DOJ announced a similar settlement with Apple, which also denied any discriminatory behavior but agreed to pay up to $25 million in back pay and civil penalties, conduct more expansive recruitment, train employees in anti-discrimination requirements and submit to DOJ monitoring for three years.

And yet, the PERM process carries on, with its own ecosystem. One firm, Atlas Advertising, offers the specific service of advertising jobs intended for PERM applicants. “Expertly place your immigration ads in leading newspapers, ensuring compliance and targeted reach for PERM certification,” Atlas urges potential customers.

I searched in vain for defenders of the process — major tech lobby groups either declined to comment or didn’t return my calls. Theresa Cardinal Brown has lobbied on immigration policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Immigration Lawyers Association, but she, too, was critical of PERM. “Even if you are trying to sponsor someone who is already on the job, you have to act as if you aren’t,” she said. “Increasingly, this jury-rigged system isn’t working for anyone.”

Among those now decrying the system the most sharply is Morrison, the former Democratic congressman who helped write the 1990 law. In 2017, he told “60 Minutes” that H-1B “has been hijacked as the main highway to bring people from abroad and displace Americans.”

Morrison, who is now a lobbyist, was even more outspoken when I talked with him. He noted the H-1B caps have grown in recent years. The 65,000 cap laid out in 1990 no longer includes the thousands renewed every year, and there are an additional 20,000 visas for people with graduate degrees and 35,000-odd exemptions for universities, nonprofits and research organizations. This adds up to about 120,000 new H-1Bs per year. Meanwhile, the per-country cap for employer-based green cards last year was 11,200. The backlog of workers and family members awaiting green cards, mostly Indians, has swelled to more than 1 million, creating a vast army of what Morrison and others call “indentured” workers who are at the mercy of their employers.

“It’s fair to say that no American has ever gotten a job due to the certification system,” Morrison said. “It doesn’t do what it should do.”

One day, after many more hang-ups on calls to Sapphire Software Solutions, the company with the mail-drop in Ashburn and 51 PERM applications on last year’s Department of Labor list, I finally reached one of their managers, Phani Reddy Gottimukkala.

I asked him whether the company had gotten any responses to its recent ads in The Washington Post. “That will be taken care of by the immigration department,” he said. More broadly, he said the PERM process was working well for the company. “Everything is fine because we have very strong attorneys working for us.”

Doris Burke contributed research.

by Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio

This article was produced by WPLN/Nashville Public Radio, a 2023 ProPublica Local Reporting Network partner. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Richard L. Bean, the longtime superintendent of the East Tennessee juvenile detention center that bears his name, abruptly announced Friday that he will be stepping down. His decision to retire came the day after the Knox County mayor said he had lost confidence in Bean’s leadership.

Bean, 84, has been superintendent of the juvenile detention center since 1972. A 2023 investigation from WPLN and ProPublica found the facility was using solitary confinement more than other detention centers in the state. Sometimes the children were locked up alone for hours or days at a time. That kind of confinement was also used as punishment, in violation of state law.

At the time, Bean broadly defended the practices at the facility, saying he wished he had more punitive abilities and that people who pushed back didn’t understand what was necessary.

After the story ran, the head of the detention center’s governing board told local TV station WBIR that he thought the Bean center was “the best facility in the state of Tennessee.”

Renewed scrutiny on the detention center began last week when Bean dismissed two employees, including the facility’s only nurse. The nurse’s termination was first reported by Knox News, and the mayor described her dismissal as “retaliation” because she had reported to state investigators significant issues with medical care at the facility, which she said went unchecked and unaddressed by Bean.

On Wednesday, Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs and juvenile court Judge Tim Irwin wrote a letter to Bean demanding he reinstate both employees. Irwin is a nonvoting member of the center’s governing board of trustees but selects one of its three voting members.

“These dismissals may well lead to lawsuits against you and the county,” the letter reads, “which could cost the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

The following day, Jacobs wrote a letter to the governor calling for immediate state intervention and detailing issues with medication in the facility going missing, errors with medication reporting and “even medication going to the wrong detainees.”

In a public video statement, Jacobs said he had “no confidence that these issues will be addressed with the center’s current leadership or the governing board that oversees the Bean juvenile detention center.” He called for the Knox County Sheriff’s Office to take over operation of the center but said he has limited power to intervene.

By Friday, Bean announced that he would leave his post as superintendent in two months after he gets the facility “shipshape,” according to a press release. He did not respond to requests for comment but said in the press release that his last day will be Aug. 1.

During WPLN and ProPublica’s investigation of the Bean center, documents revealed that state officials repeatedly had put the Bean center on corrective action plans and had documented its improper use of seclusion yet continued to approve the center’s license to operate without the facility changing its ways.

“What we do is treat everybody like they’re in here for murder,” Bean told WPLN during a 2023 visit to the facility. “You don’t have a problem if you do that.” Most of the children in the Bean center are not in for murder and instead are awaiting court dates after being charged with a crime.

When asked if he was worried he might get in trouble for the way he was running the facility, Bean said, “If I got in trouble for it, I believe I could talk to whoever got me in trouble and get out of it.”

by Max Blau

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

The mother of an Arizona man who died after being unable to find mental health treatment is suing his health insurer, saying it broke the law by publishing false information that misled its customers.

Ravi Coutinho, a 36-year-old entrepreneur, bought insurance from Ambetter, the most popular plan on HealthCare.gov, because it seemed to offer plenty of mental health and addiction treatment options near his home in Phoenix. But after struggling for months in early 2023 to find in-network care covered by his plan, he wasn’t able to find a therapist. In May 2023, after 21 calls with the insurer without getting the treatment he sought, he was found dead in his apartment. His death was ruled an accident, likely due to complications from excessive drinking.

Coutinho was the subject of a September 2024 investigation by ProPublica that showed how he was trapped in what’s commonly known as a “ghost network.” Many of the mental health providers that Ambetter listed as accepting its insurance were not actually able to see him. ProPublica’s investigation also revealed how customer service representatives and care managers repeatedly failed to connect Coutinho to the care he needed after he and his mother asked for help. The story was part of a yearlong series, “America’s Mental Barrier,” that investigated the ways insurers employed practices that interfered with their customers’ ability to access mental health care.

The lawsuit, filed on May 23 in Maricopa County by Coutinho’s mother, Barbara Webber, accused the insurer Centene, along with the subsidiary that oversaw her son’s plan, Health Net of Arizona, of publishing an “inaccurate and misleading” provider directory. The suit also accused the companies of breaking state and federal laws, including ones that require directories to be kept accurate.

The errors in the Ambetter directory gave Coutinho a false impression about the kinds of mental health care that were actually available, the lawsuit said. According to the lawsuit, the failure to correct those errors concealed the fact that Centene companies had provided insufficient services through the Ambetter plan.

The lawsuit draws upon the findings of ProPublica’s investigation, summarizing Coutinho’s repeated attempts to find a therapist in Ambetter’s network and to get Centene representatives to connect him with a mental health provider that he could actually see.

The lawsuit also describes how Arizona insurance regulators had previously informed Health Net of Arizona that it had failed to maintain accurate provider directories. Health Net of Arizona promised to correct the errors. Regulators did not fine the insurer and declined to answer ProPublica’s questions about whether the Centene subsidiary addressed their concerns.

Centene and Health Net of Arizona didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on the lawsuit. ProPublica previously reached out to Centene and Health Net of Arizona more than two dozen times and sent them both a detailed list of questions. None of their media representatives responded.

One of the 25 largest companies in America, Centene and its subsidiaries have been accused in past lawsuits of purposefully misrepresenting the number of in-network providers by publishing inaccurate directories. Centene lawyers have previously denied such claims in two of the bigger cases, in Illinois and California. Both cases are ongoing.

The top trade group for the industry, AHIP, has told lawmakers that companies contact in-network providers to ensure the listings are accurate. AHIP also stated that the companies could correct inaccuracies faster if providers did a better job updating their listings. Providers have told ProPublica, however, that insurers don’t always remove their names from insurer lists when they officially request to leave their networks.

Mel C. Orchard III, a partner with The Spence Law Firm who is representing Webber, told ProPublica that he intended to bring the case before a jury to hold Centene accountable for negligence and consumer fraud. The lawsuit does not state a specified amount that Webber is seeking in damages.

“Ravi is an example of the abject failure of the insurance industry to do what it’s supposed to do — and that is to insure us in times when we need them the most,” Orchard told ProPublica. “Instead they prey upon our vulnerabilities; that is what happened in this case.”

Watch a live performance of Max Blau’s investigation of Ravi Coutinho’s death, performed by actors Oscar Isaac, Kathryn Erbe and Bill Camp, produced by Theater of War Productions and presented by WNYC.

by Ginny Monk and Dave Altimari, The Connecticut Mirror

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

The Connecticut Senate on Friday overwhelmingly passed the most significant reform to the state’s towing policies in decades, a measure lawmakers said would help protect drivers from predatory towing.

House Bill 7162 overhauls the state’s century-old towing statutes and comes in response to an investigation by the Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica that showed how state towing laws have come to favor tow companies at the expense of drivers. It takes several steps to make it harder to tow vehicles from private property and easier for drivers to retrieve their vehicles after a tow.

The bill, which passed the House of Representatives last week with wide bipartisan support and little debate, sailed through the Senate on a 33-3 vote.

“It’s reform that ensures transparency, it ensures fairness and accountability, but does all of this without undercutting the essential work that ethical and professional tow operators do each and every day for us, keeping our roads safe and our properties accessible,” said Transportation Committee Co-chair Sen. Christine Cohen, D-Guilford. “We’ve learned over the years, and particularly over the last year due to some investigative reporting, of some particularly egregious circumstances.”

A spokesperson for Gov. Ned Lamont said the governor plans to sign the bill into law.

Republican Sen. Tony Hwang, ranking member of the Transportation Committee, also spoke in favor of the bill. The bill got about a half hour of debate ahead of passage, and there were no comments in opposition.

Hwang, who represents Fairfield, said the bill strikes the right balance between the interests of towers and consumers.

“I want to acknowledge that our press had an important part to bring out transparency and some of the bad actions, and I think in this bill we address some of those issues,” Hwang said. “We took measures to ensure that there is due process, and what has been discovered to have occurred in a criminal action, I believe, should never, ever happen again, to undermine the trust that we have to have in this process.”

Connecticut’s law allows tow companies to begin the process to sell vehicles after just 15 days. CT Mirror and ProPublica found that it is one of the shortest windows in the nation, and that the law has particularly impacted people with low incomes. Reporters spoke with people who said towing companies required them to pay in cash or wouldn’t allow them to get personal belongings out of their vehicles. Many couldn’t afford to get their towed vehicles back and lost transportation or jobs because of it.

After weeks of negotiations, lawmakers said they came to a compromise with the towing industry. Two bills were merged to include massive reforms to towing procedures from private property and rate increases for highway tows that typically follow car accidents.

The bill that passed and would take effect Oct. 1 requires tow companies to accept credit cards and doesn’t allow them to tow vehicles immediately just because of an expired parking permit or registration. Vehicles can’t be towed from private property without notice unless they’re blocking traffic, fire hydrants or parked in an accessible spot.

Under the bill, towing companies can still start the sales process for vehicles worth $1,500 or less after 15 days, but they would now have to take more steps to give the owner a chance to claim the vehicle. The Department of Motor Vehicles would be required to check whether the driver filed any complaints about the tow before approving the sale, and the tower would have to send a notice ahead of the sale to the registered owner and lienholders via certified mail, with receipts of delivery.

The actual sale couldn’t go through until 30 days after the tow.

The bill also requires that towers take at least two photos before they tow a vehicle — one of the violation that resulted in a tow and another of any damage to the vehicle. Cohen said this would help determine if vehicles had any missing parts before the tow, a seeming nod to the news organizations’ story about a DMV employee who the agency’s investigators found schemed with a towing company to undervalue vehicles and sell them for thousands in profit. (The employee denied he did anything wrong, and the agency ultimately took no action in that case.)

The bill also establishes a working group to study how to handle proceeds from the sales of towed vehicles. State law requires that towing companies hold profits in escrow for a year in case the vehicle owner claims them, then remit that money to the state. But CT Mirror and ProPublica found the DMV never set up a system for that process to occur.

Additionally, it calls for the DMV to work with the state’s attorney general to develop a consumer bill of rights on towing.

Tow companies have to be available after hours and on weekends to allow people to get their vehicles or personal property. In a story published this month, CT Mirror and ProPublica reported that tow truck companies sometimes hold onto people’s belongings to pressure them into paying their towing fees.

Under the new law, drivers will be allowed to retrieve their belongings from their vehicles, even if they haven’t paid the towing fees. State regulations currently allow vehicle owners to retrieve only “personal property which is essential to the health or welfare of any person.”

Cohen listed many of the issues outlined in the news outlets’ reporting as “some of the worst abuses of predatory towing practices.”

Timothy Vibert, president of Towing and Recovery Professionals of Connecticut, said the industry initially opposed the bill because towers believed it would impede their ability to tow cars and clear traffic. He also said towers weren’t involved enough in the original draft. But they worked with lawmakers on the bill over several weeks, and he issued a statement in support this week.

“The people of Connecticut deserve safety, accountability and transparency when their cars are towed, and so do the people who work for Connecticut’s towing companies who risk our lives every day to make our roads safe,” Vibert said. “We all need clear, easy-to-follow rules.”

DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera commended the House and Senate.

“The DMV fully supports this initiative, as it not only enhances the framework for fair and equitable enforcement of towing laws but also provides a clear path forward for our agency to advance these efforts,” Guerrera said in a statement.

Cohen said that the bill aims to “fix a broken process,” and that lawmakers had worked on some aspects of it for years before the bill passed.

News of the bill’s passage brought relief to Melissa Anderson, who was featured in a CT Mirror and ProPublica story after her car was towed and sold from her Hamden apartment because of an expired parking permit.

The bill requires a 72-hour grace period before a car can be towed for an expired parking sticker to allow people time to get a new one.

“I’m glad we made a difference,” Anderson said. “This is going to help a lot of people.”

The bill next heads to Lamont’s desk.

“The Governor appreciates all the work that went into this legislation, which provides greater protections for the public and their vehicles,” Lamont’s spokesperson, Rob Blanchard, said in a text message. “He plans on signing the legislation once it reaches his desk.”

by Anjeanette Damon and Mollie Simon

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

The former operator of one of the largest HomeVestors of America franchises has agreed to plead guilty to federal wire fraud in connection with a sprawling Ponzi scheme targeting people who believed they were investing in his real estate empire.

Federal prosecutors in Texas identified 80 victims defrauded of nearly $40 million by Charles Carrier since 2018. Though Carrier agreed to plead guilty to only one count of felony wire fraud involving one $200,000 transfer, he admitted to the broader scheme as part of the deal and agreed to pay restitution — the amount of which has yet to be determined.

The charge also carries a maximum 20-year prison sentence and the possibility of millions of dollars in fines. A federal judge will decide the sentence.

Carrier owned Dallas-based C&C Residential Properties, one of the most successful franchises in the HomeVestors chain, which is known for its “We Buy Ugly Houses” slogan. HomeVestors terminated Carrier’s franchise in October 2024, after receiving a tip that he had been defrauding investors. It has since sued him for infringing on the company’s assiduously protected trademark. Carrier has not yet responded to the lawsuit.

In a story published this month, ProPublica detailed how Carrier bilked millions of dollars from scores of investors across Texas, including both wealthy businesspeople and older adults of more modest means who depended on the investment income for daily expenses. According to new court documents, losses to individual investors range from $35,000 to $11.6 million. The plea agreement was filed in court two weeks after the article was published.

Carrier took loans from investors to finance his house-flipping business, initially using the money to buy and renovate older houses to sell for a profit. Carrier promised each loan would be secured by an ownership interest in a house and that he would pay 8%-10% interest in monthly installments over the course of the loan.

For many years, investors received reliable monthly payments. In 2018, however, Carrier started taking out multiple loans on individual properties, sometimes providing investors with deeds he never recorded and racking up debt far beyond the value of the houses, according to court documents. Carrier also admitted to forging signatures and notary stamps so he could sell properties without notifying the investors or paying off their notes, according to court documents. Carrier admitted to using investor money to “pay personal credit card balances, business operating expenses and interest obligations to earlier investors,” according to court documents.

The fact that Carrier’s plea deal contains only a single charge left some victims even more angry.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Ron Carver, who lost $300,000 and whose father lost $200,000 before he died. “They will let him plead out and he might get a slap on the wrist.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office said they can’t comment on a pending case.

Carrier’s lawyer, Tom Pappas, said it wasn’t Carrier’s “intention to defraud anybody of their money.”

“Pretty much all of his money was put into his business to try and make it successful so investors would be successful,” Pappas said, adding that Carrier didn’t fund a lavish lifestyle. Without providing details, Pappas said changes in the real estate market “overtook” Carrier and “the thing just got away from him.”

Although Carrier agreed to plead to only one count, the entirety of the fraud identified by prosecutors will be considered by the judge during sentencing.

Pappas said Carrier is “committed to repaying every investor every dollar he can to make them whole.” Pappas said he expects the restitution will likely be “much lower” than the $40 million in losses identified by prosecutors, as the lawyers are wrangling over the value of the investors’ losses. In February, Carrier signed an asset liquidation agreement allowing prosecutors to oversee the sale of his remaining properties, with the proceeds going toward restitution.

Pappas said he expects Carrier will serve time in prison.

“Depending on the amount of the loss, there’s a strong possibility he may go to jail,” he said. “But again, we are doing everything we can to make everybody as whole as we can.”

by Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica; Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune; Melissa Sanchez and Gabriel Sandoval, ProPublica; Ronna Rísquez, Alianza Rebelde Investiga; and Adrián González, Cazadores de Fake News

Leer en español.

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

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues. It’s also co-published with Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates), a coalition of Venezuelan online media outlets, and Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters), a Venezuelan investigative online news organization.

The Trump administration knew that the vast majority of the 238 Venezuelan immigrants it sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador in mid-March had not been convicted of crimes in the United States before it labeled them as terrorists and deported them, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security data that has not been previously reported.

President Donald Trump and his aides have branded the Venezuelans as “rapists,” “savages,” “monsters” and “the worst of the worst.” When multiple news organizations disputed those assertions with reporting that showed many of the deportees did not have criminal records, the administration doubled down. It said that its assessment of the deportees was based on a thorough vetting process that included looking at crimes committed both inside and outside the United States. But the government’s own data, which was obtained by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of journalists from Venezuela, showed that officials knew that only 32 of the deportees had been convicted of U.S. crimes and that most were nonviolent offenses, such as retail theft or traffic violations.

The data indicates that the government knew that only six of the immigrants were convicted of violent crimes: four for assault, one for kidnapping and one for a weapons offense. And it shows that officials were aware that more than half, or 130, of the deportees were not labeled as having any criminal convictions or pending charges; they were labeled as only having violated immigration laws.

As for foreign offenses, our own review of court and police records from around the United States and in Latin American countries where the deportees had lived found evidence of arrests or convictions for 20 of the 238 men. Of those, 11 involved violent crimes such as armed robbery, assault or murder, including one man who the Chilean government had asked the U.S. to extradite to face kidnapping and drug charges there. Another four had been accused of illegal gun possession.

We conducted a case-by-case review of all the Venezuelan deportees. It’s possible there are crimes and other information in the deportees’ backgrounds that did not show up in our reporting or the internal government data, which includes only minimal details for nine of the men. There’s no single publicly available database for all crimes committed in the U.S., much less abroad. But everything we did find in public records contradicted the Trump administration’s assertions as well.

ProPublica and the Tribune, along with Venezuelan media outlets Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters) and Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates), also obtained lists of alleged gang members that are kept by Venezuelan law enforcement officials and the international law enforcement agency Interpol. Those lists include some 1,400 names. None of the names of the 238 Venezuelan deportees matched those on the lists.

The hasty removal of the Venezuelans and their incarceration in a third country has made this one of the most consequential deportations in recent history. The court battles over whether Trump has the authority to expel immigrants without judicial review have the potential to upend how this country handles all immigrants living in the U.S., whether legally or illegally. Officials have suggested publicly that, to achieve the president’s goals of deporting millions of immigrants, the administration was considering suspending habeas corpus, the longstanding constitutional right allowing people to challenge their detention.

Hours before the immigrants were loaded onto airplanes in Texas for deportation, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, declaring that the Tren de Aragua prison gang had invaded the United States, aided by the Venezuelan government. It branded the gang a foreign terrorist organization and said that declaration gave the president the authority to expel its members and send them indefinitely to a foreign prison, where they have remained for more than two months with no ability to communicate with their families or lawyers.

Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in the American Civil Liberties Union’s legal fight against the deportations, said the removals amounted to a “blatant violation of the most fundamental due process principles.” He said that under the law, an immigrant who has committed a crime can be prosecuted and removed, but “it does not mean they can be subjected to a potentially lifetime sentence in a foreign gulag.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in response to our findings that “ProPublica should be embarrassed that they are doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens who are a threat,” adding that “the American people strongly support” the president’s immigration agenda.

When asked about the differences between the administration’s public statements about the deportees and the way they are labeled in government data, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin largely repeated previous public statements. She insisted, without providing evidence, that the deportees were dangerous, saying, “These individuals categorized as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gang members and more — they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”

As for the administration’s allegations that Tren de Aragua has attempted an invasion, an analysis by U.S. intelligence officials concluded that the gang was not acting at the direction of the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro and that reports suggesting otherwise were “not credible.” Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, fired the report’s authors after it became public. Her office, according to news reports, said Gabbard was trying to “end the weaponization and politicization” of the intelligence community.

Our investigation focused on the 238 Venezuelan men who were deported on March 15 to CECOT, the prison in El Salvador, and whose names were on a list first published by CBS News. The government has also sent several dozen other immigrants there, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who the government admitted was sent there in error. Courts have ruled that the administration should facilitate his return to the U.S.

We interviewed about 100 of the deportees’ relatives and their attorneys. Many of them had heard from their loved ones on the morning of March 15, when the men believed they were being sent back to Venezuela. They were happy because they would be back home with their families, who were eager to prepare their favorite meals and plan parties. Some of the relatives shared video messages with us and on social media that were recorded inside U.S. detention facilities. In those videos, the detainees said they were afraid that they might be sent to Guantanamo, a U.S. facility on Cuban soil where Washington has held and tortured detainees, including a number that it suspected of plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Trump administration had sent planes carrying Venezuelan immigrants there earlier this year.

They had no idea they were being sent to El Salvador.

Among them was 31-year-old Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, who left Venezuela and his job as a youth soccer coach last July. His sister, Leidys Trejo Solórzano, said he had a hard time supporting himself and his mother and that Venezuela’s crumbling economy made it hard for him to find a better paying job. Colmenares was detained at an appointment to approach the U.S.-Mexico border in October because of his many tattoos, his sister said. Those tattoos include the names of relatives, a clock, an owl and a crown she said was inspired by the Real Madrid soccer club’s logo.

First image: Colmenares’ mother, Marianela Solórzano, and sister at their home in Venezuela. Second image: Photos of Colmenares as a child in Venezuela. (Adriana Loureiro Fernández for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Colmenares was not flagged as having a criminal history in the DHS data we obtained. Nor did we find any U.S. or foreign convictions or charges in our review. Trejo said her brother stayed out of trouble and has no criminal record in Venezuela either. She described his expulsion as a U.S.-government-sponsored kidnapping.

“It’s been so difficult. Even talking about what happened is hard for me,” said Trejo, who has scoured the internet for videos and photos of her brother in the Salvadoran prison. “Many nights I can’t sleep because I’m so anxious.”

The internal government data shows that officials had labeled all but a handful of the men as members of Tren de Aragua but offered little information about how they came to that conclusion. Court filings and documents we obtained show the government has relied in part on social media posts, affiliations with known gang members and tattoos, including crowns, clocks, guns, grenades and Michael Jordan’s “Jumpman” logo. We found that at least 158 of the Venezuelans imprisoned in El Salvador have tattoos. But law enforcement sources in the U.S., Colombia, Chile and Venezuela with expertise in the Tren de Aragua told us that tattoos are not an indicator of gang membership.

McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said the agency is confident in its assessments of gang affiliation but would not provide additional information to support them.

John Sandweg, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said, “for political reasons, I think the administration wants to characterize this as a grand effort that’s promoting public safety of the United States.” But “even some of the government’s own data demonstrates there is a gap between the rhetoric and the reality,” he said, referring to the internal data we obtained.

The government data shows 67 men who were deported had been flagged as having pending charges, though it provides no details about their alleged crimes. We found police, court and other records for 38 of those deportees. We found several people whose criminal history differed from what was tagged in the government data. In some cases that the government listed as pending criminal charges, the men had been convicted and in one case the charge had been dropped before the man was deported.

Our reporting found that, like the criminal convictions, the majority of the pending charges involved nonviolent crimes, including retail theft, drug possession and traffic offenses.

Six of the men had pending charges for attempted murder, assault, armed robbery, gun possession or domestic battery. Immigrant advocates have said removing people to a prison in El Salvador before the cases against them were resolved means that Trump, asserting his executive authority, short-circuited the criminal justice system.

Take the case of Wilker Miguel Gutiérrez Sierra, 23, who was arrested in February 2024 in Chicago on charges of attempted murder, robbery and aggravated battery after he and three other Venezuelan men allegedly assaulted a stranger on a train and stole his phone and $400. He pleaded not guilty. Gutiérrez was on electronic monitoring as he awaited trial when he was arrested by ICE agents who’d pulled up to him on the street in five black trucks, court records show. Three days later he was shipped to El Salvador.

But the majority of men labeled as having pending cases were facing less serious charges, according to the records we found. Maikol Gabriel López Lizano, 23, was arrested in Chicago in August 2023 on misdemeanor charges for riding his bike on the sidewalk while drinking a can of Budweiser. His partner, Cherry Flores, described his deportation as a gross injustice. “They shouldn’t have sent him there,” she said. “Why did they have to take him over a beer?”

Jeff Ernsthausen of ProPublica contributed data analysis. Adriana Núñez and Carlos Centeno contributed reporting.

by Jeremy Kohler

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.

Across the country, Republican lawmakers have been working to undermine or altogether undo the will of the voters by making it harder to pass amendments and laws through citizen-led initiatives.

In Missouri, the 2025 legislative session was dominated by Republican lawmakers trying to reverse two major measures that voters had put on the ballot and approved just months before; one made abortion in the state legal again, while the other created an employee sick leave requirement.

GOP lawmakers in Alaska and Nebraska also have moved to roll back sick leave benefits that voters approved last year, while legislators in Arizona are pushing new restrictions on abortion access, despite voters six months ago approving protections.

At the same time, Republican leaders in Florida, Utah, Montana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Ohio, North Dakota and South Dakota have approved efforts to restrict citizen-led ballot initiatives or are considering measures to do so, essentially trying to make it harder for voters to change laws outside legislatures.

In some cases, legislators aren’t just responding to measures that voters approved; they’re acting shortly after citizen-led efforts failed but came too close for comfort, such as an abortion-rights initiative in Florida, which in November fell just short of the 60% of votes needed to pass and loosen the state’s ban on the procedure.

Republican elected officials across these states make strikingly similar arguments: They say the initiative process is susceptible to fraud and unduly influenced by out-of-state money. What’s more, they say that they, as elected officials, represent the true will of the people more than ballot initiatives do.

In his opening speech on the first day of Utah’s legislative session in January, Senate President Stuart Adams urged lawmakers to push back against citizen-led ballot initiatives, warning that “unelected special interest groups outside of Utah” were using the process to “override our republic” and “cast aside those who are duly elected.”

Utah lawmakers then passed a law tightening the process. They required initiative sponsors to detail how their proposal would be funded and, if it makes the ballot, pay for costly publication of the ballot language in newspapers across the state — potentially adding $1.4 million in expenses. They also voted to put a 2026 measure before voters that would require a 60% supermajority for any tax-related initiatives.

The battle between direct democracy and representative government isn’t new, and it hasn’t always been the domain of just Republicans. Democrats have done the same thing, although perhaps not with the same frequency, when voters have taken steps they had campaigned against.

What’s different now, political observers say, is that the tension has reached a new level. State lawmakers, primarily Republicans the past few years, are routinely trying to undermine voter majorities.

“This is very much connected to the rise of authoritarianism that we’ve seen across the country,” said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a nonprofit that tracks and supports ballot measures across the 26 states and the District of Columbia that allow some form of direct democracy. “They can’t win fairly, so they’re trying to rewrite the rules to get their way no matter what a majority of folks in their state wants.”

In Missouri, overturning the will of voters has almost become the legislature’s main business. Lawmakers wasted no time moving to undo a constitutional amendment that legalized abortion up to fetal viability, advancing a new measure to place another amendment on the ballot that would ban it again.

They also moved to repeal a sick leave requirement and portions of a minimum wage increase, which had also passed through the initiative process but which Republicans have said are harmful to businesses.

The bill has gone to Gov. Mike Kehoe, who has indicated that he will sign it.

In addition, Missouri lawmakers passed, and the governor signed, a new law that limits the ability of courts to intervene when the legislature writes ballot language for proposed constitutional amendments.

Critics say the law opens the door to misleading ballot language, giving politicians and partisan officials more power to frame initiatives in a way that could mislead voters. Kehoe said in a statement that the law “streamlines complex procedures while protecting the rights of every Missourian.”

State Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Branson, has supported multiple failed efforts to change the state’s initiative process — he’d prefer a 60% threshold rather than a simple majority, as it is now — and backed the sick leave repeal and the amendment to restore Missouri’s abortion ban.

“We’ve been elected in a representative republic to see to the needs of the people,” he said, “and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

Missouri State Rep. Brian Seitz reviews a proposed constitutional amendment on abortion at the state Capitol in April. (David A. Lieb/AP Photo)

State Rep. Ashley Aune, a Democrat from Kansas City and the House minority leader, recalled that one of her first fights as a lawmaker was over the expansion of Medicaid, which voters approved in 2020 but Republican lawmakers refused to fund the following year.

“They thought they were being clever — and of course, the courts told them they are not clever. They had to fund it,” Aune said. “But I’ve seen this nearly every year I’ve been here, and this year has been the absolute worst.”

In response to lawmakers’ efforts, a new campaign called Respect Missouri Voters is recruiting volunteers to collect signatures for a statewide ballot measure in November 2026. The measure would bar lawmakers from overturning voter-approved initiatives or undermining the citizens’ ability to use the initiative process.

In several states, Republican legislators are trying to change the initiative petition process by imposing stricter rules on who can collect signatures and how petitions are submitted and raising the threshold for passing amendments. They are also trying to limit out-of-state funding, shorten signature-gathering windows and give themselves more power to rewrite or block voter-approved measures.

Arkansas is one example of where this is playing out. Last year, abortion rights supporters turned in more than 100,000 signatures for a ballot measure that would have loosened the state’s near-total abortion ban. But the state Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling blocking the proposal from making the ballot, deciding that organizers had made a technical error in how they submitted paperwork for a portion of the signatures that had been collected by paid canvassers.

This year, state Sen. Kim Hammer, a Republican from Benton, led a push to pass a series of laws aimed at the ballot initiative process. They place requirements on petition circulators and signers, including mandates that the signer read the ballot title in the presence of a canvasser or have it read to them, that canvassers ask signers to show photo ID and that they inform signers that petition fraud is a crime. They also expand state oversight, giving officials more power to disqualify petitions.

The League of Women Voters of Arkansas has filed a lawsuit challenging some of the new laws, along with existing restrictions, arguing that they violate the U.S. Constitution. Arkansas Secretary of State Cole Jester said in a statement that they were “basic, commonsense protections, and we look forward to fighting for them.”

Hammer said he’s concerned that outside groups are using Arkansas as a testing ground for policy changes, and he wants to prevent that by keeping the ballot process “as pure as possible.”

“They drop the rock in the state, and it just ripples out from there,” he said in an interview. “So it’s to the benefit of abortionists and to the benefit of the marijuana industry and others to be able to do whatever they have to do to get a foothold.”

Republican Sen. Kim Hammer, left of center, answers questions about proposed laws that would alter the citizen-initiated ballot measure process during an Arkansas Senate committee hearing in February. (Tess Vrbin/Arkansas Advocate)

Dan Smith, a political scientist at the University of Florida who studies direct democracy, said it wasn’t long ago that voters might punish a candidate for opposing a popular policy — like raising the minimum wage or expanding health care.

But that connection has largely been severed in the minds of voters, he said. Today, many voters experience a kind of cognitive dissonance: They support abortion rights or paid sick leave at the ballot box but continue voting for politicians who oppose those policies.

They don’t see the contradiction, he said, because partisanship has become more about team loyalty than policy.

Smith said the disconnect is reinforced by gerrymandered legislative and congressional districts, which are drawn to favor Republican candidates and help maintain their supermajority control. They can override or ignore voter-backed initiatives with little political risk.

Direct democracy in the United States took root during the Progressive Era of the late 1800s and early 1900s, especially in the West and Midwest, where newer states had less entrenched political structures and were more open to reform. These regions were often skeptical of centralized power, and reformers pushed for tools like the initiative and referendum to give citizens a way to bypass political machines and corporate influence.

The first state to adopt the initiative process into its constitution was South Dakota in 1898. Now it’s one of the states where legislators are trying to undermine it.

Most East Coast and Southern states never adopted initiative processes at all. Their constitutions didn’t allow for it, and lawmakers have shown little interest in surrendering power to voters through direct legislation. Some academics have argued the process is barred by Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, which requires states to produce governments by electoral processes.

While efforts to override or undermine voter-approved initiatives are now almost exclusively driven by Republicans, Democratic-controlled legislatures have also tried to rein in direct democracy when it clashed with their priorities.

After California voters passed Proposition 13 in 1978 to limit property taxes — and later Proposition 209 in 1996 banning affirmative action — Democrats sought ways to blunt or undo their impact through legislation and legal challenges.

In the mid-2000s, Colorado Democrats began pushing to restrict the initiative process after a wave of conservative-backed measures passed at the ballot box. A key example was Amendment 43, a 2006 initiative placed on the ballot by citizen petition, which amended the state constitution to define marriage as between “one man and one woman.” It passed with 55% of the vote and effectively banned same-sex marriage in the state until the U.S. Supreme Court overturned such bans in 2015.

In 2008, Colorado’s Democratic-controlled legislature placed a referendum on the ballot that would have made it harder for people to petition to change the state constitution. The measure, also backed by some Republicans, failed at the polls. But in 2016, voters approved a citizen-initiated measure that raised the bar for constitutional amendments by requiring signatures from every state senate district and a 55% supermajority to pass. More recently, Democrats have sought to overturn Colorado’s “taxpayer bill of rights,” which voters enacted through initiative petition in 1992. The measure prohibits tax increases without voter approval. Democrats have argued the law may be unconstitutional because it strips the legislature of its budgetary authority.

But most of the states that allow citizen-led ballot initiatives are Republican-controlled, which means the fight over direct democracy is often playing out in red states. At the center of the GOP argument is the claim that voter initiatives are driven by outside influence and funding. Smith called it “hypocrisy.”

“If you ask lawmakers to not take any outside contributions when they are running for office, they would find every reason under the sun to oppose it,” he said.

Efforts to change the initiative process have themselves drawn heavy outside funding. In August 2023, Ohio voters decisively rejected Issue 1, a Republican-backed proposal to raise the threshold for passing constitutional amendments from a simple majority to 60%. The measure also would have made it harder to place initiatives on the ballot by requiring signatures from at least 5% of voters in all 88 counties.

Backers claimed the changes were needed to protect the constitution from out-of-state special interests — but the campaign itself was funded mostly by $4 million from conservative Illinois billionaire Dick Uihlein.

Just three months later, Ohio voters returned to the polls and approved a new Issue 1 — this time a constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights up to fetal viability. It passed with nearly 57% of the vote.

In 2006, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment to raise the threshold for future amendments to 60% — but the measure itself passed with just 57.8% of the vote, a margin that wouldn’t meet the standard it created.

That irony came into sharp focus in 2024, when a ballot measure to protect abortion rights received 57% of the vote — more support than a similar measure in Missouri, which passed with just under 52% — yet failed in Florida due to the supermajority rule.

After the election, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican lawmakers began pushing for even tougher restrictions on the process, pointing to a report issued by the governor’s administration alleging “widespread petition fraud” in the push for the abortion rights measure. The governor signed a law prohibiting felons, non-U.S. citizens and non-Florida residents from serving as petition circulators; limiting the number of signed petitions a volunteer can collect before being required to register as an official canvasser and requiring signers to write either the last four numbers of their Social Security or driver’s license number on petitions.

In response, several groups have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the new restrictions. Florida Decides Healthcare, which is working to place a Medicaid expansion initiative on the 2026 ballot, has argued that the law imposes vague and punitive restrictions that chill political speech and civic engagement. The state has not yet responded to the lawsuit; the lead defendant, Secretary of State Cord Byrd, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“I think that what happens here is being watched and copied,” Mitch Emerson, executive director of Florida Decides Healthcare, said in an interview. “And if these attacks on democracy work in Florida, they’ll spread.”

by Jake Pearson

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

What Happened: Three Democratic senators asked the Justice Department and other federal authorities to investigate whether members of the Department of Government Efficiency helping to downsize federal agencies violated conflict of interest laws by holding stocks in companies that their agencies regulate.

The letter sent Wednesday by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden and Jack Reed cited ProPublica reporting on how one such aide assigned to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau helped oversee the mass layoffs of the agency’s staff while holding as much as $715,000 in stocks that bureau employees are prohibited from owning.

What They Said: The DOGE aides’ cases “underscore what appears to be a pervasive problem with Elon Musk and DOGE employees trampling ethics rules and laws to benefit their own pockets at the expense of the American public,” the lawmakers said in the letter.

Warren and Reed sit on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. Wyden is the ranking member of the chamber’s Committee on Finance.

The letter asked Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Office of Government Ethics and three inspectors general with jurisdiction over the CFPB, Treasury and IRS to investigate the DOGE aides' finances, including whether they’d appropriately divested from any conflicted holdings, and their specific work at the agencies. “The American people deserve answers regarding whether their own interests may have been undermined by Trump Administration officials that acted in violation of federal ethics laws,” the letter said.

Background: In recent weeks, ProPublica reported that at least two DOGE aides assigned to the CFPB helped coordinate mass layoffs at the agency while maintaining financial arrangements that experts have said either are or appear to be conflicts of interests. In the case of Gavin Kliger, ProPublica reported that ethics attorneys at the bureau warned the 25-year-old software engineer that he could not hold onto his stocks and also participate in major agency actions. Days later, he nevertheless helped oversee the layoffs of nearly 90% of the CFPB’s staff — an action that one expert called a “pretty clear-cut violation” of the federal criminal conflict-of-interest statute.

Response: The DOJ declined comment. Neither the Treasury Department, the IRS, DOGE nor the CFPB responded to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the OGE said the agency doesn’t comment on “situations in specific agencies.” Kliger didn’t respond to emails seeking comment. The White House has previously said that “these allegations are another attempt to diminish DOGE’s critical mission.” It added that Kliger “did not even manage” the layoffs, “making this entire narrative an outright lie.”

Why It Matters: The Trump administration has repeatedly tested the boundaries of mixing personal and public business, from the president’s own foray into the cryptocurrency industry to Elon Musk’s dual roles as both DOGE’s founder and a major federal contractor. (Musk announced Wednesday that he’s leaving the administration.)

The lawmakers’ letter adds to a growing chorus of good-government groups that have called for an outside investigation into Kliger’s actions at the CFPB. Federal prosecutors can bring charges against government workers who violate the criminal conflict of interest statute, an offense that’s punishable with a fine of up to $250,000 and up to five years in prison. But one expert previously told ProPublica that’s unlikely to happen under Trump, as the administration “greatly deprioritized public integrity, ethics and public corruption as issues for them.”