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Scammers Are Stealing Millions From Food Stamp Recipients. Congress Could Fix It — but Won’t.

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Jovelle Tamayo/ProPublica. Source images: Zaydee Sanchez/ProPublica, Tina Russell for ProPublica, MPfoto71/Alamy. It wasn’t the kind of call a grocery store gets every day. A customer with a thick Eastern European accent was on the phone saying he wanted to buy several thousand cans of Red Bull. Could the store have them in stock in a few days? Also, did they have equipment to move all those stacks of energy drinks into the parking lot, where two minivans would be waiting? When the day came, Oct. 19, 2022, employees at the Smart & Final store in San Diego sold 3,960 cans of Red Bull and 720 of Monster Energy to two men and two women, all with the same accent, and helped them wheel the pallets out back. To pay for it all — the bill came to $10,747.05 — the group pulled out piles of plastic. These weren’t credit or debit cards; they looked more like hotel-room keys. There were 25 cards in all, each with a different amount loaded onto it, and the four people took turns s...

He Waited Nine Years in Prison for His Lawyer to File a Single Brief. In This State, There’s No Rule Against It.

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Mark Harris for ProPublica. Source images: Alejandro A. Alvarez/The Philadelphia Inquirer, courtesy of Patrick Hickson, court records. In 2020, seven years after he was appointed to represent a client who claimed he was wrongly convicted, attorney Scott Galloway told the judge that he was still looking into the case and needed more time.   “I am still in the process of interviewing individuals,” the lawyer wrote to the judge in Delaware County, outside Philadelphia, who had already granted him 32 extensions.  His client, Nolan O’Neal, had been a 20-year-old high school student when he was arrested for murder by Chester police, who had four eyewitnesses identifying him. At his 2005 trial, those witnesses all recanted, saying police had pressured them to accuse O’Neal.  By the time Galloway joined the case, in 2013, O’Neal had already spent eight years in prison insisting he was innocent. The lawyer’s job was to help him file a petition under Penn...

As Trump’s Wall Closes in, DHS Intimidates a Border Tribe With Surveillance, Masked Agents and Drones

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A border patrol vehicle drives past the Tadai Me:i prayer camp on the Tohono O’odham nation on Sept. 5. Cam Mackey At 4:59 a.m. on Aug. 25, Verlon Jose, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation in Southern Arizona, received an email from the head of the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector. Government contractors were en route to conduct soil tests for construction of a 62-mile wall along the Nation’s southern boundary, wrote acting chief patrol agent Henry N. Laxdal. If the tribe wished to have cultural monitors observe the work, they were welcome to, but they could not interfere with the government’s operations. The work would begin in exactly one minute. Jose, 59, was already aware of the contractors’ arrival. An hour earlier, a tribal member had called to report a caravan heading south through the reservation, and Facebook was lighting up with similar accounts. The convoy included not only work trucks and drilling rigs, but Border Patrol vehicles as well. Do...