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How a Man Once Ordered to Pay Libel Damages Helped Launch an Investigation Into Islamic Private Schools

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Brighter Horizons Academy is one of nearly 50 Texas-based Islamic and Chinese schools that were investigated by the state comptroller’s office. Desiree Rios for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune Nearly a decade ago, a British court ordered a man named Sam Westrop to pay the equivalent of more than $173,000 in libel damages after he published an article on his website calling the founder of a London-based Islamic TV channel a “convicted terrorist.” Westrop eventually admitted the underlying evidence for the claim was not reliable, according to court filings, and corrected the story on his website. “There simply was no evidence to support the allegation of terrorism,” the judge in the case wrote. Years after that ruling, Westrop made similar claims about a group of Islamic private schools in Texas that had applied to the state’s new voucher program. He alleged the school leaders had connections to Islamic extremist or terrorist groups, such as Hamas. Westrop shared his ...
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Trump Officials Want to Use Human Rights Aid to Advocate for White South Africans and Right-Wing Causes in Europe

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Collage by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source image: Roberto Schmidt/Stringer/Getty Images. For decades, the U.S. Department of State gave money to groups protecting free speech, human rights and persecuted minorities in poor and authoritarian countries.  To decide what to fund, staffers with deep expertise typically pored over reams of information on abuses under the most repressive regimes and held an open competition to fund groups to work in those countries.  This year, Trump administration officials presented State Department workers with their own list of organizations that should be funded. To the shock of many staffers and lawmakers, they proposed at least a dozen grants that would bypass the normal open bidding process. They also sought to give taxpayer dollars to groups aligned with conservative and anti-immigration movements in Europe as well as advocates for white South Africans, according to interviews and documents reviewed by ProPublica.  A...
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How a Paid Expert Reversed His View of a Notoriously Flawed Prosecution in the Rape of a Bestselling Author

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Bennett Gershman in 2015 Andrew Sullivan/The New York Times/Redux The upstate New York city of Syracuse seems at odds with itself when it comes to a notorious miscarriage of justice. Nearly five years ago, the district attorney of Onondaga County, William Fitzpatrick, stood up in court and excoriated his county’s decision decades earlier to prosecute Anthony Broadwater for the rape of author Alice Sebold. With the DA’s support, the conviction was thrown out. Today, the same county government and that of its main city, Syracuse, continue to fight a lawsuit filed by Broadwater that seeks financial damages for the years he lost behind bars. The conflicts, it seems, aren’t simply between criminal authorities, who view Broadwater as a wronged man, and civil authorities, who defend the original prosecution. A key expert for the city and county seems to be experiencing an internal conflict of his own — or, at minimum, a dramatic change in opinion. Syracuse’s paid expert, a vete...
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Texas Democrats Ask for Investigation Into Ken Paxton After Our Reporting Found He May Have Violated Election Law

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Sipa USA Dallas-area Democrats are demanding that Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton be investigated for illegal voting after ProPublica and The Texas Tribune revealed that he has repeatedly voted while registered at an address where he appears to no longer live. In a complaint filed Tuesday, the Collin County Democratic Party asked the Texas secretary of state to investigate whether Paxton committed election fraud by voting in the May primary runoff. Paxton beat longtime incumbent John Cornyn in that race, securing the Republican Party’s nomination for U.S. Senate. Read More Ken Paxton Vowed to Crack Down on “Illegal Voting.” He May Have Violated Texas Election Law. Mary Higbe, vice chair of the Collin County Democratic Party, noted in the complaint that Paxton’s office, as recently as February, warned voters that “it is illegal to misrepresent your res...
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DHS Plans “All-Out War” on Immigration Scammers as Fraud Complaints Double

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Bloomberg/Getty Images The Department of Homeland Security is investigating a sophisticated network of scammers who target people caught in immigration proceedings, bilking them of their savings and causing some to be deported, following a ProPublica report that complaints of such fraud doubled under the second administration of President Donald Trump. Homeland Security Investigations, the subagency known for tracking international crimes such as human trafficking, has asked about specific cases detailed in the story, including the tale of a woman who, fearful of Trump’s nationwide immigration sweeps, enlisted someone she thought would help her keep her legal status. After the scammers got her money and caused her to miss a court date, she was deported to Nicaragua. Read More Fear and Opportunity: Immigration Scams Surged as Trump’s Sweeps Lured Desperate People to Eager Defrauders That was one of thousands of cases in w...
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Public Money Is Fueling an Explosion of Private Schools. States Often Don’t Care How They’re Run.

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Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images: Paul Sableman via Flickr A decade ago, the state of Florida stripped a teacher of her license for sexual abuse of a 16-year-old boy. Last year, she opened a private school there with ease.  Her name and photo were on her new school’s website and details of her case were easy to find with an online search. The state also knew that a transplanted Midwesterner had been fired from her Cincinnati charter school, following felony charges related to misuse of public funds, and had been banned from teaching or running schools in Ohio. Yet Florida did not stop her from starting a private school and collecting public money. As private schools proliferate in Florida and across the country, fueled by taxpayer dollars, states are choosing not to closely regulate who is operating them or to oversee student safety and achievement, a ProPublica investigation found. The backgrounds of school founders and employees ...
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