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The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement arm is requesting unfettered access to what is considered to be the most comprehensive government database of people in the United States and their most private information, including sensitive details about individual children, according to six current and former federal officials. It is called the Federal Parent Locator Service, and it’s meant for finding people who owe child support. Granting access to the Department of Homeland Security, the officials said, would violate a federal law that explicitly limits its use to determining and collecting child support payments and a handful of other narrow purposes. But DHS’ ask is being seriously considered within the Department of Health and Human Services, which maintains the database. The database contains the name, address, Social Security number, employer, and salary or wages of every employed person in the country, as well as the equivalent details for anyone listed in state unempl...

Images from the missile strike in southern Iran were more horrifying than any of the case studies Air Force combat veteran Wes J. Bryant had pored over in his mission to overhaul how the U.S. military safeguards civilian life. Parents wept over their children’s bodies. Crushed desks and blood-stained backpacks poked through the rubble. The death toll from the attack on an elementary school in Minab climbed past 165, most of them under age 12, with nearly 100 others wounded, according to Iranian health officials. Photos of small coffins and rows of fresh graves went viral, a devastating emblem of Day 1 in the open-ended U.S.-Israeli war in Iran. Bryant, a former special operations targeting specialist, said he couldn’t help but think of what-ifs as he monitored fallout from the Feb. 28 attack. Just over a year ago, he had been a senior adviser in an ambitious new Defense Department program aimed at reducing civilian harm during operations. Finally, Bryant said, the military was getti...

Rebecca Sheppard specializes in untangling other people’s financial messes. But for nearly a year, the Colorado accountant has been unable to fix a glaring error on her own credit report.  Her credit score plunged roughly 85 points because of a $240,000 student loan debt she does not owe. She repeatedly asked the nation’s big three credit reporting companies to correct the mistake, submitting documentation showing the debt belonged to her ex-husband. Even the loan’s account manager confirmed she wasn’t responsible. Still, the credit bureaus refused to remove it, jeopardizing her plans to move with her disabled father into a more accessible home. “There’s no way in the world I could qualify for the purchase,” she said. Sheppard should have been able to count on the federal government to pressure the credit bureaus to take her dispute seriously. For years, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wielded the threat of fines and lawsuits to make companies fix errors and engage with...

One of the largest school districts in New Mexico subjects Navajo students to pervasive discrimination and a climate of fear, according to a report released last week by the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission.  The 25-page report draws on testimony from parents and community members at four public hearings in Navajo Nation communities within the school district. It urges the New Mexico attorney general’s office to release findings from a two-and-a-half-year investigation into the district’s discipline of Indigenous students. The Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission’s report cited an investigation published in December 2022 by New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica that found Indigenous students were punished more harshly than other students in New Mexico during the four years ending in 2020. The Gallup-McKinley district, which has the largest Indigenous student body of any local school district in the country, was largely responsible for that disparity, an analysis of student d...

Clifford Thomas and his family lost four relatives during the COVID-19 pandemic, including his beloved mother, Beverly. A middle school teacher, Beverly had struggled with chronic health problems all her life, and when they forced her to leave her job due to disability, she was unable to afford regular medical care. Her final request to her son was that he keep the family healthy. But in Albany, Georgia, achieving that promise is a battle. The city is served by a single, dominant hospital system, Phoebe Putney Memorial. Its control of the market and Georgia’s strict limits on Medicaid have left nearly one-third of people in Albany, one of the poorest cities in the state, uninsured. Poor access to quality, affordable care has contributed to deep distrust of the system. Residents like Thomas see Phoebe as more of a barrier to good health than a safety net. He gave up on trying to find medical insurance or a doctor who would care for him without it. Then, he began to get sick. There a...

The New York State attorney general’s office has begun investigating how Columbia University let a predatory doctor continue to see patients despite decades of warnings. “The Office of the Attorney General is conducting a thorough investigation into the institutional response to Robert Hadden’s misconduct,” a spokesperson said in a statement to ProPublica. The agency did not give further details. A ProPublica investigation from the fall of 2023 revealed how Columbia ignored women and ultimately protected Robert Hadden , a longtime OB-GYN at the university. In 2012, Columbia allowed Hadden to continue seeing patients just days after one of them called 911 to report Hadden had sexually assaulted her. In early 2023, Hadden was convicted in federal court of sexually abusing patients. He is currently serving a 20-year sentence. Columbia has paid out more than $1 billion for over 1,000 claims of sexual abuse. After our investigation, Columbia committed to a variety of reforms, including ...