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Ken Paxton Touts His Efforts to Fight Voter Fraud. His Senate Opponent Is Now Accusing Him of Committing It.

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Texas state Rep. James Talarico is challenging Attorney General Ken Paxton in a U.S. Senate race. Sergio Flores for The Texas Tribune The Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas is trying to turn a key talking point of his Republican opponent against him — alleging Attorney General Ken Paxton is guilty of the same type of voter fraud he has spent years trying to eliminate. “As our state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton has gone on a voter fraud witch hunt,” state Rep. James Talarico, who is challenging Paxton in the race to replace U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, said during a campaign event in Houston. “Turns out, he was committing voter fraud the whole time, voting illegally in six elections in a row from the wrong address.” Talarico’s comments come after ProPublica and The Texas Tribune revealed that Paxton moved out of the home he shared with his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, in 2024 but continued to vote using that address, including during the March Republican primar...
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How Videos Helped Me Uncover Abuse at an Arkansas Private School

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Mary “Tracy” Morrison, moments before she hits a student with a plastic object similar to a pipe. The still is from a video that reporter Jennifer Smith Richards obtained as part of a ProPublica investigation into child mistreatment at Morrison’s school. Obtained by ProPublica. Faces blurred in original video. Vignette added by ProPublica to spotlight Morrison. The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain was set back off a country road in a white colonial house — such an atypical location that I first drove right by it, unsure that it was a school. I turned around, went to the door, introduced myself as a reporter and asked for a tour. I knew a student had been assaulted in this Arkansas school a year earlier because of some news reports based on a detective’s description. Once inside, I noted the preteens tucked into hammock chairs or sitting on the floor. I noted the cameras mounted in the foyer and classrooms, a reminder that, in order to fully understand what had happe...
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5 Raw Quotes From America’s Largest Raw-Milk Dairy Owner

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From left: Mark McAfee is interviewed by ProPublica audio producer Gabrielle Berbey and reporter Annie Waldman at Raw Farm in Fresno, California. Sarahbeth Maney for ProPublica I never thought I’d spend six months of my life investigating raw milk. But I did.  In early June, ProPublica published a story I reported that features Mark McAfee , who runs America’s largest raw-milk dairy. The story came about after months of reporting on how the Trump administration’s policies were reshaping federal health agencies . My colleagues and I spoke with dozens of civil servants, many of whom described a climate of fear in which routine science had suddenly become politicized.  One notable example they shared with me was raw milk, which most scientists and health experts agree has no significant, proven nutritional benefits over its pasteurized counterpart and subjects its consumers to over 100 times the risk of foodborne illness .  But under the leadership of Hea...
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How the Government’s Obligation to Keep Foreign Workers Safe Collided With Its Efforts to Keep Farms Afloat

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A laborer picks tomatoes on one of the few farms that participates in a voluntary initiative to protect workers from exploitation. Audra Melton for ProPublica It’s been nearly two years since I started reporting on abuses of foreign farmworkers in Georgia. Some of the workers I tracked down had come to the U.S. legally through the H-2A visa program and were harmed and exploited by labor contractors — despite protections that were supposed to be guaranteed by the federal government.  During those two years, I’ve thought a lot about how the government’s obligation to keep foreign workers safe has collided with another priority: to help U.S. farmers stay in business.  Farmers have long pushed for fewer H-2A regulations. That’s in part because of the skyrocketing costs of the program, which sets minimum hourly wages and requires that farmers pay for workers’ housing and transportation. As one Georgia farmer wrote last year in a letter to the U.S. Department of Lab...
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My Maddening Quest to Find Out if Blueberries Come From Farms Where Workers Were Harmed

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Illustration by Andrew B. Myers for ProPublica Over the past year, I’ve reported at length about crimes against farmworkers who have come to the U.S. legally from Mexico and Central America.  I haven’t stopped thinking about how they suffered. Their wages were stolen, guns were pointed in their faces, and one woman I met was held captive, raped and nearly killed. As I wrote those stories, there was something else I couldn’t stop thinking about — something I keep thinking about: Whenever I go to the grocery store, I have no easy way of knowing if the fruits and vegetables I put in my cart are part of the problem I’ve documented. Footage from labor contractor Javier Sanchez Mendoza in 2018 on a blueberry farm. Mendoza was charged in a federal indictment and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to engage in forced labor. via Facebook I eat a lot of blueberries, which happen to be the fruit grown most in the state where I live, Georgia, and the state where I tracked th...
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