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Federal agents face off with protesters in a Minneapolis neighborhood after a federal agent shot a man from Venezuela while attempting to detain him in January. Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images Over the “strongest possible” objections from the federal prosecutor handling the case, leaders at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., quashed plans to bring civil rights charges against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent accused of shooting a Venezuelan immigrant and then lying about it.  The agent, 52-year-old Christian Castro, allegedly shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg in Minneapolis this January during Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s immigration blitz that sent thousands of federal agents into the state. The incident was one of three shootings by immigration agents in the city, the other two of which were fatal.  Federal prosecutors in Minnesota had been preparing to charge Castro with deprivation of rights under c...

An election worker processes mail-in ballots at the Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center during California’s state primary election in June. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images Top U.S. Postal Service officials tasked with issuing new regulations on mail voting expressed concerns in internal meetings about how the rules they were drafting could delay or block ballots from reaching large swaths of eligible voters for the upcoming midterms, but the rules moved forward anyway, ProPublica has learned. The revelations about the discussions, from someone familiar with the rulemaking process, come as a separate anonymous federal employee filed a whistleblower disclosure with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal , warning that the new system is untested and error-prone, and could lead to mass disenfranchisement in the upcoming election. The whistleblower described the entire process as “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed.”  In a March executive order , Pr...

Joe Rogers, a former resident of the Hyder Mountain Road mobile home park near Clyde, North Carolina. Hurricane Helene swept his mobile home into the nearby river with his wife and three of their dogs still inside. The county still allows trailers and campers at the mobile home park. Jesse Barber for ProPublica and The Assembly Dave Masters could no longer ignore the storm as trees cracked and the swollen river roared. It was dark outside, but through the window he could see his father’s house, usually 100 feet away from the Pigeon River, was surrounded by water. Masters, tall and slender, forded the frigid waist-deep water to wake up his father and convince the 63-year-old to evacuate. From the son’s trailer on the hillside, the two watched the water rise as Hurricane Frances wreaked havoc on Western North Carolina in early September 2004. Within an hour, his father’s home floated up like a bobber on a fishing line and then sailed down the middle of the road before veerin...