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Georgia congressman Mike Collins spent most of his life running a trucking business. ProPublica’s analysis of federal motor vehicle data shows that truckers for the business have a higher rate of unsafe driving and speeding violations per mile than the majority of similar companies in recent years. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images A Georgia congressman running for one of the country’s most competitive U.S. Senate seats has vowed in social media posts and interviews to make America’s roads safer — by taking commercial driver’s licenses away from noncitizens. “If you can’t read English road signs,” Mike Collins, a Republican, posted on Facebook in April, “you don’t belong behind the wheel. Period.” Collins, the owner of a trucking business and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives’ transportation committee, is one of the loudest champions of the Trump administration’s effort to revoke licenses from nearly 200,000 noncitizen commercial drivers, inclu...

Members of the New York City Police Department’s Community Response Team conduct a raid on a smoke shop in lower Manhattan in 2024. Luiz C. Ribeiro/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images More than a decade ago, a federal court found that the New York City Police Department had been unconstitutionally stopping and frisking Black and Hispanic residents. The ruling laid out required fixes, including something quite basic: The NYPD would review officers’ stops to make sure they were legal. But for most of the past three years the nation’s largest police department failed to do that for many officers in one aggressive and politically connected unit as it stopped New Yorkers. The lack of court-required review was recently discovered and disclosed by the NYPD’s federal monitor, which oversees the department’s compliance with the 2013 stop-and-frisk decision. In all, more than 2,000 stops weren’t properly reviewed, according to data from the monitor. ...

Pablo José Hernández Rivera, Puerto Rico’s representative in Congress, called for an investigation into the halting of prosecution efforts related to an alleged scheme to buy prisoners’ votes. Photo by Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images Federal and local lawmakers in Puerto Rico, as well as civil rights and advocacy organizations, have called for investigations after ProPublica reported how a federal probe into a drugs-for-votes scheme in Puerto Rico prisons got quashed after the 2024 elections.   The territory’s representative in Congress, Pablo José Hernández Rivera, called on members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday to join him in a push for a congressional probe into the matter.  “The report published today by ProPublica details facts that no elected official — whether in Puerto Rico or in Washington — can ignore,” he said in a statement in Spanish. The same day, Rep. Héctor Ferrer Santiago, a Popular Democratic Party member, in...

White smoke rises from a Freeport-McMoRan copper smelter in eastern Arizona, one of more than 180 facilities granted exemptions to the Clean Air Act by the Trump administration. Roberto “Bear” Guerra for ProPublica In March 2025, President Donald Trump’s administration made a tantalizing offer to coal-fired power plants, chemical manufacturing facilities and other factories: Their operations could be exempted from key provisions under the Clean Air Act, the bedrock environmental law estimated to have prevented thousands of premature deaths. All they had to do was ask. No rigorous application was needed. An email, which they had until the end of the month to send, would suffice. Within two weeks, executives across major industries began flooding an inbox set up to receive and funnel requests from the Environmental Protection Agency to the White House. They asked that their facilities be excused from expensive Clean Air Act requirements, relief that would save their comp...