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After ProPublica Investigation, House Democrats Demand Answers on U.S. Citizens Detained by Immigration Agents

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Photo illustration by ProPublica. Source images: Congress and videos obtained by ProPublica. What Happened: Citing ProPublica’s recent investigation , House Democrats are again asking the Trump administration to explain why hundreds of U.S. citizens have been held by immigration agents and how the government verifies citizenship during immigration operations. In an October letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, California Rep. Lou Correa and 39 other legislators demanded the administration share the number of citizens that immigration agents have detained and how the government is tracking such encounters. They also asked for more information about how agents are trained to verify citizenship and legal status. Why It Matters: ProPublica counted more than 500 Americans detained by immigration agents — almost certainly an undercount since the government is not transparently tracking the cases. Experts told us the cases collectively s...
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“Chaos” in the Air: Five Ways Voting Could Be Disrupted on Election Day

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Election workers in Los Angeles County process ballots for the state’s primary in June. Mario Tama/Getty Images As Americans head to the polls on Tuesday, voting experts are watching to see how the Trump administration’s unprecedented efforts to assert more federal control over elections will play out. Since President Donald Trump retook the White House, his administration has tried to force states to turn over their unredacted voter rolls and to restrict mail-in voting . The Department of Homeland Security has used its resources to identify and prosecute noncitizen voters , an effort that has unfolded alongside the agency’s massive crackdown on immigrants. The president has justified these steps by claiming, without evidence, that American elections are beset by fraud and that illegal voting is tipping the scales in favor of Democrats. Help Us Report on Key Election Issues ProPublica’s reporters are on the lookout for what’s going right and what is...
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Tribal Leaders Warned Border Wall Construction Would Disturb Native American Remains. They Were Right.

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Quitobaquito Springs, a rare Sonoran Desert oasis imperiled by border wall construction, is located within 200 feet of the U.S.-Mexico border in Organ Pipe National Monument outside Ajo, Arizona. Anna Watts Lorraine Eiler stood in the blazing August sun, surrounded by reporters, to offer a warning. The Trump administration was racing to erect a second border wall across Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, southwest of Tucson. If the bulldozers came, she said, they were bound to disturb the final resting places of her family and Hia-Ced O’odham tribal ancestors. “People used to live here,” the 89-year-old said. Fifteen days later, her fears were realized. ProPublica has confirmed that Native American remains were unearthed in Organ Pipe amid soil overturned by border wall contractors. The discovery, unreported until now, was made on Sept. 8, the National Park Service said in a statement. “Following established protocols, the University of Arizona conducted an ass...
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Trump Has Tried to Exert More Control Over Elections. Here Are the Key Findings From Our Reporting.

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Early voting for the midterm elections in Los Angeles this month Grace Hie Yoon/Anadolu via Getty Images Ahead of next week’s midterm elections, President Donald Trump has systematically demolished institutional guardrails that prevented him from overturning the 2020 presidential election, ProPublica’s reporting has shown. Trump has empowered his loyalists to try to transform the voting process. He launched an unprecedented — and largely unsuccessful — effort to find noncitizen voters . And he tried to restrict mail-in voting . Our reporters have spent much of this year covering Trump’s efforts to exert more federal control over elections. Here are five takeaways from their reporting. 1. The Trump administration has sought greater federal control over elections. In April, Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield reported on Trump’s efforts to “ take over ” the midterm elections, detailing how the administration has discarded or diminished endeavors across the federal go...
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How a Secret Vote by U.N. Scientists Legitimized Carbon Capture and Skewed Decades of Climate Policy

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Illustration by Chris W. Kim for ProPublica From the series Carbon Captured: How the fossil fuel industry influence climate research , an investigation from ProPublica and Drilled In the spring of 2005, the United Nations convened more than 100 of the world’s top scientists in the medieval town of Oviedo, Spain. They were there to finish writing a paradigm-shifting report about a technology that they hoped could help stop climate change.  To celebrate the report’s impending completion, the meeting’s hosts handed out bottles of cava, Spanish sparkling wine, with tongue-in-cheek labels stating that they were to be opened only by those who truly believed it could work. Belief was necessary because the technology — carbon capture and storage, or CCS — had barely been tested. The idea was simple: strip carbon dioxide from smokestacks before it could flow into the air and warm the planet. Then pump it into a porous part of the Earth’s crust and leave it the...
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