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Despite Court Order, NYPD Failed to Properly Monitor Stop-and-Frisks by Aggressive Unit

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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. ...
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Puerto Rico Lawmakers Call for Investigation Into Alleged Drugs-for-Votes Scheme After ProPublica Report

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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...
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Trump Exempted Some of the Nation’s Biggest Polluters From Air Quality Rules. All It Took Was an Email.

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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...
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At Least 79 Kids Have Been Harmed by Tear Gas or Pepper Spray During Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

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Yaakov Strasberg/@YaakovStras The children were walking to school in Broadview, Illinois, or leaving a shopping center in Columbus, Ohio. They were at home in Minneapolis, or sitting in a stroller in Chicago, or at an afternoon protest in Portland, Oregon, alongside dogs on leashes and older people pushing walkers. They were mostly going about their days when federal immigration agents shot tear gas or fired pepper spray near their homes and schools and into their family cars. The chemicals blew through the air, sometimes for blocks. They seeped into bedrooms, forcing an asthmatic teen to gasp for air. They stuck to the skin of a young girl, who cried, “It burns!” They caused an infant to stop breathing. ProPublica identified 79 children across the country who have been harmed by tear gas or pepper spray as immigration officers dramatically stepped up their use during President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. The Department of Homeland Security has repea...
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